Honoring those who served — Veterans Day, Remembrance Day, and the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
Next: Wednesday, November 11, 2026.
Veterans Day is a US federal holiday held every year on November 11 to honor everyone who has served in the U.S. Armed Forces. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first Armistice Day in November 1919, Congress made November 11 a legal holiday in 1938, and in 1954 the day was renamed Veterans Day to honor veterans of all wars. Unlike Memorial Day, which remembers those who died in service, Veterans Day thanks all who served, living and deceased.
In the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries, November 11 is Remembrance Day, honoring members of the armed forces who died in the line of duty. Many people observe a two-minute silence at 11 a.m., the moment the 1918 Armistice took effect. Red poppies, inspired by John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Fields," are worn in the weeks before the day.
November 11 is a public holiday in Poland marking the restoration of Polish independence in 1918, after 123 years of partition among Russia, Prussia and Austria. On that day Józef Piłsudski was given command of Polish military forces in Warsaw. The holiday was established in 1937, abolished under communist rule, and restored in 1989.
In Marshal Ferdinand Foch's railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne, France, Allied and German representatives signed the Armistice in the early morning of November 11, 1918, between about 5:00 and 5:45 a.m. Paris time. The ceasefire took effect at 11:00 a.m., ending the fighting on land, at sea and in the air. The war had cost an estimated 15 to 20 million lives, and the formal peace came later with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
Forty-one male passengers aboard the Mayflower signed the Mayflower Compact while the ship lay anchored off Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown Harbor (the date was November 11 in the Julian calendar then used by the English). The settlers agreed to form a "civil Body Politick" and to obey laws made for the general good of the colony. It is often cited as an early example of self-government in English North America.
President Benjamin Harrison issued the proclamation admitting Washington to the Union as the 42nd U.S. state. Washington had been organized as a territory in 1853, and its voters approved a state constitution in October 1889. The new state was named after George Washington, the only U.S. state named for a president.