November 26

Song dynasty naval forces defeat the Jin dynasty fleet at the Battle of Caishi on the Yangtze River.

The Battle of Caishi saw a numerically inferior Southern Song fleet, equipped with innovative paddle-wheel warships and early gunpowder weapons, decisively repel a much larger invading Jin dynasty force attempting to cross the Yangtze River. The unexpected victory halted the Jin invasion and helped secure the continued survival of the Southern Song dynasty for well over another century.

Captain James Cook becomes the first European to sight the Hawaiian island of Maui.

Captain James Cook's sighting of Maui came during his third and final Pacific voyage, part of his broader extensive charting of the Hawaiian Islands, which he had named the Sandwich Islands after his patron. Cook's detailed navigational records opened the islands to increased Western contact, with profound and often devastating consequences for native Hawaiian society in subsequent decades.

Captain James Cook becomes the first European to visit the Hawaiian island of Maui.

Cook, the British Royal Navy explorer whose Pacific voyages mapped vast stretches of previously uncharted coastline, sighted Maui during his third and final expedition. His visit came weeks before his death in a confrontation with Hawaiians at Kealakekua Bay in early 1779, ending one of the era's most consequential careers of exploration.

President George Washington proclaims a national day of thanksgiving, as requested by Congress.

President Washington's proclamation, issued at the request of Congress, designated a specific day of national thanks and prayer following the successful ratification of the Constitution, establishing an early precedent for presidential thanksgiving observances. However, the practice remained inconsistent and irregularly observed by subsequent presidents for decades afterward.

Thomas Telford's Pontcysyllte Aqueduct officially opens in Wales.

The cast-iron trough aqueduct, designed by Telford with William Jessop, carries the Llangollen Canal 38 metres above the River Dee near Llangollen. It remains the longest and highest aqueduct in Britain and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009, celebrated as a masterpiece of civil engineering from the canal age.

The Battle of Berezina begins as Napoleon's army attempts to cross the river during its disastrous retreat from Russia.

Napoleon's retreating Grande Armee attempted a desperate crossing of the icy Berezina River while pursued by Russian forces, resulting in catastrophic losses among French and allied troops during the chaotic, multi-day engagement. The crossing became emblematic of the broader disaster of Napoleon's Russian campaign, from which his once-formidable army never fully recovered.

President Abraham Lincoln formally designates the last Thursday of November as an annual national Thanksgiving holiday.

President Lincoln's proclamation, issued amid the ongoing Civil War, formally established the last Thursday of November as a recurring national Thanksgiving holiday, building on Washington's earlier one-time observance. Lincoln's action, encouraged by tireless magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, created the annual tradition that continues, with a slight date adjustment, to the present day.

The Royal Navy battleship HMS Bulwark is destroyed by a massive internal explosion while anchored near Sheerness, killing 741 men.

The explosion, most likely caused by overheated cordite charges stored near a boiler room, tore the pre-dreadnought apart in seconds, and only a dozen sailors survived. It remains one of the deadliest accidental disasters in Royal Navy history and prompted tighter safety procedures for onboard ammunition storage.

The National Hockey League is founded in Montreal with five original member teams.

The National Hockey League was founded in Montreal by team owners seeking to reorganize professional hockey after disputes within a previous league, initially fielding five teams including the still-active Montreal Canadiens. The NHL would gradually expand over the following century into the premier professional ice hockey league in North America.

The Manchester Guardian publishes the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France.

The leaked agreement, negotiated by British diplomat Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Georges-Picot, had secretly carved the Ottoman Empire's Arab territories into British and French zones of control. Its publication, sourced from Bolshevik Russia after the October Revolution, embarrassed the Allies and fuelled lasting distrust among Arab leaders who had been promised independence.

Archaeologist Howard Carter and his patron Lord Carnarvon become the first people in modern times to enter the antechamber of King Tutankhamun's tomb.

