There are 54 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Nov. 7, 2013, shares of Twitter went on sale to the public for the first time; by the closing bell, the social network was valued at $31 billion. (The company would go private again in October 2022 after Elon Musk purchased the social media platform for $44 billion.)
On this date:
In 1917, Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution took place as forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky.
In 1940, Washington state’s original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, nicknamed “Galloping Gertie,” collapsed into Puget Sound during a windstorm just four months after opening to traffic.
In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term in office, defeating Republican Thomas E. Dewey.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide over Democrat George McGovern.
In 1973, Congress overrode President Richard Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Act, which limits a chief executive’s power to wage war without congressional approval.
In 1989, L. Douglas Wilder won the governor’s race in Virginia, becoming the first elected Black governor in U.S. history; David N. Dinkins was elected New York City’s first Black mayor.
In 1991, basketball star Magic Johnson announced that he had tested positive for HIV, and was retiring. (Johnson would go on to play again, in the NBA and the Olympics.)
In 2001, the Bush administration targeted Osama bin Laden’s multi-million-dollar financial networks, closing businesses in four states, detaining U.S. suspects and urging allies to help choke off money supplies in 40 nations.
In 2011, a jury in Los Angeles convicted Michael Jackson’s doctor, Conrad Murray, of involuntary manslaughter for supplying a powerful anesthetic implicated in the entertainer’s 2009 death. (Murray was sentenced to four years in prison; he served two years and was released in October 2013.)
In 2015, the leaders of China and Taiwan met for the first time since the formerly bitter Cold War foes split amid civil war 66 years earlier; Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou hailed the meeting in Singapore as a sign of a new stability in relations.
In 2018, a gunman killed 12 people at a country music bar in Thousand Oaks, California, before apparently taking his own life as officers closed in; the victims included a man who had survived the mass shooting at a country music concert in Las Vegas.
In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden clinched victory over President Donald Trump as a win in Pennsylvania pushed Biden over the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes; the victory followed more than three days of uncertainty as election officials sorted through a surge of mail-in ballots. Trump refused to concede, threatening further legal action on ballot counting. Chanting “This isn’t over!” and “Stop the steal,” Trump supporters protested at state capitols across the country, echoing Trump’s baseless allegations that the Democrats won by fraud.
