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January 7 |
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January is: March of Dimes Birth Defects Month
1502: Pope Gregory XIII
1745: Frenchman Jacques
Montgolfier, who, with his brother, invented the hot air balloon
1800: Millard Fillmore, 13th president of the United States (1850-1853)
1844: Bernadette Soubirous, who became St. Bernadette.
1845: Louis III, last King of Bavaria.
1873: Film executive Adolph Zukor
1928: Author William Peter Blatty
1930: Country singer Jack Greene (There Goes My Everything)
1942: Pop musician Paul Revere
1946: Magazine publisher Jann Wenner
1948: Singer Kenny Loggins
1949: Singer-songwriter Marshall Chapman
1952: Actor Sammo Hung ("Martial Law")
1957: "Today" show co-host Katie Couric
1959: Country singer David Lee Murphy
1959: Rock musician Kathy Valentine (The Go-Go's)
1960: Actor David Marciano
1964: Actor Nicolas Cage
1970: Actor Doug E. Doug ("Cosby")
1974: Country singer-musician John Rich (Lonestar)
1976: Actor Dustin Diamond ("Saved by the Bell: The New
Class")
1990: Actor Liam Aiken
1990: Actress Camryn Grimes
1991: Actor Max Morrow
0049 BC: Roman Senate declares Cësar a public enemy
unless he disbands his army
0312: Martyrdom of St. Lucian
1131: Murder of St. Canute Lavard
1285: Death of Charles I of Anjou, King of Naples and
Sicily
1327: Edward II is deposed. Edward II was the son of the
great English Warrior, King Edward I.
1477: The body of Charles
the Bold is found, half eaten by wolves
1537: Assassination of Alessandro de Medici
1566: Pope Pius V elected
1598: Boris Godunov seizes the Russian throne on death of
Theodore I
1598: Death of Czar Theodore of Muscovy
1610: Galileo, using his primitive telescope, discovered
the four major moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
1611: Second trial of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, for
"satanic terror;" she is found guilty and walled up in her tower
1618: Francis Bacon appointed Lord Chancellor of England
1714: The typewriter is patented (It was not built years
later)
1785: The 1st balloon flight across the English Channel
was completed. The flight was by balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard. Mr. Blanchard and his
passenger had to shed all of their clothes as the wind died and the balloon's airbag
cooled too quickly over the sea.
1789: The first nationwide U.S. presidential election was
held. The electors chosen by the voters unanimously picked George Washington as president
and John Adams as vice president.
1809: Beethoven, fresh from the success of his Fifth and
Sixth Symphonies, wrote to his publisher declaring that "nobody in Vienna has more
enemies than I do. This is readily comprehended since the state of music here is growing
worse and worse."
1894: One of the earliest motion picture experiments took
place at the Thomas Edison studio in West Orange, New Jersey, as comedian Fred Ott was
filmed sneezing.
1901: New York stock exchange trading exceeds two million
shares for the first time in history.
1904: The distress signal, "CQD", was
established this day. It didn't last long. Two years later, "SOS" became the
radio distress signal because it was more convenient.
1926: George Burns and Gracie Allen were married by a
Justice of the Peace in Cleveland, Ohio.
1927: Commercial transatlantic telephone service was
inaugurated between New York and London.
1929: Sheffield Farms of New York begins using wax paper
cartons instead of glass bottles for milk delivery.
1929: The comic strip "Buck Rogers 2429 A.D."
appeared for the first time in newspapers around the nation. The comic strip title was
later changed to: "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century."
1929: "Tarzan", one of the first adventure comic
strips appears.
1931: As the Great Depression was getting under way, a
report to President Hoover estimated that four-million to five-million Americans were out
of work.
1934: The U.S.S.R.s first ambassador to the U.S.
arrives in New York.
1934: Six-thousand pastors in Berlin defy the Nazis
insisting that they will not be muzzled.
1942: The World War Two siege of Bataan
began.
1944: The U.S. Air Force announces the production of the
first jet-fighter, Bell P-59 Airacomet.
1951: Hostile demonstrations welcome Eisenhower to Paris
talks on European defense strategy.
1953: President Truman announced in his State of the Union
address that the United States had developed a hydrogen bomb.
