12 History Lessons + 7 Births & 7 Deaths for November 14, 2025
Today’s History:
- 1851 – Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is published in the United States.
- 1889 – Journalist Nellie Bly departs New York to race “around the world” in under 80 days.
- 1910 – Eugene B. Ely makes the first airplane takeoff from a ship (USS Birmingham), pioneering naval aviation.
- 1918 – Tomáš G. Masaryk becomes the first president of newly independent Czechoslovakia.
- 1922 – The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) begins daily radio transmissions from London’s 2LO studio.
- 1940 – The Coventry Blitz: a devastating Luftwaffe raid batters the English city overnight.
- 1957 – Police bust the Apalachin meeting in New York, exposing a national Mafia network.
- 1960 – Six-year-old Ruby Bridges integrates William Frantz Elementary in New Orleans under federal protection.
- 1965 – Battle of Ia Drang, the first major battle between U.S. forces and the PAVN in Vietnam, begins.
- 1969 – Apollo 12 launches, NASA’s second crewed Moon-landing mission.
- 1970 – Southern Airways Flight 932 crashes near Huntington, WV, killing 75 (including most of Marshall University’s football team).
- 1972 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 1,000 for the first time (1,003.16).
Today’s Birthdays:
- 1948 – King Charles III, British monarch (77).
- 1954 – Condoleezza Rice, U.S. secretary of state/national security adviser (71).
- 1962 – Laura San Giacomo, actor (Pretty Woman; Just Shoot Me!) (63).
- 1964 – Patrick Warburton, actor/voice actor (Seinfeld; The Tick; Family Guy) (61).
- 1972 – Josh Duhamel, actor (Transformers; Las Vegas) (53).
- 1975 – Travis Barker, drummer/producer (Blink-182; collaborator) (50).
- 1979 – Olga Kurylenko, actor/model (Quantum of Solace) (46).
Today’s Deaths:
- 1716 – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German polymath/philosopher (70).
- 1832 – Charles Carroll of Carrollton, last surviving signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence (95).
- 1908 – Guangxu Emperor, penultimate emperor of China’s Qing dynasty (37).
- 1915 – Booker T. Washington, educator and Tuskegee Institute founder (59).
- 1991 – Tony Richardson, Oscar-winning film director (Tom Jones) (63).
- 2014 – Glen A. Larson, TV producer (Battlestar Galactica; Knight Rider; Magnum, P.I.) (77).
- 2016 – Gwen Ifill, journalist and PBS anchor (Washington Week; PBS NewsHour) (61).
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