TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: JANUARY 6
1066 Harold Godwineson is crowned King Harold II – King of England.
1497 Jews are expelled from Graz (Syria)
1540 Henry VIII of England marries his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. The marriage will last six months.
1649 The English Rump Parliament votes to put Charles I on trial for treason and other “high crimes”
1681 1st recorded boxing match (Duke of Albemarle’s butler vs his butcher)
1838 Samuel Morse presents the telegraph to the public
1861 The Governor of Maryland, Thomas Hicks, announces his opposition to the state’s possible secession from the Union.
1861 New York City NY mayor proposes New York become a free city, trading with N & S
1900 In India, it was reported that millions of people were dying from starvation.
1907 Maria Montessori opens her first school. Montessori’s revolutionary educational approach is practiced at about 30,000 schools today.
1910 Union leaders ask President William H. Taft to investigate U.S. Steel’s practices.
1912 Geophysicist and meteorologist Alfred Wegener presents his controversial theory of continental drift in a lecture at the Geological Association (Geologischen Vereinigung) at the Senckenberg-Museum, Frankfurt
1912 New Mexico became the 47th state in the United States.
1921 The U.S. Navy orders the sale of 125 flying boats to encourage commercial aviation.
1929 Mother Theresa arrives in India. Through her tireless work in helping the poor and ill, the Albanian religious sister later received the Nobel Peace Prize and was posthumously beatified.
1941 US President Franklin Roosevelt makes his “Four Freedoms” speech (freedom of speech and worship; freedom from want and fear) during his US State of Union address
1958 Gibson patents the Flying V Guitar
1973 “Schoolhouse Rock” premieres on ABC-TV with Multiplication Rock
1982 William G. Bonin was convicted in Los Angeles, CA, of being the “freeway killer” who had murdered 14 young men and boys.
1987 Astronomers report sighting a new galaxy 12 billion light years away.
1994 Figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed on the right leg by an assailant at Cobo Arena in Detroit, MI. Four men were later sentenced to prison for the attack, including Tonya Harding’s ex-husband.
1999 The 106th U.S. Congress opened. The first item on the agenda was the impeachment proceedings of U.S. President Bill Clinton. The trial was set to begin January 7, 1999.
2001 In one of the closest Presidential elections in U.S. history, George W. Bush was finally declared the winner of the bitterly contested 2000 Presidential elections more than five weeks after the election due to the disputed Florida ballots.
2005 Former Ku Klux Klan organizer Edgar Ray Killen is arrested as a suspect in the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi.
REFERENCES: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeoplehistory.com, timeandate.com, factmonster.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
