Chicago Daily Tribune
ON JANUARY 12 ...
In 1737 revolutionary leader John Hancock, the first signer of the Declaration of Independence, was born in Braintree, Mass.
In 1773 the first public museum in America was established, in Charleston, S.C.
In 1828 the United States and Mexico signed a Treaty of Limits defining the boundary between the two countries to be the same as the one established by an 1819 treaty between the U.S. and Spain.
In 1876 novelist Jack London was born in San Francisco.
In 1893 Nazi commander Hermann Goering was born in Rosenheim, Germany.
In 1915 the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a proposal to give women the right to vote.
In 1932 Hattie Caraway became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
In 1945, during World War II, Soviet forces began a huge offensive against the Germans in Eastern Europe.
In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that states could not discriminate against lawschool applicants because of race.
In 1954 radio shock jock Howard Stern was born in New York.
In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson said in his State of the Union address that the United States should stay in South Vietnam until Communist aggression there was ended.
In 1969 the New York Jets defeated the Baltimore Colts 16-7 in Super Bowl III at the Orange Bowl in Miami.
In 1971 the groundbreaking television sitcom “All in the Family” premiered on CBS.
In 1976 mystery writer Agatha Christie died in Wallingford, England; she was 85.
In 1986 the space shuttle Columbia blasted off with a crew that included U.S. Rep. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and the first Hispanic-American in space, Dr. Franklin R. Chang-Diaz.
In 1987 Anglican Church envoy Terry Waite arrived in Lebanon to help win the release of Western hostages; instead, Waite ended up being taken captive himself.
In 1991 a deeply divided Congress gave President George H.W. Bush the authority to use force to expel Iraq from Kuwait. (The Senate vote was 52-47; the House followed suit 250183.)
In 1999 Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball was sold at auction in New York for $3 million to an anonymous bidder. (The buyer was later revealed to be comic book creator Todd McFarlane.)
In 2001 the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded a two-day hearing on Florida’s presidential election, with members accusing Secretary of State Katherine Harris of presiding over a “disaster” and trying to shift blame to others.
In 2004 President George W. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox forged agreement on the contentious issues of immigration and Iraq, meeting in Monterrey before the opening of a 34-nation hemispheric summit.
In 2005 a NASA spacecraft, Deep Impact, blasted off on a mission to smash a hole in a comet and give scientists a glimpse of the frozen primordial ingredients of the solar system.
In 2006 Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, was released from an Istanbul prison after serving more than 25 years in Italy and Turkey for the plot against the pontiff and the slaying of a Turkish journalist.
In 2010 a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck near the Haitian capital Port-auPrince, devastating the impoverished nation and
In 2017 President Barack Obama ended the longstanding “wet foot, dry foot” immigration policy that allowed any Cuban who made it to U.S. soil to stay and become a legal resident.