On November 3, 1783, Congress officially disbands the Continental Army. The Army was created in June 1775 by the Continental Congress, which from the beginning feared the establishment of a permanent army. Enlistment in the Continental Army was all volunteer and for enlistments of no more than a year. At its peak, it consisted of 48,000 men, with local militias raising the total fighting force to about 80,000. It was racially integrated and included men from all 13 colonies. At its disbanding, the peacetime army was reduced to a force of 600 (500 infantry, 100 artillerymen), plus care taking units at West Point and Fort Pitt. On November 3, 1964, residents of Washington, D.C. vote in a presidential election for the first time. The concept of a purpose-built national capital city was introduced with the Residence Act of 1790. George Washington himself selected the site on the Potomac River for its relatively central location in the new country. Though the site included the existing cities of Georgetown, Maryland and Arlington, Virginia, Congress would soon decide (District of Columbia Act of 1801) that the new city should be exclusively under the control of the federal government. As such, its residents were citizens of no state and therefore not entitled to vote in federal elections. Voting rights were restored via the 23rd Amendment in 1961; D.C. voters overwhelmingly supported incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson in their first trip to the polls. On November 3, 1996, Kobe Bryant makes his NBA debut. The son of former NBA journeyman Joe "Jellybean" Bryant, Kobe was the first guard ever selected in the NBA draft directly out of high school. He was picked 13th by the Charlotte Hornets and traded to the Los Angeles Lakers the same day in a pre-arranged swap (the Hornets got veteran center Vlade Divac). Bryant's debut was inauspicious; in a win over the Minnesota Timberwolves, he came off the bench, played six minutes and did not score. Twenty years later on his retirement (he spent his entire career with the Lakers) Bryant was fourth on the all-time NBA scoring list with 33,643 points. He was a 5-time NBA champion, 18-time All Star (and 4-time All Star Game MVP), the 2008 league MVP, 2-time NBA Finals MVP, 11-time All-NBA first team, 9-time NBA All-Defensive first team, 2-time Olympic gold medalist, member of the NBA's 75th anniversary team, and the only player in NBA history to have 2 jersey numbers retired by his team (having switched from the 24 jersey to the #8 mid-career).
On December 22, 1975, President Gerald Ford signs the Energy Policy and Conservation Act. The response to the still-lingering effects of the 1973 oil crisis created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, currently a complex of four underground oil storage sites maintained by the Department of Energy. Located along the Texas and Louisiana coastlines of the Gulf of Mexico (each site is located near a major refining center), the SPR has a total capacity of 714 million barrels of oil. The current inventory (the government has engaged in numerous selloffs of oil from the reserve since 2015 as a means of debt reduction; Congress refused to fund President Trump's 2020 call to replenish the reserve) is about 387 million barrels, enough to cover about 20 days of normal U.S. energy usage. On December 22, 1944, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe delivers an immortal 1-word message. It is the height of the Battle of the Bulge, the German winter offensive to turn the war in Belgium and northern France. German forces have America's 101st Airborne Division surrounded in the Belgian city of Bastogne. Earlier in the month, Division Commanding General Max Taylor had returned to the States for a conference, leaving McAuliffe, his artillery commander, in charge. The Germans sent a party under flag of truce to deliver a written invitation to the 101 to "honorably" surrender and forego further loss of life. McAuliffe, on reading the note, reportedly muttered "Aw, nuts", crumbling the note and throwing it in a waste basket. Members of his staff considered a more eloquent written response, until Lt. Col Harry Kinnard suggested McAuliffe's one-word reaction fit perfectly. He typed out the following message: "To the German Commander. NUTS! The American Commander." The German officer was confused by the one-word reply until the colonel delivering it told him it meant, "Go to hell." (A personal aide later recalled that McAuliffe never used profanity, and that "nuts" was a typical substitute oath in his vocabulary.) The Germans resumed the attack, but the 101 held until relieved by Patton's 4th Armored Division on December 26. Patton would decorate McAuliffe with the Distinguished Service Cross (below), the Army's second highest decoration. A month later he received his second star and command of an infantry division. He retired from the Army in 1956 as a 4-star. McAuliffe died in 1975 and is buried at Arlington.
