On Nov. 26, 1789, President George Washington asked Americans to observe the day as one of thanksgiving for the adoption of the Constitution.
In 1825 the first college social fraternity, Kappa Alpha, was formed at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.
In 1832 public streetcar service began in New York. The fare: 12 1/2 cents.
In 1922 “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schulz was born in Minneapolis.
In 1940 Warsaw’s 500,000 Jews were ordered by the Nazis to live within a walled ghetto.
In 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt ordered nationwide gasoline rationing, beginning Dec. 1. Also in 1942 the film “Casablanca,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, had its world premiere in New York.
In 1943, during World War II, the HMT Rohna, a British transport ship carrying American soldiers, was hit by a German missile off Algeria; 1,138 men were killed, including 1,015 American troops.
In 1949 India adopted a constitution as a republic within the British Commonwealth.
In 1950 China entered the Korean War, launching a bloody counteroffensive against United Nations forces, primarily troops from the United States and South Korea.
In 1956 bandleader Tommy Dorsey died in Greenwich, Conn.; he was 51.
In 1965 France launched its first satellite, sending a 92-pound capsule into orbit.
In 1975 a federal jury in Sacramento convicted Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, of attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford. (She is serving a life sentence.)
In 1986 President Ronald Reagan appointed a commission headed by former Sen. John Tower to investigate his National Security Council staff in the wake of the Iran-contra affair.
In 1988 the United States denied an entry visa to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, who was seeking permission to travel to New York to address the UN General Assembly.
In 1990 Japanese business giant Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. agreed to acquire MCA Inc. for $6.6 billion.
In 1991 the Stars and Stripes were lowered for the last time at Clark Air Base in the Philippines as the United States abandoned one of its oldest and largest overseas installations, which was damaged by a volcano.
In 1992 the British government announced that Queen Elizabeth II had volunteered to start paying taxes on her personal income.
In 1994 thirty clergymen were elevated to the rank of cardinal in a Vatican ceremony presided over by Pope John Paul II.
In 1995 senior U.S. officials declared the Dayton treaty on Bosnia was final, rejecting demands from Bosnian Serbs that provisions relating to the future of Sarajevo be changed.
In 1996 major league baseball owners reversed course, approving the same collective bargaining agreement they had rejected just three weeks earlier.
In 1998, in India, at least 211 people died when two trains collided in the northern state of Punjab.
In 1999 sixteen people were killed when a Norwegian high-speed passenger ferry hit a shoal and sank off Boemla Island, 250 miles west of Oslo.
In 2000 Florida’s Republican secretary of state certified George W. Bush as the winner over Al Gore in the state’s presidential balloting by 537 votes; the state’s 25 electoral votes enabled him to win the presidency. Also in 2000 Haiti held its presidential election; former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide won by a huge margin.
In 2002 WorldCom and the federal government settled a lawsuit over the company’s $9 billion accounting scandal. Also in 2002 a UN report said that for the first time in the 20-year history of the AIDS epidemic, about as many women as men were infected with HIV.
