November 24

Baruch Spinoza, the Amsterdam-born philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent whose rationalism reshaped early modern thought, was born.

John Knox, the Scottish minister and leader of Scotland's Reformation, died in Edinburgh and was buried beside St Giles'.

The Sri Aurobindo Ashram took definitive form at Pondicherry as Sri Aurobindo entrusted its day-to-day guidance to Mirra Alfassa, the Mother.

Parveen Shakir, the Urdu poet who brought a distinctive feminine voice to modern Pakistani verse, was born in Karachi in 1952.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species appeared in London, a landmark work of biology whose entire first printing sold out on its first day.