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November 7 in History

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The Dot That Resized the Heavens

November 7, 1631

The Dot That Resized the Heavens

A priest seals himself in a dark Paris room for two days to catch a planet no one had ever reliably seen, only for his assistant to abandon the one post that mattered. What that stubborn speck of black revealed was far stranger than being right about Copernicus.

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Also on this day

More that happened on November 7

Pick any event and Historai will make it an episode.

  1. 1492A meteorite fell out of the sky into a wheat field near Ensisheim, Alsace, leaving a recorded impact site.
  2. 1811American troops under William Henry Harrison fought Tecumseh's Native American confederacy in the Battle of Tippecanoe.
  3. 1885Workers drove the ceremonial last spike at Craigellachie to finish Canada's transcontinental railway to the Pacific coast.
  4. 1916Montana voters elected pacifist Jeannette Rankin to Congress, making her the first woman to serve in the legislature.
  5. 1917Bolshevik forces led by Vladimir Lenin seized power across Russia during the dramatic climax of the October Revolution.
  6. 1940High winds triggered catastrophic structural oscillations that caused the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State to collapse.
  7. 1944Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated Republican challenger Thomas Dewey to secure an unprecedented fourth term as president.
  8. 1956The United Nations General Assembly voted to demand that British, French, and Israeli armed forces leave Egyptian territory.
  9. 1973United States lawmakers overrode Richard Nixon's veto to enact the War Powers Resolution, restricting executive military actions.
  10. 1989Douglas Wilder won the Virginia gubernatorial election, becoming the first elected African American governor in United States history.
  11. 2000The presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore ended in Florida recount disputes without an immediate winner.

Chosen from the November 7 pages of HISTORY, HistoryNet and OnThisDay.com, retold in our own words.