ON JANUARY 6 ...
In 1412 according to tradition, Joan of Arc was born in Domremy, France.
In 1759 George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis were married.
In 1838 Samuel Morse first publicly demonstrated his telegraph, in Morristown, N.J.
In 1878 poet Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Ill.
In 1912 New Mexico became the 47th state.
In 1919 Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th U.S. president, died in Oyster Bay, N.Y.; he was 60.
In 1942 the Pan American Airways “Pacific Clipper” arrived in New York after making the first round-theworld trip by a commercial airplane.
In 1950 Britain recognized the Communist government of China.
In 1994 figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed on the right leg by an assailant at Cobo Arena in Detroit. (Four men, including the ex-husband of Kerrigan’s rival, Tonya Harding, later were sentenced to prison for the incident.)
In 2000 in Miami, demonstrators angered by the U.S. government’s decision to send Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba skirmished with police.
In 2001, with the vanquished Vice President Al Gore presiding, Congress formally certified George W. Bush the winner of the close and bitterly contested 2000 presidential election.
In 2002 Argentina announced the devaluation of its peso, ending a decadelong policy pegging the currency one-to-one with the U.S. dollar. (In the year that followed, the peso lost 70 percent of its value against the dollar.)
In 2004 a design consisting of two reflecting pools and a paved stone field was chosen for the World Trade Center memorial in New York. In 2006 Chicago’s Pilgrim Baptist Church, the historic Bronzeville edifice designed by Louis Sullivan and considered the birthplace of gospel music, was nearly destroyed by fire. Also in 2006 singer Lou Rawls died in Los Angeles; he was 72.
In 2012 Juan Rivera, 39, was released from Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet, Ill., after nearly 20 years in prison, exonerated in the 1992 stabbing and sexual assault of 11-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan, Ill. Rivera had been convicted three times, at three trials, and his exoneration was based on DNA evidence. Also in 2012 Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George apologized for remarks aired on Christmas Day comparing the city’s gay pride parade to 1940sera Ku Klux Klan protests.
In 2013 the NHL and players union reached a tentative deal on a collective bargaining agreement to end the 113-day lockout. (It became official five days later.)
In 2016 the Texas state trooper who arrested Sandra Bland after a contentious traffic stop in the summer was fired after being charged with perjury for allegedly lying about his confrontation with the black Naperville woman who died three days later in a county jail.
In 2017 five people were shot to death and six others wounded when a gunman opened fire at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida; an Iraq War veteran with suspected psychological problems was charged.
In 2018 Chicago tied a record of 12 straight days of temperatures below 20 degrees, which has happened only twice since records have been kept, in 1936 and 1895.