Vespucci sailed on Spanish and Portuguese expeditions to the New World in the 1490s and early 1500s, and was among the first Europeans to argue in print that the lands Columbus had reached were not Asia but a separate continent. In 1507, cartographer Martin Waldseemüller labeled the new landmass 'America' in his honor on a printed world map.

Born to a former army doctor in a hospital for the poor, Dostoevsky would go on to write Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot. A near-execution by firing squad and years of Siberian exile for revolutionary activity darkened and deepened a body of work obsessed with sin, redemption, and the human capacity for both cruelty and grace.

With Germany's collapse and the Armistice signed the same day, the Regency Council transferred military authority to Józef Piłsudski, who had just returned from imprisonment in Magdeburg. Poland, partitioned out of existence by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the late 18th century, re-emerged as an independent republic. November 11 has been celebrated as Poland's National Independence Day since.

Signed in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne at 5:45 a.m., the Armistice took effect six hours later. More than 9 million soldiers had died since 1914. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month became a fixed point of remembrance, observed ever since as Armistice Day or Veterans Day.

At the King's request, the entire British Empire paused at 11 a.m. for two minutes of silence—traffic stopped, factories fell quiet, and crowds gathered at the newly built Cenotaph in London. The ritual, along with the red remembrance poppy inspired by John McCrae's 1915 poem 'In Flanders Fields,' became a permanent fixture of November 11 commemorations across the Commonwealth.

Named for War Minister André Maginot, the fortified line was designed to prevent a repeat of the 1914 invasion by making the Franco-German frontier impregnable. Construction absorbed enormous resources through the 1930s. When German forces invaded in May 1940, they simply swept through Belgium and the Ardennes, rendering the line's static defenses strategically irrelevant within days.

Launched at 11:22 a.m. local time into rain clouds, the Saturn V triggered its own lightning strike, momentarily disabling instrument readouts in the command module. Flight controller John Aaron's calm call of an obscure switch setting—'SCE to Aux'—allowed pilot Alan Bean to restore telemetry, saving the mission. Apollo 12 went on to make the second crewed Moon landing days later.