Noah Rayman

It was almost 'Mayflower Day'

On Nov. 11, many years ago, a group of men gathered in a transport to sign a document with vast repercussions for the world.

This wasn’t the signing of the Armistice in a train car in France on Nov. 11, 1918, which brought World War 1 hostilities to an end; that happened centuries later. This was the signing of the Mayflower Compact, on the ship of the same name, that in 1620 established governing rules for the Plymouth Colony, one of the earliest settlements in North America.

The date of the Mayflower Compact signing has largely been eclipsed by the Armistice, which ended a war that killed more than 16 million people, including over 100,000 Americans. After the conflict, Americans commemorated the moment “from coast to coast and frontier to frontier,” as TIME wrote in 1927. Congress officially dubbed the date Armistice Day in 1926 and made it a national holiday in 1938.

But creating a formal holiday soon looked tragically premature. Nazi Germany invaded Poland a year later, unleashing the Second World War and shattering the tenuous peace wrought by the Armistice. Even before the United States entered the war, Armistice Day felt obsolete here. “To many Americans the events of the last 15 months have made the Armistice seem less important and less worthy of a national holiday,” TIME wrote in an article in November 1940. “So last week Dr. Francis Carr Stifler, editorial secretary of the American Bible Society, suggested that it would be far more appropriate to celebrate the anniversary of the Mayflower Compact this Monday.”

Stifler called the Mayflower Compact “the cornerstone on which stand the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.”

His proposal didn’t take hold, but the sentiment remained. How could America commemorate the end of World War I when a conflict less than two decades later mobilized 16.5 million Americans and cost the lives of 400,000? On Nov. 11, 1947, World War II veteran Raymond Weeks organized a parade in Birmingham that honored all veterans. (Memorial Day, a much older holiday, commemorates Americans who have died in the armed services.) Dubbed “National Veterans Day,” that occasion is credited as the first celebration using the term Veterans Day, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

U.S. Representative Edward Rees of Kansas soon proposed changing the official name of the Nov. 11 holiday from Armistice Day to Veterans Day, and Congress renamed the Nov. 11 holiday in 1954.

The official date would go through one more makeover. Veterans Day was swept up in a movement by the federal government, under pressure from the travel industry, to shift national holidays to Monday and allow for more three-day weekends. In 1968, Congress rescheduled Washington’s Birthday (later known as Presidents’ Day), Memorial Day, Columbus Day and Veterans Day to fall consistently on Mondays. But as the VA writes, ” November 11 was a date of historic significance to many Americans.” Congress shifted the official holiday back to Nov. 11 in 1978.

Read the 1927 story about how the winners and losers of World War I observed Armistice Day: Armistice

The Hateful Eight will have some familiar Tarantino actors as well as newcomers to the director's recognizable style

21 Jump Street and Magic Mike star Channing Tatum has joined the cast of Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming film Hateful Eight, along with Demián Bichir, an Oscar-nominated actor from Mexico probably still most recognized for his role in Showtime’s Weeds as a drug cartel boss and boyfriend of Mary Louise Parker’s character.

The Weinstein Company confirmed the lineup for the 2015 Western that is “set six or eight or twelve years after the Civil War” in “the wintry Wyoming landscape,” according to a press release.

The Hateful Eight will feature some familiar faces from the Tarantino oeuvre, including Samuel L. Jackson (of course), Kurt Russell, Tim Roth and Michael Madsen. The film also stars Tarantino newcomers (but seasoned veterans of film) Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bruce Dern.

"You don't want to hear that you have Ebola"

Amber Vinson, a 29-year-old nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, remembers the moment a doctor confirmed her diagnosis.

“Even when he told me I had it, it’s like I didn’t hear it,” she told People in one of her first interviews since she recovered from the deadly virus. “Because you don’t want to hear that you have Ebola.”

The nurse had spent multiple nights treating Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S. When he died on Oct. 8, she was distraught, but she didn’t realize that she, too, had contracted the virus until her temperature spiked days later.

Read more at People

Former SEALs preemptively revealed his name in protest of his decision to come forward

The White House has not confirmed the letter

President Barack Obama wrote a secret letter to Iran’s Ayatullah Ali Khamenei last month, laying out a shared interest in fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), according to a media report based on anonymous sources.

Obama used the letter to try to win support for the U.S.-led strikes against the Sunni Islamist group and to push for a deal over Iran’s nuclear program ahead of a Nov. 24 deadline, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, has been critical of U.S.-led strikes, claiming the West is using ISIS as an excuse to intervene in the Middle East, and has been highly skeptical of the nuclear talks being conducted under the purview of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

At a White House news conference on Thursday, spokesperson Josh Earnest said he could not confirm the letter.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Over the next week, a donation prompt will appear atop your News Feed

Facebook announced a new initiative on Thursday that it hopes will encourage its massive user base to donate and help tackle the worst Ebola outbreak on record.

Over the next week, the social network said in a blog post, users will see a message at the top of News Feeds that will ask for donations to organizations like the International Medical Corps, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and Save the Children. All donations will go directly to the charities.

Beyond that, Facebook is working with UNICEF to spread key information about Ebola symptoms and treatment and collaborating with NetHope in order to provide emergency voice and data services for health and aid workers in the three hardest-hit countries: Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

The Ebola response in West Africa has seen a smaller flow of individual charitable donations than other recent relief efforts. An analysis by the CNNMoney last month found that the American Red Cross had raised $486 million in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, while it had raised just $100,000 in individual donations toward combatting Ebola, aside from a $2.8 million foundation contribution.

Philanthropists, meanwhile, have represented the largest source of private donations, including a $100 million pledge from Microsoft’s Paul Allen and a $25 million donation from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.