November 16

1532 – Having hidden several artillery pieces in houses that had been evacuated by the Inca, Francisco Pizarro and his men ambush and take Inca Emperor Atahualpa hostage at Cajamarca, Peru.

1776 –  Refusing to abandon the garrison, American Colonel Robert Magaw is finally forced to surrender Fort Washington, on the north end of Manhattan Island, to British and Hessian forces under Lieutenant General William Howe.

1822 – Missouri trader William Becknell arrives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over a route that will become known as the Santa Fe Trail.

1871 – The National Rifle Association receives its charter from New York State.

1904 – English engineer John Ambrose Fleming receives a patent for the thermionic valve vacuum tube.

1907 – Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory join to form Oklahoma, which is admitted as the 46th U.S. state.

1914 – The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States officially opens.

1938 – LSD is first synthesized by Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland.

1940 – In occupied Poland, Nazis close off the Warsaw Ghetto stopping anyone from entering or leaving.

1958 – National Airlines Flight 967, a Douglas DC-7. explodes in mid-air over the Gulf of Mexico, killing all 42 passengers and crew aboard.

1965 – The Soviet Union launches the Venera 3 space probe toward Venus,  the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet.

1973 – President Nixon signs the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, authorizing the construction of the Alaska Pipeline.

1974 – A interstellar radio message, developed by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, carrying basic information about humanity and Earth is transmitted from the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico towards the globular cluster Messier 13.

2002 – The first cases of the 2002–2004 SARS corona virus outbreak are traced to Foshan, Guangdong Province, China.

2009 – NASA launches Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-129 to the International Space Station.

2022 – NASA launches Artemis 1 on the first flight of the Space Launch System, the start of the program’s future missions to the moon.