What happened on 21 November?

9 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 late-Soviet 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 flight The Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloon carries the first humans aloft 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