This Week in History: November 8–14

How to Solve a History Crossword

You don’t need to be a history buff to finish this one. Every clue hands you a date and a short story, and the word bank lists all sixteen answers, so the real puzzle is matching each story to its word and fitting it into the grid. Here’s a good way in:

• Start with the blanks. Clues with a ___ in them are the quickest wins. If you recognise the name or the phrase, the answer is staring right at you.
• Use the word bank as a checklist. Cross off each answer as it goes into the grid. With sixteen answers and only a handful left, the last few clues often solve themselves.
• Count the squares. The number in brackets is the answer’s length. Several answers in the bank share a length, so counting squares is the fastest way to narrow a clue down to two or three choices.
• Three answers are two words. They’re marked (6,4), (6,6) and (4,4) and go into the grid with no space, the same way every crossword handles phrases.
• Read the grey lines. A few clues carry a second line in grey italics. It’s a bonus hint, often a modern connection to an old event, for the clues that are hardest to pin down from the date alone.
• Let the long answers do the heavy lifting. The twelve-letter answer at 5 Across runs almost the full width of the grid, and three more answers are ten letters long. Get one of those in and you’ll have letters for half a dozen shorter words.

New to crosswords? Our complete guide to solving crosswords covers clue types and fill strategy from the ground up.

About This Puzzle

The TWIH series splits the calendar into 52 weeks that land on the same dates every year, so this puzzle is worth pulling out every November. The This Week in History page shows the whole calendar and every week that’s ready so far.

Remembrance Day falls right in the middle of this week, so two of the clues belong to it: the armistice that stopped the fighting of the First World War at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918, and the red flower first handed out in Canada in 1921. Two more stories start in Ontario: the co-discoverer of insulin was born in Alliston, and the biggest blackout of its day began at a power station in Queenston. Add a freighter lost on Lake Superior, a novel that is both a whale of a tale and a tale of a whale, a reporter racing a fictional record around the world and two big firsts in the air and in space, and it’s a busy week.

Every date and detail in the clues was checked against museum, archive and encyclopedia sources before it went into the grid. A few needed care. The exact day of Röntgen’s discovery is a reconstruction, since his lab notes were later burned, and November 8 is the date historians settled on. Moby-Dick actually came out in London a month earlier under a different title, so the clue sticks to its American debut. And the number of people left in the dark in 1965 varies from source to source, so we used the figure most histories give: about 30 million.

Missed last week? This Week in History: November 1–7 runs from Michelangelo’s ceiling to the last spike of the CPR. Like your crosswords packed with facts? Try the General Knowledge Crossword, or for something with no word bank at all, the Hard crossword It’s Coming Down.

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Puzzle Pack: Word Play & Trivia · Series: This Week in History