TODAY IN HISTORY

WEDNESDAY JAN 11, 2023

1908

President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the Grand Canyon National Monument.

1913

The first enclosed sedantype automobile, a Hudson, went on display at the 13th National Automobile Show in New York.

1927

The creation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was proposed during a dinner of Hollywood luminaries at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

1935

Aviator Amelia Earhart began an 18-hour trip from Honolulu to Oakland, California, that made her the first person to fly solo across any part of the Pacific Ocean.

1943

The United States and Britain signed treaties relinquishing extraterritorial rights in China.

1963

The Beatles’ single “Please Please Me” was released in Britain by Parlophone.

1964

U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry issued “Smoking and Health,” a report that concluded that “cigarette smoking contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific diseases and to the overall death rate.”

1978

Two Soviet cosmonauts aboard the Soyuz 27 capsule linked up with the Salyut 6orbiting space station, where the Soyuz 26 capsule was already docked.

1989

Nine days before leaving the White House, President Ronald Reagan bade the nation farewell in a primetime address, saying of his eight years in office: “We meant to change a nation and instead we changed a world.”

2003

Calling the death penalty process “arbitrary and capricious, and therefore immoral,” Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences of 167 condemned inmates, clearing his state’s death row two days before leaving office.

2020

Health authorities in the central Chinese city of Wuhan reported the first death from what had been identified as a new type of coronavirus; the patient was a 61-year-old man who’d been a frequent customer at a food market linked to the majority of cases there.