the news

On the evening of November 4, 2008, before a crowd of 240,000 in Chicago’s Grant Park, Barack Obama claimed victory in the US presidential election. The 47-year-old senator from Illinois — son of a Kenyan father and a Kansas mother — had become the first African American elected president of the United States, 145 years…

On November 3, 1957 — one month after Sputnik 1 shocked the world — the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2, a cone-shaped spacecraft carrying a small dog named Laika. She became the first living creature to orbit the Earth, proving that a body could survive launch and weightlessness. Her story, long hidden, remains the most…

On November 2, 1947, in Long Beach Harbor, California, the largest airplane ever built — by wingspan — lifted off the water and flew for 26 seconds. The Hughes H-4 Hercules, better known as the Spruce Goose, flew exactly once. Its one flight became the most famous flight of an airplane that never entered service.…

On November 1, 1512 — All Saints’ Day — the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican reopened for worship with its ceiling newly painted by Michelangelo Buonarroti. After four years of work on scaffolding, lying on his back beneath the vault, the 37-year-old sculptor had produced the single most famous painting in Western art: a vast…

On October 31, 1517, an Augustinian friar and professor of theology named Martin Luther is traditionally said to have nailed a list of 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Saxony — the public bulletin board of a university town. Whether he actually used a hammer is debated by historians; the…

On the evening of October 30, 1938 — Halloween eve — millions of Americans tuned their radios to CBS for a drama adaptation of H. G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds.” What they heard sounded like a live news bulletin: Martian cylinders landing in New Jersey, poison gas spreading, the National Guard annihilated. Thousands…

On October 29, 1969, at UCLA, a graduate student named Charley Kline sat at a teletype terminal connected by telephone line to a computer at Stanford Research Institute, 560 kilometers away. He typed the command “LOGIN.” The system crashed after two letters — L and O. The first message ever sent over the ancestor of…

On October 28, 1886, before a crowd of a million people, President Grover Cleveland accepted the Statue of Liberty on behalf of the United States. “We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home,” he said, as the veil fell from the colossal copper figure in New York Harbor. The gift of the…

At 7 p.m. on October 27, 1904, Mayor George B. McClellan gripped the controls of the first train on the Interborough Rapid Transit — New York’s subway — and drove it from City Hall to Harlem himself, refusing to yield the throttle until police intervened at 103rd Street. Within hours, 150,000 New Yorkers had ridden…