1783 – Jean Francois Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis Francois Laurant d’Arlandes made the first flight in a balloon, thus becoming the first men to fly – period. The pair flew nearly six miles around Paris in 25 minutes, reaching an altitude of around 300 feet.

1789 – North Carolina ratified the U.S. constitution and became the 12th U.S. state.

1864 – Legend holds that on this day, President Abraham Lincoln composed a letter to Lydia Bixby, a widow and mother of five men who had been killed in the Civil War. The letter expressed condolences to Mrs. Bixby on the death of her five sons, who had fought to preserve the Union.
Scholars continue to debate the authorship of the letter, and the authenticity of copies printed between 1864 and 1891. At the time, copies of presidential messages were often published and sold as souvenirs. Many historians and archivists agree that the original letter was probably written by Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay.
As to Mrs. Bixby’s loss, scholars have discovered that only two of her sons actually died fighting during the Civil War. A third was honorably discharged and a fourth was dishonorably thrown out of the Army. The fifth son’s fate is unknown, but it is assumed that he deserted or died in a Confederate prison camp.

1877 – Thomas Edison announced his invention of the phonograph. Edison stumbled on one of his greatest inventions while working on a way to record telephone communication at his laboratory in Menlo Park, NJ. His work led him to experiment with a stylus on a tinfoil cylinder, which, to his surprise, played back the short song he had recorded, “Mary had a little lamb.” Public demonstrations of the phonograph made the Yankee inventor world famous, and he was dubbed the “Wizard of Menlo Park.”

1927 – A fight broke out between Colorado State Police and a group of striking coal miners during which the unarmed strikers were attacked with machine guns. It remains unclear whether the machine guns were used by the police or by guards working for the mine. Six strikers were killed, and dozens were injured. Ironically, the massacre took place in the town of Serene.

1941 – Juanita Spellini became the first woman to be executed in California when she died in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison. Described by the warden as “the coldest, hardest character, male or female, I have ever known,” Spellini had developed what she thought was a foolproof plan – taking homeless men into her home where she would cook and clean for them and train them to be professional criminals. The men received a ten dollar weekly allowance, with Spinelli keeping everything they stole. But when she conspired to have one of her “boys” killed (because she feared he would talk), she was arrested and her gang members testified against her at her trial.

1941 – Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect and minister for armaments and war production, asked for 30,000 Soviet prisoners of war to use as slave laborers to begin a massive Berlin building program. As minister of armaments and munitions, Speer’s job description expanded to include not only armament production and transportation, but also the direction of raw material use and finally the conscription of slave labor, culled from concentration camps, for war material production. These slave laborers would come in handy for Hitler’s “new” Berlin. Speer wanted to begin construction even as the war waged. Despite the drain on resources Hitler agreed.
But as the war turned against Nazi Germany, the rebuilding plans were scrapped. When the war was over, Hitler was dead, and Speer was convicted as a war criminal at Nuremberg and sentenced to 20 years in Spandau prison in Berlin.

1945 – The United Auto Workers struck 92 General Motors plants in 50 cities to back up worker demands for a 30-percent raise and a greater voice in management. GM said they would pay higher wages but refused to consider power sharing. After a 113-day strike, the union settled with an eighteen-and-a-half-cent wage increase but little more.

1958 – Baseball Hall of Fame outfielder Mel Ott died due to injuries suffered in an auto accident. He was 41. Ott was the first National League player to hit 500 home runs.

1959 – Max Baer, former heavyweight boxing champion (and the father of actor Max Baer, Jr., best known as Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies) died of a heart attack at the age of 50.

1963 – President John F. Kennedy flew from Washington, DC to San Antonio, Texas. After speaking at the Aero-Space Medical Health Center, he flew to Houston for a brief visit before flying to Fort Worth.
The next morning, he flew to Dallas.

1963 – Robert Stroud (one of the most notorious criminals in American history, but best known as the “Birdman of Alcatraz”) died at the age of 73, having been incarcerated for the last 54 years of his life, of which 42 were spent in solitary confinement.
Despite the nickname, Stroud was not allowed to keep birds in his cell at Alcatraz – his time with them was during his Leavenworth Prison days. Although he was depicted as a mild mannered and humane person by Burt Lancaster in the movie Birdman Of Alcatraz, Stroud was an “extremely dangerous and menacing psychopath, disliked and distrusted by his jailers and fellow inmates.”

1964 – The Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened. Technically, it was the upper deck that was opened to traffic. The bridge, linking Brooklyn and Staten Island, was at the time the world’s longest suspension bridge at 4,260 ft.

