On Nov. 5, 1872, 48 years beforethe 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony and a group of women cast votes in the presidential election in Rochester, N.Y.
After the Civil War, when Congress sought to pass an amendment granting black males the right to vote, Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton led the call for the right to be extended to women.
"Meeting little success, they adopted a 'new departure' strategy which interpreted the 14th Amendment as granting all naturalized and native born Americans citizenship, believing that particular status inherently conferred suffrage rights," explains Office of the Clerk.
A U.S. commissioner issued an arrest warrant for Anthony, the other women, and the elections inspectors. Anthony was asked to turn herself in, but demanded that she be "arrested properly," and was handcuffed. The following June, Anthony was convicted and fined $100, which likely was never collected.
On November 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes was discovered in the cellar of the House of Lords guarding barrels of gunpowder, exposing a plot to kill the king. Guy Fawkes Day is still celebrated today, featuring bonfires and fireworks displays. Schoolchildren make effigies of Fawkes and learn rhymes about him. The image of Fawkes was made famous around the world by the 2006 film "V for Vendetta," which featured a man in a Fawkes mask waging war against the government.
Highlights from SweetSearch2Day:
Letters of Note features the speech penned by Nixon speechwriter William Safire that was to be read to the American people in the event that Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became hopelessly stranded on the moon. We wrote about the never-delivered speech and other famous presidential speeches shortly after Safire's death, a year ago.
Interview of the Day features an audio interview in 2000 with 95yo poet Stanley Kunitz, who had just been named Poet Laureate for the second time. He told the Library of Congress that "my new role as Poet Laureate is to do whatever I can to bring into the school system an understanding of the power of the spoken word and the release that it gives to the pent-up feelings of a child who is exposed to so much and has not yet formulated an adequate language to express what he needs to say in order to feel whole."
The Week in Rap takes on the mid-term elections.
NatGeo's Photo of the Day shows zebras migrating across Botswana.
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