#TodayInHistory – November 28

November 28 – Some important events on this day.

1291 👉🏼 Eleanor of Castile, wife of King Edward I of England, dies in Northamptonshire. Crosses are erected where her body rests on the way to London.
1520 👉🏼 Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan begins crossing the Pacific Ocean
1660 👉🏼 The Royal Society is formed at Gresham College, London, after a lecture by Christopher Wren, Gresham Professor of Astronomy
1717 👉🏼 Blackbeard attacks and captures a French merchant slave ship, which he renames as his flagship the “Queen Anne’s Revenge”
1720 👉🏼 Anne Bonny and Mary Read are tried, found guilty of pirating, and sentenced to death in Spanish Town, Jamaica, although their discovered pregnancies win them stays of execution
1754 👉🏼 Enlightenment Philosopher Jean-Baptiste Le Rond d’Alembert is elected to the French Academy of Sciences
1814 👉🏼 The Times of London first printed by automatic, steam powered presses built by German inventors Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer – makes newspapers available to a mass audience
1878 👉🏼 Whistler v. Ruskin, the most famous trial in art history, ends with artist James McNeill Whistler awarded a token farthing in compensation after suing the writer and critic John Ruskin for libel, seeking £1,000 damages

1893 👉🏼 Women vote in a national election for the first time, in the New Zealand general election. ✔️READ THE ARTICLE!

1895 👉🏼 America’s 1st auto race organised by the “Chicago Times-Herald” – Chicago to Evanston and back. 6 cars, 55 miles, Frank Duryea wins averaging 7 MPH.
On this Thanksgiving Day in 1895, piloting a gas-powered “horseless carriage” of his and his brother’s own design, the mechanic, inventor and now racecar driver Frank Duryea wins the first motor-car race in the United States. The race, sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald, was intended to drum up publicity for the nascent American car industry. It worked, especially for the Duryeas: In the year after the Times-Herald race, the brothers sold 13 of their eponymous Motor Wagons, more than any other carmaker in America.
The race course was originally supposed to loop from Chicago to Waukegan, Illinois, and back but, thanks to the sudden arrival of a spectacular blizzard, race organizers decided to abbreviate the route. (“With eight inches of snow,” one journalist wrote later, “Waukegan might as well have been Timbuktu.”) The racers would be driving just 50 miles, from Chicago to Evanston, Illinois, and back again. The other rules would remain the same: Vehicles had to have at least three wheels, all wrapped in twine to give traction in the snow, and they also had to be able to carry at least two people, the driver and a race-appointed umpire who would ride along to guard against cheating.
Because of the bad weather, only six of 89 racers made it to the starting line: the Duryea; three Benz cars, one sponsored by Macy’s in New York; and two electrics whose batteries died almost immediately after the race began.
About 10 hours after the race began, the Duryea chugged across the finish line. The only other finisher was one of the Benzes (not the one from Macy’s: that one collided with a streetcar on the way to Evanston and with a sleigh and then a hack on the return trip), which sloshed to a finish almost two hours later. The victorious Duryeas won $2,000 and enough publicity to establish themselves as theAmerican motor-car company. From then on, for the Duryeas and all who followed, automobile manufacturing was a business—not just a hobby.

1907 👉🏼 In Haverhill, Massachusetts, scrap-metal dealer Louis B. Mayer opens his first movie theater
1919 👉🏼 US-born Lady Nancy Astor elected as the 1st female member of the British House of Commons
1922 👉🏼 Captain Cyril Turner (RAF) gives 1st skywriting exhibition (NYC) Turner spelled out “Hello USA. Call Vanderbilt 7200.” 47,000 called
1967 👉🏼 1st radio pulsars detected by British postgraduate Jocelyn Bell Burnell and her supervisor Antony Hewish at Cambridge University
2019 👉🏼 European parliament declares a climate emergency