Fun facts about today

1620: Forty-one male passengers aboard the Mayflower sign the Mayflower Compact before going ashore at Cape Cod, setting up a self-governing body under majority rule.
1831: Nat Turner is hanged in Jerusalem, Va., for leading a slave rebellion that killed dozens of white residents.
1889: Washington becomes the 42nd state.
1918: World War I fighting ends at 11 a.m. under the armistice signed earlier that morning in a railroad car in Compiègne, France.
1921: President Warren Harding dedicates the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.
1940: The Armistice Day Blizzard strikes the upper Midwest without warning, killing about 150 people, many of them duck hunters caught out on the water.
1954: The nation observes Veterans Day for the first time, after Congress renamed Armistice Day to honor veterans of every war.
1965: Rhodesia's white-minority government declares independence from Britain.
1966: NASA launches Gemini 12, the final Gemini mission. Buzz Aldrin's spacewalks prove astronauts can work outside a spacecraft, clearing the way for Apollo.
1987: Vincent van Gogh's Irises sells at auction for $53.9 million, a record at the time.
2004: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat dies in a hospital outside Paris.

Birthdays Today include: Abigail Adams, first lady and adviser to John Adams; Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of Crime and Punishment; George S. Patton, the general who led the Third Army across Europe; Kurt Vonnegut, World War II veteran, POW, and author of Slaughterhouse-Five; Jonathan Winters, Marine veteran and comedian; Stanley Tucci, actor from The Devil Wears Prada; Demi Moore, actress from Ghost; Calista Flockhart, actress from Ally McBeal; and Leonardo DiCaprio, actor from Titanic. If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday from all of us.