On this day: November 7
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid die in Bolivia, Marie Curie wins her second Nobel Prize, FDR wins an unprecedented fourth term, Steve McQueen dies, and Magic Johnson announces he is HIV-positive, all on this day.
1492: The Ensisheim meteorite, the oldest meteorite with a known date of impact, strikes the earth around noon in a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace, France.
1492: The Ensisheim meteorite, the oldest meteorite with a known date of impact, strikes the earth around noon in a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace, France.
1665: The London Gazette, the oldest surviving journal, is first published as The Oxford Gazette. The Gazette was not a newspaper in the modern sense: it was sent by post to subscribers, not printed for sale to the general public.
1728: British naval officer, explorer and cartographer Captain James Cook, the first European to have contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, is born in the village of Marton in Yorkshire, now a suburb of Middlesbrough, England. Cook who made detailed maps of Newfoundland prior to his voyages in the Pacific Ocean, also was the first to circumnavigate New Zealand.
1848: Gen. Zachary Taylor is elected as president of the United States, running as the Whig Party's candidate and defeating Democratic candidate Lewis Cass, who received 42.5 percent of the popular vote and 127 electoral votes to Taylor's 47.3 percent and 163 electoral votes. Also running was Free Soil Party candidate Martin Van Buren, who received about 10 percent of the popular vote and no electoral votes. Taylor would die a little more than a year into his term as president from what scholars now believe was a kind of severe gastroenteritis.
1862: Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside assumes command of the Army of the Potomac during the American Civil War after George B. McClellan is removed from command by President Abraham Lincoln.
1867: Marie Curie, the Polish-born French physicist twice awarded the Nobel Prize for her work on radioactivity, is born in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland.
1874: A cartoon by Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly is considered the first important use of an elephant as a symbol for the United States Republican Party. The image of the featured cartoon was inspired by, and the text taken from, one of Aesop's fables, "The Ass in the Lion's Skin."
1876: Election Day ends with Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden of New York (right) outpolling Republican candidate and former Ohio Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes (left) in the popular vote. However, Tilden had 184 electoral votes to Hayes' 165, with 20 votes uncounted. Those 20 electoral votes, in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, would ultimately be awarded to Hayes after a bitter legal and political battle, giving him the presidency.
1879: Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War and the first leader of the Red Army, is born under the birth name Lev Davidovich Bronshtein near Yelizavetgrad, Russian Empire, in what is now the Ukraine.
1897: Filmmaker Herman J. Mankiewicz, who won an Oscar as the co-writer of "Citizen Kane" with Orson Welles, is born in New York City. Often asked to fix the screenplays of other writers, with much of his work uncredited, among other screenplays he wrote or worked on were "The Wizard of Oz," "Man of the World," "Dinner at Eight," "Pride of the Yankees" and "The Pride of St. Louis."
1908: Robert LeRoy Parker (front row, far right) and Harry Longabaugh (front row, far left), better known as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, respectively, are reportedly killed by soldiers in San Vicente, Bolivia, a few days after robbing a courier of a company's payroll worth about 15,000 Bolivian pesos.
1910: The first air freight shipment is undertaken when pilot Phil O. Parmalee carries two bolts of silk on his Wright Model B from Dayton, Ohio, to Columbus, Ohio. The delivery was a publicity event organized by the Wright Brothers and department store owner Max Moorehouse.
1911: Marie Curie becomes the first multiple Nobel Prize winner when she wins the award for chemistry eight years after garnering the physics prize with her late husband, Pierre. She remains the only woman with multiple Nobels and the only person to receive the award in two science categories.
1914: The first issue of The New Republic magazine is published.
1916: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate, is re-elected president over Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican candidate. Wilson won 49.2 percent of the popular vote and 277 electoral votes to Hughes' 46.1 percent and 254 electoral votes.
1916: Jeannette Rankin becomes the first woman elected to the United States Congress. A Republican and a lifelong pacifist, she was one of the 50 members of Congress who voted against the entry of the United States into World War I in 1917 and, after being elected again in 1940, the only member of Congress who voted against declaring war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. She is also the only woman to be elected to Congress from Montana.
1917: Russia's Bolshevik Revolution takes place as forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky.
1918: Evangelist Billy Graham, who rose to celebrity status in 1949 with revival meetings in Los Angeles that drew national media attention, is born in Charlotte, N.C.
1932: "Buck Rogers in the 25th century," notable as the first science-fiction program on radio, hits the airwaves.
1940: In Tacoma, Wash., the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapses in a windstorm, a mere four months after the bridge's completion. The dramatic footage of the bridge's deck swaying wildly in the wind is has become an iconic film. Here the bridge is seen on its opening day on July 1, 1940.
1942: Singer-songwriter Johnny Rivers, whose greatest success came in the 1960s with a string of hit songs, including "Poor Side of Town," "Summer Rain" and "Secret Agent Man," is born under the birth name John Henry Ramistella in New York City.
1943: Folk singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, whose popular songs like "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Woodstock" helped define an era and a generation, is born under the birth name Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada.
