Celebrating equality and progress — honoring Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a pioneer of women's rights in America.
Next: Thursday, November 12, 2026.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born on November 12, 1815, in Johnstown, New York. She was the principal author of the Declaration of Sentiments presented at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention in the United States. Its call for women's right to vote was the most controversial demand of the meeting and became a central goal of the movement she helped lead.
Stanton met Susan B. Anthony in 1851, beginning a working partnership that lasted half a century. Stanton was often the writer and strategist while Anthony did much of the organizing and traveling. In 1869 they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, and both died before the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.
Stanton campaigned not only for the vote but also for women's property rights, divorce reform, and equal access to education and work. In her later years she published The Woman's Bible (1895 and 1898), a critique of how religion was used to justify women's subordination. She died in New York City on October 26, 1902.
Ellis Island in New York Harbor closed as an immigration station on November 12, 1954. Since opening on January 1, 1892, it had processed roughly 12 million immigrants. Its last detainee was a Norwegian merchant seaman who had overstayed his shore leave. The main building reopened as a national museum of immigration in 1990.
Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a major step in Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power. Trotsky, a leader of the 1917 October Revolution and founder of the Red Army, was sent into internal exile in early 1928 and deported from the USSR in 1929. He was assassinated in Mexico in 1940.
Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN published a formal proposal, "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project," building on Berners-Lee's 1989 memo on information management. It described a system of linked hypertext documents that could be browsed over the internet. By the end of 1990 Berners-Lee had the first web server and browser running at CERN.
NASA's Voyager 1 made its closest approach to Saturn, returning detailed images of the planet's rings and moons. The flyby included a close pass of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, which revealed its thick atmosphere. The trajectory sent Voyager 1 out of the plane of the planets, and it later became the first spacecraft to reach interstellar space.