18th November 1916: Battle of the Somme ends with a German withdrawal

17th November 1903: The Bolshevik-Menshevik split within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

16th November 1938: Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann synthesizes lysergic acid diethylamide, later known as LSD

15th November 1969: 500,000 people march on Washington in the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam

14th November 1990: Margaret Thatcher’s fifteen year leadership of the British Conservative Party challenged by Michael Heseltine

13th November 1833: Great Meteor Storm brings tens of thousands of meteors per hour to the North America sky

12th November 1990: The World Wide Web formally proposed by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee

11th November 1918: WW1 Armistice of Compiègne is signed

10th November 1898: Wilmington Massacre sees an armed white mob overthrow the elected government of Wilmington, North Carolina

9th November 1989: Berlin Wall opened by the East German government after Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced that GDR citizens could cross to West Berlin with immediate effect

8th November 1923: Adolf Hitler leads the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, alongside General Ludendorff

7th November 1874: Elephant first appears as a symbol of the Republican Party in Thomas Nast’s political cartoon Third Term Panic

6th November 1975: The Sex Pistols play their first gig at St Martin’s College of Art in London

5th November 1940: President Roosevelt elected for an unprecedented third term

4th November 1852: Count Camillo Benso di Cavour appointed Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia

3rd November 1957: Laika the dog becomes the first animal to enter orbit around the Earth

2nd November 1795: The Directory established in France following the Thermidorian Reaction

1st November 1938: American racehorse Seabiscuit defeats War Admiral in a direct contest between the two horses

31st October 1517: Martin Luther reputedly nails his Ninety-five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, laying the foundations of the Protestant Reformation

30th October 1961: The Tsar Bomba detonated by the USSR