November 10 in History

The Continental Congress passed a resolution on November 10, 1775, authorizing two battalions of Marines "good seamen, or so acquainted with maritime affairs as to be able to serve to advantage by sea." Captain Samuel Nicholas, a Philadelphia tavern keeper, began recruiting at Tun Tavern on Water Street, buying drinks for potential enlistees in what has become the founding legend of the United States Marine Corps. The decision was practical. The Continental Navy, established just weeks earlier, needed soldiers capable of fighting aboard ships, conducting amphibious raids, and maintaining discipline among often-reluctant crews. Marines served as shipboard sharpshooters, boarding parties, and security against mutiny. The first detachment, roughly 300 men, deployed aboard the Alfred, the Columbus, and other vessels of Commodore Esek Hopkins' small fleet. The Marines' first significant action came in March 1776, when Nicholas led 234 Marines and 50 sailors in an amphibious assault on British-held New Providence in the Bahamas. The raiders captured Fort Montagu and Fort Nassau, seizing cannons, ammunition, and supplies desperately needed by Washington's army. The operation was the first amphibious landing in Corps history and established the expeditionary character that would define the institution. The Corps was disbanded after the Revolution, re-established in 1798, and has participated in every American conflict since. From the shores of Tripoli in 1805 to Belleau Wood in 1918, from Iwo Jima in 1945 to the deserts of Iraq, the Marine Corps has cultivated an identity built on combat readiness, esprit de corps, and the principle that every Marine is first a rifleman. November 10 remains the most celebrated date on the Marine calendar, marked annually with a formal ball where the first slice of cake goes to the oldest Marine present, who passes it to the youngest.

Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-born journalist working for the New York Herald, walked into the lakeside town of Ujiji in present-day Tanzania on November 10, 1871, and approached the only white man in the settlement with a greeting that became one of the most quoted lines in exploration history: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary who had vanished into the African interior six years earlier, was standing before him, gaunt and ill but alive. Stanley had been dispatched by Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., who recognized that finding Livingstone would be the scoop of the decade. Livingstone had departed Zanzibar in 1866 to find the source of the Nile and had not been heard from in years. Rumors of his death circulated. Stanley assembled a caravan of roughly 200 porters and guards and spent eight months marching over 700 miles through hostile terrain, surviving malaria, tribal conflicts, and near-starvation. Livingstone refused to leave Africa. Despite severe illness, including dysentery and intestinal parasites, he was consumed by his quest to locate the Nile's source. Stanley spent four months with Livingstone, exploring the northern shore of Lake Tanganyika together and confirming that the Rusizi River flowed into rather than out of the lake, eliminating it as the Nile's source. Stanley tried repeatedly to convince Livingstone to return to civilization. Livingstone declined. Stanley departed in March 1872 carrying Livingstone's journals and letters. Livingstone continued his search and died on May 1, 1873, in present-day Zambia. His followers, Chuma and Susi, carried his embalmed body over a thousand miles to the coast for transport to England. Stanley returned to Africa and completed expeditions that traced the Congo River and mapped vast sections of the continent, work that also opened Central Africa to European colonization with consequences that echo to this day.

An operator in Englewood, New Jersey, picked up a telephone on November 10, 1951, dialed a number in Alameda, California, and completed the first direct-dial long-distance call without any human operator intervening at any point along the route. The call, placed by Englewood Mayor M. Leslie Denning, traveled through a network of automatic switching equipment that connected the two cities across 3,000 miles in roughly 18 seconds, demonstrating the North American Numbering Plan that would reshape American communication. The NANP had been developed by AT&T engineers beginning in 1947 to solve a problem that was choking the telephone system. Long-distance calls required multiple operators to relay connections from one switching center to the next, a process that was slow, expensive, and prone to error. As telephone usage exploded after World War II, the system was approaching physical limits on the number of operators it could train and deploy. The solution was a hierarchical numbering system that assigned every telephone in the United States and Canada a unique ten-digit number: a three-digit area code, a three-digit exchange, and a four-digit subscriber number. Area codes were assigned based on population density, with the fastest-to-dial codes going to the busiest regions. New York City received 212 because rotary dial phones could complete those digits most quickly. Los Angeles received 213. The system required massive investment in automated switching equipment and the installation of millions of rotary dial phones to replace candlestick and hand-crank models. AT&T spent over $2 billion converting the network throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Direct-distance dialing gradually replaced operator-assisted calling, reaching most of the country by the mid-1960s. The ten-digit format proved so robust that it survived the transition from rotary phones to touch-tone to mobile phones and remains the foundation of North American telecommunications.

