On November 13, 2000, the Parliament of the Philippines voted to impeach President Joseph Estrada on corruption charges. He was ousted from power the following year.
On November 13, 1956, the US Supreme Court declined the appeal of a US District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that had declared unconstitutional Alabama’s state and local laws requiring segregation on buses, thereby ending the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
On November 12, 1997, Ramzi Yousef and two co-conspirators were convicted of plotting the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Yousef was later given a life sentence in prison without the possibility of parole. Learn more about the trial of Ramzi Yousef.
On November 12, 1948, former Japanese premier Hideki Tojo and several other World War II Japanese leaders were sentenced to death for war crimes. Read more about the Tokyo War Crimes Trials before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
On November 11, 1991, prosecutors from the United States and the United Kingdom announced their indictments in the bombing of a passenger airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland. A Scottish court convicted Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, allegedly a former Libyan intelligence official, of the 270 murders in 2001. Read documents from the Lockerbie bombing trial.
On November 11, 1918 at 11:00 AM, the Allied Powers signed an armistice with Germany, ending World War I. Armistice Day is marked every year in Europe on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” with two minutes of silence.
On November 11, 1620, 41 Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact, creating a civil government for Plymouth Colony.
On November 10, 1982, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died of a heart attack. He had served as leader of the USSR from October 1964 until his death. Following his death, the Soviet Union cycled through three more leaders during the 1980s until Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the country to dissolve in 1991. Read an obituary of [...]
On November 10, 1919, the US Supreme Court ruled in Abrams v. United States that the federal government could criminalize speech if it was of a type tending to bring about harmful results, in this case, resistance to the United States war effort. In a powerful dissenting opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes countered that even [...]
On November 9, 1970, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 in Massachusetts v. Laird not to hear the case of the state’s anti-draft law. Massachusetts had passed a law, which allowed its citizens to decline to fight in any undeclared war, even if the person was drafted. The law was passed in opposition to the draft [...]