Thursday, January 25, 2018

TODAY IN HISTORY ― JANUARY 25

January 25 is the 25th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 340 days remaining until the end of the year (341 in leap years). This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday (58 in 400 years each) than on Saturday or Sunday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Tuesday or Thursday (56).

NATIONAL OPPOSITE DAY 



1327 ― King Edward III (Plantagenet House) accedes to the English throne. Predecessor, Edward II / Successor, Richard II. His reign of 50 years was the second longest in medieval England and saw vital developments in legislation and government—in particular the evolution of the English parliament—as well as the ravages of the Black Death. Edward II was crowned at age 14 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.


1554 ― Sir Thomas Wyatt gathers an army in Kent and rebels against Queen Mary I.


1721 ― Tsar Peter the Great ends Russian-orthodox patriarchy.

1776 ― The U.S. Continental Congress authorizes the first national Revolutionary War memorial in honor of Brigadier General Richard Montgomery, who had been killed during an assault on Quebec on December 31, 1775.


1787 ― Shays' Rebellion suffers a setback when debt-ridden farmers, led by Captain Daniel Shays, fail to capture an arsenal at Springfield, MA. 


1825 ― The first U.S. engineering college opens, Rensselaer Polytechnic, Troy, NY.

1840 ― American naval expedition under Charles Wilkes first to identify Antarctica as a new continent.

1863 ― General Joseph Hooker replaces Ambrose Burnside as head of the Union Army of Potomac in the American Civil War

1890 ― The United Mine Workers of America is founded in Columbus, OH, by the merger of the Knights of Labor and the National Progressive Miners Union.


1904 ― 179 die in coal mine explosion at the Cheswick, PA, Harwick Mine. Greatly touched by two rescuerers' sacrifice, Andrew Carnegie had medals privately minted for their families, and within two months had established a $5 million Carnegie Hero Fund as a result which still exists today.

1905 ― A 3,106-carat diamond is discovered at the Premier Mine in Pretoria, South Africa during a routine inspection by the mine’s superintendent. Weighing 1.33 pounds, and christened the “Cullinan,” it was the largest diamond ever found.

1914 ― An Indian mass meeting in Durban unanimously endorse the agreement between General J.C. Smuts and Mohandas Gandhi regarding voluntary registration, poll tax, recognition of Indian marriages and other matters.

1918 ― Russia is declared a republic of Soviets.


1939 ― The first nuclear fission experiment (splitting of a uranium atom) in the US, in the basement of Pupin Hall, Columbia University, by a team that included Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.

1945 ― The NY Yankees are sold by Ruppert estate to construction magnate Del Webb and partners Dan Topping and Larry MacPhail for $2.8 million. Now worth $3.2 billion, over 1000 times more.

1955 ― Columbia University scientists develop an atomic clock, accurate to within one second in 300 years.



1971 ― In Los Angeles, California, cult leader Charles Manson is convicted, along with followers Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkle, of the brutal 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others.

1974 ― Christian Barnard transplants the first human heart without removal of old.

1981 ― The 52 Americans held hostage by Iran for 444 days arrived back in the United States.



1983 ― Nazi war criminal Nikolaus "Klaus" Barbie is arrested in Bolivia. He was an SS-Hauptsturmführer (rank equivalent to army captain) and Gestapo member and was known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for having personally tortured French prisoners of the Gestapo while stationed in Lyon, France. He was extradited to France, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and died in prison of cancer.

1995 ― Russia’s early-warning defense radar detects an unexpected missile launch near Norway, and Russian military command estimates the missile to be only minutes from impact on Moscow. 


2006 ― Three independent observing campaigns announce the discovery of OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb through gravitational micro-lensing, the first cool rocky/icy extra-solar planet around a main-sequence star.

2011 ― It is announced on this day that the UK economy suffered a shock contraction of 0.5% in the fourth quarter of 2010, which has been widely blamed on the severe winter weather in December and austere budget cuts implemented by the coalition government increasing fears that the UK is heading for a double-dip recession.




TODAY'S BIRTHS

1736 – Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Italian-French mathematician and astronomer (d. 1813)

1759 – Robert Burns, Scottish poet and songwriter (d. 1796)

1874 – W. Somerset Maugham, French-English author and playwright (d. 1965)

Wikipedia and Google, ex as noted. 

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