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Explore 5 November

Explore 5 November: the Gunpowder Plot is foiled beneath Parliament, Akbar’s army wins the Second Battle of Panipat, and Susan B. Anthony casts a vote she had no legal right to cast. Plus the reopening of the Vienna State Opera and the announcement of Android.

This day through time →8 verified events across 4 eras

⌛8Full
Timeline ◈3Historic
Moments ♙7Born
Today ✦5Lives
Remembered ◉1Firsts &
Discoveries ♫1Culture
Stories ☉2Observances
Eight of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, Guy Fawkes among them, in an engraving of 1605.
Eight of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, Guy Fawkes among them, in an engraving of 1605.
Image creditUnknown authorUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1605

The Gunpowder Plot is foiled

Around midnight on 4 to 5 November 1605 a search party at Westminster found Guy Fawkes in a cellar beneath the House of Lords, guarding about thirty-six barrels of gunpowder hidden under firewood and coal. He and a small group of English Catholics had planned to blow up the building at the opening of Parliament on 5 November, killing King James I and his government. The date is recorded under the Julian calendar then used in England.

When the other conspirators learned that morning that the plot had been discovered, most of them fled. Fawkes was interrogated under torture and gave up their names. Parliament ordered that the King’s escape be celebrated every year, the origin of Bonfire Night.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: UK Parliament: The Gunpowder Plot and its discovery ↗
The defeat of Hemu at Panipat, painted by Kankar for the Akbarnama in the 1590s.
The defeat of Hemu at Panipat, painted by Kankar for the Akbarnama in the 1590s.
Image creditKankar · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1556

The Second Battle of Panipat

On 5 November 1556 (Julian calendar), on the plain of Panipat north of Delhi, the army of the thirteen-year-old Mughal emperor Akbar, led by his regent Bairam Khan, met the much larger army of Hemu, the Hindu ruler who had taken Delhi only weeks before and been crowned as Samrat Hem Chandra Vikramaditya. Hemu had some 30,000 cavalry and hundreds of war elephants.

The battle turned when Hemu was struck in the eye by an arrow and his troops broke. He was captured and beheaded. Akbar went on to take Delhi and Agra and to rule for nearly fifty years, laying the foundations of the Mughal Empire at its height.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Second Battle of Panipat ↗
Susan B. Anthony, photographed about 1890.
Susan B. Anthony, photographed about 1890.
Image creditUnknown authorUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1872

Susan B. Anthony casts her vote

On 5 November 1872 Susan B. Anthony and fourteen other women voted in the American elections in Rochester, New York, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment already gave them the right. The election officials had let them register and cast their ballots.

Two weeks later Anthony was arrested for voting illegally. At her trial the next year the judge directed the jury to find her guilty, and she was fined $100, which she refused to pay. American women won the vote nationally in 1920, fourteen years after her death.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US National Archives Museum: Courting confrontation, the arrest of Susan B. Anthony ↗
♙
PEOPLE

Born Today

Hans Sachs
Image creditUnknown · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1494

Hans Sachs

Nuremberg shoemaker, poet and master-singer, later the hero of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. His birth is recorded under the Julian calendar.

Roy Rogers
Image creditHarry Warnecke / Robert F. Cranston · CC0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1911

Roy Rogers

American singer and actor, the ‘King of the Cowboys’ in more than a hundred films.

Vivien Leigh
Image creditFawcett Publications · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1913

Vivien Leigh

British actress, born in Darjeeling, who won Oscars for Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Art Garfunkel
Image creditRaph_PH · CC BY 2.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1941

Art Garfunkel

American singer, half of Simon & Garfunkel.

Bryan Adams
Image creditRaph_PH · CC BY 2.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1959

Bryan Adams

Canadian singer-songwriter and photographer.

Virat Kohli
Image creditBahnfrend · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1988

Virat Kohli

Indian batsman and former national captain, one of the leading run-scorers in international cricket.

◉
IDEAS THAT CHANGED THINGS

Firsts, Science & Discoveries

The T-Mobile G1, also sold as the HTC Dream, the first phone to run Android, in 2008.
The T-Mobile G1, also sold as the HTC Dream, the first phone to run Android, in 2008.
Image creditLuis Alberto Arjona Chin · CC BY 2.0Resized and cropped for display.
2007

Google announces Android

On 5 November 2007 Google and more than thirty technology and telephone companies, among them Intel, Motorola, Samsung, LG and T-Mobile, announced the Open Handset Alliance, formed to develop Android, a free and open-source operating system for mobile phones.

The tools for writing Android apps were released a week later, and the first Android phone went on sale in 2008. Android went on to become the most widely used operating system in the world.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Android operating system ↗
♫
MUSIC • FILM • BOOKS • CULTURE

Culture Stories

The front of the Vienna State Opera today.
The front of the Vienna State Opera today.
Image creditWiener Staatsoper GmbH · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
1955

The Vienna State Opera reopens

The Vienna State Opera, burned out by bombing in the last months of the Second World War, reopened on 5 November 1955, weeks after the last occupying troops had left Austria. Karl Böhm conducted Beethoven’s Fidelio, the opera of tyranny overthrown and freedom regained.

The performance was broadcast by forty radio stations around the world, and it was one of the first live broadcasts of Austrian television. It was seen as a symbol of the new beginning of the Austrian republic.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Vienna State Opera: History ↗
✦
LIVES REMEMBERED

Remembered Today

Alexis Carrel
Image creditUnknown authorUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1944

Alexis Carrel

French surgeon who won the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his methods of suturing blood vessels.

René Goscinny
Image creditHans Peters for Anefo · CC0Resized and cropped for display.
Died 1977

René Goscinny

French writer who created Asterix with the artist Albert Uderzo.

Isaiah Berlin
Image creditRob C. Croes (ANEFO) · CC0Resized and cropped for display.
Died 1997

Isaiah Berlin

Riga-born British philosopher and historian of ideas, author of ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’.

☉
AROUND THE WORLD

Observances & Anniversaries

Guy Fawkes night festivities at Windsor Castle, in a print by Paul Sandby of 1776.
Guy Fawkes night festivities at Windsor Castle, in a print by Paul Sandby of 1776.
Image creditPaul Sandby · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Annual, United Kingdom

Bonfire Night

In Britain 5 November is Bonfire Night, or Guy Fawkes Night, marked with bonfires and fireworks. It began as a celebration of King James I’s escape from the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, ordered by Parliament the following year.

To this day the cellars of the Palace of Westminster are searched by the Yeomen of the Guard before the State Opening of Parliament.

Source: UK Parliament: Frequently asked questions, the Gunpowder Plot ↗
Hamaguchi Goryō, whose burning rice sheaves saved his village in 1854.
Hamaguchi Goryō, whose burning rice sheaves saved his village in 1854.
Image creditUnknown authorUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
United Nations

World Tsunami Awareness Day

In 2015 the United Nations General Assembly named 5 November World Tsunami Awareness Day. The date honours the Japanese story of Inamura-no-hi, ‘the burning of the rice sheaves’.

On 5 November 1854 a tsunami struck the Kii Peninsula after a great earthquake. A village leader, Hamaguchi Goryō, set fire to the newly harvested rice in his own fields so that the villagers would climb to high ground in the dark, and many lives were saved.

Source: UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction: World Tsunami Awareness Day ↗
HISTORY & TIMELINE

Finished the highlights?

Follow 5 November chronologically, from the Middle Ages to the modern day, with 8 verified events and the sources behind them.

This day through time →
Sources & further reading