Scott Allsop's Blog

25th November 1940: Nikolai Yezhov, former head of the Soviet secret police, executed in Moscow

Under Yezhov's leadership the NKVD launched a campaign of arrests targeting party members, military officers, and civilians that saw widespread purges, forced confessions, and executions. Estimates of those killed range into the hundreds of ...

22nd November 1987: Max Headroom signal hijacking takes control of two Chicago television stations

The hijackings showed a figure dressed as Max Headroom, a fictional artificial-intelligence television personality created in the mid-1980s and presented as “the world’s first computer-generated TV host”, in front of a sheet of corrugated ...

19th November 2006: Nintendo release the Wii console that includes motion-sensing technology

The Wii's defining feature was the Wii Remote, a wireless controller that could be swung, pointed, or tilted that enabled physical actions to correspond directly with on-screen ...

16th November 1938: Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann synthesizes lysergic acid diethylamide, later known as LSD

Lysergic acid diethylamide was modified from one of the principal active components of ergot, a fungus found on rye that had long been known for its medicinal and toxic ...

13th November 1833: Great Meteor Storm brings tens of thousands of meteors per hour to the North America sky

Contemporary estimates suggest that up to 100,000 meteors per hour may have been visible at the Great Storm's peak shortly before dawn on 13 ...

10th November 1898: Wilmington Massacre sees an armed white mob overthrow the elected government of Wilmington, North Carolina

On 10 November, hundreds of armed men led by Alfred Waddell set fire to the Daily Record office, and violence spread through the city as mobs killed an estimated 60 to 300 Black ...

9th November 1989: Berlin Wall opened by the East German government after Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced that GDR citizens could cross to West Berlin with immediate effect

Although the border remained closed for around three hours, by 11pm the Berlin Wall checkpoint at Bornholmer Strasse had been ...

8th November 1923: Adolf Hitler leads the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, alongside General Ludendorff

Hitler was injured and escaped capture, but was arrested two days later and put on trial for high ...

7th November 1874: Elephant first appears as a symbol of the Republican Party in Thomas Nast’s political cartoon Third Term Panic

Third Term Panic became one of Thomas Nast’s most influential works, securing the elephant’s place in American political iconography and was later adopted by the Republican Party ...

19th October 1935: League of Nations imposes sanctions on Italy for the invasion of Abyssinia

When Abyssinia was finally captured on 5 May, all the sanctions were ...