On November 8, 1864, Abraham Lincoln defeated his former general George B. McClellan to win reelection, carrying 212 of 233 electoral votes despite widespread war-weariness. The result, buoyed by Union military successes including Sherman's capture of Atlanta, signaled that Northern voters supported continuing the war until the Confederacy's defeat and slavery's abolition, rather than pursuing a negotiated peace.
Working late in his laboratory at the University of Würzburg, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen observed that a screen coated with fluorescent material glowed even when shielded from a cathode-ray tube by black cardboard. He called the mysterious radiation "X-rays." Within weeks he produced an image of his wife's hand, bones and wedding ring visible through flesh, and the discovery spread across the scientific world almost instantly.
On the night of November 8, 1923, Hitler and roughly 600 Nazi Party paramilitaries surrounded the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich where Bavarian state commissioner Gustav von Kahr was addressing a crowd. Hitler fired a pistol into the ceiling, proclaimed the revolution underway, and forced Kahr and other officials at gunpoint to publicly back his coup. The uprising collapsed the next day when police fired on the marchers, killing sixteen Nazis and four police officers.
On November 8, 1924, Wyoming elected Nellie Tayloe Ross as governor, making her the first woman to hold a U.S. governorship. She ran to complete the term of her husband, Governor William B. Ross, who had died in office, and won by a wide margin on a platform emphasizing tax relief and support for agriculture, a milestone just four years after the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the vote.
On November 8, 1938, Nazi leaders assembled in Munich for the annual commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch anniversary. That evening, word reached Joseph Goebbels that Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official shot in Paris by 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, had died of his wounds. Goebbels used the death as pretext to incite the pogrom against Jewish communities across Germany and Austria that erupted the following night, known as Kristallnacht.
Before dawn on November 8, 1942, Allied task forces landed simultaneously near Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers, opening Operation Torch, the first joint American-British invasion of the war. The operation aimed to trap German and Italian forces in North Africa between Allied troops and the British Eighth Army advancing from Egypt, and it marked the first time American soldiers fought against Axis forces in the European theater.
On November 8, 1989, the Communist Party Politburo of East Germany resigned in its entirety amid weeks of mounting protests, with hundreds of thousands of citizens marching in Leipzig and East Berlin demanding freedom of travel and political reform. The dramatic collapse of the ruling apparatus set the stage for the following evening, November 9, when confused officials announced open borders, and jubilant crowds tore down the Berlin Wall.