This Week in History: Nov. 6th-12th

Nov 6- 1860: Republican Abraham Lincoln is elected as the 16th president. South Carolina would secede from the Union in December and the Civil War would begin barely a month after Lincoln’s inauguration. 1917: Russia’s “October Revolution” concludes as the Bolsheviks bomb the Winter Palace in Petrograd and the communists take control. 1947: “Meet the Press” debuts on NBC. It remains the longest running television program in history, marking 77 years of broadcasts! 1961: The US Postal Service issues a stamp honoring James Naismith, credited with inventing the game of basketball, on the 100th anniversary of his birth. And despite his close association with the quintessential American sport, James Naismith was Canadian by birth!

Nov 7- 1874: Harper’s Magazine publishes a cartoon by Thomas Nast which represents the Republican Party as an elephant, the first depiction of the political party’s longtime symbol. 1916: Jeannette Rankin (R-MT) becomes the first woman elected to serve in Congress, four years before women even gained the right to vote! 1972: President Richard M. Nixon is reelected in the greatest landslide election in history, losing only the state of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, receiving 97% of the Electoral vote. Less than two years later, he would be forced to resign for his role in the Watergate scandal. 1991: Basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson stuns the sports world when he announces that he has tested positive for HIV (AIDS virus) and abruptly retires from the Los Angeles Lakers. 2000: The presidential election, pitting Vice President Al Gore against former Texas Governor George W. Bush, is too close to call, with the candidates receiving nearly equal numbers of votes in the state of Florida. The race is ultimately decided by the US Supreme Court on December 12, when it releases a 5-4 decision declaring George W. Bush the winner.

Nov 8- 1895: German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen first detects electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength better known today as X-rays. 1972: Home Box Office (HBO) premieres as the first premium channel on cable television, offering viewers commercial-free entertainment for a monthly fee. The initial subscription price was $6 per month, and the initial offering (a hockey game between the Vancouver Canucks and New York Rangers from Madison Square Garden) was available to 365 subscribers in Wilkes-Barre, PA! 1977: Archeologist Manolis Andronikos discovers the tomb of Macedonian King Phillip II, who conquered Greece in 338 BCE, and his wife Queen Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great. 2016: Republican Donald Trump wins the presidential election with 304 Electoral votes, despite losing the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million to Democrat Hillary Clinton, who claimed 227 Electoral votes.

Nov 9- 1799: Napoleon Bonaparte leads a successful coup that topples the French government. He assumes the role of dictator, naming himself “First Consul.” 1906: President Theodore Roosevelt heads to Panama aboard the USS Louisiana, the first sitting president to undertake a trip outside the US. 1965: The Great Northeastern Blackout occurs at 5:46 pm, leaving some 30 million people without power until the next morning, from eastern Canada to Maryland. 800,000 commuters in New York City alone were trapped on stopped subway trains and thousands more in elevators. The blackout prompted major changes to federal policy and oversight of the electrical grid! 2020: Pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech announce that trials of their vaccines for Covid-19 were more than 90% effective, paving the way for government approval and mass distribution of the products to combat the worldwide pandemic.

Nov 10- 1885: German engineer Gottlieb Daimler unveils the “Reitwagen,” considered the world’s first motorcycle. 1940: Walt Disney is recruited by the FBI’s Los Angeles office to serve as an informant, reporting information on Hollywood “subversives.” 1969: “Sesame Street” premieres on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television. 1989: East and West German citizens begin demolishing the Berlin Wall.

Nov 11- 1620: The Mayflower Compact, establishing the first framework of government in the New World, is signed by the Pilgrims in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. 1807: The periodical Salmagundi, published by noted author Washington Irving, is the first source to associate the word “Gotham” with New York City. 1918: The Armistice signed by Allied and German leaders, takes effect at 11:00 am, ending World War I. 1938: Mary Mallon, more commonly known as “Typhoid Mary,” died of pneumonia at Riverside Hospital in New York. Born in Ireland, Mary emigrated to New York City at the age of 15. Between 1900 and 1907 she worked as a cook for eight affluent families, moving on after family members and other workers developed typhoid fever. An investigator managed to connect multiple cases in the New York area to a common denominator; they had all employed an Irish-born cook named Mary. She became the first person in the United States to be identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the bacteria that causes typhoid. After refusing to give up her career as a cook, Mary Mallon was forcibly quarantined and spent the last 25 years of her life detained in a hospital and prevented from leaving.

Nov 12- 1660: English writer and Puritan religious figure John Bunyan is imprisoned for preaching without a license. (Who knew THAT was a crime!). While in jail, he penned his most famous work, the Christian allegory “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” 1954: The immigration office on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, where more than 12 million immigrants were processed entering the United States beginning in 1892, closed its doors. 1968: The Supreme Court issues its decision in Epperson v. Arkansas, declaring the state law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools to be unconstitutional. 1970: Cyclone Bhola makes landfall in E. Pakistan (now Bangladesh), eventually claiming nearly 500,000 lives, making it the deadliest cyclone in history as well as one of the worst humanitarian disasters of all time. 1990: The World Wide Web is first proposed by CERN computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee.