8 November

1519     Hernán Cortés enters Tenochtitlán and Aztec ruler Moctezuma welcomes him with a great celebration.

1602     The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford is opened to the public.

1656     Edmond Halley (born), English astronomer and mathematician (died 1742)

1837     Mary Lyon founds Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which later becomes Mount Holyoke College.

1847     Bram Stoker (born), Irish author (died 1912)

1866     Herbert Austin (born), 1st Baron Austin, English businessman, founded the Austin Motor Company (died 1941)

1892     The New Orleans general strike begins, uniting black and white American trade unionists in a successful four-day general strike action for the first time.

1895     While experimenting with electricity, Wilhelm Röntgen discovers the X-ray.

1922     Christiaan Barnard (born), South African surgeon (died 2001)

1931     Morley Safer (born), American journalist

1933     US President Franklin D. Roosevelt unveils the Civil Works Administration, an organization designed to create jobs for more than 4 million unemployed.

1942     Angel Cordero Jr. (born), Puerto Rican jockey

1949     Bonnie Raitt (born), American singer-songwriter and guitarist

1949     Wayne LaPierre (born), American businessman, author, and activist

1957     Operation Grapple X, Round C1: the United Kingdom conducts its first successful hydrogen bomb test over Kiritimati (Christmas Island) in the Pacific.

1960     John F. Kennedy defeats Richard Nixon to become the 35th president of the United States.

1966     Former Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke becomes the first African American elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction.

1966     US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs into law an antitrust exemption allowing the National Football League to merge with the upstart American Football League.

1968     The Vienna Convention on Road Traffic is signed to facilitate international road traffic and to increase road safety by standardising the uniform traffic rules among the signatories.

1973     The right ear of John Paul Getty III is delivered to a newspaper together with a ransom note, convincing his father to pay 2.9 million USD.

2002    UN Security Council Resolution 1441, The United Nations Security Council unanimously approves a resolution on Iraq, forcing Saddam Hussein to disarm or face “serious consequences”.

2004    More than 10,000 U.S. troops and a small number of Iraqi army units participate in a siege on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.

2011     The potentially hazardous asteroid 2005 YU55 passed 0.85 lunar distances from Earth (about 324,600 kilometres or 201,700 miles), the closest known approach by an asteroid of its brightness since 2010 XC15 in 1976.

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EO Smith

Interests include biological anthropology, evolution, social behavior, and human behavior. Conducted field research in the Tana River National Primate Reserve, Kenya and on Angaur, Palau, Micronesia, as well as research with captive nonhuman primates at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and the Institute for Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya.
EO Smith
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