HIGHLIGHTS IN HISTORY

Today is Saturday, November 14, the 319th day of 2020. There are 47 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlights in History:

1851: Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale was published in the United States, almost a month after being released in Britain.

1862: During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln gave the go-ahead for Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s plan to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond; the resulting Battle of Fredericksburg proved a disaster for the Union.

1889: Jawarharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, was born.

1910: Eugene B. Ely became the first aviator to take off from a ship as his Curtiss pusher rolled off a sloping platform on the deck of the scout cruiser USS Birmingham off Hampton Roads, Virginia.

1915: African-American educator Booker T. Washington, 59, died in Tuskegee, Alabama.

1940: During World War II, German planes destroyed most of the English town of Coventry.

1965: The US Army’s first major military operation of the Vietnam War began with the start of the five-day Battle of Ia Drang. (The fighting between American troops and North Vietnamese forces ended on November 18 with both sides claiming victory.)

1969: Apollo 12 blasted off for the moon. 1970: A chartered Southern Airways DC-9 crashed while trying to land in West Virginia, killing all 75 people on board, including the Marshall University football team and its coaching staff.

1990: It was revealed that the pop duo Milli Vanilli (Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan) had done none of the singing on their Grammy-winning debut album, Girl You Know It’s True. 1996: Singer Michael Jackson married his plastic surgeon’s nurse, Debbie Rowe, in a ceremony in Sydney, Australia. (Rowe filed for divorce in

1999.)

1997: A jury in Fairfax, Virginia, decided that Pakistani national Aimal Khan Kasi should get the death penalty for gunning down two CIA employees outside agency headquarters. (Five years later on this date, Aimal Khan Kasi was executed.)

Ten years ago: Somali pirates released British couple Paul and Rachel Chandler, who were held for 388 days after they were abducted from their 38-foot-yacht.

Five years ago: The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a wave of attacks in Paris that killed 130 people and said France would remain at the “top of the list” of its targets. A high-speed train undergoing a test run derailed and plunged into a canal in northeast France, killing 11 people.