On November 7 and 8 Anne Hutchinson was tried by the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for “traducing the ministers and their ministry.” At meetings held in her home, Hutchinson had preached that salvation could be earned not by obeying the laws of church and state but by one’s spiritual condition alone. Furthermore, she said, one could communicate directly with God, without the aid of clergy, whom she described as being for the most part misguided anyway. Such notions couldn’t be stomached in a theocracy like Massachusetts.

Inasmuch as Hutchinson’s judges were also her accusers, she had little hope. On the second day of her trial, however, Rev. John Cotton came to her defense, testifying alone in her favor against the gathered ministers. It seemed she was out of danger, when suddenly she professed that God revealed himself to her “by the voice of his own spirit to my soul”; she even threatened the colony with God’s curse. She had condemned herself. A vote was taken, and John Winthrop turned to the accused. “Mrs. Hutchinson,” he said, “the sentence of the court you hear is that you are banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned till the court shall send you away.”

The following spring Hutchinson and her family settled on Rhode Island. After her husband’s death in 1642, she moved to New York, where a year later she and all her children but one were massacred by Indians.

On November 4 Richard Jordan Gatling received Patent Number 36,836 for a rapid-fire gun. Catling’s previous inventions were mostly agricultural ones, including a rice-sowing machine, a wheat drill, and a steam plow, but the advent of the Civil War turned his thoughts to ordnance. Adopting principies used in earlier rapid-fire guns, Gatling created the first weapon that took advantage of modern machine tooling to guarantee reliable fire.

Catling’s purpose in devising the deadly weapon was avowedly benign. Stunned by the number of soldiers who died not from wounds but from illness, he wrote, “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—that would by its rapidity of fire enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred it would to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished.”

By 1865 Catling had perfected his invention, enabling the gun to fire two hundred shots a minute. “It bears the same relation to other firearms that McCormack’s [sic] Reaper does to the sickle, or the sewing machine to the common needle,” Catling wrote that year. Although he was aware of the revolutionary nature of his invention, most military men were not. The U.S. Army adopted the Catling gun in 1866, but it was for the most part ignored. In 1872 the original Catling was superseded by the Hotchkiss gun, and by 1883 the Maxim gun had rendered it obsolete.

Woodrow Wilson was elected President on November 2, defeating the Republican William Howard Taft; Theodore Roosevelt, who had founded the Progressive or Bull Moose party; and the Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, a twenty-yearold poet from Camden, Maine, suddenly found herself famous in November. That month an anthology entitled The Lyric Year was published, containing what were deemed the best one hundred poems written by Americans in 1912. Millay’s “Renascence”—“All I could see from where I stood/Was three long mountains and a wood”—was included in the anthology as fourth best, though it had been promised first prize by an editor who was later overruled by his fellow judges. After The Lyric Year was published, however, “Renascence” was universally acknowledged the best poem in the volume, and Millay received wide acclaim. “Fully armed from the head of Jove had sprung a new miracle,” wrote the poet Witter Bynner a few years after Millay’s sudden emergence before the public. “Where there had been nothing, no whisper of her, stood a whole poet.”

The arrival of the new 1913 automobiles prompted Harper’s Weekly to run an article entitled “The Vanishing Hand Crank” in its November 2 issue. The 1913 models were not the first to feature the self-starter, a device invented by Charles Franklin Kettering in 1911 and soon after perfected by Vincent Bendix. But it struck Harper’s as the first year in which the majority of cars were self-starting, heralding the end of an arduous and risky chore. The “fair feminine driver” will benefit most from the death of the hand crank, Harper’s noted, but so, too, would those drivers whose motors stalled in the midst of heavy city traffic, a form of public humiliation now long forgotten. “It is naturally mortifying as well as time consuming to be forced to alight from the seat, walk to the front of the car, and then crank a few times,” wrote the author, “the while traffic behind—and possibly on either side, if on a busy cross-street—is held up until the engine can be started and the operator can return to his seat.”