January 01: Revolutionary Birthdays, Brazen Bath Houses & Confused Calendars plus Hangovers are a National Achievement!
Today's History: January 01, 2023
Happy New Year! We have officially entered the much anticipated Presidential election year, and if you rang it in with a bang, know that you’re in good company as it’s National Hangover Day.
It’s also National Bloody Mary Day. Hair of the dog, anyone?
Inexplicably, it’s also National Thank God It’s Monday Day — so shake off your case of the Mondays!
Now let’s get onto today’s history…
In Government…
On January 1, many revolutionary icons of the American founding were born; including Paul Revere (1735) and Betsy Ross (1752).
Related: In 1787 Arthur Middleton died at the age of 44. Middleton was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and he was a prisoner of war following that fateful signature.
January 1st is a big day for firsts, as new legislation typically goes into effect on the first day of a new year. Some of these firsts in US History include:
1797: Albany became the capital of New York
1847: Michigan abolished capital punishment
1862: First US income tax goes into effect
1934: Alcatraz officially became a federal prison
1934: The FDIC became effective
1962: The US Navy SEALs were born
1976: Liberty Bell moved to a new home
In 1788, Pennsylvania Quakers emancipated their slaves and, exactly 75 years later in 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. More than 100 years later in 1990, David Dinkins was sworn in as the first African American mayor of New York City.
Related: In 1910, African-American slave and quilt maker Harriet Powers passed away in 1910.
During the war of 1812, British troops burned the White House, and it was rebuilt in the aftermath of that war. It was reoccupied by President James Monroe in 1817, and officially reopened on this day 1818. Exactly 85 years later in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt revealed the extensive renovations he made on the Executive Mansion, including the West Wing, and after officially adopting the name “The White House” two years earlier in 1901.
Speaking of openings, on this day in 1852, the first US public bath opened in New York City. This is also the day that J. Edgar Hoover was born in 1895, America’s first dictator, I mean, Director of the FBI.
In world government history today, the calendar takes center stage. In 45 BC, the Julian calendar took effect following the edict of Julius Caesar. Russia adopted the calendar in 990, Scotland in 1600, and the Papal Chancery in 1622. But the calendar was not without problems. From Britannica:
“Sosigenes had overestimated the length of the year by 11 minutes 14 seconds, and by the mid-1500s the cumulative effect of this error had shifted the dates of the seasons by about 10 days from Caesar’s time. Pope Gregory XIII’s reform (see Gregorian calendar), proclaimed in 1582, restored the calendar to the seasonal dates of 325 CE, an adjustment of 10 days. The Julian calendar has gradually been abandoned since 1582 in favour of the Gregorian calendar. Great Britain changed to the Gregorian calendar in 1752.
Some Eastern Orthodox churches continue to use the Julian calendar for determining fixed liturgical dates; others have used the Revised Julian calendar, which closely resembles the Gregorian calendar, since 1923 for such dates. Nearly all Eastern Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar to establish the dates of movable feasts such as Easter. The current discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendars is 13 days. However, the difference will become 14 days in 2100.”
Clearly, #CalendarGate has a long history and, in 1918, today marked the final day of Julian calendar in Finland.
Other government moments around the world today include:
630: Prophet Muhammad set out to conquer Mecca
1660: Samuel Pepys' began his diary
1801: The United Kingdom was born
1895: Philippine Revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo became a Freemason,
1912: Republic of China formed by Sun Yat-sen
1934: Nazis passed the "Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring"
1957: IRA failed again when Seán South and Fergal O'Hanlon are killed in the Brookeborough Raid
In Culture…
Trust the Science
In 1724, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a glassblower, proposed a new system for measuring temperature — the Fahrenheit temperature scale. The proposal was made to the Royal Society of London and it earned Fahrenheit a fellowship.
Words matter and are particularly important when it comes to names. In 1758, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature began standardizing species names across the animal kingdom, and you have to wonder how much we lost with these changes.
In 1894 German physicist Heinrich Hertz died. He was the first documented scientist to broadcast and receive radio waves and, two years later in 1896, German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen announced that he had discovered x-rays.
Finally, in 1992 Grace Hopper died at 85. Hopper is credited with coining the phrase “debugging.” She and her team invented the compiler for the A-0 programming language — then coined the term “compiler” to describe it. In other words, Hopper not only gave us new programming languages, but she gave us new language to describe the new programming languages.
Start Something New
In 1914, the first scheduled plane flight took place from St. Petersburg to Tampa. This “Airboat Line” became the world's first scheduled airline, and the flight took 23 minutes to travel the 18 miles between the two cities. The flight was only in service for three months.
In 1916, the first blood transfusion was performed using cooled, stored blood. Fifty years later in 1966, a new law went into effect whereby all US cigarette packs were required to print a warning on every pack that states: "Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health."
A Time to Dance & Sing
Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus" was published on this day in 1818. Shelley published the work anonymously through a small London publishing house.
Speaking of classics, J. D. Salinger was born on this day in 1919. He would go on to publish “The Catcher in the Rye” in 1951.
Jakob Wassermann, the German novelist who penned “My Life as German and Jew,” died of a heart attack in 1934. In 1943, Andrew Summers Rowan, American military officer who gave "a message to Garcia” died. Rowan’s story is a tale of the power of narrative. It’s widely accepted that he embellished his story, but his real fame came from Elbert Hubbard’s “A Message to Garcia,” which is alleged to be a fabrication. In other words, even some of history’s most obscure and seemingly irrelevant stories are fake. #RealityCollapse
Ten years later in 1953, Hank Williams Sr died of a heart attack in the back of a car — a Cadillac.
In 1960, Johnny Cash played his first of many concerts at San Quentin. Reportedly, Merle Haggard was among the inmate audience — before turning his life around and launching his own successful music career.
In 1962, the Beatles bombed an audition at Decca Records and were told that “guitar groups are on the way out..." and in 1966, Simon & Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100.
Finally in culture, "The Far Side" by Gary Larson debuted in The San Francisco Chronicle on this day in 1980, and it concluded exactly 15 years later on this day in 1995.
In Death & Destruction…
2007: 102 lost when Adam Air Flight 574 disappeared over Indonesia
2009: 61 killed in nightclub fire one night in Bangkok
2010: 105 killed, 100 injured by car bomb in Pakistan
2013: 18 killed, 16 wounded in bus collision in Senegal
2013: 10 killed, 120 injured in a stampede in Angola
2013: 60 killed, 200 injured after in Abidjan New Year’s stampede
On This Day is published Monday through Friday. Watch the Today’s History podcast weekdays at 12PM ET! Don’t forget to visit bootlegproducts.com and use coupon code MYAMERICA!
Thank you to these aggregators for making it easier to pull this show together!
Note: All images are created using DaVinci AI with human prompts by the Today’s History team.