THIS WEEK IN HISTORY
Sunday, Dec. 31
1879: Thomas Edison first publicly demonstrated his electric incandescent light by illuminating some 40 bulbs at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. 1904: New York’s Times Square saw its first New Year’s Eve celebration, with an estimated 200,000 people in attendance.
1951: The Marshall Plan expired after distributing more than $12 billion in foreign aid.
1972: Major League baseball player Roberto Clemente, 38, was killed when a plane he had chartered and was traveling on to bring relief supplies to earthquake-devastated Nicaragua crashed shortly after takeoff from Puerto Rico.
1974: Private U.S. citizens were allowed to buy and own gold for the first time in more than 40 years.
1978: Taiwanese diplomats struck their colors for the final time from the embassy flagpole in Washington, D.C., marking the end of diplomatic relations with the United States.
1985: Singer Rick Nelson, 45, and six other people were killed when fire broke out aboard a plane that was taking the group to a New Year’s Eve performance in Dallas.
1987: Robert Mugabe was sworn in as Zimbabwe’s first executive president. 1995: The syndicated comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” created by Bill Watterson, came to an end after a 10-year run. 1999: Russian President Boris Yeltsin announced his resignation.
2017: The Cleveland Browns joined the 2008 Detroit Lions as the only teams in NFL history to go 0-and-16, losing to the Pittsburgh Steelers 28-24.
2019: The health commission in the central Chinese city of Wuhan announced that experts were investigating an outbreak of respiratory illness and that most of the victims had visited a seafood market in the city; the statement said 27 people had become ill with a strain of viral pneumonia and that seven were in serious condition. 2020: Britain completed its economic break from the European Union.
2021: Betty White, a television mainstay for more than 60 years on series including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Golden Girls,” died less than three weeks before she would have turned 100.
2022: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who had become the first pontiff in 600 years to resign from the job, died at age 95.
Monday, Jan. 1
1863: President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that slaves in rebel states shall be “forever free.”
1892: The Ellis Island Immigrant Station in New York formally opened.
1942: The Rose Bowl was played in Durham, North Carolina, instead of Pasadena, California, because of security concerns in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor; in it, Oregon State defeated Duke, 20-16.
1953: Hank Williams Sr., among the most important singers and songwriters in country music history, was discovered dead at age 29 in the back seat of his car during a stop in Oak Hill, West Virginia, while he was being driven to a concert date in Canton, Ohio.
1954: NBC broadcast the first coast-tocoast color TV program as it presented live coverage of the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California. 1959: Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries overthrew Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista, who fled to the Dominican Republic.
1975: A jury in Washington found Nixon administration officials John N. Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman guilty of charges related to the Watergate cover-up.
1984: The breakup of AT&T took place as the telecommunications giant was divested of its 22 Bell System companies under terms of an antitrust agreement.
1985: The music cable channel VH-1, intended as a more adult alternative to MTV, made its debut with a video of Marvin Gaye performing “The StarSpangled Banner.”
1993: Czechoslovakia peacefully split into two new countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
2006: The Medicare prescription drug plan went into effect.
2013: In Maryland, same-sex marriage became legal in the first state south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
2014: The nation’s first legal recreational marijuana shops opened in Colorado. 2017: California launched legal sales of recreational marijuana.
Tuesday, Jan. 2
1788: Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
1900: U.S. Secretary of State John Hay announced the “Open Door Policy” to facilitate trade with China. 1929: The United States and Canada reached agreement on joint action to preserve Niagara Falls.
1942: The Philippine capital of Manila was captured by Japanese forces during World War II.
1967: Republican Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as the new governor of California in a ceremony that took place in Sacramento shortly after midnight.
1974: President Richard Nixon signed legislation requiring states to limit highway speeds to 55 miles an hour as a way of conserving gasoline in the face of an OPEC oil embargo. (The 55 mph limit was effectively phased out in 1987; federal speed limits were abolished in 1995.)
