November 26 in History

George Washington issued a proclamation asking Americans to observe a day of public thanksgiving, making November 26, 1789, the first nationally recognized Thanksgiving in United States history. The request was not a command but an invitation, and Washington framed it not as a celebration of abundance but as gratitude for the new Constitution that had taken effect earlier that year. The idea of thanksgiving days was already familiar in the colonies. Puritans in New England had observed occasional days of fasting and thanksgiving since the 1620s, and the Continental Congress proclaimed multiple thanksgiving days during the Revolutionary War. Washington's 1789 proclamation was different because it carried the authority of a newly formed federal government. Congress had passed a joint resolution requesting that the president recommend a day of thanks, and Washington responded on October 3 designating November 26. The proclamation asked Americans to acknowledge "the many signal favors of Almighty God" and to pray for the new government's success. Washington attended services at St. Paul's Chapel in New York, then the nation's capital. Not everyone approved. Some members of Congress argued that proclaiming religious observances overstepped federal authority, and Thomas Jefferson later refused to issue thanksgiving proclamations as president, calling them inappropriate. Thanksgiving did not become an annual national holiday until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November as a permanent observance during the Civil War. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book, had campaigned for the holiday for 36 years. Franklin Roosevelt moved it to the second-to-last Thursday in 1939 to extend the Christmas shopping season, prompting Congress to fix it as the fourth Thursday in 1941.

Five men sat in a Montreal hotel room on November 26, 1917, and founded a professional hockey league that would grow into one of North America's dominant sports institutions. The National Hockey League was born from the collapse of its predecessor, the National Hockey Association, and the desire of four team owners to exclude a fifth they despised. The NHL's origin story is less about sporting vision than it is about a business dispute. The NHA had operated since 1909 but was plagued by the disruptive behavior of Eddie Livingstone, owner of the Toronto Blueshirts. Livingstone's feuds with other owners were so poisonous that the remaining four teams decided the simplest solution was to create an entirely new league and not invite him. The founding teams were the Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Wanderers, Ottawa Senators, and Quebec Bulldogs, with the Toronto Arenas replacing Livingstone's franchise. Quebec could not ice a team for the first season and suspended operations. The league's first season was played during the harshest winter of World War I, with many potential players serving overseas. The Montreal Wanderers' arena burned down after just six games, and the team folded permanently. The NHL survived these early disasters through stubbornness and the absence of serious competition. When the Western Canada Hockey League collapsed in 1926, the NHL absorbed its best players and expanded into American cities, including Boston, New York, Chicago, and Detroit. The league that emerged from a petty ownership squabble now generates over five billion dollars in annual revenue. The Montreal Canadiens, one of the four founding franchises, have won 24 Stanley Cup championships, more than any other team in hockey history. Livingstone, the man the founders were so desperate to exclude, spent years in court trying to reclaim his stake. He never succeeded. The NHL was built on spite, and spite proved an excellent foundation.

Howard Carter held a candle through a small hole in a sealed doorway and peered into a chamber closed for over 3,000 years. When Lord Carnarvon asked if he could see anything, Carter replied with the most famous words in archaeology: "Yes, wonderful things." On November 26, 1922, Carter and his patron became the first people to gaze upon the treasures of Tutankhamun's tomb since ancient Egyptian priests sealed it around 1323 BCE. Carter had been searching for the tomb for six years, funded entirely by the Earl of Carnarvon. By 1922, Carnarvon was ready to abandon the search, and the upcoming season was to be the last. On November 4, a water boy stumbled upon a step carved into the bedrock of the Valley of the Kings. Carter's team excavated a descending staircase that led to a sealed doorway bearing royal necropolis seals. Carter cabled Carnarvon in England and waited three weeks for his patron to arrive. The tomb, designated KV62, was the most intact royal burial ever discovered in Egypt. The antechamber alone contained over 700 objects: gilded couches shaped like animals, dismantled chariots, alabaster vases, and food offerings. Beyond lay the burial chamber with its nested shrines, three coffins fitting inside one another, and the solid gold innermost coffin weighing 243 pounds. On the mummy rested the iconic gold death mask, eleven kilograms of beaten gold with inlaid lapis lazuli. The discovery sparked a global sensation. Egyptian motifs flooded fashion, architecture, and design. Lord Carnarvon died from an infected mosquito bite five months later, spawning the "Curse of the Pharaohs" legend. Carter spent ten years cataloguing 5,398 objects. Tutankhamun, a minor pharaoh who died at roughly nineteen, became the most famous ruler in Egyptian history because his tomb was the one the grave robbers missed.

