Washington calls for a national day of thanksgiving (1789), and Edgar Allan Poe found delirious in Baltimore (1849). Born on this day: Sergey Aleksandrovich Yesenin, Gwen Stefani and Alicia Vikander. Died: Gustav Stresemann, Leon Max Lederman and Jalal Talabani.
33 events, 65 births and 47 deaths on this date.
As the first president, Washington called on Americans to set aside one day to give thanks for the new government and the country's successes. The call helped turn Thanksgiving into a shared national observance, one Americans still keep each November.
Gilbert Stuart · Public domainPoe was found in Baltimore, confused and barely conscious, in circumstances nobody fully explained. He died four days later, so this was his final known appearance.
Unknown author Unknown author ; Restored by Yann Forget and Adam Cuerden · Public domain
Gordimer's novels and stories examined apartheid and racial injustice, at a time when some of her books were banned at home. Her award made her the earliest South African to be honoured with the prize in literature, a recognition of her decades of writing against racial injustice.
Rome's emperor agreed terms that let the Goths stay within imperial borders as semi-independent allies. The deal ended years of fighting but gave the Goths a lasting foothold in the Balkans.
Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5
The attack on Roy Horn, half of the flamboyant Las Vegas duo known for white tigers, ended their stage career. They had given 5,750 performances together, and Horn was badly hurt by a tiger during the show.
Troops set out from Valdivia in southern Chile to put down a rising by the Huilliche, an Indigenous people of the region. The city, founded by Pedro de Valdivia, was among the most fortified in the Spanish American empire.
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Yesenin wrote lyric poems about the Russian countryside of his childhood, tender and raw at once, often lamenting how towns and factories were changing rural life. He remains among the most widely read Russian poets of the twentieth century.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Gwen Stefani is the lead singer of No Doubt, the band behind hits like Don't Speak. She later became a solo pop star, with Hollaback Girl reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
Liton Ali · CC BY 2.0
Swedish actress who won an Academy Award for playing Gerda Wegener in The Danish Girl. She also drew wide attention as the robot Ava in Ex Machina and as Vera Brittain in Testament of Youth.
Harald Krichel · CC BY-SA 4.0
German statesman who, as foreign minister, worked to reconcile Germany with France and shared the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize with Aristide Briand. He died of a stroke at 51, weeks before the Wall Street Crash.
Unknown Unknown · CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Leon Max Lederman was an American experimental physicist who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on neutrinos. He also wrote The God Particle, a 1993 book that popularised the nickname for the Higgs boson.
FNAL · Public domain
Iraqi Kurdish politician who founded the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and served as Iraq's sixth president from 2005 to 2014. He spent more than five decades campaigning for Kurdish rights and democracy in Iraq.
Khamenei.ir · CC BY 4.0
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