Francisco Pizarro traps Incan emperor Atahualpa

Hessian Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Knyphausen and a force of 3,000 Hessian mercenaries and 5,000 Redcoats lay siege to Fort Washington at the northern end and highest point of Manhattan Island. Throughout the morning, Knyphausen met stiff resistance from the Patriot riflemen inside the fort, but by afternoon, the Patriots were overwhelmed, and the garrison […]

On November 16, 1849, a Russian court sentences Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for his allegedly anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group. His execution is stayed at the last minute. Dostoevsky’s father was a doctor at Moscow’s Hospital for the Poor, where he grew rich enough to buy land and serfs. After his father’s […]

On November 16, 1941, Joseph Goebbels publishes in the German magazine Das Reich that “The Jews wanted the war, and now they have it”—referring to the Nazi propaganda scheme to shift the blame for the world war onto European Jews, thereby giving the Nazis a rationalization for the so-called Final Solution. Just two days earlier, […]

On November 16, 1959, The Sound of Music opens on Broadway, becoming a smash success from the first night. Did a young Austrian nun named Maria von Trapp really take to the hills surrounding Salzburg to sing spontaneously of her love of music? No, but nearly all of the particulars of her 1949 book, The […]

On November 16, 2001, the British author J.K. Rowling’s star creation—bespectacled boy wizard Harry Potter—makes his big-screen debut in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which opens in movie theaters across the United States. Based on the mega-best-selling fantasy novel of the same name, the film, which starred Daniel Radcliffe in the title role, went […]