This day in history
Today is Sunday, Nov. 6, the 310th day of 2022. There are 55 days left in the year.
▶ Birthdays: Actor Sally Field is 76. Singer Rory Block is 73. TV host Catherine Crier is 68. News correspondent and former California first lady Maria Shriver is 67. Actor Lori Singer is 65. Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan is 58. Author Colson Whitehead is 53. Actor Ethan Hawke is 52. Retired NBA star Lamar Odom is 43. Actor Emma Stone is 34. US Olympic swimming gold medalist Bobby Finke is 23.
▶ 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 1970, Aerosmith took the stage for the first time, at Nipmuc Regional High School in Mendon.
▶ In 1977, 39 people were killed when the Kelly Barnes Dam in Georgia burst, sending a wall of water through Toccoa Falls College.
▶ In 1984, President Ronald Reagan won reelection by a landslide over former Vice President Walter Mondale, the Democratic challenger.
▶ 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 2012, President Barack Obama rolled to reelection, vanquishing Republican Mitt Romney as he picked up 332 electoral votes compared to 206 for the former Massachusetts governor; Obama also received 51 percent of the popular vote as opposed to 47 percent for Romney.
▶ In 2014, the march toward same-sex marriage across the United States hit a roadblock when a federal appeals court upheld laws against the practice in four states: Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee. (A divided US 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 2017, President Donald Trump told reporters in Tokyo that North Korea was “a threat to the civilized world.” The Television Academy became the latest movie or TV organization to expel Harvey Weinstein. Former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner reported to prison in Massachusetts to begin a 21month sentence for sexting with a 15-year-old girl.
▶ 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 US diplomat in Ukraine.
▶ In 2020, the federal agency that oversees US 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.” Senator 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.