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November 3 in History

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The Handkerchief That Caught Black Bart

November 3, 1883

The Handkerchief That Caught Black Bart

For eight years a polite phantom robbed Wells Fargo on foot and signed his verses 'the Po-8,' and no posse could touch him. The legend says a dropped handkerchief undid him, but the truth is stranger and far more deliberate.

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Also on this day

More that happened on November 3

Pick any event and Historai will make it an episode.

  1. 644The second Muslim caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, was mortally wounded during an assassination attempt inside a mosque in Medina.
  2. 1493Christopher Columbus made landfall on the Caribbean island he named Dominica during his second transatlantic expedition.
  3. 1640King Charles the First summoned the English Long Parliament to convene at Westminster following the Bishops Wars.
  4. 1838The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce was founded in India, later becoming the prominent broadsheet The Times of India.
  5. 1839British naval frigates engaged Chinese junks at Chuenpi, initiating open military conflict in the First Opium War.
  6. 1903Panama formally declared its separation and independence from Colombia with the diplomatic and naval backing of the United States.
  7. 1906The International Radiotelegraph Conference in Berlin established the Morse code sequence SOS as the universal maritime distress signal.
  8. 1918German sailors stationed at the naval base in Kiel mutinied, sparking the revolution that ended imperial rule.
  9. 1957The Soviet Union launched Sputnik Two into orbit carrying Laika, making the stray dog the first living animal in space.
  10. 1964Residents of Washington, D.C. cast ballots in a United States presidential election for the first time under the Twenty-third Amendment.
  11. 1973NASA launched the Mariner 10 space probe, which became the first robotic craft to visit the planet Mercury.
  12. 1986The Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed covert American weapon shipments to Iran, initiating the public phase of the Iran-Contra affair.

Chosen from the November 3 pages of HistoryNet and OnThisDay.com, retold in our own words.