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Explore 23 November

Explore 23 November: Georgia’s Rose Revolution topples Eduard Shevardnadze, the People’s Republic of China takes its seat on the UN Security Council, Liberia elects Africa’s first woman president and Doctor Who is first broadcast. Meet Franklin Pierce, Manuel de Falla and Boris Karloff, born on this date.

This day through time →11 verified events across 3 eras

⌛11Full
Timeline ◈4Historic
Moments ♙8Born
Today ✦5Lives
Remembered ◉1Firsts &
Discoveries ♫2Culture
Stories ☉1Observances
Crowds in Tbilisi during the Rose Revolution, photographed on 23 November 2003.
Crowds in Tbilisi during the Rose Revolution, photographed on 23 November 2003.
Image creditZaraza · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
2003

Georgia’s Rose Revolution topples Shevardnadze

Parliamentary elections in Georgia on 2 November 2003 were widely judged to have been rigged, and for three weeks tens of thousands of protesters filled the streets of Tbilisi. On 22 November opposition supporters led by Mikheil Saakashvili burst into the new parliament carrying roses as President Eduard Shevardnadze was addressing it.

The next day, 23 November 2003, Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister who had led Georgia for most of the decade since independence, resigned without bloodshed. Saakashvili was elected president in January 2004. The peaceful change of power became a model for protest movements elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Eduard Shevardnadze ↗
Huang Hua, China's first permanent representative to the United Nations, in 1978.
Huang Hua, China’s first permanent representative to the United Nations, in 1978.
Image creditSuyk, Koen / Anefo · CC0Resized and cropped for display.
1971

The People’s Republic of China takes its seat on the Security Council

On 25 October 1971 the UN General Assembly voted that the government in Beijing, not the Republic of China on Taiwan, was the only lawful representative of China at the United Nations, including in China’s permanent seat on the Security Council.

Four weeks later, on 23 November 1971, representatives of the People’s Republic of China took part in a meeting of the Security Council for the first time, led by Huang Hua, the country’s first permanent representative. China has held the seat, with its veto, ever since.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library: The 1971 resolution on the representation of China ↗
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf campaigning in Monrovia, Liberia, in 2005.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf campaigning in Monrovia, Liberia, in 2005.
Image creditUwe.Kerkow · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
2005

Liberia elects Africa’s first woman president

Two years after the end of a long civil war, Liberians voted in a presidential runoff on 8 November 2005 between the economist Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the former footballer George Weah. On 23 November the National Elections Commission announced the official result: Johnson Sirleaf had won with 59.4 per cent of the vote.

She became the first woman elected as head of state of an African country, and was sworn in on 16 January 2006. She served two terms, until 2018, and shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her work for women’s rights and peace.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: United Nations Secretary-General: Statement on the Liberian presidential election results, 23 November 2005 ↗
Perkin Warbeck, in a sixteenth-century drawing attributed to Jacques Le Boucq.
Perkin Warbeck, in a sixteenth-century drawing attributed to Jacques Le Boucq.
Image creditJacques Le Boucq · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1499

Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the English throne, is hanged

For most of the 1490s a young man from Tournai, Perkin Warbeck, claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the two ‘princes in the Tower’, and so the rightful king of England. Backed at times by the rulers of Burgundy and Scotland, he became a serious threat to the first Tudor king, Henry VII.

After a failed rising in Cornwall in 1497 Warbeck was captured and confessed his true identity. Held at court and then in the Tower of London, he was accused of plotting to escape, and on 23 November 1499 he was hanged at Tyburn.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Perkin Warbeck ↗
♙
PEOPLE

Born Today

Johannes Diderik van der Waals
Image creditUnknown authorUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1837

Johannes Diderik van der Waals

Dutch physicist who won the 1910 Nobel Prize for his equation describing real gases and liquids.

