1656 — Massachusetts enacts the first punitive legislation against the Quakers.
1773 — The East India Company tea ships’ cargo is burned at Annapolis.
1789 — President George Washington proclaims the first Thanksgiving Day.
1884 — George Eastman patents paper-strip photographic film.
1916 — Paul Robeson is excluded from the Rutgers football team when Washington and Lee University refused to play against a black person.
1926 — A. A. Milne’s book Winnie-the-Pooh is first published.
1933 — Nazi Germany withdraws from The League of Nations.
1943 -– US Air Force loses 60 B-17 Flying Fortresses during an assault on Schweinfurt. (Today’s America likely would have called it quits after such losses.)
1960 — The idea of a Peace Corps is first suggested by Presidential candidate John F Kennedy at the University of Michigan.
1962 — A U-2 flight over Cuba takes photos of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed, thus getting the Cuban Missile Crisis under way.
1964 — Martin Luther King Jr wins the Nobel Peace Prize. And Leonid Brezhnev ousts Nikita Khrushchev as leader of the Soviet Union.
1986 — Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
1991 — Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi wins the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle to achieve democracy in her homeland.
1994 — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
2009 — The price of gold spikes to a record high of $1,072 per ounce. The dollar slumps to a 14-month low against the euro (1.49:1). Crude oil futures go above $75 per barrel for the first time in a year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average passes 10,000 for the first time in a year before closing at 9988.