Today 11/4 in 1979 hundreds of Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy at Tehran and took 60 Americans hostage. The students demanded the return of Iran’s disposed king Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, who fled to Egypt in January 1979 and by November, was receiving cancer treatments in the US.
Failed negotiations and a failed rescue attempt and a worsening fuel crisis may have cost Jimmy Carter his reelection. The hostages were released minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address on January 20, 1981.
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Today in 1948 T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in literature for his effect on modern poetry. Eliot’s best known work is probably “The Waste Land,” published in 1922. Eliot died in 1965.
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Today in 2008, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois became the first African American elected to the White House and the 44th President.
That night, the president-elect appeared before a huge crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park and delivered a speech: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer… It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.”
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Happy birthday, Will Rogers, prolific writer, actor, humorist and cowboy philosopher, born 1879 in Cherokee Indian Territory, Oklahoma. Rogers was popular during the Depression.
Rogers died in a plane crash with famous pilot Wiley Post, near Point Barrow, Alaska, August 15, 1935. He was age 55.
