This day in history...

On December 27, 1941, war rationing officially begins in America, as the Office of Price Administration mandates limitations on automobile tires; from that day on, five tires per licensed driver is the limit. The OPA was created the previous April, in anticipation that the government would need to control hoarding and war profiteering. With the Japanese in control of the Pacific sea lanes and good quality artificial rubber non-existent, all available rubber was needed for airplane and munitions factories. In addition to rationing, the OPA encouraged car pooling, and championed a national speed limit (35 mph) and rubber recycling. Rationing would strike virtually every available commodity over the course of the war; rubber was the first and last (ending 12/31/45) to be rationed.


On December 27, 1932, Radio City Music Hall opens in New York City. Since its opening, more than 300 million people have gone to Radio City to enjoy movies, stage shows, concerts and special events.

On December 27, 1968, Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, returns safely to Earth after an historic six-day journey. Apollo 8, with astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, Jr., and William Anders aboard, completed 10 lunar orbits on Christmas Eve, relaying live images to a world-wide live television audience.

 

On December 28, 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr is born in Norfolk, VA. She is the first American "test-tube baby," a child conceived through in-vitro fertilization. The process will allow women with damaged or missing Fallopian tubes to become pregnant. Despite criticism of the process, mostly on moral grounds, it is estimated that IVF now accounts for over one percent of American births every year.

On December 28, 1895, Parisians pay brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere a small fee to watch a film of short scenes from everyday French life. Taking place at Paris' Grand Cafe, it is the world’s first commercial movie screening. The Lumiere brothers will open the first dedicated movie theatre a year later in Paris. The same year, the first American movie theatre, Vitascope Hall, opens in New Orleans.

On December 28, 1958, The Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants 23-17 in Yankee Stadium for the 1958 NFL Championship. It is the first playoff game in NFL history to go into sudden-death overtime, and is quickly dubbed the 'Greatest Game Ever Played.'

 

In 1890, relations between the Sioux indians and US Reservation Police have been deteriorating since the accidental killing of Chief Sitting Bull two weeks earlier. On December 29, the US 7th Cavalry surround a band of Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek and demand they surrender their weapons. A fight breaks out between an indian and a soldier and a single shot is fired; no one knows who is responsible, but the soldiers open fire. The official death toll of the Wounded Knee massacre is 146 Sioux and 25 cavalrymen are dead. Some historians put the number of dead Sioux at closer to 300, many of them women and children, and believe it was retribution for cavalry deaths at Little Big Horn.

December 29, 1940 is the most catastrophic day of The Blitz, Hitler's air campaign against England. German bombers drop more than 24,000 high explosive bombs and 100,000 incendiary bombs in one of its most aggressive attacks on the city, setting virtually the entire city of London on fire. Firefighters work amid the dropping bombs and are able to save some of the city's landmarks, such as St. Paul's Cathedral, from total destruction.


On December 29, 1170, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, is murdered by four knights of King Henry II at Canterbury Cathedral. Becket had been appointed chancellor by Henry in 1155, and Archbishop in 1162. But their friendship was strained over the next 8 years, as Becket worked to separate the church from government influence. In what may have been a mere moment of frustration, the king publicly issued to his court a plea: “What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in my house, and not one of them will avenge me of this one upstart clerk.” Legend puts the quote more succinctly: "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" A group of Henry’s knights took the statement very seriously. Becket was canonized in 1173, and a year later, Henry ended all efforts to end the separation of church and state.

 

On December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is established. Also known as the Soviet Union, the new communist state was the successor to the Russian Empire and the first country in the world to be based on Marxist socialism. It is a confederation of Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasian Federation (divided in 1936 into the Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Armenian republics). At its height, the USSR will encompass 15 republics across Asia and eastern Europe, but will be dissolved in 1991 following the collapse of its communist government.

On December 30, 1853, James Gadsden, U.S. minister to Mexico, and General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the president of Mexico, finalize the Gadsden Purchase. For the price of $15 million, later reduced to $10 million, the U.S. acquires approximately 30,000 square miles of land in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona.The treaty also settles the dispute over the location of the Mexican border west of El Paso, Texas and establishes the final boundaries of the southern United States.

