Category: Today

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, and under questionable circumstances, some of his supporters (along with some possible 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.

On January 2, 1921, in a theater in Hradec Králové, Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. received its world premiere. The initials stood for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” a fictional company that created a line of intelligent workers, and from which the word “robot” was coined. In Czech, robota means forced labour of the kind that serfs were once required to perform on their masters’ lands; it is derived from rab, meaning “slave.”

On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was banned.

This was not a ban on the slave trade as such, of course, but of the buying of slaves from sources overseas.

On December 31, 1695, Englanders received a new tax, a window tax. One of the main responses to this was the bricking up of many British windows.

This last day of the year in 1991 marked the complete cessation of all institutions of the Soviet Union.

New Year’s Eve 1992 saw the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This has been dubbed the “Velvet Divorce.”

On December 30, 1919, Lincoln’s Inn in London, England, admitted its first female bar student.

On December 29, 1911, Mongolia gained independence from the Qing Dynasty.

The first Vice President of the United States to resign his office occurred on December 28, 1832, when the seventh, John C. Calhoun — serving at the job since March 4, 1825, under two presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson — vacated the position to take up his new calling as Senator from South Carolina (December 29, 1832 – March 3, 1843). After an unsuccessful bid for the presidency and a short stint as Secretary of State, Calhoun returned to the Senate on November 26, 1845, dying in office on March 31, 1850.

On the same date three years later, the great leader Osceola led his Seminole warriors into the Second Seminole War against the United States Army. Eleven years after that, Iowa joined the union as the 29th state.