Category: Today

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.

On Dec. 27, 1657, thirty non-​Quakers signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition to Peter Stuyvesant, Director-​General of the New Netherland colony requesting an exemption to his ban on Quaker worship. In 1663, the Dutch West India Company informed Stuyvesant to end religious persecution in the colony, which was the northeast Atlantic coast, including what is now New York City. The petition is considered a precursor to the First Amendment’s provision guaranteeing freedom of religion.