Nov. 13 history: Death & taxes

Nov. 13 in history 

In 1775, during the American Revolution, the Continental Army captured Montreal. 

In 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote in a letter to a friend, Jean-Baptiste Leroy: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln pays a late-night visit to General George McClellan, who Lincoln had recently named general in chief of the Union army. The general retired to his chambers before speaking with the president. It was the most famous example of McClellan’s cavalier disregard for the president’s authority. 

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure lowering the minimum draft age from 21 to 18.

In 1956, the Supreme Court struck down laws calling for racial segregation on public buses.

In 1971, the U.S. space probe Mariner 9 went into orbit around Mars.

In 1979, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan announced in New York his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

In 1982, near the end of a week-long national salute to Americans who served in the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C. In 2015, a cell of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant commits a string of terrorist attacks across Paris, killing 131 and injuring over 400. It was the deadliest day in France since World War II, as well as the deadliest operation ISIL has carried out in Europe to date.

In 2019, the House Intelligence Committee opened two weeks of public impeachment hearings with a dozen current and former career foreign service officials and political appointees scheduled to testify about efforts by President Donald Trump and others to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rivals. 

In 2020, veteran front-office official Kim Ng breaks several glass ceilings simultaneously when she is named General Manager of the Miami Marlins. Ng is the first woman and first person of East Asian descent to lead a Major League Baseball front office, as well as the first female GM in the history of North American professional men’s sports.

In 2020, speaking publicly for the first time since his defeat by Joe Biden, President Donald Trump refused to concede the election. Masked workers in teams of two began counting ballots in counties across Georgia; the hand tally of the presidential race stemmed from an audit required by a new state law.