This Day in History for Friday, November 6, 2009
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Events
Events: 1429: Henry VI was crowned King of England.
Events: 1860: Abraham Lincoln defeated three other candidates and became 16th President of the United States of America; he was the first Republican president.
Events: 1861: Jefferson Davis was elected to a six-year term as president of the Confederacy.
Events: 1869: The first intercollegiate football game took place, between Rutgers University and Princeton University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Events: 1888: Benjamin Harrison of Indiana won the presidential election, defeating incumbent Grover Cleveland with electoral votes, even though Cleveland won the popular vote.
Events: 1917: The Third Battle of Ypres finally ended when Canadian forces take the village of Passchendaele in Belgium; it was one of the bloodiest battles of World War I with 250,000 casualties.
Events: 1932: In general elections held in Germany, the Nazis emerged.
Events: 1945: The first jet landed on a carrier, the USS Wake Island.
Events: 1947: amp;quot;Meet the Press" premiered on TV, making it the oldest program still on television.
Events: 1956: Construction began on the Kariba High Dam, on the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Events: 1962: The United Nations condemned South Africa for its Apartheid policies. The General Assembly called on all member states to terminate economic and military relations with South Africa.
Events: 1975: amp;quot;Good Morning America" premiered on TV.
Events: 1976: Benjamin L. Hooks was chosen to be the new executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Events: 1976: King Hassan II of Morocco launched the Green March, a mass migration in which over 300,000 unarmed Moroccans marched into the newly sovereign nation of Western Sahara and settle.
Events: 1979: Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolutionary Council took power in Iran from the provisional government.
Events: 1988: Six thousand U.S. Defense Department computers were crippled by a virus; the culprit was the 23-year-old son of the head of the country's computer security agency.
Events: 2002: A jury in Beverly Hills convicted actress Winona Ryder of stealing $5,500 worth of merchandise from a Saks Fifth Avenue store.
Holidays
-- Feast day of St. Demetrian of Khytri, St. Melaine, St. Barlaam of Khutyn, St. Leonard of Noblac, St. Winnoc, and St. Illtud.
-- Sweden: Gustavus Adolphus Day.
Births
-- Alois Senefelder, German inventor of lithography.
-- Antoine-Joseph Sax (Adolphe Sax), Belgian musician and inventor of the saxophone.
-- Charles Henry Dow, American financial journalist who, with Edward D. Jones, started the Dow-Jones Averages.
-- John Philip Sousa, American bandleader and composer.
-- Ignace Jan Paderewski, Polish composer and musician.
-- James Naismith, Canadian-born American, creator of basketball.
-- Sally Field, American film and television actress.
-- Maria Shriver, first lady of California and former journalist for NBC.
-- Klaus Kleinfeld, German industrialist.
Deaths
-- Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, presumably from cholera, although undocumented rumors of suicide abounded.
-- Dickie Goodman, creator of "break-in" records.
-- Gene Tierney, American actress and former fashion model.
-- Fred Dibnah, an English steeplejack, engineer, and eccentric who became a television personality.