Today in history: On Nov. 26, 1973, President Richard Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, told a federal court she'd accidentally caused part of the 18 1/2-minute erasure of a key Watergate tape. The gap was in a 1972 recording of a conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff. Also on this date: In 1791, President George Washington held his first full cabinet meeting; in attendance were Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox
In the English language, the turkey gets kind of a tough break. Talking turkey requires serious honesty and speaking harsh truths. Going cold turkey is, often, an onerous way of quitting something completely and suddenly. Being a turkey is a rude zinger thrown at movie and theatrical flops, as well as unpleasant, failure-prone people. Yet, in the culinary world, the turkey looms large, particularly during November.
Today is Tuesday, Nov. 25, the 329th day of 2025. There are 36 days left in the year. Today in history: On Nov. 25, 1999, Elian Gonzalez, a 5-year-old Cuban boy, was rescued by two sport fishermen off the coast of Florida, setting off an international custody battle that eventually saw him repatriated to his father in Cuba. Also on this date:
For over a century, sharpshooters have shaped the evolution of special operations warfare. From the minimalist precision of Simo Häyhä to the extreme-range shots of modern SOF snipers, these marksmen forced militaries to rethink how small teams could dominate the battlefield. Advances in optics, ballistics, and training didn't just make rifles better, they transformed snipers into high-value assets for reconnaissance, target interdiction, and mission security.
Last week, a group of Democratic congresspeople, all of them veterans either from the military or from the intelligence agencies, released a video in which they reminded people currently serving that, not only are they able to refuse an illegal order, but that those in the military are required to do so. This, of course, sent the usual escadrille of flying monkeys into low-earth orbit, from the president and the vice president all the way down the opinion food chain to Bill Maher.
Beyond the written word and photographic evidence, how does one keep history alive? For the Guna people of northern Panama, community theatre emerges as a potent form of cultural documentation and preservation. This vibrant documentary directed by Duiren Wagua, who hails from the same Indigenous community, traces a vital tradition that breathes life into monumental events from the past. The year 1903 marked the separation of Panama from Colombia.
Alexander the Great, born in 356 BCE in the ancient kingdom of Macedon, is one of history's most recognized military leaders and conquerors. Taking the throne at just 20 years old after the assassination of his father, King Philip II, Alexander quickly made plans to expand his empire. Over the course of just 13 years, he led his armies across Asia Minor, Egypt, Persia, and into parts of India, building one of the largest empires the world had ever seen.
Three colossal planks of sandstone, ranging in height from fifteen feet nine inches to eighteen feet eight inches, rise from the grass, along with a smaller stone that has the bent shape of a boomerang. In contrast to the rectilinear blocks at Stonehenge, the Stenness megaliths are thin slabs with angled upper edges, like upside-down guillotine blades. Remnants of a ceremonial circle, they are placed twenty or more feet apart, creating a chasm of negative space.
A gold pocket watch that belonged to a man who died onboard the Titanic when it sank has sold for a record sum. The watch, which belonged to 67-year-old Isidor Straus, went for 1.78m at auction, the highest amount ever paid for Titanic memorabilia. He was given the watch an engraved 18-carat Jules Jurgensen as a gift on his 43rd birthday in 1888.
A conversation with Ed Watts about his recent book, The Romans: A 2,000 Year History, which covers two millennia of Roman history, down to 1204 AD. We talk about questions of scale in writing history, of continuity and discontinuity in the Roman experience, and what enabled this polity to last for so long.
Her name was Iva Toguri D'Aquino, and she was born in Watts to Japanese parents in 1916 and had a degree in zoology from UCLA. She wanted to be a doctor. But she traveled to Tokyo in 1941 to care for a sick aunt, with disastrous timing. She made the trip without a passport, which doomed her desperate efforts to board a ship home as the war erupted.
London has been through some serious change in its lifetime. Founded by the Romans in 43 AD, the capital's 2,000 year history has seen the city go through plagues, fires, industrialisation, the Blitz, and the tech boom. Now a new photo book has revealed London's lost and secret histories. To be published on November 23, Panoramas of Lost London: Work, Wealth, Poverty and Change 1870-1945, features more than 300 black and white photos, 60 of which have never been seen before, showing London in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The stylish patrons of a hookah lounge on a terrace in the shadow of Dubai's Burj Khalifa; the teens I spotted taking selfies around a hookah at Istanbul's Ciragan Palace; the friends sharing a pipe on a sidewalk in Cairo; the men setting up a hookah on a sand dune in the Saudi desert-they're all carrying on a tradition that began in the royal courts of Mughal India before traveling to Iran, Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, and, eventually, the West.
Today all that's left of the ancient city of Semiyarka are a few low earthen mounds and some scattered artifacts, nearly hidden beneath the waving grasses of the Kazakh Steppe, a vast swath of grassland that stretches across northern Kazakhstan and into Russia. But recent surveys and excavations reveal that 3,500 years ago, this empty plain was a bustling city with a thriving metalworking industry, where nomadic herders and traders might have mingled with settled metalworkers and merchants.
On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university's bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use :-) and :-( as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as "the inventor ... or at least one of the inventors" of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment.
In the last century we've witnessed people set foot on the moon, and seen even the dark side in high-res images, and yet the moon still evokes a sense of romance and mystery, just as it did in the Middle Ages. This week, Danièle speaks with Ayoush Lazikani about what - and who - medieval people across the world believed the moon to be. Ayoush Lazikani is a lecturer at the University of Oxford, where she specializes in medieval literature.
On Nov. 19, 1959, Ford Motor Co. announced it was halting production of the unpopular Edsel. Also on this date: In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of a national cemetery at the site of the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. In 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad and Alan Bean made the second crewed landing on the moon.
When Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, declared in 1995 that "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race," he was voicing a sentiment that now circulates widely online. Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral, strengthened by anxieties about our own digital era, with some claiming that modernity itself was a mistake and that "progress" is an illusion. Medieval peasants led happier and more leisurely lives than we do, according to those who pine for the past.
Like nearly all Americans, you descended from an immigrant, the British penny. Those coins were once so valuable that they were split into halves and even quarters your late British cousins, the halfpenny and the farthing. In Britain, the coin's history goes back to the time when kings and queens had names like Offa and Cynethryth and Aethelred the Unready, and your name likely traces its lineage from the German for pan pfanne, for pan, which evolved to pfennig, for penny.
Peña's diary was stored away after his death - no one knows where - and resurfaced in 1955 when it was self-published by one Jesús Sanchez Garza, who never disclosed where he had obtained the manuscript or where it might have been since circa 1840. Published in Spanish in Mexico in 1955, the work received no attention from English-speaking scholars, who did not even know it existed.
If I have provided you with any factoids in the course of Atlantic Trivia, I apologize, because a factoid, properly, is not a small, interesting fact. A factoid is a piece of information that looks like a fact but is untrue. Norman Mailer popularized the term in 1973, very intentionally giving it the suffix -oid. Is a humanoid not a creature whose appearance suggests humanity but whose nature belies it? Thus is it with factoid.
On a frigid winter's day in 1906, tens of thousands of Jewish parents in New York's Lower East Side and Brooklyn kept their children home from school. It wasn't a snow day, but a protest: Activists and the Yiddish press had called for a boycott of the Christmas assemblies and pageants that they knew Jewish children would be obliged to attend on the day before the holiday.
