TODAY IN HISTORY

In 1649, King Charles I of England went on trial, accused of high treason (he was found guilty and executed by month’s end).

In 1801, Secretary of State John Marshall was nominated by President John Adams to be chief justice of the United States (he was sworn in on Feb. 4, 1801).

On Jan. 20, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first president to be inaugurated on Jan. 20 instead of March 4.

In 1942, Nazi officials held the notorious Wannsee conference, during which they arrived at their “final solution” that called for exterminating Europe’s Jews.

In 1964, Capitol Records released the album “Meet the Beatles!”

In 1986, the United States observed the first federal holiday in honor of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1994, Shannon Faulkner became the first woman to attend classes at The Citadel in South Carolina. (Faulkner joined the cadet corps in Aug. 1995 under court order but soon dropped out, citing isolation and stress from the legal battle.)

In 2001, George Walker Bush became America’s 43rd president after one of the most turbulent elections in U.S. history.

In 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, faced with stiff resistance and calls to go slow, bluntly told the Security Council that the U.N. “must not shrink” from its responsibility to disarm Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

In 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the nation’s 44th, as well as first African American, president.

In 2017, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, pledging emphatically to empower America’s “forgotten men and women.”