Category: Today

On Jan. 7, 1979, invading Vietnamese troops captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, toppling the brutal regime of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot had attempted to establish an agrarian utopia, evacuating the cities and closing schools and factories. He abolished private property and created collective farms. Intellectuals and skilled workers were killed and modern technology outlawed. An estimated two million Cambodians died by execution, forced labor, and starvation.

On Jan. 6, 1412, Joan of Arc, the French military figure and Roman Catholic Saint, was born.

On Jan. 6, 1929, Mother Teresa arrived in Calcutta, India, and began begin her work among India’s poor and sick.

On Jan. 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his “Four Freedoms” speech in the State of the Union address.

On Jan. 5, 1968, the “Prague Spring” began as Alexander Dubcek became ruler of Czechoslovakia and instituted political and economic reforms, including increased freedom of speech and the rehabilitation of political dissidents. In August, the Soviet Union ended Dubcek’s reforms by marching 600,000 Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia.

On Jan. 5, 1970, the bodies of dissident union leader Jock Yablonski, his wife, and daughter were discovered, murdered by killers hired by the United Mine Workers (UMW) union leadership. Jock Yablonski had run against UMW President Tony Boyle in the 1969 union leadership election and, after losing to Boyle, Yablonski asked the Labor Department to investigate for fraud. The murder investigation ended in nine convictions, including union leader Tony Boyle.

On Jan. 3, 1968, Senator Eugene McCarthy (D‑Minnesota) announced he would challenge incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination. In March, spurred by public opposition to Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, McCarthy came within a few hundred votes of beating Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. At the end of March, Johnson withdrew from the race.

On Jan. 3, 1777, General George Washington evaded the numerically superior forces of British General Cornwallis dispatched to trap him in Trenton and went north to rout the British rear guard in the Battle of Princeton.

On Jan. 2, 1962, The Weavers, a folk music quartet, were banned from appearing on “The Jack Paar Show” by NBC, after the performers each refused to sign a political loyalty oath. One of the most significant popular-​music groups of the postwar era, The Weavers career was nearly destroyed during the Red Scare of the 1950s, when Pete Seeger and Lee Hays were denounced as Communist Party members by an FBI informant (who later recanted). The entire group was placed under FBI surveillance and not allowed to perform on radio or television until the late 1950s. In 1955, both Hays and Seeger were called to testify before the House Committee on Un-​American Activities, where Hays took the Fifth Amendment, while Seeger refused to answer on First Amendment grounds – the first person to do so after the Hollywood Ten were convicted in 1950. Seeger was found guilty of contempt and placed under restrictions by the court pending appeal, but in 1961 his conviction was overturned on constitutional grounds. Seeger, who left the group in 1958, didn’t appear on television again until 1968 on the Smothers Brothers show.

On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the final Emancipation Proclamation, which ended slavery in the rebelling states. A preliminary proclamation had been issued in September 1862, following the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam. As the proclamation freed slaves only in rebellious areas, it actually freed no one, since these were areas not yet under Union control. Yet, the act signaled an important shift in the Union’s Civil War aims, expanding the goal of the war from reunification to include the eradication of slavery.

On Dec. 31, 1879, Thomas Alva Edison lit up a street in Menlo Park, New Jersey, the first public demonstration of his incandescent lightbulb. Although the first incandescent lamp had been produced 40 years earlier, no inventor had been able to come up with a practical design until Edison embraced the challenge in the late 1870s.

On Dec. 30, 1853, American Ambassador to Mexico James Gadsden signed what came to be known as the Gadsden Purchase, a treaty whereby the U.S. bought a 29,670-square-mile region of present-​day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico from Mexico. The purchase was the last major territorial addition to the contiguous United States. Purchasing property is the proper way for a free country to acquire it.

On Dec. 29, 1940, London suffered its most devastating air raid when the German Luftwaffe firebombed the city. The next day, a newspaper photo of St. Paul’s Cathedral standing undamaged amid the smoke and flames seemed to symbolize the capital’s unconquerable spirit during the Battle of Britain.

On Dec. 29, 1890, the U.S. Army massacred hundreds of Sioux at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

On Dec. 29, 1170, Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered by followers of King Henry II in Canterbury Cathedral, after engaging in conflict with the king over the rights and privileges of the Church. Becket is venerated as a saint and martyr by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.

On Dec. 28, 1793, Thomas Paine was arrested in France for treason. The American patriot and author of the revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense, had traveled to Paris to assist in the French Revolution. Originally, Paine was welcomed and given honorary citizenship. His book against royalty, The Rights of Man, was popular with the leaders of the revolution. However, Paine was a strong opponent of the death penalty and was vocal against the revolutionaries’ use of the guillotine. Paine was released in November 1794.

On Dec. 28, 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris. The book about the police-​state system in the Soviet Union from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution to 1956 was an instant success in the West, but Soviet officials were livid and on February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his citizenship, and deported.