November 13 in History

Walt Disney's Fantasia opened at the Broadway Theatre in New York City, and nothing in the history of animation had prepared audiences for what they saw. The film merged classical music with animated imagery in a feature-length experiment that was part concert film, part visual symphony, and entirely unlike anything Hollywood had ever produced. Disney was betting his studio's financial future on the idea that cartoons could be high art. The project grew from a short film. Disney had commissioned a new Mickey Mouse cartoon set to Paul Dukas's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," hiring conductor Leopold Stokowski to record the score with the Philadelphia Orchestra. When production costs ballooned to $125,000, far too much for a single short, Disney decided to embed it within a larger film pairing other classical pieces with animation. The result was seven animated segments set to works by Bach, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Ponchielli, Mussorgsky, and Schubert, in addition to Dukas. The sequences ranged from abstract patterns dancing to Bach's Toccata and Fugue to the terrifying Night on Bald Mountain finale. Disney's animators created 500,000 frames of hand-painted art. The studio also developed Fantasound, a pioneering multi-channel audio system that required theaters to install custom speaker configurations, making Fantasia the first commercial film released in stereo sound. Critics were divided. Some hailed it as a masterpiece of visual imagination. Others found it pretentious. Audiences were confused. The film's initial roadshow release in thirteen cities earned respectable reviews but could not recoup its $2.28 million production cost, an enormous sum that pushed the studio toward financial crisis during a period when the European market was closed by World War II.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Alabama's bus segregation laws in Browder v. Gayle, declaring that racial separation on public transit violated the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. The ruling vindicated a 381-day boycott in Montgomery that had tested the endurance of an entire Black community and catapulted a 26-year-old Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. into national prominence. The Montgomery Bus Boycott had begun on December 5, 1955, four days after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. The boycott was not spontaneous. The Women's Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, had been planning a bus protest for months and used Parks's arrest as the catalyst. Robinson mimeographed 52,000 leaflets overnight, and within days Montgomery's Black population, which made up 75 percent of the bus system's ridership, had virtually abandoned public transit. The economic pressure was devastating. The Montgomery City Lines bus company lost 65 percent of its revenue. Black residents organized elaborate carpool networks, with volunteer drivers running routes that mirrored the bus system. White authorities fought back with mass arrests, including King's, and a campaign of intimidation that included the bombing of King's home. The city even invoked an obscure anti-boycott law from 1921. While the boycott ground on in the streets, the legal battle moved through the courts. Attorney Fred Gray filed Browder v. Gayle on behalf of four Black women who had been mistreated on Montgomery buses. A three-judge federal panel ruled in their favor in June 1956. Alabama appealed, and the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court's decision on November 13. The boycotters rode the integrated buses for the first time on December 21, 1956. The victory was local, but the strategy of combining economic pressure with legal challenges became the template for the civil rights movement's greatest triumphs over the next decade.

Thousands of Vietnam War veterans marched through Washington, D.C., many wearing old fatigues and unit patches, converging on the newly completed memorial that bore the names of 57,939 Americans killed or missing in the war. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in a ceremony that released emotions suppressed for nearly a decade, giving a divided nation its first shared space to grieve. The memorial had been controversial from the moment its design was selected. Maya Ying Lin, a 21-year-old Yale architecture student, won a blind competition that drew 1,421 entries. Her design was radical in its simplicity: two walls of polished black granite sunk into the earth, meeting at a 125-degree angle, inscribed with every name of the dead in chronological order of casualty. There was no heroic statuary, no flag, no traditional monument language. Some veterans were outraged, calling it a "black gash of shame." The opposition was fierce and politically charged. Tom Carhart, a decorated veteran, called the design "a tribute to Jane Fonda" at a public hearing. Ross Perot, who had funded the design competition, turned against the winning entry. Interior Secretary James Watt refused to issue a building permit until a compromise was reached: a representational bronze statue of three soldiers and a flagpole would be added nearby. Lin's design endured, and the wall's emotional power silenced most critics on dedication day. Veterans who had returned from the war to hostility or indifference broke down at the sight of familiar names. The black granite surface acts as a mirror, reflecting the faces of the living among the names of the dead, an effect Lin had intended. Visitors began leaving personal objects at the base, a spontaneous tradition that continues. The National Park Service has collected more than 400,000 items.

King Aethelred II of England ordered the killing of all Danes living in his kingdom, unleashing a coordinated massacre on St. Brice's Day that ranks among the most brutal acts of ethnic violence in medieval English history. The slaughter failed to solve Aethelred's Danish problem and instead provoked a campaign of vengeance that would eventually cost him his throne. England in 1002 was a kingdom under siege. Viking raids had intensified throughout the 990s, and Aethelred's strategy of paying increasingly enormous tributes of Danegeld to buy peace had only encouraged further attacks. The English king was surrounded by advisors he did not trust, some of Danish descent, and consumed by paranoia about a fifth column within his own realm. The massacre targeted Danish settlers who had lived in England for years, many of them merchants, craftsmen, and even baptized Christians. The precise scale is debated by historians, as Aethelred's authority was limited in the heavily Danish regions of northern and eastern England known as the Danelaw. The killing was likely concentrated in southern and central England, where the Anglo-Saxon population held greater sway. Archaeological evidence suggests the violence was genuine. A mass grave discovered at St. Frideswide's Church in Oxford in 2008 contained the remains of 34 to 38 young men, many with blade wounds and signs of burning, consistent with chronicle accounts that Danes were hunted down and the church was set ablaze when they took refuge inside. Among the dead was reportedly Gunhilde, sister of the Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard. Whether or not this specific claim is historical fact, Sweyn launched devastating retaliatory raids in 1003 and 1004, burning Exeter, Norwich, and other towns. His campaigns escalated over the following decade until he invaded England outright in 1013, forcing Aethelred to flee to Normandy.