On November 3, 1844, William Makepeace Thackeray completes The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century, which is published in Fraser’s Magazine. Thackeray was born in Calcutta in 1811. As a young man, he attended Cambridge but left without a degree, then drifted through a variety of professions. He tried studying law, […]

With the support of the U.S. government, Panama issues a declaration of independence from Colombia. The revolution was engineered by a Panamanian faction backed by the Panama Canal Company, a French-U.S. corporation that hoped to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with a waterway across the Isthmus of Panama. In 1903, the Hay-Herrán Treaty was […]

On November 3, 1948, the Chicago Tribune jumps the gun and mistakenly declares New York Governor Thomas Dewey the winner of the previous days’ presidential race against incumbent Harry S. Truman in a front-page headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Many of America’s major newspapers had predicted a Dewey victory early on in the campaign. A New […]

The Soviet Union launches the first animal to orbit the earth into space—a dog nicknamed Laika—aboard the Sputnik 2 spacecraft. Laika, part Siberian husky, lived as a stray on the Moscow streets before being enlisted into the Soviet space program. Laika survived for a few hours as a passenger in the USSR’s second artificial Earth […]

In one of the most crushing victories in the history of U.S. presidential elections, incumbent Lyndon Baines Johnson defeats Republican challenger Barry Goldwater, Sr. With more than 60 percent of the popular vote, Johnson turned back the conservative senator from Arizona to secure his first full term in office after succeeding to the presidency after […]

President Richard Nixon goes on television and radio to call for national solidarity on the Vietnam War effort and to gather support for his policies; his call for support is an attempt to blunt the renewed strength of the antiwar movement. Pledging that the United States was “going to keep our commitment in Vietnam,” he […]

Five members of the Communist Workers Party, participating in a “Death to the Klan” rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, are shot to death by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis. Several others were wounded in what became known as the Greensboro massacre.  Members of the Communist Workers Party had organized the anti-Ku Klux Klan rally […]

Dianne Feinstein, the former mayor of San Francisco, makes history on November 3, 1992, when she wins election to the U.S. Senate. The first woman to represent the state of California in the upper chamber, she joins a record number of women winning seats in Congress that year, earning 1992 the label “Year of the […]

One World Trade Center officially opens in Manhattan on November 3, 2014. The new tower, along with the rest of the World Trade Center complex, replaced the Twin Towers, which were destroyed by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.