Don’t miss anything from the holiday weekend!
December 31
- 1600 – Queen Elizabeth I grants charter to the East India Company
- 1879 – Thomas Edison demonstrates incandescent light
- 1904 – First New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square
- 1911 – Marie Curie receives her second Nobel Prize.
- 1937 – Anthony Hopkins is born.
- 1943 – John Denver is born.
- 1999 – Panama Canal turned over to Panama
January – National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month
Jan 1
- 45 B.C. – The Julian calendar takes effect for the first time on New Year’s Day
- 1735 – Paul Revere is born
- 1803 – Haitian independence proclaimed
- 1818 – Frankenstein is published. Mary Shelley’s identity as the author is not revealed for 3 more years.
- 1863 – Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation
- 1892 – The first immigrants come through Ellis Island Immigration Station
- 1895 – C.W. Post introduces Postum.
- 1939 – Hewlett Packard Company is founded in a garage in Palo Alto.
- 1914 – Noor Inayat Khan is born. After joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) during World War II, Khan was recruited as a Special Operations Executive (SOE) to be a radio operator for the resistance network in occupied Paris. Her mission was to send coded messages back to London. In 1943, Germans captured her, and she was later executed.
- 1919 – J.D. Salinger is born; best known for his coming-of-age story, Catcher in the Rye
- 1936 – James Sinegal is born. In 1983, he founded Costco.
- 1942 – United Nations created
- 1994 – The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) comes into effect
Jan 2
- 1776 – Congress publishes the Tory Act
- 1788 – Georgia becomes the 4th state in the Union.
- 1811 – First censuring of a U.S. Senator, Timothy Pickering, who publicly revealed secret documents
- 1839 – Louis Daguerre takes the first photo of the moon
- 1890 – President Benjamin Harrison welcomes Alice Sanger as the first female White House staffer
- 1920 – Isaac Asimov is born
- 1974 – President Nixon signs national speed limit into law
- 2006 – 13 coal miners trapped in Sago Mine explosion; 12 die
Jan 3
- 1521 – Martin Luther is excommunicated from the Catholic church
- 1793 – Lucretia Mott, women’s right pioneer, is born
- 1841 – Herman Melville sails for the South Seas
- 1879 – Grace Anna Goodhue is born. She was teaching at the Clarke School for the Deaf when she met and married Calvin Coolidge in 1904. She later became the nation’s 32nd First Lady.
- 1892 – J.R.R. Tolkein is born.
- 1924 – King Tut’s tomb discovered.
- 1925 – Benito Mussolini declares himself dictator of Italy.
- 1938 – Franklin D. Roosevelt founds the March of Dimes.
- 1949 – Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) starts her tenure in the Senate, where she stays until 1973. She became the first woman to serve in both the House and Senate, having served in the House from 1940-1949.
- 1959 – Alaska is admitted to the Union as the 49th state.
- 1953 – Mother and son serve simultaneously in the U.S. Congress, Frances P. Bolton and Oliver Bolton.
Jan 4
- 1809 – Louis Braille is born
- 1847 – Samuel Colt sells his first revolvers to the U.S. government.
- 1892 – Helen Hull is born. She was the director of Henry Street Settlement House, and then appointed by FDR to the Committee on Economic Security which created the Social Security Act of 1935 and Unemployment Compensation
- 1896 – Utah becomes the 45th state admitted to the Union.
- 1905 – Sterling Holloway, the voice of Winnie the Pooh and the Cheshire cat, is born.
- 1943 – Doris Kearns Goodwin, historian, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Lincoln, also wrote The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson.
- 1965 – L.B.J. envisions a Great Society in his State of the Union address.
- 1974 – President Nixon refused to hand over tapes.
- 1995 – GOP wins control of Congress for first time in 40 years.
- 2001 – Michael Jordan scores his 30,000th career point.
- 2007 – Nancy Pelosi is elected the first female Speaker of the U.S. House.
