November 12 ...

In 1815 American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in Johnstown, NY. In 1840 sculptor Auguste Rodin was born in Paris, France. In 1920 Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was elected the first commissioner of Major League Baseball. In 1927 Josef Stalin became the undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union as Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party. In 1929 Grace Kelly was born in Philadelphia. In 1942 the World War II naval Battle of Guadalcanal began. (The Americans ended up winning a major victory over the Japanese.) In 1948 former Japanese premier Hideki Tojo and several other World War II Japanese leaders were sentenced to death by a war crimes tribunal. In 1977 the city of New Orleans elected its first black mayor, Ernest "Dutch" Morial. In 1980 the US space probe Voyager I came within 77,000 miles of Saturn while transmitting data back to Earth. In 1982 Yuri V. Andropov was elected to succeed the late Leonid I. Brezhnev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee. In 1985 Xavier Suarez was elected Miami's first Cuban-American mayor. In 1995 Israel's ruling Labor Party unanimously approved Shimon Peres as its new leader, replacing slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In 1997 the UN Security Council imposed new sanctions on Iraq for constraints being placed on UN arms inspectors; also on this day, Ramzi Yousef was found guilty of masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.