Carl Sagan, November 9, 1934
Sagan was an American astronomer, astrochemist, author, and highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics and other natural sciences. He is world-famous for writing popular science books and for co-writing and presenting the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which has been seen by more than 500 million people in over 60 countries


Joseph McCarthy - November 14, 1908
McCarthy was a senator from Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread Communist subversion.[1] He was noted for making claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States federal government and elsewhere. Ultimately, McCarthy's tactics and his inability to substantiate his claims led him to be censured by the United States Senate.

 

 

 

 

FDR was the only President in the history of our country to be elected to more than 2 terms. He was enormously popular, and although his health was failing prior to the election of 1944, he felt it necessary to run for a fourth term in order to maintain continuity of leadership during the waning years of World War II.

 

On January 20, 1945, Roosevelt took the oath of office for the 4th time in an austere, sparsely attended ceremony on the south portico of the White House. A light snow had fallen the night before and the thermometer registered only one degree above freezing; nevertheless, the President appeared bareheaded and without an overcoat to deliver a 6-minute address. Less than 2 months later, Roosevelt was dead.

 

Shortly thereafter, the country ratified the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that reads, in part: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice".

 

 

Launched in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was for many years the largest ship on the Great Lakes. The Fitzgerald sank on this date in 1975 during a gale-force stom on Lake Superior. There were no distress signals, and all 29 crew members perished, presumably by drowning.

 

 

Armistice Day is the anniversary of the symbolic end of World War I on November 11, 1918. It commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies and Germany which took effect at eleven o'clock in the morning — the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month". While this official date to mark the end of the war reflects the cease fire on the Western Front, hostilities continued in other regions, especially across the former Russian Empire and in parts of the old Ottoman Empire.

The date was declared a national holiday in many allied nations, to commemorate those members of the armed forces who were killed during war.

 

 

Jonestown was the informal name for the "Peoples Temple Agricultural Project", a community in northwestern Guyana formed by the Peoples Temple, an American cult led by Jim Jones. It became internationally notorious when, on November 18, 1978, 918 people died in the settlement as well as in a nearby airstrip and in Georgetown, Guyana's capital. The name of the settlement became synonymous with the incidents at those locations.

 

909 Temple members died in Jonestown, all but two from apparent cyanide poisoning, in an event termed "revolutionary suicide" by Jones and some members on an audio tape of the event and in prior discussions. The poisonings in Jonestown followed the murder of five others by Temple members at a nearby Port Kaituma airstrip. The victims included Congressman Leo Ryan, the first and only Congressman murdered in the line of duty in the history of the United States. Four other Temple members died in Georgetown at Jones' command.