Howard Carter and his financial backer Lord Carnarvon became the first people in over 3,000 years to peer into the antechamber of King Tutankhamun's nearly intact tomb, with Carter famously describing seeing "wonderful things" by candlelight through a small hole. The discovery ignited a worldwide sensation and renewed fascination with ancient Egyptian civilization.

U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull delivers the Hull note to Japan, demanding withdrawal from China and French Indochina.

U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull delivered a diplomatic note demanding Japan's complete withdrawal from China and French Indochina as a condition for lifting American economic sanctions, terms Japanese leadership considered unacceptable. The failure of last-minute negotiations following the note contributed directly to Japan's decision to attack Pearl Harbor less than two weeks later.

The British troopship HMT Rohna is sunk by a German guided glide bomb in the Mediterranean, killing 1,015 American servicemen.

A Luftwaffe Henschel Hs 293 radio-guided glide bomb struck the Rohna, a British-crewed transport carrying American troops, off the Algerian coast, in the first ship ever sunk in combat by a guided missile. The disaster was the deadliest single loss of US troops at sea to enemy action in the war, yet details were classified for decades and remain little known.

A German V-2 rocket strikes a Woolworth's department store in New Cross, south London, killing 168 people.

The rocket struck at midday on a Saturday, when the store was crowded with Christmas shoppers, making it the deadliest single V-2 strike on Britain. Because the V-2's supersonic descent gave no warning, victims had no chance to take shelter, and the scale of the tragedy was censored from wartime reporting to preserve morale.

An unidentified hijacker calling himself 'Vrillon' interrupts Britain's Southern Television broadcast for six minutes, claiming to represent an extraterrestrial 'Ashtar Galactic Command.'

The broadcast, which overrode the audio of an ITN news bulletin in southern England, warned viewers to abandon weapons of war or face grave consequences before normal programming resumed. The perpetrator and method were never identified, and the incident remains one of the most notorious unsolved broadcast signal intrusions in British television history.

Armed robbers steal 6,800 gold bars worth almost £26 million from the Brink's-Mat vault at Heathrow Airport.

The gang had expected to find cash but discovered a shipment of gold bullion instead, triggering one of Britain's most notorious criminal cases. Laundering the gold drew in figures across London's underworld and sparked a string of related murders, and much of the loot was never recovered, cementing Brink's-Mat as a byword for British crime folklore.

Tony Blair becomes the first British Prime Minister to address the Oireachtas, the parliament of the Republic of Ireland.

Blair's speech in Dublin, delivered eight months after the Good Friday Agreement was signed, symbolized the warming of relations between Britain and Ireland following decades of conflict in Northern Ireland. It underscored the two governments' shared commitment to the peace process at a pivotal moment in Anglo-Irish relations.

Concorde makes its last-ever flight, passing over Bristol, England, where the British-built aircraft was assembled.

The supersonic airliner, developed jointly by Britain's BAC and France's Aérospatiale, had entered service in 1976 and could cross the Atlantic in under three and a half hours. Rising costs, the 2000 Air France crash, and declining passenger numbers after the September 11 attacks led British Airways and Air France to retire the fleet, ending the era of supersonic passenger travel.

Coordinated terrorist attacks across Mumbai kill approximately 175 people over several days.

Coordinated attacks by armed militants targeted luxury hotels, a train station, and other locations across Mumbai over several days, killing approximately 175 people in one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Indian history. The assault, attributed to a Pakistan-based militant group, significantly strained diplomatic relations between India and Pakistan in the years that followed.

NASA's InSight lander successfully touches down on Mars to study the planet's deep interior.

NASA's InSight lander touched down on the flat Martian plain of Elysium Planitia to study the planet's deep interior structure using sensitive seismometers designed to detect "marsquakes." The mission provided scientists with unprecedented data about Mars's crust, mantle, and core, helping refine theories of how rocky planets, including Earth, form and evolve.