1955: Marian Anderson became the first African-American to
sing at New York's Metropolitan Opera. She sang Ulrica in Verdi's "The Masked
Ball." Marian Anderson was 53 before she got this opportunity.
1959: The United States recognized Fidel Castro's new
government in Cuba.
1963: First Class postage raised from 4 cents to 5 cents.
1968: First Class postage raised from 5 cents to 6 cents.
1972: Lewis F. Powell Junior and William H. Rehnquist were
sworn in as the 99th and 100th members of the US Supreme Court.
1979: Vietnamese forces captured the Cambodian capital of
Phnom Penh, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge government.
1985: Vietnam seizes Khmer National Liberation Front
headquarters near the Thai border.
1985: Yul Brynner returned to the Broadway stage as
"The King and I" returned to where Yul first began his reign, 33 years before.
Through his career to that date, Brynner appeared in 4,434 shows without missing a single
performance.
1987: Assassins using a remote-controlled car bomb tried
but failed to assassinate former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun. Four other people,
however, were killed.
1988: Secretary of State George P. Shultz, seeking to
smooth a rift caused by a United Nations vote, told reporters that overall American
support for Israel remained "unshakable."
1988: British actor Trevor Howard died in Bushey, England,
at age 71.
1989: Emperor Hirohito of Japan died at age 87; he was
succeeded by Crown Prince Akihito.
1990: The president of El Salvador, Alfredo Cristiani,
said in a nationally broadcast address that military men had carried out the massacre of
six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter the previous November.
1991: Pete Rose left an Illinois federal
prison camp and checked into a halfway house in Cincinnati to complete his
sentence for cheating on his taxes.
1991: Loyalist troops in Haiti crushed a
coup attempt that had threatened the transition of power to the country's
first freely elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
1991: Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled
plans to purchase the A-12 stealth attack plane for the Navy.
1992: President George Bush arrived in Japan on a
tough-talk trade mission.
1992: Serb forces shot down a European Community
helicopter in Croatia, killing five truce observers.
1992: Pitchers Tom Seaver and Rollie Fingers were elected
to baseball's Hall of Fame.
1993: US forces in Somalia unleashed tank, helicopter and
rocket fire on two clan camps in Mogadishu where snipers had been taking potshots at the
troops.
1993: A preliminary report prepared for the European
Community said about 20,000 women in Bosnia-Herzegovina might have been raped by Serb
fighters.
1994: The government reported the unemployment rate fell
to a three-year low of 6.4 percent in December 1993.
1994: Nancy Kerrigan withdrew from the US Figure Skating
Championships in Detroit, a day after her right leg was severely bruised in an attack
following a practice session.
1995: Major General Viktor Vorobyov, a senior commander
leading Russian troops in their advance on the secessionist capital of Chechnya, was
killed by a mortar shell.
1996: One of the biggest blizzards in U.S. history
paralyzed the East. (More than 100 deaths were later blamed on the severe weather.)
1996: Republicans rejected President Clinton's budget plan
and warned they would close government programs they didn't like if there were no
agreement on a budget plan in the next few weeks.
1997: Newt Gingrich overcame dissension in the G-O-P ranks
to become the first Republican re-elected House speaker in 68 years.
1998: Convicted Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry
Nichols escaped the death penalty when a jury deadlocked over his punishment.
1998: The government of Canada apologized for past acts of
oppression against the country's native peoples.
1998: A U.S. Customs agent died from injuries sustained
while helping protect President Clinton in the U.S. Virgin Islands the previous week.
Senior Special Agent Manuel Zurita, a 12-year veteran based in Puerto Rico, died while
being treated for a punctured lung and other internal injuries. He was one of three
customs agents injured when their boat hit a rock off St. Thomas, following an assignment
assisting the Secret Service during the landing of Air Force One.
1998: Hundreds of villagers packed belongings and fled
their homes in remote mountains in western Algeria after at least 600 men, women and
children were massacred there the previous week.
1999: For only the second time in history, an impeached
American president went on trial before the Senate.
2000: US Representative Dan Burton
(Republican, Indiana), subpoenaed Elian Gonzalez to testify before Congress,
a bid to keep Elian in the United States for at least another month while
courts decided whether the six-year-old should be returned to Cuba. (Elian
never actually testified.)
2004: President Bush proposed legal status —
at least temporarily — for millions of illegal immigrants working in the
U.S.
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