1944: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected for a record fourth term, easily defeating the Republican candidate, New York Gov. Thomas Dewey. Roosevelt garnered 53.4 percent of the popular vote and 432 electoral votes compared to Dewey's 45.9 percent and 99 electoral votes. Less than three months into his fourth term, Roosevelt would die on April 12, 1945, with Vice President Harry S. Truman, who had been added to Roosevelt's ticket in 1944 when the Democratic Party dropped former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, succeeding him as president.
1952: David Petraeus, a four-star general who had more than 37 years in the United States Army before becoming director of the CIA in 2011, is born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y.
1957: Actress Christopher Knight, best known for playing Peter Brady on the TV sitcom "The Brady Bunch," is born in New York City.
1962: Eleanor Roosevelt, former United States first lady and the widow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, dies at the age of 78 in New York City. She's seen here with Frank Sinatra in 1960.
1962: Richard M. Nixon, who had failed in a bid to become governor of California, holds what he calls his last press conference, telling reporters, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore."
1964: Actress Dana Plato, best known for playing the role of Kimberly Drummond on the TV sitcom "Diff'rent Strokes," is born in Maywood, Calif.
1965: Poppin' Fresh, better known as the Pillsbury Doughboy, debuts in television commercials.
1967: Carl B. Stokes is elected as the mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, becoming the first black mayor of a major American city.
1967: U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
1972: U.S. President Richard M. Nixon is re-elected to a second term, easily defeating Democratic candidate U.S. Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota. Nixon earned 60.7 percent of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes compared to McGovern's 37.5 percent and 17 electoral votes. McGovern only won the electoral votes of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
1973: Sylvia Pressler, a judge serving as a hearing examiner with New Jersey's Division on Civil Rights, rules that Maria Pepe, a 12-year-old northern New Jersey girl who was only allowed to play three Little League games before the organization forced her to quit, should have been allowed to play. The ruling was decried by Little League as "conceived in vindictive and prejudicial fashion of the worst kind," but it was upheld on appeal, and New Jersey became the first state to bar sex discrimination in Little League. By the following year, Little League amended its charter to allow girls and also created a softball division.
1980: Actor Steve McQueen, nicknamed the "King of Cool" and one of the top box-office draws of the 1960s and 1970s, dies at age 50 in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, following an operation to remove or reduce several metastatic tumors in his neck and abdomen. McQueen earned an Academy Award nomination for his role in "The Sand Pebbles" and some of his other popular films include "The Magnificent Seven," "The Great Escape" and "Bullitt."
1983: A bomb explodes inside the United States Capitol shortly before 11 p.m. No people are harmed, but an estimated $250,000 in damage is caused. In May 1988, six members of the "Resistance Conspiracy" would be arrested and charged with the bombing, as well as related bombings of Fort McNair and the Washington Navy Yard. The bombing also marked the beginning of tightened security measures throughout the Capitol.
1986: The film biography "Sid And Nancy," starring Gary Oldman as former Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, opens nationally. Although the movie struggles at the box office, earning $2.8 million on a $4 million budget, it would go on to be regarded as a cult classic.
1988: John Fogerty wins his self-plagiarism court battle with Fantasy Records. The label claimed Fogerty had copied his own song, "Run Through The Jungle," when he wrote "The Old Man Down The Road."
1991: Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Magic Johnson announces that he had tested positive for HIV and was retiring immediately. Johnson initially said that he did not know how he contracted the disease, but later acknowledged that it was through having multiple sexual partners during his playing career. Despite his retirement, Johnson would play in the 1992 NBA All-Star Game, earning MVP honors after recording 25 points, nine assists and five rebounds, and attempt an aborted comeback before the 1992-93 season, before actually returning for the last 32 games of the 1995-96 NBA season.
1996: NASA launches the Mars Global Surveyor aboard a Delta II rocket. The spacecraft would travel nearly 466 million miles over the course of a 300-day cruise to reach Mars on Sept. 11, 1997.
1999: Tiger Woods becomes the first golfer since Ben Hogan in 1953 to win four straight tournaments, winning the World Golf Championship in a play-off after he had tied at 6-under-par after 72 holes with Spain's Miguel Angel Jimenez.
2000: Republican George W. Bush is elected president over incumbent Democratic Vice President Al Gore, though Gore won the popular vote by a narrow margin. The winner wouldn't be known for more than a month because of a dispute over the results in Florida.
2000: Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected to the United States Senate, becoming the first former first lady to win public office in the United States, although actually she still was the first lady until January 2001.
2001: The new .BIZ domain extension, intended for registration of domains to be used by businesses, is officially launched.
2006: Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, becomes the first Muslim elected to Congress. Facing three competitors, Ellison still garnered 56 percent of the vote.
2010: Queen Elizabeth II launches a page on Facebook. However, no one is allowed to "poke" or "befriend" her and the page is actually run by a media team. Still, the Queen receives more than 100,000 "likes" on the first day her Facebook page goes live.
2011: Retired professional boxer Joe Frazier, former Olympic gold medalist and Undisputed World Heavyweight Champion, dies of liver cancer at the age of 67 in Philadelphia.
2011: Physician Conrad Murray, the personal doctor of pop star Michael Jackson, is found guilty of manslaughter in the singer's 2009 death. Murray would later be sentenced to the maximum penalty of four years of incarceration, but Los Angeles County Sheriff officials said he is expected to serve a little less than two years in the Los Angeles County Jail due to California prison overcrowding.
