November 16 in History

Francisco Pizarro and 168 Spanish soldiers ambushed Inca Emperor Atahualpa in the main square of Cajamarca, killing thousands of unarmed attendants and capturing the ruler of the largest empire in the Americas. The battle, if it can be called that, lasted less than two hours and destroyed a civilization that governed 12 million people across 4,000 kilometers of the Andes. Nothing in the history of colonialism matched the asymmetry of what happened at Cajamarca. Atahualpa had arrived with an entourage of perhaps 6,000, mostly unarmed retainers, ceremonial attendants, and nobles carried on ornate litters. He had just won a civil war against his half-brother Huascar and commanded an army of 80,000 veterans camped outside the city. The Spanish were a tiny, exhausted force that had marched into the Andes with horses, steel armor, and a handful of arquebuses. Pizarro had studied Hernan Cortes's capture of Montezuma and planned to replicate the strategy. The trap was sprung when a Spanish friar approached Atahualpa with a Bible and a demand that he accept Christianity and Spanish sovereignty. Accounts vary on what happened next, but Atahualpa reportedly threw the book to the ground. Pizarro gave the signal. Cannons fired into the packed square, cavalry charged from three directions, and the Spanish infantry waded into the panicked crowd with swords. The Inca attendants, carrying no weapons, were slaughtered. Those trying to flee crushed through a stone wall. Atahualpa's personal guards shielded him with their bodies, sacrificing themselves rather than let the emperor be harmed. Pizarro seized Atahualpa alive, recognizing his value as a hostage. The captured emperor offered to fill a room with gold and two rooms with silver in exchange for his freedom. The Spanish accepted, collected the ransom over several months, and then executed Atahualpa by garroting on July 26, 1533.

President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov exchanged diplomatic notes in Washington, formally establishing relations between the United States and the Soviet Union after sixteen years of official non-recognition. The agreement ended the longest diplomatic freeze between two major world powers in the twentieth century and began an uneasy partnership that would prove indispensable when both nations faced a common enemy less than a decade later. The United States had refused to recognize the Bolshevik government since the 1917 Revolution. American objections were both ideological and practical. The Soviets had repudiated tsarist debts owed to American creditors, nationalized foreign-owned property without compensation, promoted worldwide communist revolution through the Comintern, and maintained a system of government that Americans found fundamentally repugnant. Three successive Republican administrations maintained that recognition would legitimize a regime built on repression. Roosevelt, inaugurated in March 1933, took a more pragmatic view. The Great Depression had devastated American manufacturing, and the Soviet Union represented a potentially enormous export market. More urgently, Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria and Hitler's rise to power in Germany created a security landscape where American isolation from a major Eurasian power looked increasingly dangerous. Roosevelt also faced domestic pressure from American businesses eager to trade with the Soviets. The negotiations were conducted largely through back channels before Litvinov's arrival in Washington. The Soviets agreed to stop funding communist propaganda in the United States, promised to protect the rights of American citizens in the USSR, and pledged to negotiate a settlement of the debt question. Roosevelt sent a warm telegram expressing hope for permanently "normal and friendly" relations.

Albert Hofmann, a 32-year-old Swiss chemist at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide for the first time while researching ergot alkaloids for potential pharmaceutical applications. The compound, catalogued as LSD-25 because it was the twenty-fifth in a series of lysergic acid derivatives, showed no immediately promising properties and was shelved for five years. Hofmann had no inkling that he had created one of the most potent psychoactive substances ever discovered. Hofmann's research was focused on finding medically useful compounds derived from ergot, a fungus that grows on grain and had been used in folk medicine for centuries. Ergot alkaloids had already yielded drugs that could stimulate uterine contractions and treat migraines. Hofmann was systematically exploring variations on the lysergic acid molecule, hoping to find a compound that would stimulate the circulatory or respiratory system. LSD-25 was tested on animals in 1938, which noted only a restless quality in the subjects, and Sandoz lost interest. The substance sat in Hofmann's files until April 16, 1943, when he re-synthesized it following what he described as "a peculiar presentiment." During the process, he accidentally absorbed a small amount through his fingertips and experienced an unusual state of altered consciousness, including vivid closed-eye imagery. Three days later he deliberately ingested 250 micrograms, an amount he assumed would be a threshold dose but which turned out to be powerfully psychoactive. His famous bicycle ride home through Basel under the influence became the founding story of the psychedelic era. Sandoz marketed LSD under the trade name Delysid beginning in 1947, promoting it as a tool for psychotherapy and psychiatric research. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, legitimate researchers published over a thousand scientific papers exploring its potential for treating alcoholism, depression, and end-of-life anxiety.

President Richard Nixon signed the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, cutting through years of legal challenges and environmental opposition to authorize the construction of an 800-mile oil pipeline from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean to the ice-free port of Valdez on Prince William Sound. The decision was driven by a single overriding factor: the 1973 Arab oil embargo had made American energy independence a matter of national security. The discovery of the Prudhoe Bay oil field in 1968 had revealed the largest petroleum deposit in North American history, an estimated 25 billion barrels trapped beneath the frozen North Slope of Alaska. Getting the oil to market required crossing some of the most challenging terrain on Earth: permafrost that would melt and collapse if heated by warm oil, three mountain ranges, over 800 rivers and streams, and the active Denali Fault earthquake zone. Environmental groups and Alaska Native organizations had blocked construction through a series of lawsuits beginning in 1970. The National Environmental Policy Act, signed just months after the Prudhoe Bay discovery, required an environmental impact statement that took years to complete. Native land claims, unresolved since Alaska statehood in 1959, presented another legal barrier. Congress addressed the latter with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, transferring 44 million acres and nearly $1 billion to Native corporations. The Arab oil embargo in October 1973 transformed the political landscape overnight. Americans waited in gas lines for hours. Oil prices quadrupled. Nixon signed the authorization act on November 16, and Congress included a provision specifically barring further legal challenges under NEPA.

A farmer in Suffolk asked his neighbor Eric Lawes to help find a lost hammer with a metal detector, and Lawes discovered instead the largest cache of late Roman gold and silver ever found in Britain. The Hoxne Hoard, buried in an oak chest sometime after 407 AD, contained 15,234 coins, 200 silver spoons and ladles, and dozens of gold jewelry pieces, all in remarkable condition. The find rewritten understanding of Roman Britain's final years and the wealth that existed in the province as imperial authority collapsed. Lawes, an experienced detectorist, realized within minutes that he had found something extraordinary and stopped digging. He reported the discovery to the Suffolk Archaeological Unit, who conducted a proper excavation the next day. This decision preserved crucial information about how the objects had been arranged in the ground, something that treasure hunters who dig without reporting often destroy. The hoard's coins provide a precise dating bracket. The latest coins were minted during the reign of Emperor Constantine III, who withdrew the last Roman legions from Britain in 407 AD. The absence of any later coins suggests the hoard was buried around that time, during the chaotic transition as Roman administration disintegrated and Britain fragmented into independent territories. The treasure reveals a household of substantial wealth. The gold body chain, weighing over 250 grams, is one of the finest pieces of late Roman jewelry ever found. The silver pepper pots, shaped like figures including an empress, indicate access to exotic spice trade networks. Many of the spoons are inscribed with Christian symbols or personal names, suggesting they were baptismal gifts, evidence of established Christianity in late Roman East Anglia.