On December 23, 1972, a rescue party of the Chilean Air Force carries the last of 16 survivors of Uruguayan Flight 571 off a glacier in the Andes Mountains. The charter flight carrying the 19 members of a Uruguayan Christian men's club rugby team and supporters (40 in all) from Montivideo to Santiago, Chile crashed into a mountain in Argentina due to pilot error on October 13. Nine passengers and 3 of the craft's 5-man flight crew died in the crash, and 17 more died over the following weeks. With only a few airline-type snacks available to them, the survivors slowly and reluctantly turned to cannibalism to survive, first eating the flesh of the dead, and as that ran out, internal organs. On December 13, two of the survivors began a 38-mile trek into Chile to find help. The "Miracle of the Andes" garnered world-wide attention. (photo: memorial near the crash site. The survivors who went for help had to climb the mountain in the background without gear to escape) On December 23, 1941, a Japanese invasion force occupies Wake Island. The U.S. Marines had garrisoned the island (about 2,000 miles southeast of Tokyo) 3 months before with light weapons and 450 Marines. The Japanese launched their assault on the island simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor (due to the International Date Line, the official date of the Japanese attack is December 8), but the Marines resisted for two weeks, finally succumbing when the Japanese reinforced their assault force. The Navy, meanwhile, dispatched reinforcements of their own, but recalled the task force to protect its aircraft carrier. More than 400 Marines and a thousand civilian workers went into captivity. The Japanese would hold Wake until two days after the official surrender on Sept. 2, 1945. (memorial on Wake Island)
December 25, 336 A.D. is considered to be the first time the date is celebrated as the birth of Jesus Christ. In the early days of Christianity, the date of death was considered much more important than the date of birth, as it marked the transition to the afterlife. Historians do not know the actual date of Jesus' birth; December 25 is chosen as it coincides with a number of festivals celebrated in other religions from which many Christians are converting. Christmas is not celebrated much after 336, until Charlemagne is crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day, 800 A.D. Merry Christmas to all.
On December 27, 1657, a group of residents in the New Netherlands colony (the modern-day Queens borough of NYC) issue the Flushing Remonstrance. The colony was established 12 years earlier as a religiously open community, but Director-General Peter Stuyvesant took control in 1656 and banned the practice of all religion other than Dutch Reform. The Flushing Remonstrance called for members of the Society of Friends (the Quakers) to have the same religious freedoms. Stuyvesant rejected the Remonstrance (considered the model for protections of religious worship in the U.S. Constitution) until advised to accept it by the Dutch government in 1683. (The Quaker House in Flushing, below, is the oldest continuously active house of worship in New York state) On December 27, 1922, the Hosho, the first vessel built as an aircraft carrier from the keel up, is commissioned into the Imperial Japanese Navy. The Hosho served as a training vessel, and, in essence, a functioning model for future aircraft carrier design by the IJN, being too small (maximum capacity 15 aircraft) to be used as an offensive weapon. It survived WWII and was deployed in a fleet defensive role in both the Pearl Harbor and Midway operations. The U.S. Navy took possession of the Hosho after the surrender and scrapped her in 1946. On December 27, 1966, residents of the San Luis Potosi state of Mexico show outsiders (read: white guys) Sótano de las Golondrinas - "The Cave of the Swallows" - for the first time. About 150 wide at its mouth, the vertical cave opens into a room more than 990 feet wide and more than 1,200 feet deep, the largest known cave shaft and one of the longest sheer drops in the world. Home to thousands of birds (mostly parakeets; despite the name; swallows are rarely seen there) that nest in its crevasses, the Cave has become an extreme sports attraction, popular for rappelling and BASE jumping.
On January 5, 1945, Japanese pilots are officially ordered by their superiors for the first time to execute suicide attacks against American naval vessels. The operation was called kamikaze ("divine wind"). By the turn of the calendar in '45, aerial combat had deprived the Japanese of virtually all experienced pilots, and there was no time or budget to train new combat-ready pilots. Pilots had been attempting suicide runs when combat rendered them unable to return to base since the beginning of the war. In mid-1944, new pilots began training specifically for kamikaze missions. At the Battle of Okinawa alone, kamikaze attacks would claim 30 American ships, killing about 5,000 men (a kamikaze attack on USS Missouri, attacking plane is visible at top left in the photo) On January 5, 1957 in an address to Congress, President Dwight Eisenhower proposes that the U.S. become more proactive in its dealings with the Middle East. Eisenhower was concerned that Egyptian President Gamal Nasser's increasing coziness with the Soviets would give communism a toehold in the vital region. The U.S. press panned Eisenhower's proposal, but Congress was supportive. The first test of "the Eisenhower Doctrine" came in the summer of 1958, when the U.S. responded to a request from Lebanon's president for help in quelling civil disobedience in the country by sending in 15,000 troops, establishing the Middle East once and for all as a major front in the Cold War.
