1811 – The Battle of Tippecanoe was fought at Prophetstown, near the junction of the Wabash and Tippecanoe rivers. Native American forces, led by the Prophet, the brother of Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, attacked United States soldiers led by William Henry Harrison. The battle, which lasted two hours, was a victory for Harrison’s army and broke Tecumseh’s dream of a Native American Confederation.
1816 – The Indiana General Assembly, preparing for statehood, elected the state’s first two United States Senators. They chose James Noble, an attorney and circuit judge from Brookville, and Waller Taylor, a territorial judge from Vincennes. Both men served in the Senate until their deaths, Waller in 1826 and Noble in 1831.
1918 – World War I ended with the signing of an armistice at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month. More than 130,000 men and women from Indiana served in the war, which had started for the United States in April of 1917.
1967 – Attorney and Civil Rights Leader Richard Hatcher was elected mayor of Gary. He was one of the first African Americans to be elected mayor of a large American city. He served five terms and became known for developing innovative approaches to solving urban problems. A statue of Mayor Hatcher was unveiled outside the City Hall in Gary in 2019.
1978 – Janet Flanner died in New York City. Born in Indianapolis in 1892, she attended the Tudor Hall School for Girls. She was a long-time Paris correspondent for the New Yorker magazine and associated with fellow Americans Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, and Gertrude Stein.
1986 – Hoosiers premiered at the Circle Theater in Indianapolis. Loosely based on the 1954 Milan High School basketball team, the movie was shot entirely in Indiana and has become one of the most popular sports films of all time. Film Critic Roger Ebert awarded the picture a full five stars. “Hoosiers works a magic,” he wrote, “in getting us to care about the fate of the team and the people depending on it … it is a movie that is all heart.”