November 2 in History

1898 – Cheerleading was started at the University of Minnesota with Johnny Campbell leading the crowd in cheering on the football team with “Rah, Rah, Rah! Ski-u-mah, Hoo-Rah! Hoo-Rah! Varsity! Varsity! Varsity, Minn-e-So-Tah!” Princeton had published cheers for the audience to chant as early as 1877. In 1903 the first cheerleading fraternity, Gamma Sigma, was founded. Women started being popular cheerleaders in the early 1920s.

1936 – First high-definition TV broadcast service, by BBC in London. At the time, the “standard definition” was 30 horizontal lines making up the picture, and the ’36 BBC hi-def had 240 lines. Today, 720 is considered the minimum for HD.

1936 – The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was established.

1957 – The Levelland UFO Case in Levelland, Texas, generated national publicity. Officially, they called it ‘blue lightning.’

1959 – Quiz show scandal – Twenty-One game show contestant Charles Van Doren admitted to a Congressional committee that he had been given questions and answers in advance.

1960 – Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in the trial R v Penguin Books Ltd, the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case.

1965 – Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker, set himself (suicide) on fire in front of the river entrance to the Pentagon to protest the use of napalm in the Vietnam war.

#1 Hit November 2, 1974 – November 8, 1974: Stevie Wonder – You Haven’t Done Nothin’

1974 – Seventy-eight people died when the Time Go-Go Club in Seoul, South Korea, burned down.

1983 – President Reagan signed the bill establishing the Dr Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on the third Monday in January.

#1 Hit November 2, 1985 – November 8, 1985: Stevie Wonder – Part-Time Lover

1988 – The Morris Worm, the first internet-distributed computer worm to gain significant mainstream media attention, was launched at MIT. It was written by a student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris. He intended to gauge the ‘size’ of the internet.

#1 Hit November 2, 1991 – November 8, 1991: Karyn White – Romantic

2000 – The first crew arrived at the International Space Station. The assembly of the IISS began in November 1998.

2003 – Arrested Development debuted on FOX. Despite acclaim from critics, Arrested Development received low ratings, and the series was canceled in 2006. It returned in 2016 on Netflix.

#1 Hit November 2, 2019 – November 8, 2019: Lewis Capaldi – Someone You Loved