20 novembre

From the murder of Severus Alexander by his troops to Diocletian: more than twenty emperors in fifty years, most of them killed. Plague, war on the Rhine, the Danube and the Euphrates, and a silver coin debased until it was barely silver.

Diocletian and his successors ruled openly as dominus, lord, with Persian-style court ceremony, a larger army and bureaucracy, and heavier taxes to pay for both.

Augustus kept the Republic’s offices and names and held the power himself as princeps, first citizen, never king. The fiction held until Diocletian dropped it.

Moved partly by Bartolomé de las Casas, Charles V forbade enslaving Indigenous people and ordered that encomiendas, the grants of their labour, end with their holders’ deaths. In Peru the settlers rebelled under Gonzalo Pizarro and killed the viceroy sent to enforce them.

Betrayed and ambushed nearly two years after Macaco fell. His head was displayed in Recife to disprove the belief that he could not die. Brazil keeps 20 November as Black Consciousness Day, a national holiday since 2024.

With no preliminary bombardment, more than 400 British tanks broke into the Hindenburg Line and church bells rang in Britain. A German counter-attack ten days later took back most of the ground.

Dukhonin, acting commander-in-chief, had refused Sovnarkom’s order to seek an armistice. When Ensign Krylenko, the new commander, reached Mogilev with sailors, a mob lynched Dukhonin at the station. The day before he had let Kornilov escape from Bykhov.

To pay its bills and reparations, the Reichsbank printed marks faster than anyone could spend them. Prices rose so fast that workers were paid twice a day and ran to the shops before their wages lost their value.

French and Vietnamese paratroopers took a valley near the Laotian border to block the Viet Minh’s road into Laos. Navarre expected Võ Nguyên Giáp to break his army on its fortified hills. Giáp instead spent four months dragging artillery into the surrounding hills by hand, supplied by porters and…

France had fought the Viet Minh since December 1946 to hold on to Indochina. By 1954 the war was being paid for largely by Washington, and the French commander, Henri Navarre, wanted one set-piece battle that would let France negotiate from strength. He got the battle, and lost it.

Destroyers and cruisers, with carriers behind them, waited on an arc across the Atlantic approaches, pulled in to about 500 nautical miles from Cuba to give Khrushchev more time. The line held until 20 November, when the Il-28 bombers were promised out too.

Once Khrushchev agreed to take out the Il-28 bombers as well, Kennedy announced at an evening press conference that the quarantine was over.

Microsoft's graphical shell on top of MS-DOS. Its windows could not even overlap; the version that sold, Windows 3.0, came in 1990.

Qatar won the vote in December 2010 and built seven new stadiums, a metro and a city with a workforce of migrants tied to their employers under the kafala system. How many died is disputed. The Guardian counted 6,500 deaths of workers from five South Asian countries in Qatar from 2010 to 2020,…

The first World Cup in the Arab world, moved to November and December to avoid the summer heat. Morocco became the first African team to reach a semi-final.