Today in History in 1947 The Princess Elizabeth marries Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey in London.

The On This Day In History archives at “Simple English Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia” contains over 200,000 events, birthdays and deaths from 6,000 years of history. Here is a roundup of a few of them:

November 20 is the 324th day of the year (325th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 41 days remaining until the end of the year.

EVENTS

284 – Diocletian becomes Roman Emperor.

1194 - Palermo is conquered by Emperor Henry VI.

1272 – Following Henry III of England's death on November 16, his son Prince Edward becomes King of England.

1316 - King John I of France dies at the age of only 5 days old.

1695 - Zumbi, the last of the leaders of Quilombo dos Palmares in Brazil, is executed by the forces of Portuguese bandeirante Domingos Jorge Velho.

1739 - Start of the Battle of Porto Bello between British and Spanish forces during the War of Jenkins' Ear.

1776 - American Revolutionary War: British forces land at the Palisades and then attack Fort Lee. The Continental Army starts to retreat across New Jersey.

1789 – New Jersey becomes the first U.S. state to ratify the Bill of Rights.

1805 - Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio, is performed for the first time in Vienna.

1820 - An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the ship Essex, 2,000 miles from the west coast of South America.

1845 - Anglo-French blockade of the Río de la Plata: Battle of Vuelta de Obligado.

1861 - American Civil War: The Secession Ordinance is filed by Kentucky's Confederate Governor.

1902 – Henri Desgrange and fellow journalist Géo Lefèvre dream up the idea of the Tour de France over lunch at the Cafe de Madrid in Paris.

1910 – From exile in Texas, Francisco I. Madero calls for a Revolution against the rule of Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, starting the Mexican Revolution.

1917 – Ukraine is declared a republic.

1917 - World War I: Battle of Cambrai begins.

1929 – Salvador Dalí, a Spanish artist, opens his first one-man show.

1936 - In Spain, José Antonio Primo de Rivera is killed by a Republican execution squad.

1940 – World War II: Hungary, Romania and Slovakia join the Axis Powers.

1942 – The Alaska Highway is opened to traffic.

1945 – Nuremberg Trials begin: Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals of World War II start at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice.

1947 – The Princess Elizabeth marries Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey in London.

1955 – Bo Diddley makes his TV debut on Ed Sullivan's Toast Of The Town show on CBS.

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis ends: In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, US President John F. Kennedy ends the quarantine of the Caribbean nation.

1968 - 78 miners are killed in an explosion at Consolidated Coal Company's No. 9 mine in Farmington, West Virginia.

1969 – Vietnam War: The Cleveland Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

1974 - A Lufthansa Boeing 747-130 crashes during take-off from Nairobi, Kenya, killing 59 people.

1975 – Spanish dictator Francisco Franco dies, after more than three-and-a-half decades in power.

1977 – In a speech at the Knesset (Israel's parliament), Egypt's President Anwar Sadat recognises the state of Israel's right to exist.

1979 - Grand Mosque Seizure: 200 Sunni Muslims revolt in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest place in Islam, during the Pilgrimage, taking about 6,000 hostages. French special forces help Saudi Arabia to put down the uprising.

1985 – Microsoft Windows 1.0 is released.

1989 - Velvet Revolution: The number of protesters in Prague, then the capital city of Czechoslovakia, increases to an estimated 500,000.

1991 - An Azrebaijani MI-8 helicopter carrying 19 people - members of a peacekeeping team and journalists from Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan - is shot down by Armenian military forces in Khojavend district of Azerbaijan.

1992 – Windsor Castle, one of the residences of Elizabeth II, is damaged by fire.

1993 - A plane crash near Ohrid, present-day Republic of Macedonia, kills 115 people, with only one person on board surviving.

1994 – The Angolan government and UNITA rebels sign the Lusaka Protocol in Zambia, ending 19 years of civil war (in 1995 localized fighting resumed).

1998 – A court in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan declares accused terrorist Osama bin Laden "a man without a sin" in regards to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

2000 – Honda introduces the humanoid robot ASIMO.

2003 – A second set of bombings in five days hits Istanbul, with the British Consulate as one of the targets. 27 people are killed.

2008 - The Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches its lowest level since 1997.

2009 - The Large Hadron Collider is switched back on, after faults caused it to be shut down over a year earlier.

2011 – Mariano Rajoy is elected Prime Minister in Spain, as the Partido Popular wins the most seats in parliament.

2015 - 19 people are killed in a terrorist attack and siege on a hotel in Bamako, Mali.

2016 - Pukhrayan train derailment: At least 146 people are killed when a train derails (comes off the rail track) near Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India.

2019 - Prince Andrew, Duke of York announces that he is withdrawing from public duties because of the controversy surrounding his friendship with the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.