On Jan. 17, 1706, Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston.
In 1806 Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, Martha, gave birth to James Madison Randolph, the first child born in the White House.
In 1893 America’s 19th president, Rutherford Hayes, died in Fremont, Ohio; he was 70. Also, Hawaii’s monarchy was overthrown as a group of businessmen and sugar planters forced Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate.
In 1917 the United States paid Denmark $25 million for the Virgin Islands.
In 1945 Soviet and Polish forces liberated Warsaw during World War II. Also, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews, disappeared in Hungary while in Soviet custody.
In 1955 the submarine USS Nautilus made its first nuclear-powered test run from its berth in Groton, Conn.
In 1961 in his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the rise of “the military-industrial complex.”
In 1966 a U.S. Air Force B-52 carrying four unarmed hydrogen bombs crashed on Spain’s coast. (Three bombs were quickly recovered; the fourth was found in April.)
In 1977 convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, 36, was shot by a prison firing squad in Utah–the first U.S. execution in a decade.
In 1984 the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the private use of home video cassette recorders to tape TV programs did not violate federal copyright laws.
In 1991 in the first day of Operation Desert Storm, U.S.-led forces hammered Iraqi targets in an effort to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait; a defiant Iraqi President Saddam Hussein declared that the “mother of all battles” had begun.
In 1994 a 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck Southern California, killing at least 61 people and causing $20 billion worth of damage.
In 1995 more than 6,000 people were killed by an earthquake in Kobe, Japan.
In 1996 Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine followers were handed long prison sentences for plotting to blow up New York-area landmarks. Also, former U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan died in Austin, Texas; she was 59.
In 2000 decrying the Confederate flag as a symbol of slavery and racism, nearly 50,000 people marched to South Carolina’s Statehouse on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to demand the banner be taken down. Also, British pharmaceutical firms Glaxo Wellcome PLC and SmithKline Beecham PLC announced a merger to form the world’s largest drugmaker.
In 2001, faced with an electricity crisis, California used rolling blackouts to cut off power to hundreds of thousands of people. Gov. Gray Davis signed an emergency order authorizing the state to buy power.
In 2002 Enron fired accounting firm Arthur Andersen, citing its destruction of thousands of documents and its accounting advice; for its part, Andersen said its relationship with Enron had ended in early December 2001 when the company slid into the biggest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history.
In 2003 actor Richard Crenna, 76, died in Los Angeles. Also, Gertrude Janeway, 93, the last known widow of a Union veteran from the Civil War, died in Blaine, Tenn. (She had married John Janeway in 1927 when he was 81 and she was 18.)
In 2005 Iraqi expatriates in 14 countries began registering to vote in Iraq’s Jan. 30 elections. Also, Zhao Ziyang, who was ousted as China’s Communist Party leader after sympathizing with the 1989 pro-democracy protests, died in Beijing after 15 years of house arrest; he was 85. And actress Virginia Mayo died in Thousand Oaks, Calif.; she was 84.
