Portal:United States/Anniversaries/January

United States January anniversaries

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These are the selected anniversaries for January that appear on the United States portal.

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See also

• Yearly "...in the United States" articles, such as 2024 in the United States.
• United States history categories (Select [+] to view subcategories)

History of the United States

January 1

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Today is New Year's Day.

• 1863 – The Emancipation Proclamation takes effect in Confederate territory.
• 1892 – Ellis Island opens to begin processing immigrants into the United States.
• 1898 – New York City annexes land from surrounding counties, creating the City of Greater New York. The four initial boroughs, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and The Bronx, are joined on January 25 by Staten Island to create the modern city of five boroughs.
• 1934 – Alcatraz Island (pictured) becomes a United States federal prison.
• 1983 – The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) officially changes to using the Internet Protocol, creating the Internet.

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January 2

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• 1788 – Georgia becomes the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution
• 1791 – In what becomes known as the Big Bottom massacre, Delaware and Wyandot Indians attack a new settlement at the edge of the Muskingum River in the Ohio Country, marking the beginning of the Northwest Indian War.
• 1901 – Bob Marshall (pictured), author, government official, and one of the founders of The Wilderness Society, is born. Today he is considered largely responsible for the wilderness preservation movement in America.
• 1920 – The second Palmer Raid takes place, with 6,000 suspected communists and anarchists arrested and held without trial across several U.S. cities.
• 1942 – The Federal Bureau of Investigation convicts 33 members of a German spy ring headed by Fritz Joubert Duquesne in the largest espionage case in United States history.
• 1949 – Luis Muñoz Marín becomes the first democratically elected governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. All previous holders of the office were appointed, first by the King of Spain, then by the President of the United States.

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January 3

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• 1823 – Stephen F. Austin receives a grant of land in Texas from the government of Mexico.
• 1870 – The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge begins.
• 1888 – The James Lick telescope (pictured), a refracting telescope at the Lick Observatory in San Jose, California, is used for the first time. It was the largest refracting telescope in the world at the time.
• 1938 – The March of Dimes is established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• 1957 – The Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch.
• 1959 – Alaska is admitted as the 49th U.S. State.

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January 4

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• 1777 – American general George Washington defeats British general Charles Cornwallis at the Battle of Princeton.
• 1865 – The New York Stock Exchange opens its first permanent headquarters, at 10-12 Broad near Wall Street in New York City.
• 1896 – Utah is admitted as the 45th U.S. state.
• 1903 – Topsy, an elephant, is electrocuted by the owners of Luna Park in Coney Island, New York City.
• 1965 – President Lyndon B. Johnson delivers a State of the Union address in which he outlines his "Great Society", a platform centered around the elimination of racial injustice and poverty.
• 2004 – Spirit (pictured), one of a pair of Mars Exploration Rovers sent to survey the geology of Mars, makes a successful landing. Its twin, Opportunity rover would land on the opposite side of the planet three weeks later.

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January 5

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• 1911 – Kappa Alpha Psi, the world's second oldest and largest black fraternity, is founded at Indiana University.
• 1914 – The Ford Motor Company announces an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 per day, double what it was previously paying.
• 1925 – Nellie Tayloe Ross (pictured) of Wyoming becomes the first female governor in the United States.
• 1933 – Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge begins in San Francisco Bay.
• 1957 – In a speech given to Congress, President Dwight D. Eisenhower announces the establishment of what will later be called the Eisenhower Doctrine.
• 2005 – Eris, the largest known dwarf planet in the Solar System, is discovered by the team of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz using images originally taken on October 21, 2003 at the Palomar Observatory in California.

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January 6

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• 1838 – Samuel Morse successfully tests the electrical telegraph for the first time, at the Speedwell Ironworks near Morristown, New Jersey.
• 1893 – The Washington National Cathedral (pictured) is chartered by Congress. Construction would not begin until 1907, and would not end until 1990.
• 1910 – The Great White Fleet, a fleet of United States Navy battleships that completed a circumnavigation of the globe between 1907 and 1909, passes through the Suez Canal. It is the largest group of ships to pass through the canal up to that time.
• 1912 – New Mexico is admitted as the 47th U.S. state.
• 1941 – President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivers his Four Freedoms Speech during the State of the Union Address.
• 1974 – In response to the 1973 energy crisis, daylight saving time commences nearly four months early in the United States.

