Nov. 15 highlights: Landmark events include the 1791 founding of Georgetown University and Gen. Sherman’s 1864 March to the Sea. The day also marks the League of Nations’ first assembly (1920) and grim wartime measures against Romani people (1943). Modern milestones include the 2017 sale of da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi and SpaceX/NASA’s 2020 Crew-1 launch to the ISS aboard Falcon 9. Several disasters—Cyclone Sidr (2007) and a deadly Delhi building collapse (2010)—are also remembered.
On This Day — Nov. 15: Falcon 9’s First Operational Crew Launch to the ISS and Other Notable Events
Nov. 15 highlights: Landmark events include the 1791 founding of Georgetown University and Gen. Sherman’s 1864 March to the Sea. The day also marks the League of Nations’ first assembly (1920) and grim wartime measures against Romani people (1943). Modern milestones include the 2017 sale of da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi and SpaceX/NASA’s 2020 Crew-1 launch to the ISS aboard Falcon 9. Several disasters—Cyclone Sidr (2007) and a deadly Delhi building collapse (2010)—are also remembered.
06:33 PM, 11/15/2025Culture
Nov. 15 — A look back at notable events
From landmark institutions and wartime campaigns to scientific milestones and natural disasters, Nov. 15 has seen events that shaped history. Below are brief summaries of key moments across centuries.
1791: Georgetown University opened in what is now Washington, D.C., becoming the first Roman Catholic college established in the United States.
1864: Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman began his March to the Sea, initiating the campaign with the burning of Atlanta during the American Civil War.
1920: The inaugural assembly of the League of Nations was called to order in Geneva, Switzerland. The League later dissolved after 1946 and was succeeded by the United Nations.
1943: Heinrich Himmler ordered that Romani people be detained in Nazi concentration camps; historians estimate that up to 500,000 Romani died during the Holocaust.
1969: More than 500,000 demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C., in one of the largest protests against the Vietnam War.
1984: Five-week-old "Baby Fae" died after her body rejected a transplanted baboon heart; she had lived 20 days following the operation at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California.
1987: Twenty-seven people were killed when Continental Airlines Flight 1713, a DC-9, crashed while attempting to take off from Denver during a snowstorm.
2004: U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell submitted his resignation.
2007: Cyclone Sidr struck Bangladesh’s southwestern coast with sustained winds exceeding 150 mph, killing more than 3,400 people, injuring tens of thousands and leaving about 1 million people homeless.
2010: A five-story building housing migrant workers collapsed in New Delhi, killing at least 58 people, injuring dozens more and leaving many feared trapped under the debris.
2017: Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Salvator Mundi sold at Christie’s in New York for a world-record $450 million.
2020: SpaceX and NASA marked a milestone when four astronauts launched to the International Space Station aboard a Falcon 9 rocket — the Crew-1 mission, the first operational crewed flight for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.
2022: The global population reached an estimated 8 billion people, a milestone reached even as population growth slowed to its lowest rate since 1950.
2023: Britain’s Supreme Court rejected the government’s appeal to overturn a ruling that its plan to deport asylum seekers arriving without permission to Rwanda was unlawful.
Note: Entries summarize major historical events observed on Nov. 15. Dates and casualty figures are reported from contemporary accounts and may be estimates in some cases.