Maverick Mayor Peter F. Flaherty of Pittsburgh narrowly squeaked by Herbert S. Denenberg to win the Democratic nomination for the right to face popular Republican Sen. Richard Schweiker in the general election on this day in 1974. Campaigning as “Nobody’s Boy,” the 49-year-old Flaherty defeated […]

Harold E. Stassen, a former president of the University of Pennsylvania and frequent candidate for the presidency, easily captured the Republican nomination for mayor of Philadelphia on this day in 1959, pitting him against immensely popular Democratic incumbent Richardson Dilworth in the general election. Running […]

Paul Simon of Illinois, the rumble-voiced, bow-tie wearing former newspaperman who unseated longtime Republican Sen. Charles H. Percy only three years earlier, announced his candidacy for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination on this day twenty-five years ago. “I seek the Presidency with a firm sense […]

Wayne Morse, the three-term Oregon senator whose long-shot quest for the Democratic presidential nomination baffled party leaders and pundits alike, came up short in the Maryland primary on this day in 1960, losing to front-runner John F. Kennedy by a lopsided margin of 201,789 to […]

Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, who had stunned the Democratic establishment by polling a whopping 42% of the vote in the crowded March 14 Florida primary and finishing a strong second in the Wisconsin and Pennsylvania primaries the following month, was shot and critically wounded […]

J. B. Stoner, an unapologetic racist whose extreme views were once denounced by segregationist Lester G. Maddox, was convicted for conspiring in the 1958 bombing of the predominantly-black Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on this day in 1980. Stoner, who was suspected by prosecutors […]

Convening in a gilded ballroom in Chicago’s famous Hotel La Salle, more than 400 cheering delegates from thirty-two states enthusiastically nominated nationally-recognized economist Roger W. Babson of Massachusetts for the presidency on this day in 1940. The 65-year-old Babson, who was nominated without opposition, was […]

Arizona’s Barry M. Goldwater swept all 32 of the state’s delegates in overwhelmingly winning Indiana’s winner-take-all primary on this day in 1964. In winning his third primary of the year — and his second in three days — Goldwater demolished perennial candidate Harold E. Stassen […]

Attorney and activist Frances “Sissy” Farenthold, whose last-minute candidacy for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1972 helped galvanize women’s interest in politics, was overwhelmingly defeated by Gov. Dolph Briscoe in a second bid for her party’s gubernatorial nomination on this day in 1974. Garnering more […]

In a story spread across the top of its front page, the Miami Herald published a photograph of a young woman leaving former Sen. Gary Hart’s townhouse in Washington, D.C., on this day twenty-five years ago. The Herald, which had been investigating reports of Hart’s […]