Also on this day
Lead Story
1991
On this day in 1991, basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson stuns the world by announcing his sudden retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers, after testing positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. At the time, many Americans viewed AIDS as a gay white man’s disease. Johnson (1959- ), who...
American Revolution
1776
On this day in 1776, Congress chooses Richard Bache to succeed his father-in-law, Benjamin Franklin, as postmaster general. Franklin had sailed for France on behalf of the Continental Congress the previous month.
Benjamin Franklin invested nearly 40 years in the establishment of a reliable system of private communications in the American...
Automotive
1965
On November 7, 1965, a drag racer from Ohio named Art Arfons sets the land-speed record—an average 576.553 miles per hour—at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. (Record speeds are the average of two runs, one out and one back, across a measured mile.) Arfons drove a jet-powered machine, known as the...
Civil War
1861
On this day in 1861, Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant overrun a Confederate camp at the Battle of Belmont, Missouri, but are forced to flee when additional Confederate troops arrive. Although Grant claimed victory, the Union gained no ground and left the Confederates in firm control of that section...
Cold War
1957
The final report from a special committee called by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to review the nation’s defense readiness indicates that the United States is falling far behind the Soviets in missile capabilities, and urges a vigorous campaign to build fallout shelters to protect American citizens. The special committee...
Crime
1983
David Hendricks, a businessman traveling in Wisconsin, calls police in Bloomington, Illinois, to request that they check on his house and family. According to Hendricks, no one had answered the phone all weekend and he was worried. When the police and neighbors searched the home the next day, they found...
Disaster
1940
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapses due to high winds on this day in 1940. Fortunately, only a dog was killed.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was built in Washington during the 1930s and opened to traffic on July 1, 1940. It spanned the Puget Sound from Gig Harbor to Tacoma, which is...
General Interest
1885
At a remote spot called Craigellachie in the mountains of British Columbia, the last spike is driven into Canada’s first transcontinental railway.In 1880, the Canadian government contracted the Canadian Pacific Railroad to construct the first all-Canadian line to the West Coast. During the next five years, the company laid 4,600...
1940
Only four months after its completion, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State suffers a spectacular collapse. When it opened in 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was the third-longest suspension bridge in the world. Built to replace the ferry system that took commuters from Tacoma across the Tacoma Narrows to...
1944
Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt is reelected president of the United States for a record third time, handily defeating his Republican challenger, Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, and becoming the first and only president in history to win a fourth term in office.
Roosevelt, a fifth cousin to former president...
1989
In New York, former Manhattan borough president David Dinkins, a Democrat, is elected New York City’s first African American mayor, while in Virginia, Lieutenant Governor Douglas Wilder, also a Democrat, becomes the first elected African American state governor in American history.Although Wilder was the first African American to be popularly...
Hollywood
1980
On this day in 1980, the actor Steve McQueen, one of Hollywood’s leading men of the 1960s and 1970s and the star of such action thrillers as Bullitt and The Towering Inferno, dies at the age of 50 in Mexico, where he was undergoing an experimental treatment for cancer. In...
Literary
1913
On this day, Albert Camus, future Nobel Prize winner, is born in Algiers to a working-class family.
Camus was a good student and a dedicated athlete who won a scholarship to a prestigious French high school in Algiers. His sporting endeavors were ended at age 17 by an attack of tuberculosis....
Old West
1916
On this day in 1916, Montana suffragist Jeannette Rankin is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. She is the first woman in the history of the nation to win a seat in the federal Congress.
Born and raised on a ranch near Missoula, Montana, Rankin was the daughter of progressive...
Presidential
1944
On this day in 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected to an unprecedented fourth term in office. FDR remains the only president to have served more than two terms.
Roosevelt rose above personal and political challenges to emerge as one of the nation’s most revered and influential presidents. In 1921,...
Sports
1991
On November 7, 1991, basketball legend Magic Johnson holds a press conference to announce that he has HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and is retiring from the L.A. Lakers. From then on, he said, he would focus on staying healthy and on helping people—especially young people—understand the importance of...
Vietnam War
1964
The latest U.S. intelligence analysis claims that Communist forces in South Vietnam now include about 30,000 professional full-time soldiers, many of whom are North Vietnamese. Before this, it was largely reported that the war was merely an internal insurgent movement in South Vietnam opposed to the government in Saigon. This...
1966
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara faces a storm of student protest when he visits Harvard University to address a small group of students. As he left a dormitory, about 100 demonstrators shouted at him and demanded a debate. When McNamara tried to speak, supporters of the Students for a...
1972
Richard Nixon defeats Senator George McGovern (D-South Dakota) and is re-elected President of the United States.
With only 55 percent of the electorate voting, the lowest turnout since 1948, Nixon carried all states but Massachusetts, taking 97 percent of the electoral votes. During the campaign, Nixon pledged to secure “peace with...
World War I
1914
On this day in 1914, while World War I rages in Europe, the first issue of a new weekly magazine, The New Republic, is published in the United States.
The New Republic’s editorial board was presided over by the journalist Herbert Croly, author of the influential 1909 book The Promise of...
World War II
1944
On this day in 1944, Richard Sorge, a half-Russian, half-German Soviet spy, who had used the cover of a German journalist to report on Germany and Japan for the Soviet Union, is hanged by his Japanese captors.
Sorge fought in World War I in the German army, and then earned his...