1967 – Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, told U.S. news reporters, “I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing.”
Having been reassured by the general, most Americans were stunned when the communists launched a massive offensive during the Vietnamese Tet New Year holiday on January 30, 1968. During this offensive, communist forces struck 36 of 44 provincial capitals, 5 of 6 autonomous cities, 64 of 242 district capitals and about 50 hamlets. At one point during the initial attack on Saigon, communist troops actually penetrated the ground floor of the U.S. Embassy.

1970 – A combined U.S. Air Force and Army team of 40 Americans – led by Army Colonel “Bull” Simons – conducted a raid on the Son Tay prison camp, 23 miles west of Hanoi, in an attempt to free between 70 and 100 Americans suspected of being held there.
Unfortunately, the Green Berets could not locate any prisoners in the huts. After a sharp firefight with the North Vietnamese troops in the area, the order was given to withdraw – 27 minutes after the raid began, the force was in the air headed back to Thailand. The raid was accomplished in a superb manner and all Americans returned safely, but it was learned later that the prisoners had been moved elsewhere in July.

1973 – J. Fred Buzhardt, counsel to President Richard Nixon, revealed the presence of 18½ minute gap in a White House tape recording related to Watergate.
Rose Mary Woods, President Nixon’s secretary, claimed responsibility in a 1974 grand jury testimony for inadvertently erasing up to five minutes of the audio tape. Her demonstration of how this might have occurred – which depended upon her stretching to simultaneously press controls several feet apart (what the press dubbed the “Rose Mary Stretch”) – was met with skepticism from those who believed the erasures, from whatever source, to be deliberate. The contents of the gap remain a mystery.

1974 – Bombs devastated two central Birmingham, England pubs, killing 19 people and injuring over 180. Police had attempted to clear both pubs, but the bombs went off only 12 minutes after a man with an Irish accent telephoned a local newspaper with a warning.
Six Irishmen, who became known as the Birmingham Six, were arrested immediately after and in 1975 were given life sentences for the bombings. After 16 years in prison, their convictions were overturned after the court finally acknowledged that the scientific evidence and their “confessions,” which had been obtained through violence, were unreliable.

1975 – A Senate committee issued a report charging that U.S. government officials were behind assassination plots against two foreign leaders and had been heavily involved in at least three other plots. The shocking revelations suggested that the U.S. was willing to go to murderous levels in pursuing its Cold War policies.
The Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church, alleged that U.S. officials instigated plots to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. In addition, the U.S. officials “encouraged or were privy to” plots that led to the assassinations of Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, General Rene Schneider of Chile, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. The attempts against Castro failed, but the other four leaders were killed. There was also evidence suggesting U.S. involvement in a number of other assassination plots against foreign leaders.

1976 – Rocky, starring Sylvester Stallone as the underdog prizefighter Rocky Balboa, premiered in New York City. The movie, which opened in theaters across the United States on December 3, was a huge box-office hit and received 10 Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay for the then-little known Stallone. Rocky ultimately took home three Oscars, including one for Best Picture, and made Stallone one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

1980 – An estimated 82 million Americans tuned in to television’s Dallas to find out who shot J.R. Ewing, who had been shot on the season-ending episode the previous. The plot twist inspired widespread media coverage and left America wondering “Who shot J.R.?” for the next eight months. The November 21 episode solved the mystery, identifying Kristin Shepard, J.R.’s wife’s sister and his former mistress, as the culprit.

1980 – A fire in a restaurant inside the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino killed 87 people, most through smoke inhalation. Another 650 were injured. At the time of the fire, approximately 5,000 people were in the hotel and casino, a 23-story luxury resort with more than 2,000 hotel rooms.

1985 – Jonathan Jay Pollard, a civilian U.S. Navy intelligence analyst and Jewish American, was arrested on charges of illegally passing classified U.S. security information about Arab nations to Israel. Pollard, an employee at the navy intelligence center in Suitland, MD, was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison under the recommendation of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. The Israeli government did not officially object to the sentencing and most of Israel regarded the incident as an unfortunate embarrassment.

1986 – National Security Council staff member Oliver North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, began shredding documents that would have exposed their participation in a range of illegal activities regarding the sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of the proceeds to a rebel Nicaraguan group. On November 25, North was fired but Hall continued to sneak documents to him by stuffing them in her skirt and boots.

1988 – Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Carl Hubbell died due to injuries suffered in an auto accident. He was 85. He is best remembered for his performance in the 1934 All-Star Game when he struck out five of the game’s great hitters in succession.

1993 – Actor Bill Bixby (My Favorite Martian, The Courtship Of Eddie’s Father, The Magician, The Incredible Hulk) died of prostate cancer at the age of 59.

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