2007: The state funeral for former President Gerald R. Ford began with an elaborate service at Washington National Cathedral, then moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
2018: Sen. Al Franken formally resigned from the Senate a month after the Minnesota Democrat announced his plan to leave Congress amid a series of sexual misconduct allegations, while NBC
News announced that Hoda Kotb would be the co-anchor of the first two hours of the “Today” show, replacing Matt Lauer following his firing due to sexual misconduct allegations.
Wednesday, Jan. 3
1777: Gen. George Washington’s army routed the British in the Battle of Princeton, New Jersey.
1861: More than two weeks before Georgia seceded from the Union, the state militia seized Fort Pulaski at the order of Gov. Joseph E. Brown. The Delaware House and Senate voted to oppose secession from the Union.
1868: The Meiji Restoration reestablished the authority of Japan’s emperor and heralded the fall of the military rulers known as shoguns.
1959: Alaska became the 49th state as President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a proclamation.
1961: President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced the United States was formally terminating diplomatic and consular relations with Cuba.
1967: Jack Ruby, the man who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald – the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy – died in a Dallas hospital.
1977: Apple Computer was incorporated in Cupertino, California, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula Jr.
1990: Ousted Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces, 10 days after taking refuge in the Vatican’s diplomatic mission.
2007: Gerald R. Ford was laid to rest on the grounds of his presidential museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, during a ceremony watched by thousands of onlookers.
2008: Illinois Sen. Barack Obama won Democratic caucuses in Iowa, while
Mike Huckabee won the Republican caucuses.
2013: Students from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, reconvened at a different building in the town of Monroe about three weeks after the massacre that had claimed the lives of 20 first-graders and six educators.
2018: President Donald Trump signed an executive order disbanding the controversial voter fraud commission he had set up to investigate the 2016 presidential election after alleging without evidence that voting fraud cost him the popular vote; the White House blamed the decision to end the panel on more than a dozen states that refused to cooperate.
2020: The United States killed Iran’s top general in an airstrike at Baghdad’s international airport; the Pentagon said Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds force, had been “actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members” in Iraq and elsewhere. Iran warned of retaliation.
Thursday, Jan. 4
1821: The first native-born American saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton, died in Emmitsburg, Maryland.
1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his State of the Union address, called for legislation to provide assistance for the jobless, elderly, impoverished children and the disabled.
1948: Burma (now called Myanmar) became independent of British rule. 1964: Pope Paul VI began a visit to the Holy Land, the first papal pilgrimage of its kind.
1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered his State of the Union address in which he outlined the goals of his “Great Society.”
1974: President Richard Nixon refused to hand over tape recordings and documents subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.
1987: 16 people were killed when an Amtrak train bound from Washington, D.C., to Boston collided with Conrail locomotives that had crossed into its path from a side track in Chase, Maryland.
1999: Europe’s new currency, the euro, got off to a strong start on its first trading day, rising against the dollar on world currency markets.
2006: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a significant stroke; his official powers were transferred to his deputy, Ehud Olmert. (Sharon remained in a coma until his death in January 2014.) 2007: Nancy Pelosi was elected the first female speaker of the House as Democrats took control of Congress.
2018: The Trump administration moved to vastly expand offshore drilling from the Atlantic to the Arctic oceans with a five-year plan that would open up federal waters off of California for the first time in decades and possibly open new areas of oil and gas exploration along the East Coast.
2023: Rick Singer, the mastermind of a nationwide college admissions bribery scandal, was sentenced to 3 ½ years in prison and ordered to pay $19 million after helping authorities secure the convictions of a slew of wealthy parents involved in his scheme to rig the selection process at top-tier schools.
Friday, Jan. 5
1896: An Austrian newspaper, Wiener Presse, reported the discovery by German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen of a type of radiation that came to be known as X-rays.
1914: Auto industrialist Henry Ford announced he was going to pay workers $5 for an 8-hour day, as opposed to $2.34 for a 9-hour day. (Employees still worked six days a week; the 5-day work week was instituted in 1926.)
1925: Democrat Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming took office as America’s first female governor, succeeding her late husband, William, following a special election.
1933: Construction began on the Golden Gate Bridge. (Work was completed four years later.)
