On Jan. 6, 1412, according to tradition, Joan of Arc was born in Domremy, France.
In 1759 George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis were married.
In 1878 poet Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Ill.
In 1912 New Mexico became the 47th state.
In 1919 Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th U.S. president, died in Oyster Bay, N.Y.; he was 60.
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 Herbert Walker Bush married Barbara Pierce in Rye, N.Y.
In 1950 Britain recognized the Communist government of China.
In 1967 U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese troops launched “Operation Deckhouse 5,” an offensive in the Mekong River delta.
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.)
In 1998 Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was elected House speaker.
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 2003 a design consisting of two reflecting pools and a paved stone field was chosen for the World Trade Center memorial in New York.
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.) Also in 2005 Andrea Yates’ murder conviction for drowning her children in the bathtub was overturned by a Texas appeals court.
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.
