Portal:United States/Anniversaries/January/January 12
- 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.