It was a day like today.
Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone with the Wind, was born on November 8, 1900. On this date in 1909 was born the actress and paramour of Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn
Also born on this day in 1308 was born Franciscan friar, philosopher and theologian Johannes Duns Scotus, a Scot from whose name the epithet “dunce” is derived. Oddly enough, in the Catholic Church he is considered one of the most influential minds of medieval times and is referred to as “Doctor Subtilis” for his defense of the idea of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God, his doctrine of the "univocity of being", as well as a complex proof for the existence of God.
This date is red letter day for the Democratic Party of the United States: on November 8, 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt soundly beat the Republican incumbent President Herbert Hoover in a landslide victory garnering 472 electoral votes to 59. However, John Fitzgerald Kennedy narrowly beat former Vice-President Richard Nixon on this date in 1960. At the time, he was dogged by accusations of election chicanery in such places as Chicago and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, Democrat strongholds.
It was a black day for Germany and Europe on November 8, 1923 in Munich. On that day Adolf Hitler and General Ludendorff led a group of fanatics in Bavaria that seized the government of Munich. This was to become known as the “Beer Hall Putsch.”
This date in 1793 came in the midst of the French Revolution that had promised Liberty and Fraternity and Equality to France. It came to naught for Madame Manon Roland. A heroic woman, she refused to accompany her husband in hiding and chose to meet her doom as the Spartan women of Romantic fantasy. At her trial she dressed in which with her beautiful black hair cascading down her shoulders. Convicted by a revolutionary court, she was led to the scaffold where she refused the offer of the executioner to separate her head and boy before another man waiting for the guillotine. Her last words were reportedly, “O Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy name.”
Today, Eastern Christians celebrate as the Synaxis of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel and all Heavenly Powers. The Heavenly powers, or angels, are spirits sent to serve “those who shall inherit salvation” (see Hebrews 1:14). They are guardians and guides both to individual human beings and societies. The lower ranks are believed to be in charge of the material world. The choirs of angels are constantly participating in the heavenly liturgy, surrounding God’s altar and singing the Thrice Holy Hymn. The Church places particular emphasis on two of these heavenly powers: Gabriel, meaning Power of God, and Michael, meaning Who is Like God, for they are mentioned in the Bible
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