#Middlebury
On Nov. 6, 1528, the Spanish conquistador Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca is shipwrecked on a low sandy island off the coast of Texas. Starving, dehydrated and desperate, he is the first European to set foot on the soil of the future Lone Star state.- On Nov. 10, 1775, a resolution, drafted by future U.S. president John Adams, creates the Continental Marines and is now observed as the birth date of the United States Marine Corps. The motto of the service is Semper Fidelis, meaning “Always Faithful” in Latin.
- On Nov. 7, 1914, while World War I rages in Europe, a new weekly magazine, The New Republic, is first published in the United States. Though its first issue sold only 875 copies, after a year the circulation reached 15,000. The New Republic still operates today as a weekly journal of opinion.
- On Nov. 8, 1951, Yankees catcher Yogi Berra is voted the American League’s most valuable player. He went on to be the league MVP twice more, in 1954 and 1955.
- On Nov. 5, 1968, in one of the closest elections in U.S. history, Republican challenger Richard Nixon defeats Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Because of third-party candidate George Wallace, neither Nixon nor Humphrey received 50 percent of the vote.
- On Nov. 4, 1979, student followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini send shock waves across America when they storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The radical Islamic fundamentalists took 90 hostages.
- On Nov. 9, 1989, East German officials open the Berlin Wall, allowing free travel from East to West Berlin for the first time since 1961. The next day, celebrating Germans began to tear down one of the ugliest and most infamous symbols of the Cold War. The wall was built to keep a flood of refugees from fleeing Communist East Germany to the West.
© 2019 Hearst Communications, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
You must be logged in to post a comment.