Today In History

Occasionally, I get curious about what happened years ago on the day in which I presently live. There's a good website I enjoy that tells me what I want to know. It's The History Place at http://www.historyplace.com/.
Today it had a ton of stuff that was interesting, such as:

• The Treaty of the Pyrenees was signed, ending the Franco-Spanish war of 1648-59. (That was an eleven-year war! I hope the one we're in now doesn't last that long.)
• General William H. Harrison led 1,000 Americans in battle, defeating the Shawnee Indians at the Battle of Tippencanoe Creek near Lafayette, Indiana. (Another war!)
• A pro-slavery mob attacked and killed American abolitionish Elijah Lovejoy at his printing works in Alton, Illinois. (I used to live 3 hours from Alton!)
• Canada's first transcontinental railway, the Canadian Pacific, was completed in British Columbia. (Rode a train one time all the way to Texas. Had an amazing time!)
• Russian Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky in Petrograd. (Exactly where is/was Petrograd? I'll have to look that one up.)
• President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented fourth term, defeating Thomas E. Dewey. (I once saw the huge headlines in the newspapers about this. Was in a genealogy library somewhere.)
• Richard Nixon told news reporters in Los Angeles "...just think how much you're going to be missing. You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." (Do you think they knew what he was going to say before he said it?)
• The East German government resigned after pro-democracy protests. (What can I say?)
• L. Douglas Wilder became the first African American governor in U.S. history, elected governor of Virginia. (Progress at one level, anyhow.)
• Mary Robinson became Ireland's first female president. (Progress at another level.)

This day, November 7, was also the birthday of Polish chemist Marie Curie who with her husband received the Nobel Prize for physics for their discovery of the element Radium. And it's also the birthday of Christian evangelist Billy Graham, who was born near Charlotte, North Carolina in 1918.

Great website, huh? You can check it out on one of the library's 20 Dell computers that we have for your use anytime you're in the library. Only takes your library card to get online. . . .