Today, 11/11, is the 315th day of the year. It’s also Veterans Day, a federal holiday honoring all military veterans.
The holiday marks the anniversary of the 1918 signing of the Armistice, which took place in a railway carriage, between the Allies and Germany. This event marked the end of fighting on the Western Front in the First World War. The signing took place at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
In other parts of the world, the day is celebrated as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day.
11:11 is also a phenomenon of numerology, the notion that numbers hold some intrinsic value beyond their significance as symbols of quantity. A popular belief holds that the combination “11:11″ appears on clocks with too great a frequency to be coincidence. In that spirit, let’s look at what else happened on this day in history and see if we can draw any conclusions beyond mere coincidence:
In 1620, the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document of the Plymouth Colony, was signed near Cape Cod.
Over two hundred years later, in 1889, Washington was admitted as the 42nd U.S. State.
In 1926, the legendary Route 66 was established.
Six years ago on this date, the Palestine Liberation Organization confirmed Yasser Arafat’s death, but did not identify the cause. Shortly after, Mahmoud Abbas was elected chairman of the PLO.
Golden Globe Award winner Leonardo DiCaprio was born on this date, as was the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Back to Top