On Jan. 6, 1838, Samuel Morse first publicly demonstrated his telegraph, in Morristown, N.J.
In 1878 poet Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Ill.
In 1880 silent film actor Tom Mix was born in Mix Run, Pa.
In 1882 former House Speaker Sam Rayburn was born in Roane County, Tenn.
In 1883 philosophical essayist and poet Khalil Gibran was born in Bsharri, Lebanon.
In 1912 New Mexico became the 47th state.
In 1913 actress Loretta Young was born in Salt Lake City.
In 1919 Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th U.S. president, died in Oyster Bay, N.Y.; he was 60.
In 1931 novelist E.L. Doctorow was born in New York.
In 1942 the Pan American Airways “Pacific Clipper” arrived in New York after making the first round-the-world trip by a commercial airplane.
In 1945 George H.W. Bush, who would become the nation’s 41st president, married Barbara Pierce in Rye, N.Y.
In 1950 Britain recognized the Communist government of China.
In 1955 comic actor Rowan Atkinson was born in Durham, England.
In 1967 U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese troops launched Operation Deckhouse 5, an offensive in the Mekong River delta.
In 1982 truck driver William Bonin was convicted in Los Angeles of being the “freeway killer” who had murdered 14 young men and boys.
In 1993 jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie died in Englewood, N.J.; he was 75.
In 1994 figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed on the right leg by an assailant at Cobo Arena in Detroit. (Four men, including the ex-husband of Kerrigan’s rival, Tonya Harding, later were sentenced to prison for the incident.) Also in 1994 President Bill Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, died in Hot Springs, Ark.; she was 70.
In 1995, over the protests of refugee advocates, the U.S. military began sending Haitians housed at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba home against their will.
In 1998 Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was elected House speaker.
In 2000, in Miami, demonstrators angered by the U.S. government’s decision to send Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba skirmished with police.
In 2001, with the vanquished Vice President Al Gore presiding, Congress formally certified George W. Bush the winner of the close and bitterly contested 2000 presidential election.
In 2002 Argentina announced the devaluation of its peso, ending a decadelong policy pegging the currency one-to-one with the U.S. dollar. (In the year that followed, the peso lost 70 percent of its value against the dollar.)
In 2003 a design consisting of two reflecting pools and a paved stone field was chosen for the World Trade Center memorial in New York. Also in 2003 Mijailo Mijailovic confessed to the fatal stabbing of Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh in September 2003. Also in 2003 hitting star Paul Molitor and reliever Dennis Eckersley were elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame.
In 2004 fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo died in New York; he was 82.
In 2005 former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen was arrested 41 years after three civil rights workers were slain in Mississippi. (Killen later was convicted of manslaughter.)
In 2006 Chicago’s Pilgrim Baptist Church, the historic Bronzeville edifice designed by Louis Sullivan and considered the birthplace of gospel music, was destroyed by fire. Also in 2006 singer Lou Rawls died in Los Angeles; he was 72.
