Nov. 6
1860: Former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party was elected president of the United States.
1861: An unopposed Jefferson Davis was elected to a six-year term as president of the Confederate States of America after serving much of the year as its provisional president.
1888: Republican presidential candidate Benjamin Harrison won the electoral vote over incumbent Democrat Grover Cleveland, despite Cleveland gaining 90,000 more total votes.
Nov. 7
1916: Jeannette Rankin of Montana won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first woman elected to either chamber of Congress.
1917: Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution took place as forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky.
1944: President Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term in office.
Nov. 8
1889: Montana was admitted to the Union as the 41st state.
1923: Adolf Hitler launched his first attempt at seizing power in Germany with a failed coup in Munich that came to be known as the “Beer-Hall Putsch.”
1942: The Allies launched Operation Torch in World War II as U.S. and British forces landed in French North Africa.
1960: John F. Kennedy won the U.S. presidential election over Vice President Richard M. Nixon.
Nov. 9
1906: Theodore Roosevelt made the first trip abroad of any sitting U.S. president to observe construction of the Panama Canal.
1935: United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis and other labor leaders formed the Committee for Industrial Organization.
1938: Nazis looted and burned synagogues as well as thousands of Jewish-owned stores and houses in Germany and Austria in a pogrom that became known as “Kristallnacht.”
1989: Communist East Germany threw open its borders, allowing citizens to travel freely to the West for the first time in decades — a landmark event often referred to as the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Nov. 10
1775: The U.S. Marines were organized under authority of the Continental Congress.
1898: A mob of white supremacists killed dozens of African Americans in Wilmington, North Carolina, and overthrew the local government in the violent “Wilmington Coup.”
1954: The U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, depicting the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, was dedicated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Arlington, Virginia.
Nov. 11
1620: Forty-one Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower signed the Mayflower Compact, creating a local government calling for a “civil body politick.”
1918: Fighting in World War I ended as the Allies and Germany signed an armistice aboard a railroad car in the Forest of Compiègne in northern France.
1921: The remains of an unidentified American service member were interred in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.
Nov. 12
1927: Josef Stalin became the undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union as Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party.
1948: Former Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and several other wartime leaders were sentenced to death by a war-crimes tribunal.
1954: Ellis Island officially closed as an immigration station and detention center after processing more than 12 million immigrants since 1892.
