JANUARY Historic Notes from Phyllis Barr

What happened in past Januarys?

(trivia…who is in the photo and why is she here?)
Compiled from both on-line and old-fashioned sources such as hard copy books!

compiled by Phyllis Barr, 2010
Corporate Culture Marketing
212-765-6968
ladyhistory@earthlink.net

January 1, 1787 – Benjamin Franklin published “Thoughts Upon Female Education.”

January 1, 1898 – Greater New York was created by joining together what are now the five boroughs. Before that New York City referred only to Manhattan. Brooklyn had been one of the largest cities in America before that date. Many Brooklynites did not want to join Greater New York.

January 2, 1831 – “The Liberator,” an abolitionist newspaper, was published for the first time.

January 3, 1793 – Lucretia Mott, a reformer, antislavery and women’s rights’ activist was born. She was an organizer of the Women’s Rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.

January 5, 1925  – The first woman governor in the United Sates, Mrs. Nellie Ross, took office in Wyoming, completing her husband’s term of office.

January 5, 1943, George Washington Carver, an Aftican-American agricultural scientist and educator, died. He was an inventor who found hundreds of uses for peanuts and soybeans, etc.  His discoveries and inventions had an impact on products from peanut butter to cosmetics, and many others as well.

January 5, 1978 Actress January Jones (MadMen) is born in Sioux Fall, SD

January 9, 1788 – Connecticut was the fifth state to ratify the United States Constitution.

January 9, 1866 – Fisk University was founded. It is located in Nashville, TN.

January 10, 1776 – Thomas Paine published “Common Sense.” This pamphlet was very influential in rallying people to the cause of the Patriots in the months after the Battle of Bunker Hill and before the Declaration of Independence.

January 10, 1866 – The Georgia Equal Right Association was organized.

January 10, 1879 – Marie Younger, a reformer and suffragette, was born.

January 11, 1755 – The first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, was born. His wife Elisabeth Schuyler Hamilton was one of the founders of the Orphan Asylum Society in 1806, today’s Graham Windham.

January 15, 1929 – Civil Rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  was born.

January 16, 1920 -  Prohibition went into effect in the United States.

January 18, 1778 – Capt. James Cook was the first European to sight the Hawaiian Islands.

January 21, 1928 – The IRT subway was completed.

January 22, 1832 – Molly McCauley, aka Molly Pitcher, a heroine of the American battlefield during the American Revolution, died. She had carried water to the soldiers.

January 25, 1915 – Alexander Graham Bell, who was in New York City, called Dr. Thomas Watson in San Francisco — the first transcontinental telephone call. (What would he think about cell phones?)

January 25, 1961 – President John Fitzgerald Kennedy held the first live presidential news conference before a television audience.

January 27, 1961 – Leontyne Price made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan. She was the first African-American to sing on that stage. (Editor’s Note: I got to go to one of the performances!)

January 30, 1836 – Betsy Ross, legendary maker of the first American flag, was born. This “fact” is in dispute. Some believe that the design was based on the Washington family seal from George Washington’s ancestors who lived in England.  (Editor’s Note: I saw a window in his family’s ancestral home which had a stained glass section with stars and stripes.)

January 30, 1882 – Future Governor of New York and the only President elected to four terms as President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was born.