November 7 Activities

November 7 Activities

•Anniversary of the Completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway - In 1885, at 9:30 AM, the last spike was driven at Craigellachie, British Columbia, completing the Candian Pacific Railway's 2,980-mile transcontinental track between Montreal, Quebec, in the east and Port Moody, British Columbia in the west.
•Marie Sklodowska Curie's Birthday - (b 1867) Polish chemist and physicist. In 1903, she was awarded, with her husband Pierre, the Nobel Prize for physics for their discovery of the element radium.
•Anniversary of the Election of the First Black Governor - In 1989, L. Douglas Wilder was elected governor of Virginia, becoming the first black elected governor in US history. Wilder had previously served as lieutenant governor of Virginia.
•Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution - This holiday in the old Soviet Union was observed for two days with parades and military displays and appearances by Soviet leaders. According to the old Russian calendar, the revolution took place October 25, 1917. Soviet calendar reform causes observance to fall on November 7 (Gregorian). The Bolshevik revolution began at Petrograd, Russia, on the evening of November 6 (Gregorian), 1917. A new government headed by Nicolai Lenin took office the following day under the name Council of the People's Commissars. Leon Trotsky was commissar for foreign affairs and Josef Stalin became commissar of national minorities. In the mid-1990's, President Yeltsin issued a decree renaming this holiday the "Day of National Reconciliation and Agreement."
•Anniversary of the Republican Symbol - In 1874, Thomas Nast used an elephant to represent the Republican Party in a satirical cartoon in Harper's Weekly. Today the elephant is still a well-recognized symbol for the republican Party in political cartoons.
•Anniversary of the Election of Roosevelt to His Fourth Term - In 1944, defeating Thomas Dewey, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first, and only, person elected to four terms as President of the US. Roosevelt was inaugurated the following January, but died in office April 12, 1945, serving only 53 days of the fourth term.