Soviet artillery shells struck the village of Mainila near the Finnish border on November 26, 1939, killing four Red Army soldiers. Moscow blamed Finland and demanded that Finnish forces withdraw 25 kilometers from the border. Finland denied responsibility and proposed a joint investigation. The Soviet Union refused. Four days later, the Red Army invaded Finland. The shelling at Mainila was almost certainly staged by the Soviets themselves. Joseph Stalin had spent months pressuring Finland into territorial concessions. He wanted Finland to cede parts of the Karelian Isthmus to push Leningrad's border defenses further from the city, lease the Hanko Peninsula as a naval base, and cede several islands in the Gulf of Finland. The Finns negotiated but refused to surrender the Karelian Isthmus, their primary defensive line. Stalin needed a pretext for invasion, and the Mainila incident provided one. Finnish border guards recorded that the shells had been fired from the Soviet side. Nikita Khrushchev later confirmed in his memoirs that the shelling was a Soviet operation. The tactic followed a pattern: the Soviet Union had staged similar provocations against the Baltic states and Poland. The Mainila shelling gave Moscow diplomatic cover, however flimsy, to abrogate its non-aggression pact with Finland and launch what it framed as a defensive war. The invasion backfired spectacularly. The Red Army, weakened by Stalin's purges of its officer corps, expected to overrun Finland in weeks. Finnish forces inflicted devastating casualties through guerrilla tactics and fierce resistance in temperatures reaching minus 40 degrees. The Winter War lasted 105 days and cost the Soviet Union an estimated 125,000 dead. Finland ceded the demanded territory but preserved its independence. The Soviet performance was so poor that Hitler concluded the Red Army was weak, a miscalculation that contributed to his decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941.

Three hundred thousand Chinese soldiers materialized from the frozen mountains of North Korea and slammed into United Nations forces that believed the war was nearly won. The Chinese counteroffensive at the Chosin Reservoir, launched on November 26, 1950, shattered General Douglas MacArthur's plan to finish the Korean War by Christmas and transformed the conflict into a grinding, three-year stalemate. MacArthur had been supremely confident. After his brilliant amphibious landing at Inchon in September, UN forces had driven North Korean troops back across the 38th parallel and advanced deep into North Korea. MacArthur assured President Truman that China would not intervene and pushed his forces toward the Yalu River, the Chinese border. American and South Korean units advanced in dispersed columns through mountainous terrain, their supply lines stretched thin in temperatures dropping to minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit. China had warned repeatedly that it would not tolerate hostile forces on its border. Mao Zedong made good on the threat, secretly moving over 300,000 troops across the Yalu in October and November, marching at night and hiding in forests during the day to avoid aerial detection. The attack, when it came, achieved near-total tactical surprise. Chinese forces struck the scattered UN columns simultaneously, surrounding several units and cutting off their retreat routes. The most famous engagement was the 17-day battle at the Chosin Reservoir, where 30,000 surrounded Marines and soldiers fought their way out through seven Chinese divisions. The fighting retreat covered 78 miles in brutal cold, with Marines carrying their wounded and dead. The breakout succeeded, but the broader campaign was a catastrophe. UN forces retreated below the 38th parallel, and Seoul fell to the Chinese in January 1951. The Korean War, which MacArthur had promised was almost over, would continue for two and a half more years.

Isabella I left behind a unified Spain forged through her marriage to Ferdinand II, the conquest of Granada, and the fateful decision to finance Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic. Her death triggered a succession crisis but could not undo the imperial foundations she built, as Spanish dominion over the Americas would endure for three centuries. Isabella died on November 26, 1504, in Medina del Campo, having transformed the Iberian Peninsula through three decades of assertive governance. Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469 united the two largest Christian kingdoms on the peninsula, creating the political entity that would become modern Spain. Together they completed the Reconquista by conquering the Emirate of Granada in 1492, ending nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule in Iberia. That same year, Isabella sponsored Christopher Columbus's first voyage, a decision driven as much by competition with Portugal for Atlantic trade routes as by religious zeal. The discovery of the Americas transformed Spain into the world's most powerful empire within a generation. Isabella was also responsible for the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 and the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, decisions that demonstrated the darker dimensions of her religious absolutism. Her will specified that indigenous peoples in the Americas should be treated justly and converted peacefully, instructions that were honored more in the breach than the observance. Her death left the question of succession unresolved: her heir Joanna was declared mentally unfit, and power passed through a series of regencies before her grandson Charles V inherited both Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, creating the most powerful political entity in sixteenth-century Europe.