November 20 birthdays & history

Famous people born on November 20

• 1942Joe Biden, American politician, 46th President of the United States
• 1858Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish author and educator, Nobel Prize laureate
• 1923Nadine Gordimer, South African novelist, short story writer, and activist, Nobel Prize laureate
• 1889Edwin Hubble, American astronomer and cosmologist
• 1761Pope Pius VIII, Head of the Catholic Church from 1829 to 1830
• 1924Benoit Mandelbrot, Polish-American mathematician and economist
• 1946Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, 21st-century primate of the Russian Orthodox Church
• 1925Maya Plisetskaya, Russian-Lithuanian ballerina, choreographer, actress, and director
• 1750Tipu Sultan, Indian ruler
• 1886Karl von Frisch, Austrian-German ethologist and zoologist, Nobel Prize laureate

What happened on November 20

• 284Diocletian is chosen as Roman emperor.
• 1789New Jersey becomes the first U.S. state to ratify the Bill of Rights.
• 1805Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio, premieres in Vienna.
• 1947Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King George VI, married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, who was given the title Duke of Edinburgh.
• 1959The Declaration of the Rights of the Child is adopted by the United Nations.
• 1974The United States Department of Justice files its final anti-trust suit against AT&T Corporation. This suit later leads to the breakup of AT&T and its Bell System.
• 1977Egyptian President Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel, when he meets Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and speaks before the Knesset in Jerusalem, seeking a permanent peace settlement.
• 1980Lake Peigneur in Louisiana drains into an underlying salt deposit. A misplaced Texaco oil probe had been drilled into the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine, causing water to flow down into the mine, eroding the edges of the hole.
• 1985Windows 1.0, the first version of Microsoft Windows available to the public, was released.
• 1998The first space station module component, Zarya, for the International Space Station is launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
• 2022The 2022 FIFA World Cup begins in Qatar. This is the first time the tournament was held in the Middle East.

Also observed on November 20

• 20-N (Spain)
• Africa Industrialization Day (international)
• Black Awareness Day (Brazil)
• Children's Day (World Children's Day)
• National Sovereignty Day (Argentina)
• Day of the Mexican Revolution (Mexico)