There are 55 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Nov. 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan won reelection by a landslide over former Vice President Walter Mondale, the Democratic challenger.
On this date:
In 1860, former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party was elected President of the United States as he defeated John Breckinridge, John Bell and Stephen Douglas.
In 1861, James Naismith, the inventor of the sport of basketball, was born in Almonte, Ontario, Canada.
In 1928, in a first, the results of Republican Herbert Hoover’s presidential election victory over Democrat Alfred E. Smith were flashed onto an electric wraparound sign on the New York Times building.
In 1947, “Meet the Press” made its debut on NBC; the first guest was James A. Farley, former postmaster general and former Democratic National Committee Chair; the host was the show’s co-creator, Martha Rountree.
In 1977, 39 people were killed when the Kelly Barnes Dam in Georgia burst, sending a wall of water through Toccoa Falls College.
In 1990, about one-fifth of the Universal Studios backlot in southern California was destroyed in an arson fire.
In 2001, billionaire Republican Michael Bloomberg won New York City’s mayoral race, defeating Democrat Mark Green.
In 2014, the march toward same-sex marriage across the U.S. hit a roadblock when a federal appeals court upheld laws against the practice in four states: Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee. (A divided U.S. Supreme Court overturned the laws in June 2015.)
In 2015, President Barack Obama rejected the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, declaring it would undercut U.S. efforts to clinch a global climate change deal at the center of his environmental legacy. (President Donald Trump would reverse the Obama decision, but President Joe Biden canceled the permit for the pipeline on the day he took office.)
In 2016, FBI Director James Comey abruptly announced that Hillary Clinton should not face criminal charges related to newly discovered emails from her tenure at the State Department.
In 2019, Democrats announced that they would launch public impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump the following week; first to testify would be William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine.
In 2020, the federal agency that oversees U.S. election security pushed back at unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, saying that local election offices had detection measures that “make it highly difficult to commit fraud through counterfeit ballots.” Sen. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, said President Donald Trump was “damaging the cause of freedom” and inflaming “destructive and dangerous passions” by claiming, without foundation, that the election was rigged and stolen from him.