December 28, 169 B.C.: The menorah is lit to rededicate the Holy Temple of Jerusalem, after two centuries of foreign rule and religious oppression and a seven-year revolt. Though the Maccabees have enough oil for merely one day, the menorah burns for eight days, birthing the holiday Hanukkah.
December 29, 1997: Hong Kong begins to kill all the nation’s 1.25 million chickens, to stop the spread of a potentially deadly influenza strain.
December 30, 2006: Former President of Iraq Saddam Hussein is executed.
December 30, 1853: The United States and Mexico signed the war-ending Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo under which the U.S. agreed to buy some 45,000 square miles of land from Mexico for $10 million in a deal known as the Gadsden Purchase. It included much of the land in Arizona south of Phoenix and a narrower strip of Texas running east almost to El Paso.
December 31, 1853: A dinner party is held inside a life-size model of an iguanodon, created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and Sir Richard Owen in south London.
January 1, 1898: New York, New York annexes land from surrounding counties, creating the City of Greater New York. The four initial boroughs, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and The Bronx, are joined on January 25 by Staten Island to create the modern city of five boroughs.
January 2, 1860: The discovery of the planet Vulcan is announced at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. It is not until Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that the “evidence” for Vulcan’s existence is finally debunked.
January 2, 1960: Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts launched his successful bid for the presidency.
January 2, 1974: President Richard Nixon signed legislation requiring states to limit highway speeds to 55 miles per hour as a way of conserving gasoline in the face of an OPEC oil embargo.
January 3, 1977: Apple Computer is incorporated.
January 3, 1777: Gen. George Washington and elements of the Continental Army win the Battle of Princeton against a British force led by Lt. Col. Charles Mawhood. At one point Washington rashly rode between the opposing infantry lines; a subordinate, expecting to see the general shot from the saddle, took off his hat and covered his eyes. After volleys from both sides, Washington was unharmed, and rallied the American troops to win the day.
January 3, 1892: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is born in Bloemfontein, Orange Free State, in south Africa. He was taken to England with his family at age three, and would later go on to write The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, among other works, as well as having a distinguished academic career.
January 4, 1903: Topsy, an elephant, is electrocuted by the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island. The Edison film company shoots the film Electrocuting an Elephant of Topsy’s death.
January 5, 1933: Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge begins in San Francisco Bay.
January 6, 1912: German geophysicist Alfred Wegener first presents his theory of continental drift.
January 7, 1955: Contralto Marian Anderson becomes the first person of color to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, in Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera.
January 8, 1835: The United States national debt is zero for the only time.
January 8, 1935: Rock-and-roll legend Elvis Aron Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi.
January 9, 1349: The entire Jewish population of Basel, Switzerland, believed by the residents to be the cause of the ongoing Black Death, is rounded up and incinerated.
January 9, 2015: Snowy conditions lead to a 193-vehicle pileup on I-94 in Michigan, causing a semi-trailer truck loaded with 40,000 pounds of fireworks to explode. This occurred near Climax MI, about 15 miles (25 km) east of Kalamazoo. Amazingly, there was only one fatality.
Unfortunately, the cause of the accident was negligence. Though the weather was far from ideal, drivers had been going too fast for the conditions. A total of 63 people received tickets for driving improperly in the wintry circumstances.
And with two major crashes involving 100-plus vehicles that have shut down parts of Interstate highways already this year, it appears that some people never will learn.
-“BB”-
January 10, 1863: The London Underground, the world’s oldest underground railway, opens between London Paddington station and Farringdon station.
January 11, 1922: First use of insulin to treat diabetes in a human patient.