Category: Today

The “Stolen Election” of 1824: Since no candidate had received a majority of the total electoral college votes in the election, the United States House of Representatives was given the task, on December 1, 1824, of deciding the winner of that year’s presidential race in accordance with the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The congressional vote took place on February 9, 1825 — the only time in U.S. election history that Congress decided an election in accordance with the Twelfth Amendment.

Democratic candidate Andrew Jackson was none too pleased about Congress’s selection of John Quincy Adams over himself, despite his winning the greatest number of popular and Electoral College votes. He charged Henry Clay and Adams with having struck a “Corrupt Bargain,” and campaigned for four years on the grievance of a “stolen election.”

On November 30, 1782, representatives from the United States and Great Britain signed preliminary peace articles, drafted in Paris, France. These were later formalized as the 1783 Treaty of Paris.

On November 29, 1963, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson established, with Executive Order 11130, the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He named the following men to head the research panel:

• The Chief Justice of the United States, Chairman (the eponymous Earl Warren)
• Senator Richard B. Russell
• Senator John Sherman Cooper
• Congressman Hale Boggs
• Congressman Gerald R. Ford
• The Honorable Allen W. Dulles
• The Honorable John J. McCloy

Note that one of these men had been fired by the assassinated president as Director of the CIA, and hated JFK’s guts, while another went on to become the only president of the United States to enter office having received no votes in the Electoral College, or any popular votes on a federal-​level ticket.

On November 28, 1893, women voted for the first time in New Zealand’s parliamentary election. 

On November 27, 1896, Also sprach Zarathustra — a tone poem by the great composer Richard Strauss — was first performed. It is a program work referencing a book by Friedrich W. Nietzsche of the same title. It begins and ends with a fanfare that became the musical signature to the Stanley Kubrick film classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

On November 26, 1922, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon become the first people to enter the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in over 3,000 years.

King Tut, as he is now popularly known, started life as “Tutankhaten.” The future pharaoh’s name references the 18th Dynasty conception of a deity as represented in the sun disk, the monotheistic worship of which was the point of the Atenism of Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV), who reigned when he was a boy. During the reign of Tut, the religious revolution instigated by Akhenaten was overthrown, and the Amenist cult and its priesthood restored to preëminence. Thus the name change referencing another conception of a sun god, Amun.

Tutankhamun (c. 1341 BC – c. 1323 BC) died before age 20 and his burial appears to have been hastily made in the Valley of the Kings. He was succeeded by Ay, and then a general, Horemheb, who tried to erase from the records the “Amarna Period” pharaohs and any mention of the Atenist monotheistic revolution associated with pharaohs Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun, and Ay. The tomb designated KV62 had been left intact, its grave good astounding the world, hence the April 19, 1923, issue of Life, reproduced in the image above.