On January 22, 1863, the January Uprising broke out in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. The aim of this nationalist movement was to regain the Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian Commonwealth from occupation by Russia. The uprising was not a success, completely crushed the next year.
On January 21, 1950, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, with Whittaker Chambers being the main witness in Hiss’s prosecution. Chambers confessed to having been a Soviet spy, and accused Hiss as an accomplice, which Hiss denied to his dying day. Chambers gave a fascinating account of all this in his bestselling 1952 memoir, Witness.
On January 20, 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union was founded.
On January 19, 1795, the Batavian Republic was proclaimed in the Netherlands, replacing the Dutch Republic.
On January 18, 1919, Ignacy Jan Paderewski — an internationally famous pianist and composer — became newly independent Poland’s first prime minister.
January 17, 1918: The first serious battles take place between the Red Guards and the White Guard in the Finnish Civil War.
On January 16, 1786, Virginia enacted the Statute for Religious Freedom authored by Thomas Jefferson.
The day is also noted in the title of Ayn Rand’s hit play, Night of January 16th. First performed in 1934 as Woman on Trial, it continued on over the next few years under the title with which it is now famous, and (with the addition of the definite article before “Night”) under which it was filmed in 1941.
On January 15, 1777, New Connecticut declared independence from the crown of Great Britain and the colony of New York.
Delegates first named the independent state New Connecticut and, in June 1777, settled on the name Vermont, an imperfect translation of the French for Green Mountain.
This new “Vermont Republic” minted copper coins, starting in 1785. The people of Vermont took part in the American Revolution although the Continental Congress did not recognize the jurisdiction, because of vehement objections from New York, which had conflicting property claims.
In 1791, Vermont was admitted to the United States as the 14th state, upon which its minting of coins ceased.
On January 14, 1639, the first written constitution to create a government, the “Fundamental Orders,” was adopted in Connecticut.
On January 13, 1833, United States President Andrew Jackson wrote to Vice President Martin Van Buren expressing his opposition to South Carolina’s defiance of federal authority in the Nullification Crisis. Jackson insisted that “the crisis must be now met with firmness” and “the modern doctrine of nullification & secession put down forever.”
South Carolina had blamed protectionist high tariffs for the severity of the economic slump of the time, and Andrew Jackson’s compromise Tariff of 1832 was still too much special-interest “protectionism” for South Carolina, which threatened to nullify the law as unconstitutional. Jackson, though he agreed that the tariffs were too high, was still a nationalist at heart, having no sympathy for dissidents in the southern states. (The tariffs were designed by northern politicians to encourage the growth of industry. The belief among most economists of that time was that such high “protective” tariffs favored certain businesses at the expense of the general consumer as well as businesses not under the “protection,” particularly farmers and agricultural producers.) After the crisis subsided, tariffs were further reduced from the 1832 level, much lower than of 1828’s “Tariff of Abominations,” which had been signed into law by President John Quincy Adams — and written mainly by Martin Van Buren as a way to precipitate the election of Jackson.
Since the somewhat ambiguous end to the Nullification Crisis, the doctrine of state prerogatives — “states’ rights” — has been asserted by opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, proponents of California’s Specific Contract Act of 1863 (which nullified the Legal Tender Act of 1862), opponents of Federal acts prohibiting the sale and possession of marijuana in the first decade of the 21st century, and opponents of implementation of laws and regulations pertaining to firearms from the late 1900s up to 2013. State opposition to ObamaCare has also recently conjured up the issue.
On January 13, 1898, Émile Zola’s J’accuse exposed the Dreyfus affair.