November 4, 2024

November 5th: What’s in a Date?

By daseger

I’m anxious about our election, and when I am anxious, I always go back into history to find reassurance in relativity. Everything is relative, we’re just dust in the wind. I didn’t really know where I was going, but I started looking into the history of suffrage in our country, as those women really struggled and ulimately succeeded so I thought they would be inspiring and reassuring. And then I came across the date November 5th, 1872, when Susan B. Anthony voted for Ulysses S. Grant, and was arrested ten days afterwards for playing man at the polls. Well, I thought, we could have a nice bookend moment ahead of us on November 5, 2024! But as stalwart as Susan was, she did not ease my anxiety, I needed more historical immersion: so after a brief survey of twentieth-century US electoral November Fifths, I went back into the eighteenth, seventeenth, and sixteenth centuries just to stretch things out a bit and put my 21st century problems in perspective. I found struggles against tyranny in the 18th and 17th centuries, represented by the November 5 birthday of General John Glover, a Revolutionary hero who is ignored here in his native city of Salem but has quite a following in neighboring Swampscott, where avid preservationists are struggling to preserve his retirement farmhouse. Further back, William of Orange landed at Torbay on November 5, 1688, to unseat his father-in-law James II and establish a “glorious” contractual/constitutional monarchy. Earlier in that same century, there was of course the most memorable event, the Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1605, an attempted coup foiled, and the inspiration for the observation of “Pope’s Night” in colonial Massachusetts. And right in the midst of the Renaissance, Copernicus gazed at the lunar eclipse while in Rome for the Golden Jubilee, germinating new ideas about the heliocentric universe. November 5th has indeed been both an innovative and momentous date throughout history, and I’m hoping that November 5th, 2024 will also break new ground.

Wonderful eclipse painting in background by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 4th, 2024 at 7:51 am and tagged with , , , , , , and posted in Women's History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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