Sunday · November 15, 2026
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20081776 Club

Obama wins the presidency; the Illinois senator is the first African American elected to the office

Joe Biden takes the vice presidency over Sarah Palin as John McCain loses the race to succeed George W. Bush.

With George W. Bush barred by the Twenty-second Amendment from seeking a third term, Americans voted on November 4, 2008. Barack Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois, defeated Republican John McCain of Arizona, taking 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173, with 270 needed to win. Joe Biden won the vice presidency over McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, and Obama became the first African American elected president of the United States…

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More from November 4
1924

Wyoming elects Nellie Tayloe Ross governor; the widow who said no never campaigned

A month after her husband's death, voters give her 55 percent of the ballots against Republican E. J. Sullivan.
1962

Tightrope flies from Johnston Island, and Operation Fishbowl is finished

A low-yield device on an XM-33 Strypi rocket ends the Atomic Energy Commission's high-altitude test series in the Pacific.
1979

Students storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran and seize hostages; they want the Shah sent home

Hundreds of students blindfold Marines and embassy staff and march them before photographers, with Washington's decision to shelter the exiled Shah as their stated grievance.
19391776 Club
The old embargo is repealed, but buyers must pay on the spot and haul the goods away themselves, and the Customs Service is ordered to enforce it.
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More from Modern America
1998

Clinton tells grand jury of "improper" ties to Lewinsky, then tells the country he misled them

Seven months after denying it on camera, the president reverses himself twice in one day.
1998

Thirteen Tomahawks hit a Khartoum medicine factory; Washington says it made nerve gas

The strike came thirteen days after the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and the target was a plant that made most of Sudan's antibiotics.
2020

Biden accepts the nomination alone in a Delaware ballroom, no crowd, no roar

A pandemic convention ends with the nominee speaking to a camera instead of a stadium.
1994

Thirty-three years after his death, the Air Force finally makes Eugene Bullard an officer

France called him a hero and gave him a pilot's license in 1917; his own country waited until 1994 to make it official.
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