November 3rd:

1586 Sir Thomas Herriot introduces potatoes to England from Colombia

1854 Eureka Stockade: In what is claimed by many to be the birth of Australian democracy, more than 20 goldminers at Ballarat, Victoria, are killed by state troopers in an uprising over mining license's

1967 First human heart transplant performed in South Africa by Dr. Christiaan Barnard on Louis Washkansky

1968 Elvis Presley's Comeback Special airs on NBC, his 1st live performance in seven years, re-launching his singing career

1984 Bhopal disaster: A Union Carbide pesticide plant leaks 45 tons of methyl isocyanate and other toxic compounds in Bhopal, India, officially killing 2,259 - other estimates are as high as 16,000 (including later deaths) and over half a million injured

1989 Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H. W. Bush, declare the Cold War over

December 2nd:

1804 General Napoleon Bonaparte is crowned Emperor of the French at the Notre Dame de Paris in a ceremony officiated by Pope Pius VII

1823 US President James Monroe declares the "Monroe Doctrine" opposing European colonialism in the Americas, arguing any European political intervention in the New World would be a hostile act against the
United States

1845 US President James K. Polk announces to Congress that the United States should aggressively expand into the West, a widely held belief termed "manifest destiny" by newspaper editor John O'Sullivan

1883 Johannes Brahms' "3rd Symphony in F" premieres with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

1929 First skull of Peking man found in the caves of Zhoukoudian, 50 km outside of Peking, China. Later dated roughly 750,000 years old.

1952 First human birth televised to public on KOA-TV Denver, Colorado (Ewwwwww)

1976 Communist revolutionary Fidel Castro becomes President of Cuba, replacing Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado

December 1st:

1913 Ford Motor Company institutes world's 1st moving assembly line for the Model T Ford

1934 Leningrad mayor Sergey Kirov is assassinated, Joseph Stalin uses it as an excuse to begin his Great Purge of 1934-38

1955 Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus and give her seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama

1988 Benazir Bhutto named Prime Minister of Pakistan, the 1st female leader of a Muslim country

1990 British and French workers meet in the middle of the Channel Tunnel under the English Channel

November 30th:

1016 Cnut the Great [Canute], King of Denmark, claims the English throne after the death of Edmund 'Ironside'

1487 The first German Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot), is promulgated in Munich by Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria stating beer should be brewed from only three ingredients – water, malt and hops

1786 Grand Duke of Tuscany Leopold II promulgates a penal reform, making his the 1st state to abolish the death penalty. November 30 commemorated as Cities for Life Day.

1872 First international soccer game, Scotland draws with England (0- in Glasgow

1876 Archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann finds the gold Mask of Agamemnon at Mycenae (modern Greece) "the Mona Lisa of prehistory"

1982 "Gandhi" directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Ben Kingsley and John Gielgud premieres in New Delhi (Best Picture 1983)

1994 Beatles' 1st album in 25 years, "Live at the BBC", is released in Britain

November 29th:

526 A possible date for the Antioch earthquake in present-day Syria (then the Byzantine Empire) which killed 200,000 people

1745 Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobite army moves into Manchester and occupies Carlisle

1877 US inventor Thomas Edison demonstrates his hand-cranked phonograph for the first time

1935 Physicist Erwin Schrödinger publishes his famous thought experiment "Schrödinger's cat", a paradox that illustrates the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics

1951 1st underground atomic explosion at Frenchman Flat in Nevada

1987 Joe Montana of SF 49ers completes NFL record of 22 consecutive passes