ON JAN. 21 ...

In 1738 Ethan Allen, leader of the Green Mountain Boys militia during the American Revolution, was born in Litchfield, Conn.

In 1793, during the French Revolution, King Louis XVI, condemned for treason, was executed on the guillotine.

In 1824 Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was born in Clarksburg in present-day West Virginia.

In 1861 Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, and four other Southerners resigned from the U.S. Senate.

In 1905 fashion designer Christian Dior was born in Granville, France.

In 1908 New York City’s Board of Aldermen passed an ordinance prohibiting women from smoking in public establishments (the measure was vetoed by Mayor George B. McClellan Jr., but not before one woman, Katie Mulcahey, was jailed overnight for refusing to pay a fine).

In 1915 the first Kiwanis Club was founded, in Detroit.

In 1924 Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died; he was 54.

In 1937 Count Basie and His Orchestra recorded “One O’Clock Jump” for Decca Records. (On this date in 1942, they re-recorded the song for Okeh Records).

In 1942 pinball machines were banned in New York City after a court ruled they were gambling devices that relied on chance rather than skill. (The ban was lifted in 1976.)

In 1950 former State Department official Alger Hiss, accused of being part of a Communist spy ring, was found guilty in New York of lying to a grand jury. (Hiss, who always maintained his innocence, served less than four years in prison.) Also in 1950 novelist and essayist George Orwell died in London.

In 1954 the first atomic submarine, the USS Nautilus, was launched at Groton, Conn. (However, the Nautilus did not make its first nuclear-powered run until nearly a year later.)

In 1958 Charles Starkweather, 19, killed three relatives of his 14-yearold girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, at her family’s home in Lincoln, Nebraska. (Starkweather and Fugate went on a road trip which resulted in seven more slayings; Starkweather was eventually executed while Fugate spent 17 years in prison despite maintaining she was a hostage, not an accomplice.)

In 1968 the North Vietnamese Army launched a full scale assault against the U.S. combat base in Khe Sanh, South Vietnam, in a siege lasting 11 weeks; although the Americans were able to hold back the communists, they ended up dismantling and abandoning the base. Also in 1968 an American B-52 bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed in Greenland, killing one crew member and scattering radioactive material.

In 1976 the supersonic Concorde jet was put into service by Britain and France.

In 1977, on his first full day in office, President Jimmy Carter pardoned almost all Vietnam War draft evaders.

In 1996, at the 53rd annual Golden Globes, “Sense and Sensibility” won best dramatic picture; “Babe” won best comedy.

In 1997 Speaker Newt Gingrich was reprimanded and fined as the House voted for first time in history to discipline its leader for ethical misconduct.

In 2000 the grandmothers of Elian Gonzalez traveled to the United States to plead for the boy’s return to Cuba.

In 2001 Pope John Paul II elevated archbishops of New York and Washington and 35 other church leaders to the College of Cardinals.

In 2003 the Census Bureau announced that Hispanics had surpassed blacks as America’s largest minority group.

In 2011 disgraced former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge, long suspected of torturing suspects and sending men to prison for crimes they did not commit, was sentenced to 4 ½ years in prison after being convicted on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury for denying in a civil lawsuit that he knew about the abuses.