On January 17, 1893, 132 years ago today, Rutherford Birchard Hayes, the 19th President of the United States, died at the age of 71. Hayes was elected President in 1876 in the closest US presidential election in history, even closed than the Bush-Gore election of 2000. Like George W. Bush in 2000, Hayes received fewer popular votes than his ( Read more... )

I'm reading the new book by Christopher Cox entitled Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn (review soon to follow), and it is awful to read what a terrible human being Wilson was, despite being almost deified by many subsequent historians. Wilson was an unabashed racist who also treated suffragists so cruelly that he ignored pleas to end their ( Read more... )

In the election of 1888, just as in 2000 and 2016, the losing candidate won the popular vote. It was the third time this had happened. (In 1824 the winning candidate John Quincy Adams came in second in both the popular and electoral vote, and in 1876 Rutherford Hayes lost the popular vote and had the electoral votes awarded to him by a commission ( Read more... )

As the election of 1960 approached, the Cold War was heating up. The nation's most experienced cold warrior, former General and current President Dwight Eisenhower, was precluded from seeking a third term in office because he was the first to hold the office of President since the 22nd amendment to the Constitution came into effect.

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Lyndon Johnson, who had won the 1964 election by a huge margin (486 to 52 in the electoral college) would not have that same good fortune in 1968. The escalation of the War in Vietnam translated into a decline in popularity for Johnson. By late 1967, over 500,000 American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam. Draftees made up 42 percent of the ( Read more... )

The election of 1980 was held on November 4th. Also being held at that time were fifty-two American diplomats and citizens, who had been held captive for exactly one year since November 4, 1979 when a group of Iranian students, belonging to the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line, captured and took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. On April ( Read more... )

It must have been a very tense transition in the White House following the election of 1828. Not only was the campaign a nasty one, which included a personal attacks against the wife of the victorious candidate, but the stress of those attacks may well have killed poor Rachel Jackson, and the President-elect was never known for his forgiving nature ( Read more... )

Perhaps the most difficult presidential transition in history took place in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected to succeed James Buchanan. It was a time when sectional strife and division rose to such a high level that it split the Democratic Party and caused many to worry that the president-elect would not live to see his inauguration.

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The 1948 election wasn't a close one as it turned out. But it did illustrate how the polls can get it wrong, in this case, very wrong.

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The 2000 presidential election was held on Tuesday, November 7, 2000. The contest was between Republican candidate George W. Bush, who was the incumbent governor of Texas and son of former president George H. W. Bush and Democratic candidate Al Gore, the incumbent vice president, as well as various third-party candidates including the well-known ( Read more... )