| 131791 | November 20 | Event | 1968 – A total of 78 miners are killed in an explosion at the Consolidated Coal Company’s No. 9 mine in Farmington, West Virginia in the Farmington Mine disaster |
| 131792 | November 20 | Event | 1969 – Vietnam War: The Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. |
| 131793 | November 20 | Event | 1969 – Occupation of Alcatraz: Native American activists seize control of Alcatraz Island until being ousted by the U.S. Government on June 11, 1971. |
| 131794 | November 20 | Event | 1974 – The United States Department of Justice files its final anti-trust suit against AT&T Corporation. This suit later leads to the breakup of AT&T and its Bell System. |
| 131795 | November 20 | Event | 1977 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel, when he meets Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and speaks before the Knesset in Jerusalem, seeking a permanent peace settlement. |
| 131796 | November 20 | Event | 1979 – Grand Mosque Seizure: About 200 Sunni Muslims revolt in Saudi Arabia at the site of the Kaaba in Mecca during the pilgrimage and take about 6000 hostages. The Saudi government receives help from Pakistani special forces to put down the uprising. |
| 131797 | November 20 | Event | 1980 – Lake Peigneur drains into an underlying salt deposit. A misplaced Texaco oil probe had been drilled into the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine, causing water to flow down into the mine, eroding the edges of the hole. |
| 131798 | November 20 | Event | 1982 – The General Union of Ecuadorian Workers (UGTE) is founded. |
| 131799 | November 20 | Event | 1985 – Microsoft Windows 1.0 is released. |
| 131800 | November 20 | Event | 1989 – Velvet Revolution: The number of protesters assembled in Prague, Czechoslovakia swells from 200,000 the day before to an estimated half-million. |
| 131801 | November 20 | Event | 1991 – An Azerbaijani MI-8 helicopter carrying 19 peacekeeping mission team with officials and journalists from Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan is shot down by Armenian military forces in Khojavend District of Azerbaijan. |
| 131802 | November 20 | Event | 1992 – In England, a fire breaks out in Windsor Castle, badly damaging the castle and causing over £50 million worth of damage. |
| 131803 | November 20 | Event | 1993 – Savings and loan crisis: The United States Senate Ethics Committee issues a stern censure of California senator Alan Cranston for his "dealings" with savings-and-loan executive Charles Keating. |
| 131804 | November 20 | Event | 1994 – The Angolan government and UNITA rebels sign the Lusaka Protocol in Zambia, ending 19 years of civil war. (Localized fighting resumes the next year.) |
| 131805 | November 20 | Event | 1998 – A court in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan declares accused terrorist Osama bin Laden "a man without a sin" in regard to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. |
| 131806 | November 20 | Event | 1998 – The first module of the International Space Station, Zarya, is launched. |
| 131807 | November 20 | Event | 2001 – In Washington, D.C., U.S. President George W. Bush dedicates the United States Department of Justice headquarters building as the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Building, honoring the late Robert F. Kennedy on what would have been his 76th birthday. |
| 131808 | November 20 | Event | 2003 – After the November 15 bombings, a second day of the 2003 Istanbul bombings occurs in Istanbul, Turkey, destroying the Turkish head office of HSBC Bank AS and the British consulate. |
| 131809 | November 20 | Event | 2008 – After critical failures in the US financial system began to build up after mid-September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches its lowest level since 1997. |
| 131810 | November 20 | Birth | 270 – Maximinus II, Roman emperor (d. 313) |
| 131811 | November 20 | Birth | 1602 – Otto von Guericke, German physicist and politician (d. 1686) |
| 131812 | November 20 | Birth | 1620 – Avvakum, Russian priest and saint (d. 1682) |
| 131813 | November 20 | Birth | 1625 – Paulus Potter, Dutch painter (d. 1654) |
| 131814 | November 20 | Birth | 1660 – Daniel Ernst Jablonski, Czech-German theologian and reformer (d. 1741) |
| 131815 | November 20 | Birth | 1750 – Tipu Sultan, Indian ruler (d. 1799) |
| 131816 | November 20 | Birth | 1761 – Pope Pius VIII (d. 1830) |
| 131817 | November 20 | Birth | 1765 – Thomas Fremantle, English admiral and politician (d. 1819) |
| 131818 | November 20 | Birth | 1781 – Karl Friedrich Eichhorn, German captain and jurist (d. 1854) |
| 131819 | November 20 | Birth | 1813 – Franc Miklošič, Slovenian linguist and philologist (d. 1891) |
| 131820 | November 20 | Birth | 1839 – Christian Wilberg, German painter and illustrator (d. 1882) |