November 4 · This Day in America
On November 4, 2008, the country that wrote slavery into its founding documents elects a Black man president of the United States. Barack Obama, a senator from Illinois, defeats John McCain and carries states no Democrat had won in a generation. That night a crowd gathers in Chicago's Grant Park — the same city, the same park, where police clubbed protesters forty years before. An old man named John Lewis, who had his skull fractured on a bridge in Selma so people who looked like him could vote, watches the returns. The arc of American history is long and it does not bend on its own; it is bent, by ordinary people, over lifetimes. On this night it bent far enough for a grandmother in line to vote to live just long enough to see it.
Source: www.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1842
On November 4, 1842, a gangly, broke Springfield lawyer informs a minister he intends to be married by sundown — and he is, that evening, to Mary Todd, whose family thought she could do far better. Their engagement had once collapsed entirely. A week later Lincoln writes a friend that nothing is new with him, "except my marrying, which to me, is a matter of profound wonder." He had no idea what was coming.
Source: www.gilderlehrman.org
“Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me, is a matter of profound wonder.”Abraham Lincoln, 1842