TODAY IN HISTORY
On Nov. 5, 1605, the “Gunpowder Plot” failed as Guy Fawkes was seized before he could blow up the English Parliament.
In 1781, the Continental Congress elected John Hanson of Maryland its chairman, giving him the title “President of the United States in Congress Assembled.” In 1911, singing cowboy star Roy Rogers was born Leonard Slye in Cincinnati, Ohio.
In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term in office as he defeated Republican challenger Wendell L. Willkie.
In 1968, Republican Richard M. Nixon won the presidency, defeating Democratic Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and American Independent candidate George C. Wallace. In 1974, Democrat Ella T. Grasso was elected governor of Connecticut, becoming the first woman to win a gubernatorial office without succeeding her husband.
In 1987, Supreme Court nominee Douglas H. Ginsburg admitted using marijuana several times in the 1960s and ’70s, calling it a mistake. (Ginsburg ended up withdrawing his nomination.)
In 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born Israeli extremist, was shot to death at a New York hotel. (Egyptian native El Sayyed Nosair was convicted of the slaying in federal court.)
In 1992, Malice Green, a black motorist, died after he was struck in the head 14 times with a flashlight by a Detroit police officer, Larry Nevers, outside a suspected crack house. (Nevers and his partner, Walter Budzyn, were found guilty of second-degree murder, but the convictions were overturned; they were later convicted of involuntary manslaughter.)
In 1994, former President Ronald Reagan disclosed he had Alzheimer’s disease.
In 2006, Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced by the Iraqi High Tribunal to hang.
In 2017, a gunman armed with an assault rifle opened fire in a small South Texas church, killing more than two dozen people; the shooter, Devin Patrick Kelley, was later found dead in a vehicle after he was shot and chased by two men who heard the gunfire. (An autopsy revealed that he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.)