November 6: Lincoln Elected, Apartheid Condemned, a Senate First Three November 6ths defined by elections and verdicts that forced the question of who belongs — in the American experiment, in the international community, and in the halls of the Senate The question of who belongs — who is counted, who is protected, whose dignity the law is willing to enforce — has driven more of history's turning points than any other. November 6 has asked that question three times, in three different centuries, in three very different arenas. A nation that had been arguing about slavery for decades elected a president whose position on the question made seven states decide they would rather leave before he was even inaugurated. An international body looked at a government that had built an entire legal architecture around exclusion and said, formally and on the record, that it would not accept what it saw. And a senator from Wisconsin walked into the world's most exclusive legislative chamber and made it, for the first time, a little less exclusive. The Election That Split a Nation   On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth President of the United States — and within weeks, the country he had been elected to lead began to come apart. Lincoln, a one-term Illinois congressman who had lost a Senate race to Stephen Douglas two years earlier, had won the Republican nomination in May and ran on a platform that opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories while stopping short of calling for its immediate abolition where it existed. It was enough. Southern states had made clear that Lincoln's election would be treated as cause for secession, and they were as good as their word: South Carolina voted to leave the Union in December 1860, followed by six more states before Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861. The election that Lincoln won on November 6 set in motion the Civil War that would cost more than 600,000 lives. Lincoln had won the electoral college with 180 votes but received less than forty percent of the popular vote — his name did not even appear on the ballot in ten Southern states. The result was the consequence of a Democratic Party that had split along sectional lines, running two separate candidates, and a Constitutional Union party that further divided the anti-Lincoln vote. His minority popular vote did not diminish the legitimacy of his victory, but it illustrated the depth of the division he was inheriting. What Lincoln would do with that inheritance — the Emancipation Proclamation, the prosecution of the war to its conclusion, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural — became the measure by which American presidents have been judged ever since. The man elected on November 6, 1860, is consistently ranked first among them.   Springfield, Illinois on election night 1860 — where Abraham Lincoln learned he had won a presidency that would immediately begin pulling the nation it governed apart. The World Says No On November 6, 1962, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 1761, calling on member states to impose diplomatic, economic, and transport sanctions against South Africa in response to the country's apartheid system — the comprehensive legal regime of racial segregation that the National Party government had been constructing since 1948. The resolution condemned apartheid as a violation of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and created a Special Committee Against Apartheid to monitor the situation and coordinate international pressure. It was the first significant international institutional action against the South African government's racial policies, and it arrived at a moment when the domestic anti-apartheid movement — whose leaders included Nelson Mandela, then on trial and facing life imprisonment — was being subjected to increasingly brutal suppression. The resolution did not end apartheid. The sanctions it called for were not immediately implemented by the major Western powers, many of which had significant economic interests in South Africa and were reluctant to act on principle at the cost of profit. The United States and Britain abstained from the vote. It would take more than two decades of sustained international pressure, escalating sanctions, and the internal resistance of the South African people before the apartheid government began to negotiate its own dismantlement in the early 1990s. What the 1962 resolution established was the international framework — the formal declaration that apartheid was a global concern rather than a domestic matter — that made those eventual sanctions morally and legally coherent. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and elected president of a democratic South Africa in 1994. The road from November 6, 1962 to that outcome was long and the human cost was enormous. The resolution was the first step on it. The United Nations General Assembly — where on November 6, 1962, the international community formally declared that apartheid was the world's business, not South Africa's alone. ❦ Wisconsin's Senator   On November 6, 2012, Tammy Baldwin won the Wisconsin Senate race against former governor Tommy Thompson, becoming the first openly gay person elected to the United States Senate. Baldwin had previously served seven terms in the House of Representatives, where she had been one of the first openly gay members of Congress and had built a legislative record focused on healthcare, workers' rights, and veterans' issues. Her Senate victory came on the same night that voters in three states — Maine, Maryland, and Washington — approved same-sex marriage by popular referendum for the first time, making November 6, 2012 one of the most significant single days in the history of LGBTQ civil rights in America. Baldwin won by nearly six percentage points in a state that had twice elected her Republican opponent to statewide office. Baldwin's election to the Senate reflected a shift in American public opinion on LGBTQ equality that had been building for a decade and would accelerate dramatically in the years that followed — culminating in the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage nationwide. She has been reelected twice since 2012 and has continued to focus her Senate work on economic issues, healthcare access, and the concerns of working-class Wisconsin voters alongside her advocacy for LGBTQ rights. The barrier she broke on November 6, 2012 was real, but her Senate career has been defined less by the historic nature of her election than by the work she has done in the chamber she entered — which is, perhaps, exactly as it should be.   The United States Capitol — the building Tammy Baldwin entered on November 6, 2012, as the first openly gay person elected to the Senate in American history.

