The Republican Revolution

Event · 1994 CE · in North America

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.

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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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

• 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.
• 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.
• Apollo 11 launch (1969 CE): Apollo 11 launched from Kennedy Space Center on 16 July 1969; four days later Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon.
• September 11 attacks (2001 CE): Al-Qaeda hijackers crashed airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and a fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.
• Henry Ford (1863 CE – 1947 CE): American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company in Detroit in 1903 and used the moving assembly line to mass-produce the affordable Model T.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 CE – 1945 CE): 32nd US President (1933–1945), who led the country through the Great Depression with the New Deal and through most of World War II.
• Bretton Woods Conference (1944 CE): In July 1944 delegates of 44 Allied nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to plan the postwar monetary order. They created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and a system of fixed exchange rates.
• Transistor (1947 CE): John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley built the first working transistor at Bell Labs, the basis of modern electronics.

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