October 21 Is Stacked: Hemingway, the Guggenheim, Women's Suffrage in France, and More

Some dates on the calendar do way more work than others, and October 21 is quietly one of the busiest in history. In 1940, Ernest Hemingway published For Whom the Bell Tolls, a novel drawn from his time reporting on the Spanish Civil War. It sold half a million copies and earned a Pulitzer nomination, even with critics grumbling about the dialogue. Five years later, France granted women the right to vote in 1945, a milestone that lands later than most people expect.

The date keeps going. Florence Nightingale departed for Turkey with 38 trained nurses in 1854, laying the groundwork for modern nursing. President Warren G. Harding condemned lynching in a 1921 Birmingham speech, the first sitting president to do so. In 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum opened in New York, and in 1983 the meter was redefined using the speed of light, which is a genuinely wild sentence to type.

October 21 also gave us jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie in 1917 and actor Ken Watanabe in 1959. Literature, civil rights, science, architecture, and bebop, all sharing one date. Which of these milestones would you time-travel to first?