On This Day: Surprising Twists and Landmark Moments from November 7

When folks in Petrograd woke up on November 7, 1917, most figured it was just another damp morning of bread queues and grumbling, never guessing seven decades of global history had just jumped the track before breakfast. That right there is the gap between the morning news and history looking back. Yesterday, on November 6, we were talking through election surprises and inventions that sneaked in sideways, and today — well, today the calendar turns to November 7, and the world starts turning on a completely different axle. Down here along the creek, the water just rolls easy over the gravel, but on this date across the centuries, people kept making choices that looked small or desperate in the moment, only to find out they'd remade the whole landscape.

Now, if you take a look across the record, November 7 has been busy enough to wear out a team of mules. In 1874, the great cartoonist Thomas Nast drew an elephant in Harper's Weekly, intending it as a fleeting poke at political panic, never dreaming he had stamped an enduring symbol onto the American Republican party forever. Over in British Columbia, on November 7, 1885, Donald Smith drove the last iron spike into the Canadian Pacific Railway at Craigellachie — and as an old railroad man, I tell you what, tying an entire continent together with two steel rails is about the sweetest sight there is.

In 1891, an inventor named Whitcomb Judson patented a little clunky contraption he called a clasp locker, which looked like an awkward mess of hooks and eyes until the world realized he'd just invented the zipper. Then you had 1893, when Colorado granted women the right to vote, long before the federal government caught up to what plain mountain sense had already settled. Jump forward to 1938, and a cartoonist named Al Capp put a fictional footrace in his Dogpatch comic strip where Sadie Hawkins could chase down a bachelor, and within months, real high schools across the country were throwing their own Sadie Hawkins dances where the girls asked the boys.

In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term in the White House, steering a nation mid-war. In 1989, Virginia voters elected Douglas Wilder, making him the first elected African American governor in United States history, quietly dismantling barriers in the old capital of the Confederacy. And on November 7, 1991, Magic Johnson stepped up to a bank of microphones, looking the world dead in the eye to announce he had contracted HIV, and in ten minutes did more to dismantle public terror and ignorance than years of pamphlets ever could.

Wait, and we haven't even touched the two biggest switchbacks on this mountain yet. Now, you stay with me here, because to understand what happened in Petrograd on November 7, 1917, you have to realize that to the Russians back then, the calendar on the wall said October 25. That old Julian calendar was running thirteen days behind the rest of the planet, which is why everyone called it the October Revolution even though by standard reckoning, it was November. Looking back from a hundred years out, folks talk like the Bolshevik seizure of power was an inevitable locomotive rolling downhill.

But in the streets that morning, nobody knew that. The provisional government had already collapsed into squabbling; the soldiers were cold, hungry, and sick of the Great War; and Vladimir Lenin and his comrades simply walked in and took the telegraph office, the bridges, the railway depots, and finally the Winter Palace. It wasn't a massive cinematic clash with trumpets sounding. It was, um, mostly confused guards stepping aside and a city wondering who was actually running the waterworks. If you'd asked a shopkeeper on the Nevsky Prospect that afternoon, he would've said it was just another rowdy faction taking a turn in the parlor.

They didn't see the Soviet Union coming. They didn't see the Cold War, or the Berlin Wall, or the space race. They just saw a messy, rain-slicked Tuesday. It took twenty years for observers to realize that a handful of men taking a switchboard had bent the twentieth century completely in half. Then, go back seventeen years earlier to a dusty patch of South Africa called Leliefontein. On the morning of November 7, 1900, during the Boer War, a British column was retreating, and the Royal Canadian Dragoons were assigned the miserable job of rear guard. Now, the rear guard is the tail of the dog, friend — you don't advance, you just keep the enemy from swallowing the wagons and the artillery.

And the Dragoons had two horse-drawn twelve-pounder guns falling behind because the horses were completely spent. An overwhelming force of Boer horsemen came charging across the open veld, fixing to capture those cannons. Here's the thing. Lieutenant Hampden Cockburn, Lieutenant Richard Turner, and Sergeant Edward Holland didn't have an order to become legends. They just looked at those guns and looked at each other. Cockburn held exposed high ground twice under withering rifle fire until his crew was wounded or taken. Turner rode back into the teeth of the fight, rallying men who were ready to scatter.

And Sergeant Holland — well, Sergeant Holland had a Colt machine gun. When the Boers pressed so close they were almost on top of him and the carriage horses were shot dead, Holland didn't run. He calmly unbolted that burning-hot machine gun from its mount, threw the whole heavy barrel over his arm like a sack of meal, hopped on his horse, and galloped off with it under direct fire so the enemy wouldn't get their hands on it. Whoo, boy, ain't that something? Three Victoria Crosses awarded to one regiment on a single morning. At the time, commanders treated it like a desperate tactical salvage job — a bad morning survived.

But looking back, Leliefontein became the bedrock of Canadian military pride, proof of what discipline looks like when every easy choice points toward running away. And then, if you really want to talk about quiet beginnings that shook the earth, you have to talk about a baby girl born in Warsaw, Poland, on November 7, 1867. Maria Sklodowska. We know her as Marie Curie. Now, I know how that sounds when folks rattle off Nobel Prizes like items on a grocery receipt. But hang on. In 1867, Warsaw was under the boot of imperial Russia. Girls weren't permitted to attend university.

Poland wasn't even allowed to teach in its own language in schools. Young Maria finished her girls' school at fifteen with highest honors, but there was nowhere for her to go. So what did she do? She joined the Flying University — an underground, illegal network of scholars who moved classes from cellar to cellar at night, staying one step ahead of the Czarist police, just so women could learn mathematics and chemistry by candlelight. She worked as a governess for years, saving pennies, eating bread and butter, studying physics late into the frosty nights until she could finally afford a train ticket to Paris.

When she enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1891, she was sleeping in a freezing sixth-floor garret, sometimes fainting from pure hunger. But by 1893, she finished first in her class in physics. The next year, second in mathematics. And then she met Pierre Curie, a man who loved magnets and equations every bit as much as she did. In a damp, drafty wooden shed that used to be a medical dissecting room — a place with leaky glass roofs and no heat — Marie stood over giant iron cauldrons, stirring boiling pitchblende with an iron rod heavier than a track jack, day after day, boiling down tons of slag to find a fraction of a gram of something unseen.

In 1898, they isolated polonium, naming it after her beloved, occupied homeland, and then radium. In 1903, she won the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre. In 1911, she won a second Nobel, this time in Chemistry. Two Nobels in two different sciences — a record that still stands solitary to this day. And when the Great War broke out, she didn't sit in an armchair. She built mobile X-ray units — little vehicles the troops called "Petites Curies" — and drove them directly to the front lines herself so field surgeons could find shrapnel inside wounded boys. When she died, her notebooks were so radioactive they had to be kept in lead-lined boxes.

If you want to view them today, you still have to wear protective clothing and sign a liability waiver. Think on that. A girl from an underground attic classroom left behind pages that still burn with light a century later. Looking back from the porch rocker, none of these folks on November 7 thought they were writing monuments. Thomas Nast was just meeting a magazine deadline. Al Capp was filling funny pages. Those Canadian boys were just trying to save their horses and artillery. And Marie Curie was just stirring black rock in a drafty barn because she wanted to know why it gave off heat.

We have this habit of imagining history happens in grand marble halls under chandeliers, with everybody wearing pressed coats and knowing the future. It doesn't. It happens in the rain, on the run, or late at night over cold tea when nobody is looking. What looked like a stubborn Tuesday to them is the ground we're standing on right now. Well. That is about the size of it.