TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – JAN 20
1327 Edward II of England is deposed by his eldest son, Edward III.
1616 The French explorer Samuel de Champlain arrives to winter in a Huron Indian village after being wounded in a battle with Iroquois in New France.
1783 Britain signs a peace agreement with France and Spain, who allied against it in the American War of Independence.
1801 John Marshall was appointed Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
1841 China cedes Hong Kong to the British during the 1st Opium War
1885 LaMarcus A. Thompson of Coney Island patented the roller coaster.
1887 The U.S. Senate approved an agreement to lease Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as a naval base.
1908 The Sullivan Ordinance bars women from smoking in public facilities in the United States.
1935 Belgium arrests some Nazi agitators who urge for a return to the Reich.
1937 Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the first U.S. President to be inaugurated on January 20th. The 20th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution officially set the date for the swearing in of the President and Vice President.
1941 Hitler meets with Mussolini and offers aid in Albania and Greece.
1942 Nazi officials meet in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to decide the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”
1945 Franklin D. Roosevelt is inaugurated for his fourth term.
1977 President Jimmy Carter is sworn in and then surprises the nation as he walks from the U.S. Capitol to the White House.
1981 Ronald Reagan is sworn in as president at the same time 52 American hostages are released from their captors in Tehran, Iran.
1985 The most-watched Super Bowl game in history was seen by an estimated 115.9 million people. The San Francisco 49ers defeated the Miami Dolphins, 38-16. Super Bowl XIX marked the first time that TV commercials sold for a million dollars a minute.
1986 New footage of the 1931 “Frankenstein” was found. The footage was originally deleted because it was considered to be too shocking.
1987 Anglican Church envoy Terry Waite was kidnapped in Beirut, Lebanon. He was there attempting to negotiate the release of Western hostages. He was not freed until November 1991.
1994 Shannon Faulkner became the first woman to attend classes at The Citadel in South Carolina. Faulkner joined the cadet corps in August 1995 under court order but soon dropped out.
1998 American researchers announced that they had cloned calves that may produce medicinal milk.
2009 Barack Obama, inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States of America, becomes the United States’ first African-American president
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
