Reagan's landslide
Event · 1980 CE · in North America
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.
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
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Eva Perón (1919 CE – 1952 CE): Argentine First Lady and political figure, known as Evita, who championed labour rights and women's suffrage.
- 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.
- The Bull Moose split (1912 CE): 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.
- 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.
- 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
- Founding of the United Nations (1945 CE): Fifty nations signed the United Nations Charter in San Francisco in June 1945, and the organisation came into being that October to replace the League of Nations. Its headquarters later opened in New York.
- Trinity nuclear test (1945 CE): On 16 July 1945 the United States detonated the first nuclear weapon in the New Mexico desert, beginning the nuclear age.
- ARPANET (1969 CE): The first message on ARPANET, precursor of the Internet, was sent from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute in October 1969.
- Charlie Chaplin (1889 CE – 1977 CE): English comic actor, filmmaker and composer who became a star of silent film as the Tramp and made classics such as The Kid, The Gold Rush, Modern Times and The Great Dictator.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 CE – 1967 CE): American theoretical physicist who directed the Los Alamos Laboratory of the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bombs in 1945. His security clearance was revoked in 1954.
- Manhattan Project (1942–1946 CE): The secret Allied programme, led by the United States, that built the first atomic bombs during the Second World War. Its weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, was directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer.
- Steve Jobs (1955 CE – 2011 CE): American entrepreneur who co-founded Apple in 1976 and led the launch of the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He also founded NeXT and built Pixar into a leading animation studio.
- Intel 4004 (1971 CE): Intel's 4004, made in Santa Clara, put a computer's whole processor on a single chip, the start of the microchips in every computer and phone since.
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