What happened on 21 November?

10 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1694 Born: Voltaire French Enlightenment writer and wit; champion of freedom of speech and religion.
2. 2013 Euromaidan Three winter months on Kyiv's Maidan end with a hundred protesters shot and President Yanukovych fleeing to Russia — and Moscow's seizure of Crimea in reply.
3. 1937 Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 Composer's 'response to just criticism' under Stalin; ambiguous Stalin-era masterpiece.
4. 1806 Continental System Napoleon's economic blockade of Britain; eventually drove Russia from the alliance.
5. 1920 Bloody Sunday (1920) IRA assassinations and a retaliatory British massacre at Croke Park mark the war's bloodiest day.
6. 1916 Sinking of the HMHS Britannic Sister ship of the Titanic, serving as a hospital ship, sinks after striking a mine.
7. 1783 Montgolfier balloon's first crewed free flight The Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloon carries the first humans on a free flight over Paris, the dawn of flight.
8. 1974 The Birmingham pub bombings IRA bombs in two Birmingham pubs kill 21 people and injure 182 — the worst attack on the British mainland in the conflict. It brings the Prevention of Terrorism Act within a week,
9. 1916 Reign of Charles I of Austria The last Habsburg emperor inherits a dying war, sues secretly for peace, and renounces power without formally abdicating — two failed restorations and a Madeira exile later, the dy
10. 1963 First rocket launch from Thumba A small American Nike-Apache sounding rocket, its parts carried to the pad by bicycle and bullock cart, lifts off from a church-turned-lab in Kerala — India's space programme begin