January 12, 1967, Dr. James Bedford became the first person to be cryonically preserved with intent of future resuscitation.
Cryogenic preservation for future revival of brain and somatic function has been a concept often used in science fiction, such as in the 1966 grade B horror film The Frozen Dead and the 1976 novel A World Out of Time — the latter in which author Larry Niven dubs the recipients of such treatment “corpsicles.”
On January 11, 1571, the freedom of religion was granted to Austrian nobility.
Two years earlier, the first recorded lottery in England was held.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the eleventh day of the first month of 1759, the first American life insurance company was incorporated.
On January 11, 1935, Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California.
On this date in 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of 167 prisoners on Illinois’s death row based on the Jon Burge torture/duress scandal.
On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense.
You can read this classic on this site’s library.
On January 9, 1793, Jean-Pierre Blanchard became the first person to fly in a balloon in the United States.
Precisely 13 decades later, Juan de la Cierva y Codorníu, 1st Count of la Cierva, made the first autogyro flight.
Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
On January 8, 1790, President George Washington delivered the first State of the Union address in New York City.
On January 7, 1940, the Finnish 9th Division completely destroyed the much-larger Soviet forces on the Raate-Suomussalmi Road, in a crucial battle during Finland’s Winter War.
On January 6, 1907, Maria Montessori opened her first school and daycare center for working class children in Rome, Italy.
In 1912 on this date New Mexico became the 47th state of America’s United States.
On this date in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his “Four Freedoms” State of the Union speech, emphasizing vague “freedoms” that enabled government to usurp definable freedoms.
On January 6, 2021, lame duck President Donald John Trump gave a speech in Washington, D.C., aiming to rouse his supporters to pressure the U.S. Senate not to certify some states’ Electoral College votes in Election 2020, to address “election fraud.” Before his speech ended, some of his supporters (along with false flag agents) broke into the Capitol to set off one of the great political controversies of our time.
On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day’s labor.
On Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles I of England sent soldiers to arrest members of Parliament, beginning England’s slide into civil war.
On Jan. 4, 1649, the English “Rump Parliament,” having purged those members willing to restore Charles I to the throne, voted to put Charles I on trial for high treason. Before the month was over, the king had been executed.
On January 3, 1848, Joseph Jenkins Roberts was sworn in as the first president of the African state of Liberia. Born as a free black in Norfolk, Virginia, he was an American merchant who emigrated to Liberia in 1829, where he became a politician. He served as the first (1848–1856) and seventh (1872–1876) president of Liberia.