On January 9, 1776, the pamphlet Common Sense is published in the British colonies of North America. In the days when print and spoken word were the only journalistic media, pamphlets (simply defined as "a non-periodical written work of 5 to 48 pages") were a popular means of communication. Common Sense was widely distributed and read aloud in the colonies, advocating in its 47 pages the reasons for the colonists to declare independence from Great Britain. Originally published anonymously, it soon became known to be the work of Thomas Paine, a former British army officer and schoolteacher who met Benjamin Franklin in London several years before. It was Franklin who encouraged Paine to emigrate to the colonies in 1774, where he became a political writer/commentator of some notariety. Common Sense remains one of, if not the, best-selling title in American history. On January 10, 1941, the Avro Lancaster has its first test flight. The Lancaster would become the backbone of the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command in WWII, with more than 7,300 built. Although having roughly the same payload as the RAF's two other heavy bombers (the Short Sterling and the Handley Page Halifax), the Lancaster differed from the others for having a single, unobstructed bomb bay, allowing it to carry the largest ordinance in the British inventory. It was also well-suited for nighttime operation, allowing the Allies to conduct round-the-clock strategic bombing of the German homeland. Famed German fighter pilot Adolph Galland called the Lancaster the best night bomber of the war. Seventeen examples still exist today; only 2 are airworthy. (Lancaster maintained by the RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight) On January 9, 1973, Schoolhouse Rock! debuts during ABC television network's Saturday morning children's program lineup. Schoolhouse Rock! was conceived by advertising exec David McCall, who noticed his young son struggled with memorizing multiplication tables but had an impressive recall for Rolling Stones lyrics. McCall approached songwriter Bob Dorough about writing songs to teach the times tables. An illustrator/colleague heard the first of these, "Three Is A Magic Number," and illustrated it. The finished product appeared on famed cartoonist/producer Chuck Jones' program "Curiosity Shop" in September 1972, earning the attention of network executives. A series of shorts, Multiplication Rock!, debuted the following January, to be followed by series devoted to grammar, science, history and civics. The shorts were a fixture on Saturday morning until the mid-80's; many of the people involved with the original series continued to produce straight-to-video series on computers, money and other topics into the 21st Century (My 2 personal favorites, "Conjunction Junction" and "I'm Just A Bill")
On January 19, 1764, a Colonel Poulsen residing in the main house of Børglum Abbey, a former medieval monastery in Denmark, receives a package in the mail. It contained gunpowder and a simple trigger that, when the package was opened, lit the gunpowder and injured Poulsen. He survived but received a letter written in German a month later promising "soon the dose will be increased." No further attack happened, nor was the perpetrator of the bomb attack - considered by many historians to be the first use of a mail bomb - ever found. On January 19, 1999, production begins on "Toy Story," the first full-length feature film produced by Pixar Animation in collaboration with Disney. Pixar started as a division of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, and was noteworthy for its work in 3-D animation. It was expanded into a full-fledged film studio when purchased by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1986. "Toy Story" gave viewers the premise that toys are alive but go inert in the presence of humans, and told the story of the rivalry between a young boy's favorite toy - a stuffed cowboy named Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) - and the boys' latest birthday present, a fancy spaceman toy called Buzz Lightyear (voice of Tim Allen). Although much of the film's preliminary work was done with conventional animation techniques, the final product would be the first entirely computer-animated feature film. "Toy Story" would gross more than $350 million worldwide, earn a special Academy Award, and spawn 3 sequels. On January 19, 1938, Alfred Butts introduces a letter game called Criss-Cross Words. Butts, an architect by trade but also a game enthusiast, had written a paper examining the various types of games in 1931. Around the same time, he was reading the Edgar Allen Poe short story "The Gold Bug," which includes a line about the distribution of letters of the English language. That inspired him to create a game he called Lexico, in which players made words from tiles that contained letters of the alphabet. Each letter had a point value based on how commonly it is used. Criss-Cross Words would add a game board to Lexico with spaces for additional scoring opportunities. Criss-Cross Words did not sell successfully, and in 1948 Butts sold its right to one of the few people to buy a game set, James Brunot. He would have the good fortune of introducing the game to Jack Straus, President of Macy's, in 1952, who demanded the right to sell the game in his famed store. Brunot also renamed the game Scrabble. Today, Scrabble is sold in more than 120 countries, with versions in 30 different languages. Its estimated that one-third of all American homes and half of the homes in Great Britain have a Scrabble set.
On January 24, 1916, the U.S. Supreme Court deems the 16th Amendment, establishing a federal income tax, constitutional. Income taxes had been implemented on and off since the Civil War, usually with stipulations for apportionment (only income from in-state sources is taxed) or with consideration to the census. 16A was ratified in 1913, and Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1913, an unapportioned income tax. It was immediately challenged in Brushaber v Union Pacific Railroad, in which a UPR shareholder alleged the income tax violated the 5th Amendment by taking property without due process. SCOTUS disagreed in an 8-0 decision (Justice James McReynolds did not participate). On January 24, 1984, the Apple Macintosh 128k debuts in U.S. stores. Introduced two days earlier in a groundbreaking TV ad during the Super Bowl, the "Mac" was marketed as the computer for the masses, with an operating system that anyone could use. Priced at about $2,400 (more than $6,000 in today's economy) it sold 70,000 units in its first 3 months. Originally called McIntosh after the variety of apple, CEO Steve Jobs renamed the project "Macintosh" to avoid a trademark dispute with McIntosh Laboratory. On January 24, 2010, the New Orleans Saints beat the Minnesota Vikings 31-28 in the NFC Championship Game to advance to the first Super Bowl in franchise history. The Saints avoided a potential last-second loss when Tracy Porter intercepted Viking QB Brett Favre in the last minute of regulation, then won in overtime on Garrett Hartley's 39-yard FG. The Saints would win their first - and to date, only - Super Bowl championship two weeks later.