At 8 p.m. on December 30, 1936, the night shift at the General Motors Fisher Body Plant Number One in Flint, Michigan stops working, locks the doors of the plant and takes seats. It is not the first sit-down strike in US history, but it may be the most significant. The autoworkers were striking to win recognition of the United Auto Workers (UAW) as the only bargaining agent for GM’s workers; they also wanted to make the company stop sending work to non-union plants and to establish a fair minimum wage scale, a grievance system and a set of procedures that would help protect assembly-line workers from injury. In all, the strike lasts 44 days, and will encompass a 2nd plant in Flint and the largest engine factory of the Chevrolet division. In December, GM produced 50,000 cars. In February, it produced 125. In mid-February, at President Roosevelt's urging, GM recognized the UAW, giving workers a 5% raise and other benefits.

 

On December 31, 1999, the United States, in accordance with the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, officially hands over control of the Panama Canal, putting the strategic waterway into Panamanian hands for the first time. Started by the French in 1880, the US bought the project rights in 1902. When Panama declared its independence from Colombia in a U.S.-backed revolution in 1903, the U.S. agreed to pay Panama $10 million for a perpetual lease on land for the canal, plus $250,000 annually in rent. Construction of the canal cost the US $375 million and more than 5,600 lives lost, mostly to yellow fever. In 1977, responding to nearly 20 years of Panamanian protest, President Jimmy Carter and Panama’s General Omar Torrijos replaced the original 1903 agreement with the new treaty that gave Panama canal control, but gave the US the ongoing right to defend the canal against any threats to its neutrality.

Ships pay tolls to use the canal, based on each vessel’s size and cargo volume. In May 2006, the Maersk Dellys paid a record toll of $249,165. The smallest-ever toll–36 cents–was paid by Richard Halliburton, who swam the canal in 1928.


On December 31, 1879, Thomas Edison makes the first public demonstration of electric light. Before an estimated 3,000 observers, Edison lights up the streets and buildings around his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Although the first incandescent lamp had been produced 40 years earlier, no inventor had been able to come up with a practical design until Edison embraced the challenge in the late 1870s. After countless tests, he developed a high-resistance carbon-thread filament that burned steadily for hours and an electric generator sophisticated enough to power a large lighting system.

On December 31, 1972, future Hall of Fame baseball player Roberto Clemente is killed along with four others when their cargo plane crashes off the coast of Puerto Rico. Clemente was on his way to deliver relief supplies to Nicaragua following a devastating earthquake there a week earlier. The relief effort was personally conceived and directed by Clemente, but he made the mistake of partnering with a charlatan named Arthur Rivera, an owner/operator who had a history of safety violations. It was later determined that Rivera loaded the plane over its maximum capacity. In fact, Clemente himself was warned by someone at the airport that the plane looked dangerously overloaded when he was about to board. The plane took off at 9 p.m. and witnesses say they could hear the sounds of engine failure before the plane got off the ground. It reached an altitude of only 200 feet before exploding and plunging into the ocean. Rescue workers were sent out immediately, but the task was next to impossible in the darkness. The bodies were never found. In 1973, Clemente was posthumously inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. In 2002, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 

A lot of historic things take place on January 1 because they are related to legislation or treaties of some kind, like NAFTA and the Emancipation Proclamation taking effect. Looking for a few things that aren't New Year related:

On January 1, 1959, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista flees the country ahead of Fidel Castro's revolutionary forces advancing into Havana . The U.S. Government had originally supported Batista, but that support eroded as it became clear that the Cuban people backed Castro, who entered Havana on Jan. 7. The U.S. didn't trust Castro, and they were quickly proven right as he began establishing a Communist government, nationalizing American-owned property and making friends with the Soviets.

On January 1, 1946 on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines, a lone American soldier on detail for Graves Registration is busy recording the makeshift graves of American soldiers killed during the war, when he is interrupted by about 20 approaching Japanese soldiers waving a white flag. They had been living in an underground tunnel built during the war. When one of them ventured out in search of water, he found a newspaper and thus learned Japan had surrendered several months earlier.

