CatSalgado32
January can feel slow and dull after the holidays, but it was a tumultuous month in many countries throughout history. Below are a few of the important events and birthdays that occurred this past week.
January 12
1737 – John Hancock is born in Massachusetts. He went on to become the president of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and governor of Massachusetts.
1893 – Hermann Göring, Nazi commander of the Luftwaffe (German air force) during World War II, is born.
January 13
1929 – Wyatt Earp, iconic figure of the Wild West and hero of many stories then and since, dies.
January 14
1741 – Future American traitor Benedict Arnold is born.
1761 – The Afghanis defeat the Indian Marathas in the Third Battle of Panipat.
1943 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt arrives in Morocco for the start of a 10-day conference with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the Allies’ plan for prosecuting World War II.
January 15
588 BC – Estimated date of Babylon’s Nebuchadnezzar beginning his siege of Jerusalem, eventually leading to the Babylonian Captivity (see 4 Kings 25).
69 AD – Roman Emperor Galba is assassinated by his former ally Otho.
1929 – Martin Luther King Jr. is born. While he was an inspiring American civil rights leader, he also had serious moral flaws, including plagiarizing and serial adultery.
2009 – Pilot Captain Sullenberger accomplishes the “Miracle on the Hudson” when he safely lands his plan on NYC’s Hudson River after the engines failed.
January 16
27 BC – Reported as the date on which Octavian was given the title Augustus (“majestic”), under which he became famous as Augustus Caesar.
1547 – Reported date of the coronation of Ivan the Terrible, Russia’s first Czar (Tsar).
1901 – Hiram Revels, a Republican who had served as the first black American senator, dies.
January 17
1504 – Antonio Ghislieri, the future Pope St. Pius V, is born. He would implement the reforms of the Council of Trent.
1706 – Benjamin Franklin is born in Boston. One of the most famous and influential of the American Founding Fathers, a “statesman, author, publisher, scientist, inventor and diplomat,” he helped draft the Declaration of Independence, negotiated the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolution, and was also a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.
January 18
1782 – Daniel Webster is born. A famous American politician and subject of popular folklore—including “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” where Webster is depicted winning his case for a man’s soul against the Devil—he worked to save the Union amidst the increasingly violent and divisive slavery debate. While Webster compromised on slavery in politics, he personally helped liberate multiple slaves.
January 19
532 – Byzantine Empress Theodora refuses to let her husband Justinian flee Constinople amidst the dangerous Nika riots, started by the Green and Blue chariot racing factions after the attempted execution of two of their athletes. The Nika riots threatened to unseat Justinian. Gen. Belisarius and his troops ultimately invaded the Hippodrome amphitheater and massacred an estimated 30,000 people.
1807 – Robert E. Lee is born. He turned traitor during the Civil War, however, putting loyalty to his state and its obsession with preserving slavery over loyalty to the country his father fought so hard to create. Though he had previously freed his own slaves, his top military position in the Confederate Army caused him to act in an increasingly racist and morally evil manner, and he enforced the egregious Confederate law that ordered the war crimes of the rounding up of every “slave” (i.e. every black person encountered), the enslavement or murder of every black Union soldier, and the execution of white Union officers of black troops. This culminated in Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Ft. Pillow massacre of hundreds of black and white Union troops who surrendered. It was after the massacre and Forrest’s boasting about it, at the end of the war, that Lee praised Forrest as his greatest general. Read more on Substack.
January 20
1841 – China cedes Hong Kong to the British during the First Opium war.
1942 – “15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question.’ [Holocaust Encyclopedia]”
1955 – The Battle of Yijiangshan Islands concludes, after a Chinese Communist attack on the free Chinese in Taiwan.
Read the rest on Substack.
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