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January 7

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• 1800 – Millard Fillmore (pictured), 13th President of the United States and the last member of the Whig Party to hold the office, is born.
• 1927 – The first transatlantic telephone service is established from New York City to London.
• 1952 – President Harry Truman announces that the United States has successfully detonated its first hydrogen bomb.
• 1954 – The Georgetown–IBM experiment, the first public demonstration of a machine translation system, is held in New York at the head office of IBM.
• 1968 – Surveyor 7, the last spacecraft in the Surveyor series, lifts off from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 36A on its mission to explore the surface of the Moon.
• 1999 – The Senate trial in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton begins. He would later be acquitted of all charges.

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January 8

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• 1790 – George Washington delivers the first State of the Union Address in New York City.
• 1877 – Crazy Horse and his warriors fight their last battle against the United States Cavalry at Wolf Mountain, Montana Territory.
• 1918 – President Woodrow Wilson announces his "Fourteen Points" for the aftermath of World War I.
• 1935 – Elvis Presley (pictured), cultural icon and one of the most popular singers of the 20th century, was born.
• 1964 – President Lyndon B. Johnson declares a "War on Poverty" in the United States.
• 2011 – An attempted assassination of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and subsequent shooting in Casas Adobes, Arizona at a Safeway grocery store kills 6 people and wounds 13, including Giffords.

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January 9

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• 1788 – Connecticut becomes the fifth state to be admitted to the United States.
• 1863 – The Battle of Fort Hindman, part of the Vicksburg Campaign of the Civil War begins in Arkansas.
• 1894 – New England Telephone and Telegraph installs the first battery-operated telephone switchboard in Lexington, Massachusetts.
• 1913 – Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States, is born.
• 1945 – The United States invades Luzon (pictured) in the Philippines as part of the Pacific Theater of Operations of World War II.
• 1991 – Representatives from the United States and Iraq meet at the Geneva Peace Conference to try to find a peaceful resolution to the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait.

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January 10

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• 1901 – The first great Texas oil gusher is discovered at Spindletop (pictured) in Beaumont, Texas.
• 1920 – The Treaty of Versailles takes effect, officially ending World War I. The United States entered the war in 1917.
• 1946 – The United States Army Signal Corps successfully conducts Project Diana, bouncing radio waves off the moon and receiving the reflected signals.
• 1962 – NASA announces plans to build the C-5 rocket. Better known as the Saturn V, the rocket would serve as the launch vehicle for every Apollo Project mission, including those that landed on the Moon.
• 1990 – Time Warner is formed from the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications Inc.
• 2003 – Illinois Governor George Ryan commutes the death sentences of 167 prisoners on Illinois' death row after it is discovered that Chicago Police Department detective Jon Burge elicited several confessions through the use of torture. The move effectively ends the use of the death penalty in the state.

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January 11

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• 1755 or 1757 – Alexander Hamilton (pictured), Founding Father, economist, and political philosopher, main author of the Federalist Papers, and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury, is born.
• 1907 – Abraham Joshua Heschel, Warsaw-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century, is born.
• 1927 – Louis B. Mayer, head of film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), announced the creation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at a banquet in Los Angeles, California.
• 1935 – Amelia Earhart becomes the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California.
• 1964 – United States Surgeon General Dr. Luther Leonidas Terry, M.D., publishes a landmark report saying that smoking may be hazardous to health, sparking nation- and worldwide anti-smoking efforts.

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January 12

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• 1737 – John Hancock, Founding Father, 4th & 13th President of the Continental Congress, and 1st & 3rd Governor of Massachusetts, is born.
• 1921 – Acting to restore confidence in baseball after the Black Sox Scandal, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis is elected as Major League Baseball's first commissioner.
• 1942 – As part of the mobilization for World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt reestablishes the National War Labor Board, an arbitration tribunal chartered with solving labor disputes in order to prevent work stoppages in areas critical to the war effort.
• 1986 – Congressman Bill Nelson (pictured) lifts off from Kennedy Space Center aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia on mission STS-61C as a Mission Specialist, becoming the second sitting Congressperson and the first sitting member of the House of Representatives to do so.
• 1991 – An act of Congress authorizes the use of military force to drive the military of Iraq out of Kuwait. The intervention would become known as the Gulf War.