On January 1, 1818, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is published. Twenty-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's tale of a scientist who creates a living human constructed from dismembered corpse, is frequently called the world’s first science fiction novel. Mary Shelley created the story on a rainy afternoon in 1816 in Geneva, where she was staying with her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, their friend Lord Byron and Lord Byron's physician, John Polidori. The group, trapped indoors by the inclement weather, passed the time telling and writing ghost stories. The ideas for both Frankenstein, and Polidori's The Vampyre, which was published in 1819, were both born that day.

 

On January 2, 1980, President Jimmy Carter requests that the Senate postpone action on the SALT-II nuclear weapons treaty and recalls the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union These actions indicated that the U.S.-Soviet relationship had been severely damaged by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Before the year is over, the Carter administration will impose new trade restrictions against the Soviets and encourage a boycott of the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow.

On January 2, 1974, President Richard Nixon signs the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, setting a new national maximum speed limit of 55 miles per hour. With OPEC quadrupling oil prices the previous year, its hoped the new law will save gas by forcing Americans to drive at more fuel efficient speeds. Prior to 1974, individual states set speed limits within their boundaries and highway speed limits across the country ranged from 40 mph to 80 mph. Congress authorized states to reset speed limits within their borders in 1987, but proponents of the national maximum speed limit law claimed it lowered automobile-related fatalities, prompting Congress to keep it on the books until finally repealing it on November 28, 1995.


Its not a hoax, just poor science. On January 2, 1860, French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier hypothesizes that peculiarities in Mercury's orbit were the result of another planet, which he names "Vulcan". A number searches were made for Vulcan, but despite occasional claimed observations, no such planet was ever confirmed. Peculiarities in Mercury's orbit are now explained by Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

 

Lots of history on January 3.....

January 3, 1990, Panama’s General Manuel Antonio Noriega, after holing up for 10 days at the Vatican embassy in Panama City, surrenders to U.S. military troops to face charges of drug trafficking. He'll be convicted in July and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

January 3, 1925, Benito Mussolini, elected to Italy's Parliament 4 years earlier as leader of the nation's growing Fascist Party, declares himself dictator.

January 3, 2004, The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit successfully lands on the Red Planet. Designed to function for 90 Martian days, Spirit and its twin, Opportunity - which arrived 3 weeks later - will transmit data on Mars' geography for the next seven years.

January 3, 1924, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his team, in the second year of excavating the tomb of the Pharoah Tutankhamen, uncover a stone sarcophagus containing a solid gold coffin that holds the mummy of King Tut.

January 3, 1521, Pope Leo X excommunicates German biblical professor Martin Luther from the Catholic Church for continued criticism of the Vatican, including his 95 Theses, in which he condemns the church for selling indulgences, or the forgiveness of sin.

January 3, 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an adult victim of polio, founds the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which he later renamed the March of Dimes Foundation.

January 3, 1834, the Mexican government imprisons Texas colonizer Stephen F. Austin. Its the first spark to the fuse that will eventually erupt in the War for Texas Independence.

January 3, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower closes the American embassy in Havana and severs diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro's Cuban regime.

January 3, 1993, backup quarterback Frank Reich directs "The Comeback" leading the Buffalo Bills back from a 32-point deficit to a 41-38 overtime victory over the Houston Oilers in an AFC wild card playoff game.

And my favorite.....January 3, 1777, General George Washington manages to evade direct conflict with British General Lord Cornwallis and wins several encounters with the British rear guard between Princeton and Trenton, New Jersey. Washington had crossed the Delaware River and captured Trenton in a daring Christmas Day raid. On hearing the news, Cornwallis departs Princeton with 8,000 men and takes up positions on the Delaware to cut off Washington's escape. But Washington outsmarts his adversary by leaving his campfires burning and performing an end run to attack the trailing British units. Its a small victory in terms of men, but it leads General Howe, in charge of the British forces in the north, to abandon most of New Jersey to Washington.