In the bleak aftermath of the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Union Army stood stunned—not merely by defeat, but by the scale and clarity of it. On January 26, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln formally relieved Ambrose Burnside of command of the Army of the Potomac,…
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On January 25, 1971, one of the most infamous crime sprees in American history reached its legal conclusion. Charles Manson and four members of his so-called “Family” were found guilty for their roles in the brutal Tate–LaBianca murders, a verdict that brought a grim…
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On January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James W. Marshall bent down along the American River and unknowingly altered the trajectory of a continent. What he found glittering in the cold water near Sutter’s Mill was not merely a fleck of metal, but the…
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On a cold January morning in 1570, a single gunshot echoed through the streets of Linlithgow and across Scottish history. James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray—regent of Scotland and guardian of the infant king—slumped from his horse, mortally wounded. With that shot, fired from…
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On January 22, 1970, a new era of flight quietly but decisively began as a Boeing 747 lifted off from John F. Kennedy International Airport, bound for London Heathrow Airport. Operated by its launch customer, Pan American World Airways, the world’s first “jumbo jet”…
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On January 21, 1789, as the United States stood on the cusp of constitutional government, a modest book rolled off a Boston press that would later claim an unexpected distinction. Titled The Power of Sympathy; or, The Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth, the…
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On January 20, 1265, in the mid-thirteenth century, a quiet but enduring revolution in English governance took place inside the great halls of what is now known as the Palace of Westminster. For the first time, an English Parliament convened that included not only…
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On January 19, 1915, a quiet but consequential patent filing helped tilt the modern city toward light. Georges Claude, a French engineer and industrial chemist, secured legal protection for the neon discharge tube as a device for advertising—transforming an obscure laboratory phenomenon into one…
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On January 19, 1953, nearly three-quarters of all television sets in the United States—an estimated 44 million viewers—were tuned to a single half hour of programming. What they watched was not a presidential address or a breaking national emergency, but an episode of I…
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On January 18, 1967, Albert DeSalvo was sentenced to life imprisonment in Massachusetts, closing one chapter of the most terrifying murder spree Boston had ever known—and opening a far more unsettling debate about guilt, justice, and the limits of certainty in criminal law. By…
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