Category: Today

On December 1, 1824, with neither John Quincy Adams nor Andrew Jackson receiving a majority of votes in the Electoral College, the United States House of Representatives was given the task of deciding the winner in accordance with the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The House selected Adams. Jackson and his supporters felt deeply aggrieved, and immediately set about preparing for the next election, which Jackson won handily. Jacksonian supporters referred to the election of 1824 as “the Stolen Election,” in no small part because Jackson had received more popular votes.

On November 30, 1804, the United States House of Representatives began impeachment hearings against Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. The House thought he was too partisan, too “Federalist.”

The Senate later acquitted Chase.

On 1835 on this date, Samuel Clemens was born, later to achieve world fame as author and humorist Mark Twain (pictured above). His most beloved books include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). He died in 1910.

Irish-English medievalist, theologian, and novelist Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898. Among his best known works are Out of the Silent Planet, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and the “Narnia” fantasies for children. His novelistic retelling of the Psyche myth, Till We Have Faces, and political essays such as “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” and The Abolition of Man, will almost certainly stand the test of time.

In 1894, on November 28, economics journalist Henry Hazlitt was born. Halitt went on to write Economics in One Lesson, Time Will Run Back, and several books criticizing Keynesianism. He was the main proponent of the work of Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek in America during the 1940s and 1950s.

Exactly one year earlier, women voted in a national election for the first time . . . in New Zealand. On the same date in 1917, the Estonian Provincial Assembly declared itself the sovereign power of Estonia. November 28 also marks the independence of Mauritania from France (1960), and East Timor from Portugal.

November 27, 1295, the first elected representatives from Lancashire were called to Westminster by King Edward I to attend what later became known as “The Model Parliament.”

On the same date in 1895, Alfred Nobel (pictured) signed his last will and testament, thereby establishing the Nobel Prizes.

November 26, 1792, saw the birth of Sarah Moore Grimké, American abolitionist and feminist. She was the elder sister of the equally famed Angelina Emily Grimké Weld.

November 25, 1975, Suriname gained independence from the Netherlands.

On the same month and date 17 years later, the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia voted to split the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia (officially disjoined as of January 1, 1993). This split has been called “The Velvet Divorce” (following, in style and method, “The Velvet Revolution”).

On November 23, 1644, British poet John Milton published Areopagitica, a pamphlet decrying censorship.

November 22 marks the death dates of a number of eminent writers, including that of English-American novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley and Irish-English novelist, theologian and medieval scholar C.S. Lewis, both of whom died in 1963, the same day as the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy. British novelist Anthony Burgess died exactly 30 years later.

The date also marks the birth of the great British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), in 1819.

Recommended reading from these authors include:

• Silas Marner (1861), a short and brilliant novel by George Eliot. Her most generally esteemed classic is the much longer Middlemarch (1872).
• Earthly Powers (1980), a massive novel about life in the 20th century, by the ever-iconoclastic and hard-to-pin-down Anthony Burgess. His most famous novel is undoubtedly A Clockwork Orange (1963).
• “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (1949) and Till We Have Faces (1956), the former being C.S. Lewis’s thoughtful essay on the nature of modern tyranny, and the latter being what some regard his best fiction effort, a retelling of the Psyche myth. He is most famously known for The Screwtape Letters (1942) and The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956).
• Brave New World (1931) and Brave New World Revisited (1958), the former is Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian satire on technological tyranny-by-hedonism, and the latter is the author’s survey of the issues raised by — and the degrees to which reality conforms to — his earlier fictional prophecy. The two books have been printed under one cover as well as separately.