Category: Today

On Jan. 11, 2010, Miep Gies, who helped to hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis during World War II, died in the Netherlands. She was 100 years old. In July 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in an attic apartment behind Otto Frank’s business. Gies, along with her husband Jan, a Dutch social worker, and several of Otto Frank’s other employees risked their lives to smuggle food and supplies to the Franks and several other Jews in hiding. After the Franks were discovered in 1944 and sent to concentration camps, Gies rescued the notebooks that Anne Frank left behind describing her two years in hiding. These writings were later published as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” which became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust.

On Jan. 10, 2003, then-Illinois Governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of 167 prisoners on Illinois’ death row in the aftermath of a scandal involving Chicago detective Jon Burge, who was accused of torturing suspects into making confessions and later found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice.

On Jan. 10, 1738, Ethan Allen was born. Allen was a Revolutionary War hero, who led the Green Mountain Boys to capture Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775. Allen is also known as one fo the founders of the State of Vermont.

On Jan. 9, 1776, Thomas Paine published the pamphlet “Common Sense,” expounding his argument for American independence from Britain, though the work’s original attribution was simply “Written by an Englishman.” Born in England in 1737, Paine had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1774, just two years before his 47-page pamphlet sold some 500,000 copies, powerfully influencing American opinion.

On Jan. 8, 1815, American militiamen under the command of General Andrew Jackson won the biggest victory of the War of 1812 against an invading British force of nearly twice its size at the Battle of New Orleans. The British had close to 2,000 casualties, while only eight Americans were killed and 13 wounded. Ironically, due to the slow speed of communications at the time, the victory came two weeks after the war of 1812 officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent.

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.