On January 11, 1927, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer forever changed the way we celebrate movies by announcing the formation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. The original creation of the Academy had less to do with celebrating achievement on the big…
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Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon on January 10, 49 BC, marked a defining moment in Roman history, heralding a seismic shift in the Republic’s power dynamics. The Rubicon, a river that demarcated the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper, was more than…
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On January 9, 1861, the United States moved one step closer to going to civil war. On that day, A crew on The Star of the West, a ship hired by the U.S. government to supply American troops, found itself caught in between working for…
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On January 8, 1982, the largest corporation in the world received a mandate to break up, changing the way people connect and sparking an eventual technological revolution. The breakup of the Bell System was a significant event in the history of American telecommunications. The…
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One of the most famous early motion pictures produced by Thomas Edison’s company was a short film titled “Fred Ott’s Sneeze,” also known as “The Sneeze” or “Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze.” This film, which lasts only a few seconds, captures an employee…
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On January 6, 1941, Congress heard one of the most iconic speeches in American history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, delivered what became known as the Four Freedoms Speech. This speech was part of his State of the Union…
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On January 5, 1895, Alfred Dreyfus, a French army office, was stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a penal colony off the coast of French Guiana. The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal that divided France from the…
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In January 4, 1853, Solomon Northup finally breathed the sweet air of freedom again. Northup was an African-American man born in July 1808 in Minerva, New York. Born a free man in a time when slavery was still legal in the United States, Northup…
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On January 3, 1521, Pope Leo X issued the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem, a move that reshaped Christianity in Europe and excommunicated Martin Luther from the Catholic Church. Born in 1483 in Eisleben, Germany, Luther’s journey toward excommunication began in earnest in 1517 when…
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On January 1, 45 BC, Julius Caesar changed the way the West marked their calendars, making January 1 the first day of the new year. Prior to the Julian reform, the Roman calendar was a complex lunar calendar that often fell out of phase…
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