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January 13

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January 14

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January 15

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January 16

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January 17

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• 1706 – Benjamin Franklin (pictured), who would become a leading author and printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, diplomat, and Founding Father of the United States, is born.
• 1899 – The United States takes possession of Wake Island in the Pacific Ocean.
• 1903 – El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico becomes part of the United States National Forest System as the Luquillo Forest Reserve.
• 1917 – The United States pays Denmark $25 million for the Virgin Islands.
• 1961 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers a televised farewell address to the nation three days before leaving office, in which he warns against the accumulation of power by the "military–industrial complex".
• 1899 – Infamous American gangster Al Capone is born.

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January 18

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• 1933 – Ray Dolby, inventor of the Dolby noise-reduction system, co-inventor of video tape recording, and founder of Dolby Laboratories, is born.
• 1911 – Eugene B. Ely lands a fixed-wing aircraft on the deck of the USS Pennsylvania using a tailhook apparatus, the first successful landing of an aircraft on a ship (pictured).
• 1944 – The Metropolitan Opera House in New York City hosts a jazz concert for the first time. The performers are Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Artie Shaw, Roy Eldridge and Jack Teagarden.
• 1978 – The roof structure of the Hartford Civic Center (now known as the XL Center) in Hartford, Connecticut collapses after a significant snowfall.
• 1983 – Thirty years after his death, the International Olympic Committee restores Jim Thorpe's Olympic medals to his family. Thorpe won two gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics for the Pentathlon and Decathlon, which were controversially stripped of him in 1913.

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January 19

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• 1809 – Edgar Allan Poe, a poet and author best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, is born. Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre.
• 1862 – The Battle of Mill Springs concludes, handing the Confederacy their first significant defeat in the American Civil War.
• 1883 – The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires, built by Thomas Edison, begins service at Roselle, New Jersey.
• 1920 – The United States Senate votes against joining the League of Nations.
• 1977 – Snow falls in Miami, Florida. This is the only time in the history of the city that snow has fallen.
• 1981 – United States and Iranian officials sign an agreement to release 52 American hostages after 14 months of captivity, ending the Iran Hostage Crisis.

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January 20

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January 21

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January 22

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January 23

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January 24

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January 25

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January 26

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January 27

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• 1776 – American Revolutionary War: Henry Knox's "noble train of artillery" arrives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• 1785 – The University of Georgia is founded, the first public university in the United States.
• 1825 – The U.S. Congress approves Indian Territory (in what is present-day Oklahoma), clearing the way for forced relocation of the Eastern Indians on the "Trail of Tears".
• 1951 – Nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site begins with a one-kiloton bomb dropped on Frenchman Flat.
• 1967 – Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee are killed in a fire during a test of their Apollo 1 spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
• 2003 – The first selections for the National Recording Registry are announced by the Library of Congress.

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January 28

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• 1878 – Yale Daily News becomes the first daily college newspaper in the United States.
• 1909 – United States troops leave Cuba with the exception of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base after being there since the Spanish–American War.
• 1915 – An act of the U.S. Congress creates the United States Coast Guard.
• 1964 – An unarmed USAF T-39 Sabreliner on a training mission is shot down over Erfurt, East Germany, by a Soviet MiG-19.
• 1982 – US Army general James L. Dozier is rescued by Italian anti-terrorism forces from captivity by the Red Brigades.
• 1986 – Space Shuttle program: STS-51-L mission – Space Shuttle Challenger breaks apart after liftoff killing all seven astronauts on board.

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January 29

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January 30

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• 1806 – The original Lower Trenton Bridge (also called the Trenton Makes the World Takes Bridge), which spans the Delaware River between Morrisville, Pennsylvania and Trenton, New Jersey, is opened.
• 1835 – In the first assassination attempt against a President of the United States, Richard Lawrence attempts to shoot president Andrew Jackson, but fails and is subdued by a crowd, including several congressmen as well as Jackson himself.
• 1847 – Yerba Buena, California is renamed San Francisco, California.
• 1862 – The first American ironclad warship, the USS Monitor is launched.
• 1911 – The destroyer USS Terry makes the first airplane rescue at sea saving the life of Douglas McCurdy ten miles from Havana, Cuba.
• 1989 – The American embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan is closed.

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January 31

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