History

Nelly, born November 2, 1974, in Austin, Texas, is the American rapper behind Country Grammar, “Hot in Herre”, and “Dilemma”. Born Cornell Iral Haynes Jr. and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, he became one of the defining hip-hop stars of the early 2000s, bringing the sound of the Midwest to the whole country. With a melodic, sing-song delivery that set ...

David Schwimmer, born November 2, 1966, is the American actor best known as Ross Geller in Friends, the beloved 1990s sitcom that made him one of the most recognisable faces on television. A palaeontologist with a string of disastrous relationships and an unforgettable line — “We were on a break!” — Ross Geller became a pop-culture icon, and David Schwimmer ...

k.d. lang, born November 2, 1961, is a Canadian singer-songwriter whose unmistakable voice and restless musical curiosity have carried her from country-music stages to pop charts and the great songbook of jazz standards. She is best known for “Constant Craving,” the song from her 1992 album Ingénue that won her a Grammy Award and introduced her to listeners around the ...

Warren G. Harding, born November 2, 1865, was the 29th president of the United States — a president elected in 1920 on a promise of a “return to normalcy” after the First World War. Harding came to the presidency as a well-liked Ohio newspaper publisher and senator, and he won one of the great landslide elections in American history. Yet ...

James K. Polk, born November 2, 1795, was the 11th president of the United States — a one-term president who nonetheless redrew the map of North America. In just four years in the White House, Polk oversaw the annexation of Texas, the peaceful settlement of the Oregon boundary with Britain at the 49th parallel, and the acquisition of California and ...

Marie Antoinette, born November 2, 1755, was Queen of France, wife of Louis XVI, and a symbol of the monarchy overthrown in the French Revolution. Her name still conjures powdered wigs, palace intrigue, and a queen supposedly indifferent to her suffering people — yet the real woman was far more complicated than the caricature. She was a teenage bride sent ...

Daniel Boone, born November 2, 1734, was the American pioneer and frontiersman who blazed the Wilderness Road into Kentucky. His name has become one of the great symbols of the American frontier — the coonskin-capped hunter striding into a wilderness no one had mapped — yet the real Boone was both more ordinary and more complicated than the legend. He ...

On November 2, 2000, the first resident crew arrived at the International Space Station, beginning the station’s continuous human occupation — unbroken ever since. For more than a quarter of a century now, there has always been at least one person living and working in space, a quiet record that began the day three people floated through a hatch and ...

On November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the bill establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday in the United States, honoring the civil rights leader assassinated in 1968. The signing closed a 15-year campaign — one of the longest grassroots efforts of its kind — to give the nation a day of remembrance for the man ...

On November 2, 1976, Jimmy Carter defeated President Gerald Ford in the US presidential election, becoming the 39th president of the United States. The election capped one of the most remarkable campaigns in American political history, as a little-known former Georgia governor and peanut farmer rode a national hunger for honesty and renewal after Watergate and Vietnam to victory over ...