November 17 in History

Mary I died at St. James's Palace, and England passed to her 25-year-old half-sister Elizabeth, a woman who had spent much of her youth under suspicion, imprisonment, and the constant threat of execution. The accession of Elizabeth I inaugurated a 45-year reign that would produce Shakespeare, defeat the Spanish Armada, establish England as a naval power, and give its name to an entire era of cultural flowering. Elizabeth's path to the throne was lethally precarious. She was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, who had been beheaded when Elizabeth was two. Declared illegitimate, she was restored to the line of succession but occupied a dangerous position throughout her siblings' reigns. Under Mary, a devout Catholic, Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower of London for two months on suspicion of involvement in a Protestant rebellion. She survived by carefully avoiding any commitment that could be used against her, a skill in calculated ambiguity that would define her reign. Her first challenge was religious. England had whipsawed between Protestantism under Edward VI and Catholicism under Mary. Elizabeth's settlement, enacted through the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity in 1559, established a moderate Protestantism that retained some Catholic ceremonies and vestments. The compromise satisfied neither ardent Protestants nor committed Catholics, but it prevented the religious civil wars that would devastate France for decades. Elizabeth also mastered the politics of marriage, or rather the politics of not marrying. She entertained proposals from Philip II of Spain, Archduke Charles of Austria, and Francis Duke of Anjou, among others, using the prospect of a match as a diplomatic tool without ever committing. Her refusal to marry and name an heir drove her counselors to desperation but kept potential factions from coalescing around a rival claimant.

Richard Nixon stood before 400 Associated Press managing editors at a televised press conference in Orlando, Florida, and delivered six words that would define his presidency more than any policy achievement or diplomatic triumph. "I am not a crook," the president declared, his voice strained and his jaw set, in response to a question about his personal finances. The phrase immediately entered the American political lexicon as an emblem of denial in the face of overwhelming evidence. The Watergate scandal had been grinding toward Nixon for seventeen months. The June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters had initially seemed like a minor campaign embarrassment, but dogged reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, combined with Senate investigations led by Sam Ervin, had steadily revealed a web of wiretapping, dirty tricks, hush money payments, and obstruction of justice that reached into the Oval Office. By November 1973, the crisis was accelerating. Nixon had fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in the "Saturday Night Massacre" on October 20, triggering a firestorm that forced him to accept a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. The existence of the White House taping system, revealed by Alexander Butterfield the previous July, had created a battle over subpoenaed recordings that would ultimately reach the Supreme Court. Nixon's Orlando appearance was an attempt to regain the initiative by appealing directly to editors and, through them, the American public. The specific question that prompted his famous declaration was about his personal tax returns and a suspicious real estate deal, not the Watergate cover-up itself. Nixon insisted he had earned everything he had and that people "have got to know whether or not their president is a crook."

Riot police attacked a peaceful student demonstration in Prague, beating hundreds of marchers with batons and trapping them in the narrow streets of the Narodni trida. The crackdown, far from crushing dissent, ignited ten days of escalating protests that brought down Czechoslovakia's communist government without a single shot fired. The Velvet Revolution, as it came to be known, was one of the most remarkable regime changes in modern history. The student march on November 17 was officially commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of a Nazi crackdown on Czech universities during World War II. Many participants had broader intentions. The Berlin Wall had fallen eight days earlier, and communist regimes across Eastern Europe were collapsing. Czechoslovakia's hardline government, led by Milos Jakes, had resisted the reforms sweeping the Soviet bloc, maintaining rigid censorship and political repression even as Gorbachev's Soviet Union embraced glasnost and perestroika. The police violence backfired catastrophically. An unconfirmed rumor that a student had been killed spread through Prague overnight, and the next day thousands more took to the streets. Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who had spent years in communist prisons, emerged as the leader of the opposition through Civic Forum, an umbrella movement formed on November 19. Theaters became organizing centers. Workers joined the students. By November 20, half a million people filled Wenceslas Square. A general strike on November 27 brought the country to a standstill. The communist leadership, unable to count on Soviet military intervention as previous Czechoslovak reformers had faced in 1968, began negotiating. Jakes resigned as party leader. The government agreed to end the Communist Party's monopoly on power. By December 10, a new government with a non-communist majority was sworn in. On December 29, the Federal Assembly elected Havel president.

A flotilla of ships led by the French imperial yacht L'Aigle entered the northern entrance of the Suez Canal at Port Said and sailed south through the Egyptian desert, inaugurating a waterway that instantly redrew the map of global commerce. The 164-kilometer canal connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea eliminated the need to sail around the entire continent of Africa, cutting the sea route from London to Bombay by over 7,000 kilometers and reshaping the strategic calculus of every maritime power on Earth. The canal was the vision of Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French diplomat with more charisma than engineering knowledge. De Lesseps secured a concession from Egypt's ruler Said Pasha in 1854 and spent the next five years raising capital, mostly from French investors. Britain, which had the most to gain from a shortcut to India, opposed the project initially, fearing French control of a strategic chokepoint. The Ottoman Empire, Egypt's nominal overlord, also resisted. De Lesseps overcame these obstacles through relentless diplomacy and the personal support of Napoleon III. Construction took ten years, from 1859 to 1869, and cost the lives of tens of thousands of Egyptian forced laborers, a human toll that de Lesseps and his backers largely ignored. The early years relied on corvee labor, with Egyptian peasants conscripted in gangs of 20,000 to dig by hand. International pressure eventually ended the practice, and massive steam-powered dredgers and excavators completed the work. The opening ceremony was a lavish affair designed to project Franco-Egyptian prestige. Giuseppe Verdi was commissioned to write an opera for the occasion, though Aida was not completed in time and premiered two years later. Empress Eugenie of France led the procession aboard L'Aigle, followed by ships flying the flags of every major maritime nation.

Catherine the Great came to power by deposing her own husband in a military coup and then ruled Russia for 34 years, longer than Peter the Great. She was born Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst in Stettin, Pomerania (now Szczecin, Poland) on May 2, 1729, a minor German princess selected by Empress Elizabeth of Russia to marry the heir to the Russian throne. She arrived in Russia at fifteen, converted to Russian Orthodoxy, learned the language with obsessive dedication, and renamed herself Yekaterina (Catherine). Her husband, Peter III, was erratic, possibly mentally impaired, and conspicuously pro-Prussian at a time when Russia was at war with Prussia. He alienated the army, the church, and the court. In July 1762, six months after Peter took the throne, Catherine led a coup with the support of the Imperial Guard regiments. Peter was arrested, forced to sign an abdication, and died in custody eight days later. Whether he was murdered on Catherine's orders, murdered by her allies without her explicit consent, or died of natural causes has never been definitively established. She ruled from 1762 to 1796. She expanded Russia's borders dramatically, annexing Crimea in 1783 and participating in three partitions of Poland that erased the country from the map of Europe. She fought two wars against the Ottoman Empire and won both. Her foreign policy made Russia one of the great powers of Europe. Domestically, she corresponded with Voltaire, Diderot, and other Enlightenment philosophers, promoted education, founded the Russian Academy, established the Hermitage Museum's art collection, and encouraged the modernization of Russian institutions. She also presided over a serf economy that she never dismantled, despite her philosophical commitment to liberty. The Pugachev Rebellion of 1773-75, a massive peasant uprising, was crushed with extreme violence. She died on November 17, 1796, of a stroke, at her desk in the Winter Palace. She was 67. The apocryphal story about her death involving a horse is entirely fabricated, a piece of misogynist propaganda that has persisted for over two centuries.