November 3 · This Day in America
Every poll, every pundit, every smart-money columnist has agreed for months: Harry Truman cannot win. So sure is the Chicago Daily Tribune that it prints its November 3, 1948 front page early, in giant type: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. Some 150,000 copies roll off the presses before the actual votes come in. The actual votes say Truman. The plain Missouri haberdasher who became president by accident, who barnstormed the country by train when no one gave him a chance, has pulled off the greatest upset in American political history. Two days later, at a stop in St. Louis, a grinning Truman holds the wrong newspaper above his head for the cameras. It becomes one of the most beloved photographs ever taken in this country — a reminder that the people, not the experts, get the last word.
Source: www.trumanlibrary.gov
Also on this day · 1957
On November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union launches Sputnik 2 carrying Laika, the first living creature to orbit Earth. For Americans still reeling from the first Sputnik a month earlier, a dog circling overhead is a jolt of cold clarity. Within a year Congress creates NASA. The race that would end with American boots on the Moon began, in part, the night a Moscow stray went up and a nation looked at the sky differently.
Source: www.nasa.gov