On This Day:
Thursday November 21, 2013 This is the 325th day of the year, with 40 days remaining in 2013. Fact of the Day: Stonehenge Stonehenge is an ancient monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, the remains of four massive trilithons surrounded by concentric circles of megaliths, probably constructed c. 3100 BC. Stonehenge is architecturally unique and underwent three phases of construction. The first phase, Stonehenge I, began around 3100 BC. The second phase, Stonehenge II, began around 2100 BC, and the third phase, Stonehenge III, around 2000 BC. The reasons for its design and construction are not known, but according to most theories it was a place of worship. Archaeologists have long been fascinated by this monument because it gives evidence of massive manpower input; one calculation suggests that Phase III alone took 30 million man-hours to construct.
Holidays Feast day of St. Geasius, pope, and St. Albert of Louvain.
North Carolina: Ratification Day.
Events 1783 - François de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandres made the first human flight in a hot-air balloon, in Paris, in a balloon built by the Joseph-Michel Montgolfier and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier.
1877 - Thomas Edison announced his invention of the phonograph.
1918 - The German High Seas Fleet surrendered to the Allies.
1922 - Rebecca L. Felton of Georgia was sworn in as the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate.
1929 - Surrealist painter Salvador Dali had his first exhibit.
1942 - The Alcan Highway, an overland military supply route to the U.S. territory of Alaska, linking Canada and Alaska, was opened. It is now called the Alaska Highway. Passing through the Yukon, the more than 1,500-mile roadway connected Dawson Creek, British Columbia with Fairbanks, Alaska
1953 - The discovery of the Piltdown Man skull by Charles Dawson in Sussex in 1912 was revealed as a hoax.
1964 - New York's Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened.
1967 - President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the air quality act, which allotted money to fight air pollution.
1973 - The 18.5-minute gap in one of Richard Nixon's White House tape recordings related to Watergate was revealed by Nixon's lawyer.
1980 - A fire at the MGM Grand Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada killed 87 people.
1980 - Approximately 83 million people tuned in to find out "who shot J.R." on the TV show "Dallas."
1990 - Leaders of NATO and Warsaw Pact member states signed the Charter of Paris and a treaty on conventional forces in Europe, bringing an end to the Cold War.
1995 - The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above the 5000 mark for the first time.
2002 - NATO invited the seven former communist countries into its membership.
2004 - Donald Trump's casino empire filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Births 1694 - Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet), French philosopher, historian, poet, dramatist and novelist.
1898 - Rene Magritte, French surrealist painter.
1920 - Stan Musial, American baseball Hall-of-Famer.
1945 - Goldie Hawn, American Academy Award-winning actress.
1969 - Ken Griffey Jr., American baseball player.
Deaths 1695 - Henry Purcell, English composer.
1945 - Robert Benchley, American humorist, critic, and parodist.
1997 - Robert Simpson, English composer and long-serving BBC producer and broadcaster.
1999 - Quentin Crisp, English writer, actor and raconteur.
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