Also on this day
Lead Story
1964
On this day in 1964, residents of the District of Columbia cast their ballots in a presidential election for the first time. The passage of the 23rd Amendment in 1961 gave citizens of the nation’s capital the right to vote for a commander in chief and vice president. They went...
American Revolution
1777
On this day in 1777, General George Washington is informed that a conspiracy is afoot to discredit him with Congress and have him replaced by General Horatio Gates. Thomas Conway, who would be made inspector general of the United States less than two months later on December 14, led the...
Automotive
1930
At 12:05 A.M. on this day in 1930, the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel between the United States and Canada is officially opened to car traffic. As Windsor Mayor Frederick Jackson had bragged at the tunnel’s elaborate dedication ceremony two days before, the structure–the only international subaqueous tunnel in the world–made it possible...
Civil War
1816
On this day in 1816, Confederate General Jubal Early is born in Franklin County, Virginia. Early had a distinguished career in the Confederate army, and in 1864 he waged a campaign in the Shenandoah Valley that kept Confederate hopes alive by relieving the pressure on General Robert E. Lee’s army...
Cold War
1964
In one of the most crushing victories in the history of U.S. presidential elections, incumbent Lyndon Baines Johnson defeats Republican challenger Barry Goldwater, Sr. With over 60 percent of the popular vote, Johnson turned back the conservative senator from Arizona to secure his first full term in office...
Crime
1984
Bobby Joe Long kidnaps and rapes 17-year-old Lisa McVey in Tampa, Florida. The victim’s subsequent courage and bravery led to the capture and arrest of Long, who was eventually found guilty of 10 murders committed in the Tampa area during the early 1980s.
McVey had been riding her bicycle home from...
Disaster
1974
On this day in 1974, a fire rages out of control in a hotel in South Korea, killing 88 people, most of whom were enjoying a late-night party in a club on the hotel’s top floor.
It was very early on a Sunday morning in the eastern part of downtown Seoul,...
General Interest
1903
With the support of the U.S. government, Panama issues a declaration of independence from Colombia. The revolution was engineered by a Panamanian faction backed by the Panama Canal Company, a French-U.S. corporation that hoped to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with a waterway across the Isthmus of Panama.In 1903,...
1957
The Soviet Union launches the first animal into space—a dog name Laika—aboard the Sputnik 2 spacecraft.
Laika, part Siberian husky, lived as a stray on the Moscow streets before being enlisted into the Soviet space program. Laika survived for several days as a passenger in the USSR’s second artificial Earth satellite,...
1979
Five members of the Communist Workers Party, participating in a “Death to the Klan” rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, are shot to death by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis. Seven others were wounded.Members of the Communist Workers Party had organized the anti-Ku Klux Klan rally and march and were...
1986
The Lebanese magazine Ash Shiraa reports that the United States has been secretly selling arms to Iran in an effort to secure the release of seven American hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon. The revelation, confirmed by U.S. intelligence sources on November 6, came as a shock to officials...
Literary
1844
On this day in 1844, William Makepeace Thackeray completes The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century, which is published in Fraser’s Magazine.
Thackeray was born in Calcutta in 1811. As a young man, he attended Cambridge but left without a degree, then drifted through a variety of...
Music
1962
In an incident familiar to all fans of pop music scandals, a great hue and cry was raised in the press and in the music industry when the late 1980s dance sensation Milli Vanilli was exposed as mere lip-sync artists. Suddenly exposed as illegitimate, the duo that had earned a...
Old West
1883
On this day, authorities almost catch the California bandit and infamous stagecoach robber called Black Bart; he manages to make a quick getaway, but drops an incriminating clue that eventually sends him to prison.
Black Bart was born Charles E. Boles, probably in the state of New York around 1830. ...
Presidential
1948
On this day in 1948, the Chicago Tribune jumps the gun and mistakenly declares New York Governor Thomas Dewey the winner of his presidential race with incumbent Harry S. Truman in a front-page headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
Many of America’s major newspapers had predicted a Dewey victory early on in the...
Sports
1998
On November 3, 1998, former professional wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura is elected governor of Minnesota with 37 percent of the vote. His opponents, seasoned politicians Hubert Humphrey III (son of Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president and the attorney general of Minnesota) and St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, spent a total of...
Vietnam War
1967
In some of the heaviest fighting seen in the Central Highlands area, heavy casualties are sustained by both sides in bloody battles around Dak To, about 280 miles north of Saigon near the Cambodian border.
The 1,000 U.S. troops there were reinforced with 3,500 additional troops from the U.S. 4th Division...
1969
President Richard Nixon goes on television and radio to call for national solidarity on the Vietnam War effort and to gather support for his policies; his call for support is an attempt to blunt the renewed strength of the antiwar movement.
Pledging that the United States was “going to keep our...
World War I
1918
As the First World War draws to a close, angry rebels in both Germany and Austria-Hungary revolt on November 3, 1918, raising the red banner of the revolutionary socialist Communist Party and threatening to follow the Russian example in bringing down their imperialist governments.
By the last week of October 1918,...
World War II
1941
On this day in 1941, the Combine Japanese Fleet receive Top-Secret Order No. 1: In 34 days time, Pearl Harbor is to be bombed, along with Mayala, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines.
Relations between the United States and Japan had been deteriorating quickly since Japan’s occupation of Indochina in...