As the American Civil War entered its first winter, Union naval forces on western rivers worked to establish the dominance that would eventually let federal gunboats and ironclads split the Confederacy along the Mississippi. Control of these waterways, achieved gradually over 1861 and 1862, proved decisive in the eventual Union strategy of dividing and strangling the South.
Sun Yat-sen's birth in a small farming village near Macau set in motion decades of revolutionary agitation against the crumbling Qing dynasty. He would found the Tongmenghui, inspire the 1911 Revolution, and become the founding father of the Republic of China, a figure still honored by both mainland China and Taiwan.
Concern mounted at Britain's Antarctic base camp as Robert Falcon Scott's polar party failed to return from their attempt to be first to the South Pole. A search team departed to investigate, eventually discovering the frozen bodies of Scott and his companions along with the diaries that would make their doomed expedition legendary.
Following the brutal Second Balkan War, in which Bulgaria's neighbors turned on it after its earlier victory over the Ottomans, diplomats hammered out fresh territorial arrangements in the Balkans. The settlements redrew borders in ways that left grievances festering, contributing to the combustible atmosphere that would help ignite the First World War less than a year later.
As Central Europe's communist governments cracked one after another in autumn 1989, Czechoslovak citizens grew bolder in their public demands for change. Student and dissident networks, long suppressed, organized gatherings that swelled through November, setting the stage for the massive protests of November 17 that historians mark as the true start of the Velvet Revolution.
MESSENGER, the first spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury, continued returning data through November 2011 that upended assumptions about the solar system's innermost planet. Scientists found evidence of extensive ancient volcanism and a magnetic field oddly offset from the planet's center, findings that reshaped planetary science's understanding of how rocky worlds form and evolve.
After traveling for a decade aboard the Rosetta spacecraft, the small Philae lander detached and descended onto comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, achieving humanity's first controlled landing on a comet nucleus. Anchoring harpoons failed to fire, causing Philae to bounce before settling in a shadowed crevice, but the mission still gathered unprecedented data about a primordial building block of the solar system.
As private and state-backed Chinese aerospace firms raced to catch up with SpaceX's reusable rocket breakthroughs, November 2018 saw significant testing milestones in China's push toward landing and reflying rocket boosters. The effort reflected Beijing's determination to compete in the increasingly commercial and strategically vital space launch market.