Nov. 6, 2011: Geoffrey Mutai Shatters the New York City Marathon Course Record Across Five Boroughs On a crisp Sunday in New York, a Kenyan runner turned a famously punishing course into a stage for the fastest marathon the city had ever seen. On Nov. 6, 2011, roughly 47,000 runners poured across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge for the 41st New York City Marathon. Most were chasing personal goals. At the front, Kenya's Geoffrey Mutai was chasing something larger: a race that had never been run as fast as he was about to run it. The Fastest Mile   The New York course is no one's idea of a speed trap. It crosses five boroughs and five bridges, with long climbs and tight turns that tend to reward patience over pace. For years, the course record had stood at 2 hours, 7 minutes, 43 seconds, set by Ethiopia's Tesfaye Jifar in 2001. Mutai ran the race as though that number were a suggestion. He and his countryman Emmanuel Mutai, who is no relation, broke away from the field and traded the lead deep into the race, pushing each other through Manhattan and into Central Park. Geoffrey Mutai broke the tape in 2:05:06, taking more than two and a half minutes off the old mark. Emmanuel Mutai followed in 2:06:28, which would also have beaten Jifar's record. The pair had turned a duel into a demolition of the record book, and the old mark was left behind by two men instead of one. The same day, Ethiopia's Firehiwot Dado won the women's race in 2:23:15, adding a second victory to the day's results. Mutai's time carried an asterisk of sorts: because New York's point-to-point course drops in elevation between start and finish, the sport's governing body does not ratify such times as world records. That did not blunt the achievement in the city itself. Mutai had run faster than anyone ever had on those streets, and he did it on a course whose hills are famous for slowing people down. The record that mattered to New Yorkers was the one that belonged to their own race, and by the end of the afternoon it belonged to him. Rarely has an unofficial mark felt so definitive.  

■  The Pop Edition November 6: Spectre Opens, Peanuts Hit Theaters Sally Field turns 80, Daniel Craig's fourth Bond film reached American screens 11 years ago, and Snoopy and Charlie Brown made their CGI debut the very same day. Here is everything from November 6. Daniel Craig as James Bond in Spectre, which opened in US theaters on November 6, 2015 November 6 has a split-screen quality this year. On this date in 2015, Hollywood sent out a spy and a beagle on the same Friday, and they landed in very different multiplexes. Today's birthday list is just as lopsided in a good way: an Oscar-winning actress hits a milestone, one of the Eagles gets his due, and the man who gave us the saxophone turns up in the rapid-fire section. Here's the full accounting. OPENING WEEKEND: Spectre   Spectre, Daniel Craig's fourth outing as James Bond, opened in US theaters on Friday, November 6, 2015, eleven years ago today. The big reveal the film had been saving: Christoph Waltz played Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the cat-stroking mastermind who hadn't appeared in an official Eon Bond film in decades. American audiences were late to the party. The film had already opened in the UK on October 26, so US viewers spent about ten days reading about it first. Sam Mendes, who had directed Skyfall, returned to direct, and the film opened with a long tracking shot through a Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City, which became its most talked-about sequence. Reviews were more mixed than they had been for Skyfall, with many critics finding the story overstuffed, though the action set pieces drew praise. The title song, Sam Smith's “Writing's on the Wall,” went on to win the Oscar for Best Original Song a few months later. Craig made one more Bond film, No Time to Die, before handing the tuxedo off.   Born On This Day Sally Field BORN 1946 · TURNS 80 Field started on television as the lead of Gidget in 1965 and then The Flying Nun, a start that made her later reinvention all the more striking. She won Best Actress Oscars for Norma Rae in 1979 and Places in the Heart in 1984, and she added Emmys for ER and Brothers & Sisters. Her film career includes Steel Magnolias, Mrs. Doubtfire and Forrest Gump, and she earned another Oscar nomination for playing Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln. Emma Stone BORN 1988 · TURNS 38 Born in Scottsdale, Arizona, Stone broke out in comedy with Superbad and carried Easy A as a leading lady in 2010. She won her first Oscar for La La Land and a second for Poor Things, which makes her a two-time Best Actress winner. Ethan Hawke BORN 1970 · TURNS 56 Hawke began as a teenager in Explorers, then became a fixture of 1990s indie film through Dead Poets Society and Before Sunrise. He has since moved between Training Day, First Reformed and Richard Linklater's Boyhood, which was filmed over twelve years. Glenn Frey BORN 1948 · WOULD HAVE BEEN 78 Frey co-founded the Eagles and co-wrote “Take It Easy” with Jackson Browne. He also co-wrote the band's biggest hits and had a solo career that included “The Heat Is On” from Beverly Hills Cop. He died in 2016. Rebecca Romijn BORN 1972 · TURNS 54 Romijn went from the runway to the screen, playing the blue-skinned shapeshifter Mystique in X-Men in 2000. She later returned to a Starfleet uniform as Number One in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.   OPENING WEEKEND: The Peanuts Movie The Peanuts Movie also opened on Friday, November 6, 2015, as the first feature made with computer animation about Charlie Brown and company. Blue Sky Studios, the team behind Ice Age, was behind it, and the surprise was how hard they worked to make it look like Charles Schulz's flat, hand-inked comic strip rather than glossy CGI. Schulz's son Craig and grandson Bryan co-wrote the script, and director Steve Martino leaned on the strip's visual language, including its thin lines and thought bubbles. Noah Schnapp voiced Charlie Brown. Snoopy's sounds were assembled from archival recordings of the animator Bill Melendez, who had voiced the beagle in the original TV specials. Adults who grew up with the specials were the film's most natural audience, and most critics were warm on it, which fits a story about a kid who keeps losing the kite fight and tries again anyway.   Meanwhile… 1814Adolphe Sax, the Belgian instrument maker who invented the saxophone, was born on November 6. 1854John Philip Sousa, the composer of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and the “March King,” was born on this date. 1861James Naismith, who would invent basketball three decades later, was born on November 6. 1869Rutgers beat Princeton 6–4 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in what is considered the first intercollegiate football game. 1931Mike Nichols, director of The Graduate and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was born on November 6. He died in 2014 and would have been 95. 2015On November 6, 2015, Spectre opened in US theaters with Christoph Waltz playing the villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld. That's November 6: a spy and a beagle sharing a Friday, a first-rate birthday list, and a saxophone inventor to remind us that the pop culture we love usually starts with somebody's workshop. Come back tomorrow afternoon for another date, and tell us what you'd have watched that weekend in 2015.