It’s finally November and another month full of historical events, but what happened this week in history?
On November 3rd, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first animal to orbit the Earth and it was a dog named Laika aboard the Sputnik 2 spacecraft. Laika, part Siberian husky, was a stray dog that lived on the streets of Moscow before being enlisted into the Soviet space program. Laika survived for a few hours as a passenger in the USSR’s second artificial satellite after the success of Sputnik 1 spacecraft, which launched on October 4th, 1957. Laika was kept alive by a sophisticated life-support system and electrodes attached to her body providing scientists on the ground with important information about the biological effects of space travel. She died panicking and overheating during the flight. At least a dozen more Russian dogs were launched into space in preparation for the first, at least five of these dogs died in flight. On April 12th, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1. He orbited Earth once before landing safely in the USSR. These events were all part of the Space Race between the United States and Soviet Union.
On November 4th, 1922. British archaeologist Howard Carter and his workmen discover a step leading to the tomb of King Tutankhamun (King Tut) in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. In Egypt 1891 when Carter first arrived , most of the ancient Egyptian tombs had been discovered, though little-known King Tutankhamun, who had died at the age of 18, was still unaccounted for. After World War 1, Carter began an intensive search for “King Tut’s Tomb,” finally finding the steps to the burial room hidden in the debris near the entrance of the nearby tomb of King Ramses VI in the Valley of the Kings. On November 26th, 1922, Carter and fellow archaeologist Lord Carnarvon entered the interior chambers of the tomb, finding them miraculously intact. The tomb had four chambers: an antechamber (a room leading to the main room), an annex (a small room off of a main room), the burial chamber (containing the body of King Tutankhamen and hieroglyphics on the walls of the chamber), and a treasury room (the room containing King Tut’s treasures). His sarcophagus was actually three coffins in one and was one of two tombs that has not been robbed of its treasure. Carter carefully explored the tomb for several years, uncovering an incredible collection of several thousand objects. He discovered the final coffin, made out of solid gold, was the mummy of the boy-king Tutankhamun, preserved for more than 3,000 years. Most of these treasures are now housed in the Cairo Museum in Cairo, Egypt. For Lord Carnarvon, he later died after unearthing King Tut’s tomb. It is believed that there is an ancient curse associated with the mummies and tombs which said that disturbing these embalmed remains had been linked to bringing bad luck, illness, and death. Lord Carnarvon was bitten by a mosquito in Thebes which caused him to die from infections and complications while in hospital.
On November 5th, 1941, the Combined Japanese Fleet received Top-Secret Order No. 1: In just over a month’s time, Pearl Harbor is to be bombed, along with Malaya (now called Malaysia), the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines. Relations between the United States and Japan had been deteriorating quickly since Japan’s invasion of French Indochina in September of 1940 and the implicit menacing of the Philippines (an American territory since the Spanish-American War), with the occupation of the Cam Ranh naval base approximately 800 miles from Manila. American retaliation includes the seizing of all Japanese assets in the U.S and the closing of the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping. In September 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued a statement, drafted by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, that threatened war between the United States and Japan should the Japanese intrude any further on territory in Southeast Asia or the South Pacific. The Japanese military had dominated over foreign affairs with Japan and other nations; although official negotiations between the U.S. secretary of state and his Japanese counterpart to ease tensions, however, Hideki Tojo, the minister of war who would soon become the prime minister, had no intentions of withdrawing from captured territories, and also interpreted the American “threat” of war as an ultimatum and prepared to deliver the first blow in a Japanese-American confrontation: the bombing of Pearl Harbor. From Tokyo, he delivered the order to all relevant Fleet commanders, that not only the United States – and its protectorate of the Philippines – but British and Dutch colonies in the Pacific were to be attacked. War was going to be declared on the West.
On November 6th, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois. He first gained national stature during his campaign against Stephen Douglas for a U.S. Senate seat in 1858. The senatorial campaign featured a remarkable series of public debates on issue of slavery, known as Lincoln-Douglas debates, where Lincoln argued against the spread of slavery, while Douglas maintained that each territory should have the right to decide to have slavery or not to have slavery. Lincoln lost the race to Douglas, but his campaign brought national attention to the young Republican Party. In 1860, he won the party’s presidential nomination, and Lincoln faced against Douglas, who represented the Northern faction of the divided Democratic Party. The announcement of Lincoln’s victory caused the secession of the Southern states, which was threatened since the beginning of the year if the Republicans won the White House. By the inauguration on March 4th, 1861, seven states had seceded, and the Confederate States of America had been established with Jefferson Davis as president. One month later, the American Civil War would begin with the attack on Fort Sumter. In 1863, he emancipated the slaves within the rebellious states and was reelected in 1864. In 1865, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a confederate sympathizer, at Ford’s Theater while watching the play Our American Cousin.
On November 7th, FDR won his fourth term as president of the United States and is the only president to have served for over two terms. He overcame personal and political challenges to become president of the United States including contracting polio in 1921 at the age of 31, which caused him to be burdened with leg braces and later confined into a wheelchair. During his presidency from 1932 to mid-1945, when he died while in office, he would face two major crises in U.S. history: the Great Depression and World War 2. FDR implemented the New Deal which helped the U.S. get out of the Great Depression. Although, he tried to avoid direct U.S. involvement in World War 2, which began in 1939, the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 caused the United States to be dragged into the war. By his fourth term, the war had turned to the favor of the Allies, but his health declined due to the stress caused by serving as a wartime president. In April 1945, he would die at his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia. In 1947, Congress proposed a law that would limit presidents to two consecutive terms. In 1951, Congress passed the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, officially limiting a president’s tenure in office to two terms of four years each.