A puppet named Big Bird wandered down a street set asking where he was, and American children's television was never the same. Sesame Street debuted on November 10, 1969, on 190 public television stations, launching a program that would teach multiple generations to read and count while confronting issues no other preschool show dared address: race, poverty, disability, grief, and the reality that not every child lived in a suburban house with a yard. The show was conceived in 1966 by producer Joan Ganz Cooney and Carnegie Foundation vice president Lloyd Morrisett, who shared a concern that television was wasting its educational potential. Cooney concluded that the techniques used to sell products in commercials, repetition, catchy music, humor, and short segments, could teach letters and numbers. The result was a hybrid format alternating between live-action street scenes, animated segments, and Jim Henson's Muppet characters. The research methodology was groundbreaking. Every episode was tested with focus groups of children before broadcast. Researchers observed which segments held attention and which lost it, then adjusted accordingly. The approach, developed by research director Edward Palmer and head writer Jon Stone, made Sesame Street the first preschool program to base its curriculum on empirical evidence rather than intuition. The decision to set the show on an urban street with a racially diverse cast was deliberate and radical for 1969. Mississippi initially refused to air the program because it showed Black and white children playing together. Gordon and Susan Robinson, the first human couple, were among the first Black characters on children's television to appear as professionals in a stable family. By its 40th anniversary, Sesame Street had been broadcast in over 120 countries, won over 200 Emmy Awards, and taught hundreds of millions of children that learning could feel like play.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had minimal formal military education beyond the War Academy in Istanbul, but he commanded the defense of Gallipoli in 1915, reorganized the shattered remnants of the Ottoman army after World War I, and carved a secular republic out of the ruins of a six-hundred-year-old empire. He died on November 10, 1938, at 57, from cirrhosis caused by decades of heavy drinking. The clocks in Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul were stopped at 9:05 a.m., the moment he died. Several remain stopped today. Born in Thessaloniki (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in 1881, he attended military schools and graduated from the War College in Istanbul. At Gallipoli in 1915, he repelled the British and ANZAC forces in a campaign that cost both sides hundreds of thousands of casualties and made his military reputation. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after the war, the Allies occupied Istanbul and planned to partition Anatolia. Ataturk organized a nationalist resistance movement based in Ankara, fought a war of independence against Greek, Armenian, and French forces between 1919 and 1923, and negotiated the Treaty of Lausanne, which established the borders of modern Turkey. The Turkish Grand National Assembly proclaimed the Republic of Turkey on October 29, 1923, with Ataturk as its first president. His reform program was the most rapid cultural transformation any country had attempted. He abolished the sultanate and then the caliphate, separating religion from the state. He replaced Islamic law with a civil code modeled on Switzerland's. He mandated the Latin alphabet for Turkish, replacing the Arabic script overnight and requiring the entire literate population to relearn how to read. He gave women the vote in 1934, before France. He banned the fez and encouraged Western dress. He adopted surnames, choosing "Ataturk," meaning "Father of the Turks," for himself. His reforms were imposed from above, often by force. They modernized Turkey's institutions but created tensions between secular and religious populations that persist a century later.

Leonid Brezhnev left behind an eighteen-year reign that achieved nuclear parity with the United States but sowed the economic stagnation that would ultimately unravel the Soviet Union. Born in Kamenskoye, Ukraine, in 1906, he rose through the Communist Party apparatus as a loyal apparatchik, avoiding the purges that consumed more ambitious rivals. He participated in the collective leadership that deposed Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964 and gradually consolidated power over the following years. His era was defined by military buildup: the Soviet Union reached strategic nuclear parity with the United States for the first time under his watch, and the Warsaw Pact maintained conventional military superiority in Europe. But the economy stagnated. Central planning could not adapt to technological change, and the command economy produced chronic shortages of consumer goods while the defense sector consumed an estimated quarter of GDP. His Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted the Soviet Union's right to intervene militarily in any socialist country threatened by internal or external forces hostile to socialism, was applied with tanks in Czechoslovakia in 1968, crushing the Prague Spring reform movement. The doctrine's logical extension led to the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, a war that became the Soviet Union's Vietnam, killing over fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers and an estimated one million Afghan civilians over nine years. Brezhnev's final years were marked by visibly declining health. He appeared confused at public events, slurred his speeches, and was widely mocked in underground Soviet jokes. He died on November 10, 1982, at seventy-five, and the succession crisis that followed eventually brought Mikhail Gorbachev to power.