José Clemente Orozco
Image creditLos Angeles Times · CC BY 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1883

José Clemente Orozco

Mexican painter, one of the great muralists of the Mexican Renaissance.

◉
IDEAS THAT CHANGED THINGS

Firsts, Science & Discoveries

The Andromeda 'nebula', photographed by Isaac Roberts in 1888 and printed in 1891.
The Andromeda ‘nebula’, photographed by Isaac Roberts in 1888 and printed in 1891.
Image creditIsaac Roberts · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1924

News breaks that Andromeda is a galaxy beyond our own

Astronomers had long argued over whether the faint spiral ‘nebulae’ were clouds inside the Milky Way or separate star systems. Working at Mount Wilson in California, Edwin Hubble found Cepheid variable stars, whose brightness reveals their distance, in the Andromeda nebula.

His result, that Andromeda lies far outside the Milky Way, was first reported by the New York Times on 23 November 1924, and his paper was read to the American Astronomical Society on 1 January 1925. The universe turned out to contain countless galaxies.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: ESA/Hubble: The star that changed the universe ↗
♫
MUSIC • FILM • BOOKS • CULTURE

Culture Stories

A TARDIS control console on show at the Doctor Who Experience in London, 2012.
A TARDIS control console on show at the Doctor Who Experience in London, 2012.
Image creditLindsay Adams-Riley · CC BY 2.0Resized and cropped for display.
1963

Doctor Who is broadcast for the first time

BBC Television broadcast ‘An Unearthly Child’, the first episode of Doctor Who, on 23 November 1963. Directed by Waris Hussein, it starred William Hartnell as a mysterious traveller in time and space whose ship, the TARDIS, looks like a London police box.

Meant partly as an educational series for family viewers, it became one of the longest-running science-fiction programmes in the world, helped by the idea that the Doctor can change into a new actor.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: BFI: The 50 best Doctor Who moments ↗
Building the spillway of Fort Peck Dam in Montana, the subject of Life's first cover.
Building the spillway of Fort Peck Dam in Montana, the subject of Life’s first cover.
Image creditUS Army Corps of Engineers, Photographed by Robert Etzel. · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1936

The first issue of Life magazine

Henry Luce, publisher of Time, launched Life as a weekly picture magazine with an issue dated 23 November 1936. Its cover was Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of the concrete spillway of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, then being built, with tiny figures giving the scale.

Bourke-White was one of Life’s first four staff photographers, and the magazine went on to shape photojournalism for decades.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Montana ↗
✦
LIVES REMEMBERED

Remembered Today

Bronzino
Image creditSailko · CC BY 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
Died 1572

Bronzino

Florentine painter of cool, elegant court portraits (Old Style date).

André Malraux
Image creditRoger Pic · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1976

André Malraux

French novelist of Man’s Fate and France’s first minister of culture.

Roald Dahl
Image creditCarl Van Vechten · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1990

Roald Dahl

British writer of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda.

Larry Hagman
Image creditABC Television · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 2012

Larry Hagman

American actor who played J. R. Ewing in the television series Dallas.

☉
AROUND THE WORLD

Observances & Anniversaries

Priests at the Niiname-sai harvest rite at Hikosan Shrine, Japan, on 23 November 2015.
Priests at the Niiname-sai harvest rite at Hikosan Shrine, Japan, on 23 November 2015.
Image credit宗教法人英彦山神宮 · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
Annual

Labour Thanksgiving Day in Japan

Japan’s Labour Thanksgiving Day, a national holiday since 1948, is a day for people to thank one another for their work. It grew out of Niiname-sai, an ancient harvest festival at which the emperor offers the year’s new rice, held on 23 November since the Meiji era and still performed by the imperial family.

Source: Web Japan (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan): Labor Thanksgiving Day ↗
HISTORY & TIMELINE

Finished the highlights?

Follow 23 November chronologically, from the Middle Ages to the modern day, with 11 verified events and the sources behind them.

This day through time →
Sources & further reading