Nov. 5
Today in history
Today is Nov. 5. On this date in:
1605: “Remember, remember, the fifth of November.” Authorities discovered Guy Fawkes with dozens of barrels of explosives in the undercroft of Parliament, but most of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot had fled London late the night before. Catholic extremists had sought to blow up the building and kill King James I, forcing regime change in hopes of religious tolerance.
1824: In a letter to the Rev. Samuel Blatchford, Stephen Van Rensselaer announced he had founded the Rensselaer School in Troy, New York, which later became one of the nation’s earliest and most influential engineering schools. It opened in January 1825 and later changed its name to Rensselaer Institute and eventually Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
1852: The American Society of Civil Engineers, the first national civil engineering society in the United States, was founded.
1857: Ida Tarbell, an investigative reporter best known for her exposé on Standard Oil, was born in Amity Township, Pennsylvania. Tarbell’s “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” which was first published piecemeal in McClure’s Magazine, helped shape public opinion against Standard Oil. A federal investigation and breakup of the company’s monopoly followed.
1872: Susan B. Anthony and 14 other women from her ward in Rochester, New York, cast a ballot in the presidential election even though women were not allowed to vote. They were later arrested, and Anthony was convicted, though the resulting fine was never collected.
1895: George Selden, a patent lawyer from Rochester, New York, received a landmark U.S. patent for a gasoline-powered “road engine,” widely described as the first U.S. patent for an automobile.
1912: Democrat Woodrow Wilson won a four-way presidential election in a landslide. Wilson took 435 of the electoral votes, while Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt claimed 88. Incumbent Republican President William Taft garnered only 8, and Eugene Debs won none on the Socialist ticket.
1930: “For his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters,” Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
1935: Parker Brothers began marketing the board game Monopoly. It had been created decades earlier as The Landlord’s Game by Elizabeth Magie and later pitched to Parker Brothers by Charles Darrow.
1940: Franklin Roosevelt became the first and only person elected to a third term as president of the United States. In 1944, he became the only person elected to a fourth term. The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was proposed in 1947, nearly two years after Roosevelt died in office, and ratified in 1951, limiting the number of terms a person can be elected as U.S. president to two.
1968: Shirley Chisholm, a Democrat from New York, became the first Black woman elected to Congress. She later became the first Black woman to vie for a major party’s nomination for president, trying to top the Democratic ticket in 1972.
1974: Elaine Noble was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, becoming the first openly gay American to be elected to a state legislature.
1994: George Foreman, at 45, became the oldest boxer to win a heavyweight belt, defeating 26-year-old Michael Moorer by 10th-round knockout.
2009: U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan committed a mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, killing 13 people and wounding more than 30.
2013: India launched its first interplanetary mission, which, upon its arrival, made the Indian Space Research Organisation just the fourth space agency to successfully guide an uncrewed craft to an orbit around Mars.
2024: Former President Donald Trump once again became President-elect Donald Trump, having won the presidential election, his second victory but a rare nonconsecutive one. The Republican’s first term was won in 2016 and ran from 2017-2021, but he lost in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden, who served one term from 2021-2025. Only one other person had served nonconsecutive terms as president: Grover Cleveland, who was president from 1885-1889 and 1893-1897.
2024: Sarah McBride became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, chosen by the people of Delaware to represent them in the U.S. House. She had previously served as a state senator in Delaware, having become the first openly transgender state senator in U.S. history after her election in November 2020.
– USA TODAY Network
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Today in history, November 5
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