One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a film about a group of
patients at a mental institution, opened in theaters. Directed
by Milos Forman and based on a 1962 novel of the same
name by Ken Kesey, the film starred Jack Nicholson and
was co-produced by the actor Michael Douglas.

Louise Fletcher (1934 – 2022) & Jack Nicholson (87).

On November 19, 1863, at the dedication of a military cemetery
at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during the American Civil War,
President Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most
memorable speeches in American history. In fewer than 275
words, Lincoln brilliantly and movingly reminded a war-weary
public why the Union had to fight, and win, the Civil War.

The Battle of Gettysburg, fought some four months earlier,
was one of the single bloodiest battle of the Civil War.

Reception of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was initially mixed,
divided strictly along partisan lines. Nevertheless, the “little
speech,” as he later called it, is thought by many today to be
the most eloquent articulation of the democratic vision ever
written.

On November 18, 1978, Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones led
hundreds of his followers in a mass murder-suicide at their
agricultural commune in a remote part of the South American
nation of Guyana.

Many of Jones’ followers willingly ingested a poison-laced punch
while others were forced to do so at gunpoint. The final death toll
at Jonestown that day was 909; a third of those who perished were children.

Jim Jones (below) was a charismatic churchman who established
the Peoples Temple, a Christian sect, in Indianapolis in the 1950s.         
        
        
        
        
        
        
       

Fitz Duke, who lives in nearby Port
Kaituma village, stands in front of
a nondescript memorial stone, the
only sign of the grisly Jonestown
massacre.

In the midst of the Watergate scandal that eventually ended his presidency, President Richard Nixon told a group of newspaper
editors gathered at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, that
he is “not a crook.”

Nixon made the now-famous declaration during a televised
question-and-answer session with Associated Press editors.

Nixon, who appeared “tense” to a New York Times reporter,
was questioned about his role in the Watergate burglary
scandal and efforts to cover up the fact that members of his
re-election committee had funded the break-in.

The inauguration of the Suez Canal at Port Said.

The Suez Canal, connecting the Mediterranean and the Red
seas, was inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony attended by
French Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III.

In 1854, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the former French consul to
Cairo, secured an agreement with the Ottoman governor of
Egypt to build a canal 100 miles across the Isthmus of Suez.

An international team of engineers drew up a construction
plan, and in 1856 the Suez Canal Company was formed and
granted the right to operate the canal for 99 years after
completion of the work.

Construction began in April 1859, and at first digging was
done by hand with picks and shovels wielded by forced
laborers. Later, European workers with dredgers and
steam shovels arrived.

Ferdinand de Lesseps, the architect of the
Suez Canal.

Early photographs of dredging in the Suez Canal from
1868-69. Norbert Schiller Collection.