The Bull Moose split

Event · 1912 CE · in North America

Denied the Republican nomination, Theodore Roosevelt ran for his new Progressive Party, beating the sitting president, Taft, but splitting the vote and handing the presidency to Woodrow Wilson.

In the guided tours

• Political upsets: Ten US elections that went against the odds or turned the country over, and how the map changed with them, from Jefferson's revolution of 1800 to 2016.

Related

• ANC founded (1912 CE): Founded in Bloemfontein in January 1912 as the South African Native National Congress to defend the rights of Black South Africans.
• Eva Perón (1919 CE – 1952 CE): Argentine First Lady and political figure, known as Evita, who championed labour rights and women's suffrage.
• Dewey Defeats Truman (1948 CE): Written off by the polls and the papers, Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey. At St. Louis Union Station he held up the Chicago Tribune that had printed his defeat.
• Watergate scandal (1972–1974 CE): Political scandal over a break-in at the Democratic headquarters and its cover-up, which led to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974.
• The Communist Manifesto (1848 CE): Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote this political pamphlet while Marx lived in Brussels; it was published in London in February 1848.
• Polk, the dark horse (1844 CE): The Democrats meeting in Baltimore passed over their favourites and chose James K. Polk on the ninth ballot, the first “dark horse”. He beat Henry Clay on a promise to annex Texas and take Oregon.
• Reagan's landslide (1980 CE): Ronald Reagan, in a race the polls had close, carried 44 states against President Jimmy Carter, and Republicans took the Senate for the first time since the 1950s.
• The Republican Revolution (1994 CE): In the midterm elections Republicans gained 54 seats and the House for the first time in 40 years. Speaker Tom Foley lost his own seat, the first sitting Speaker defeated since 1862.
• Trump beats the forecasts (2016 CE): Against most forecasts, Donald Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by under a point each, and with them the presidency, while losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.
• Two Treatises of Government (1689 CE): John Locke's work, published anonymously in London in 1689, argued that government rests on the consent of the governed and must protect life, liberty and property.

Around the same time and place

• Abraham Lincoln (1809 CE – 1865 CE): 16th President of the United States, who led the Union through the Civil War, issued the Emancipation Proclamation and was assassinated in 1865.
• American Civil War (1861–1865 CE): War between the Union and the Confederacy of southern slave states; the Union victory preserved the United States and ended slavery.
• Wilbur and Orville Wright (1867 CE – 1948 CE): American aviation pioneers from Dayton, Ohio, who built and flew the first successful powered, controlled airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903. Wilbur died in 1912 and Orville in 1948.
• Telephone (1876 CE): Alexander Graham Bell received a US patent for the telephone and made the first successful call in Boston in March 1876.
• Wright Flyer (1903 CE): On 17 December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first controlled, sustained flights of a powered heavier-than-air aircraft.
• 1918 influenza pandemic (1918–1920 CE): Influenza spread around the world in waves in the last year of the First World War, infecting about a third of humanity and killing perhaps 50 million people; early cases were recorded at Camp Funston, Kansas.
• Great Depression (1929–1939 CE): Severe worldwide economic depression that began in the United States after the 1929 crash, with mass unemployment and bank failures.
• Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 CE – 1968 CE): Baptist minister from Atlanta and leader of the civil rights movement who championed nonviolent protest; Nobel Peace Prize 1964; assassinated in 1968.

More on Wikipedia.