November 30 ...

In 1667 satirist, essayist, and poet Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. In 1782 the United States and Britain signed preliminary peace articles in Paris, ending the Revolutionary War. In 1803 Spain completed the process of ceding Louisiana to France, which had sold it to the United States. In 1804 the Jeffersonian Republican-controlled US House served Federalist-partisan US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase with six articles of impeachment. (Two more articles were later added; Chase was later acquitted by the Jeffersonian Republican-controlled Senate. He is the only Supreme Court Justice in US history to be impeached.) In 1835 Samuel Langhorne Clemens -- better known as Mark Twain -- was born in Florida, MO. In 1874 author, statesman, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was born in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England. In 1900 Irish writer Oscar Wilde died in Paris at age 46. In 1939 Soviet troops invaded Finland. In 1962 U Thant of Burma was elected Secretary-General of the United Nations, succeeding the late Dag Hammarskjold. In 1966 the former British colony of Barbados became independent. In 1981 the US and the Soviet Union opened negotiations in Geneva aimed at reducing nuclear weapons in Europe. In 1988 buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Co. took over RJR Nabisco Inc. with a bid of just over $24.5 billion. In 1999 anti-globalization protesters in Seattle, WA, forced the cancellation of opening ceremonies for the WTO meeting in that city.