Hessian Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Knyphausen and a force of 3,000 Hessian mercenaries and 5,000 Redcoats lay siege to Fort Washington at the northern end and highest point of Manhattan Island. Throughout the morning, Knyphausen met stiff resistance from the Patriot riflemen inside the fort, but by afternoon, the Patriots were overwhelmed, and the garrison […]

On November 16, 1849, a Russian court sentences Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for his allegedly anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group. His execution is stayed at the last minute. Dostoevsky’s father was a doctor at Moscow’s Hospital for the Poor, where he grew rich enough to buy land and serfs. After his father’s […]

On November 16, 1941, Joseph Goebbels publishes in the German magazine Das Reich that “The Jews wanted the war, and now they have it”—referring to the Nazi propaganda scheme to shift the blame for the world war onto European Jews, thereby giving the Nazis a rationalization for the so-called Final Solution. Just two days earlier, […]

On November 16, 1957, the body of Bernice Worden of Plainfield, Wisconsin, is found, the final victim of infamous killer Edward Gein. His grave robbing, necrophilia and copious corpse trophies gained national attention, and may have provided inspiration for the characters of Norman Bates in Psycho and serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of […]

On November 16, 1974, eight years before E.T. did the “Phone Home” thing on film, researchers send humanity’s first real-life, deliberate radio message into outer space to extraterrestrials. The message goes out from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, where the Arecibo radio telescope was getting a major upgrade and conducting a ceremony to mark […]