November 22 in History

Five musket balls, twenty sword cuts, and a final decapitation blow ended the career of history's most infamous pirate. Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, died fighting on the deck of his sloop Adventure in a brutal close-quarters battle off Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, on November 22, 1718. Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy hung Blackbeard's severed head from his ship's bowsprit as proof the terror of the Atlantic was finally dead. Blackbeard had terrorized the American coastline and Caribbean for barely two years, but his reputation far outstripped his relatively brief career. He cultivated a fearsome image deliberately, weaving slow-burning fuses into his enormous black beard so that his head appeared wreathed in smoke during battle. He commanded a fleet of up to four ships at his peak, with his flagship Queen Anne's Revenge carrying forty guns. Unlike many pirates, Blackbeard relied more on intimidation than violence, often capturing merchant ships without firing a shot. By late 1718, Blackbeard had accepted a royal pardon and settled in Bath, North Carolina, under the protection of Governor Charles Eden. But he quickly returned to piracy. Virginia's governor, Alexander Spotswood, sent Maynard with two sloops to hunt him down. The final battle was a bloody ambush: Blackbeard's crew fired a devastating broadside that nearly sank Maynard's ship, then boarded, expecting easy victory. Maynard had hidden most of his men below decks. They surged up and the fight became a savage melee on a blood-slicked deck. Blackbeard fought with extraordinary ferocity, sustaining massive wounds before finally collapsing. The inventory of his body recorded five gunshot wounds and over twenty cuts. His legend only grew in death, fueling centuries of pirate mythology that transformed a calculating criminal into an enduring cultural icon.

Twelve seconds of gunfire in a Dallas motorcade shattered the American presidency and fractured the nation's sense of invulnerability. President John F. Kennedy was struck by bullets while riding in an open limousine through Dealey Plaza at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, dying at Parkland Memorial Hospital thirty minutes later. He was 46 years old, the fourth U.S. president killed by assassination and the youngest to die in office. Kennedy had traveled to Texas to mend a rift within the state's Democratic Party ahead of the 1964 election. The motorcade route through downtown Dallas was published in advance. Governor John Connally, seated in front of Kennedy, was severely wounded in the same attack. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, sitting beside her husband, was splattered with blood and brain matter. She climbed onto the trunk of the moving limousine in a moment captured on film that remains one of the most haunting images in American history. Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old former Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union before returning to the United States, was arrested that afternoon after also killing Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Oswald fired from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository using an Italian-made Carcano rifle he had purchased by mail order for $19.95. He denied involvement, declaring to reporters: "I'm just a patsy." Within two hours, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president aboard Air Force One, with Jacqueline Kennedy standing beside him in her bloodstained pink suit. The assassination traumatized a generation and spawned decades of conspiracy theories that polls consistently show a majority of Americans believe. Kennedy's murder remains the single most investigated crime in American history, and the questions it raised about power, violence, and truth have never fully been answered.

Eleven years as Britain's most dominant peacetime prime minister ended with tears in the back of a government car. Margaret Thatcher, informed by her cabinet one by one that she could no longer win their support, announced her withdrawal from the Conservative Party leadership contest on November 22, 1990. The Iron Lady, who had reshaped British society more profoundly than any leader since Clement Attlee, was brought down not by the opposition but by her own party. Thatcher's downfall stemmed from two interconnected crises. The deeply unpopular Community Charge, known as the poll tax, had sparked riots in central London and cratered Conservative support in the polls. Simultaneously, her increasingly hostile stance toward European integration alienated senior ministers. Geoffrey Howe, her longest-serving cabinet member, resigned on November 1 and delivered a devastating resignation speech that invited a leadership challenge. Michael Heseltine, a charismatic rival who had left the cabinet four years earlier, announced his candidacy. Thatcher won the first ballot on November 20 but fell four votes short of the margin required to avoid a second round. She initially declared her intention to fight on, but a parade of cabinet ministers visiting her office at the House of Commons told her, with varying degrees of sympathy, that she would lose. Denis Thatcher reportedly advised: "Don't go on, old girl." Her resignation cleared the way for John Major, whom Thatcher supported as her successor. Major won the subsequent leadership election and governed for seven years, but the Conservative Party remained bitterly divided over Europe for decades. Thatcher's legacy proved as polarizing as her tenure: she broke the power of trade unions, privatized state industries, and championed free markets, earning either reverence or contempt depending on which side of Britain's class divide one stood.

Before SOS, ships in distress had no universal way to scream for help. Different nations used different codes, and a British vessel's emergency signal meant nothing to a German radio operator. On November 22, 1906, the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin adopted three dots, three dashes, three dots as the global standard distress signal, creating a lifeline that would save thousands of lives over the next century. The need was urgent. Guglielmo Marconi's wireless telegraph had spread rapidly through the maritime industry after 1900, but each nation and each commercial operator used proprietary protocols. The Marconi Company instructed its operators to use "CQD" for distress calls, but this was a company standard, not an international one. German operators used a different code entirely. When ships from multiple nations converged on a maritime emergency, confusion could prove fatal. The German delegation proposed the signal because its pattern was unmistakable in Morse code and impossible to confuse with any other transmission. The letters S-O-S were chosen purely for their clarity in Morse, not as an abbreviation. Popular backronyms like "Save Our Souls" or "Save Our Ship" came later and have no official standing. The convention specified that all other radio traffic must cease immediately when the distress signal was detected. Adoption was slow. Marconi operators continued using CQD out of habit, and during the Titanic disaster in 1912, the ship's radio operators initially transmitted CQD before switching to SOS. That catastrophe accelerated universal compliance. SOS remained the global maritime distress standard until 1999, when satellite-based systems replaced Morse code. The three-dot, three-dash, three-dot pattern endures as perhaps the most universally recognized signal ever created by international agreement.

A massive flying boat lifted off from the waters of San Francisco Bay and pointed its nose toward the vast Pacific Ocean. The China Clipper, a Martin M-130 operated by Pan American Airways, departed Alameda, California, on November 22, 1935, carrying mail and a crew of seven on a route that would cover 8,210 miles across the Pacific to Manila in the Philippines. Commercial transpacific aviation had begun. Pan Am's founder, Juan Trippe, had spent years preparing for this moment. The Pacific crossing required building bases and refueling stations on remote islands, including Midway, Wake, and Guam. Pan Am constructed hotels, radio facilities, and maintenance shops on these tiny atolls, essentially building an infrastructure chain across the world's largest ocean. The Martin M-130 flying boat was designed specifically for the route, capable of carrying up to 32 passengers and cruising at 130 miles per hour with a range of 3,200 miles between stops. The first flight carried only mail, over 110,000 pieces in total. The departure was a national spectacle. Crowds packed the Alameda shoreline, and NBC broadcast the takeoff live by radio. Captain Edwin Musick guided the Clipper through six days of island-hopping, fighting headwinds and tropical weather before touching down in Manila Bay on November 29. Passenger service began the following year, with a one-way ticket costing $799, equivalent to roughly $18,000 today, making it accessible only to the very wealthy. The China Clipper era lasted barely six years before World War II transformed Pacific aviation from luxury travel into military necessity. The same island bases Pan Am had built became strategic targets in the war against Japan. Captain Musick died in 1938 when his Clipper exploded near Pago Pago. But the route he pioneered shrank the Pacific from an impassable barrier into a commuter lane, reshaping global commerce and diplomacy permanently.