In what proved a fateful decision on November 21, 1776, Continental Commander in Chief General George Washington writes to General Charles Lee in Westchester County, New York, to report the loss of Fort Lee, New Jersey, and to order Lee to bring his forces to New Jersey.

On November 21, 1817, U.S. troops from Fort Scott attack the small Seminole Indian village of Fowltown, located in southern Georgia, killing about 20 men and igniting the First Seminole War. The conflict, which lasted less than a year, would not succeed in squashing Native resistance, but it would contribute to the Spanish relinquishing its Florida territory to the United States.

On November 21, 1912, the Manchester Guardian breaks the news: After three years of digging in the Piltdown gravel pit in Sussex, England, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson had discovered two skulls that appear to belong to a primitive hominid and ancestor of man, along with a canine tooth, a tool carved from an elephant’s tusk, and fossil teeth from a number of prehistoric animals. Despite muted criticism from a minority of paleontologists, the majority of the scientific community hailed the so-called Piltdown Man discovery as the missing evolutionary link between ape and man.

The Britannic, sister ship to the Titanic, sinks in the Aegean Sea on November 21, 1916, killing 30 people. More than 1,000 others were rescued.

On November 21, 1976, Rocky, starring Sylvester Stallone as the underdog prizefighter Rocky Balboa, debuts in New York City. The movie, which opened in theaters across the United States on December 3, 1976, was a huge box-office hit and received 10 Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay for the then-little known Stallone. Rocky ultimately took home three Oscars, including one for Best Picture, and made Stallone one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

National Security Council staff member Oliver North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, begin shredding documents that would have exposed their participation in a range of illegal activities regarding the sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of the proceeds to a rebel Nicaraguan group. On November 25, North was fired but Hall continued to sneak documents to him by stuffing them in her skirt and boots. The Iran-Contra scandal, as it came to be known, became an embarrassment and a sticky legal problem for the Reagan administration.