1943: Educator and scientist George Washington Carver, who was born into slavery, died in Tuskegee, Alabama, at about age 80.
1949: In his State of the Union address, President Harry S. Truman labeled his administration the Fair Deal.
1953: Samuel Beckett’s two-act tragicomedy “Waiting for Godot,” considered a classic of the Theater of the Absurd, premiered in Paris.
1957: President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed assistance to countries to help them resist Communist aggression in what became known as the Eisenhower Doctrine.
1972: President Richard Nixon announced that he had ordered development of the space shuttle. 1994: Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, former speaker of the House of Representatives, died in Boston at age 81.
1998: Sonny Bono, the 1960s pop starturned-politician, was killed when he struck a tree while skiing at the Heavenly Ski Resort on the Nevada-California state line; he was 62.
2004: Foreigners arriving at U.S. airports were photographed and had their fingerprints scanned in the start of a government effort to keep terrorists out of the country.
2011: John Boehner was elected speaker as Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives on the first day of the new Congress.
2022: Australia denied entry to tennis star Novak Djokovic, who was seeking to play for a 10th Australian Open title later in the month; authorities canceled his visa because he failed to meet the requirements for an exemption to COVID-19 vaccination rules.
2023: Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his armed forces to observe a unilateral 36-hour cease-fire in Ukraine for the Orthodox Christmas holiday, the first such sweeping truce move in the nearly 11-month-old war.
Saturday, Jan. 6
1412: Tradition holds that Joan of Arc was born in Domremy.
1838: Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail gave the first successful public demonstration of their telegraph in Morristown, New Jersey.
1912: New Mexico became the 47th state.
1919: Former President Theodore Roosevelt died in Oyster Bay, New York, at age 60.
1941: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his State of the Union address, outlined a goal of “Four Freedoms”: Freedom of speech and expression; the freedom of people to worship God in their own way; freedom from want; freedom from fear.
1974: Year-round daylight saving time began in the United States on a trial basis as a fuel-saving measure in response to the OPEC oil embargo.
1982: Truck driver William G. Bonin was convicted in Los Angeles of 10 of the “Freeway Killer” slayings of young men and boys. (Bonin was later convicted of four other killings; he was executed in 1996.)
1994: Figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed on the leg by an assailant at Detroit’s Cobo Arena; four men, including the ex-husband of Kerrigan’s rival, Tonya Harding, went to prison for their roles in the attack. (Harding pleaded guilty to conspiracy to hinder prosecution, but denied any advance knowledge about the assault.)
2001: With his opponent, Vice President Al Gore, presiding in his capacity as president of the Senate, Congress formally certified George W. Bush the winner of the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election.
2005: Former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen was arrested on murder charges 41 years after three civil rights workers were slain in Mississippi. (Killen was later convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison; he died in prison in 2018.)
2006: Velvet-voiced singer Lou Rawls died in Los Angeles at age 72.
2013: The NHL and the players’ association agreed on a tentative pact to end a 113-day lockout.
2018: Pushing back against a new book that said his own aides questioned his competence, President Donald Trump defended his mental fitness in a series of tweets, saying that he is “like, really smart” and “a very stable genius.”
2020: Throngs of Iranians attended the funeral of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who’d been killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq; Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei wept while praying over the casket.
2021: Supporters of President Donald Trump, fueled by his false claims of a stolen election, assaulted police and smashed their way into the Capitol to interrupt the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, forcing lawmakers into hiding; most of the rioters had come from a nearby rally where Trump urged them to “fight like hell.” A Trump supporter, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed by a police officer as she tried to breach a barricaded doorway inside the Capitol. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, injured while confronting the rioters, suffered a stroke the next day and died from natural causes, the Washington, D.C., medical examiner’s office said. Congress reconvened hours later to finish certifying the election result.
2022: Actor Sidney Poitier, the first Black actor to win an Oscar for best lead performance and the first to be a top box-office draw, died at age 94, while Peter Bogdanovich, director of 1970s black-and-white classics “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” died at 82.