This Week in History – January 3-January 9

January 3, 1521 – Martin Luther, at age 38, is excommunicated by Pope Leo X from the Roman Catholic Church for failing to recant parts of his Ninety-five Theses which started the Protestant Reformation. Luther soon after began translating of the Bible into the German language.

January 3, 1777 – During the American Revolution, General George Washington defeated the British at Princeton and drove them back toward New Brunswick. Washington then established winter quarters at Morristown, NJ. During the long harsh winter, Washington’s army shrank to about a thousand men as enlistments expired and deserters fled.

January 3, 1892 – Literature professor J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and a devout Christian, is born in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

January 3, 1916 – Maxene Andrews is born in Minneapolis. With her sisters LaVerne (born July 6, 1911) and Patty (born February 26, 1918), she would form the Andrews Sisters singing group, known as “America’s wartime sweethearts” and remembered for their 1941 hit “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.”

January 3, 1925 – Benito Mussolini, the originator of fascism, dissolves the Italian parliament and proclaims himself dictator of Italy, taking the title “Il Duce” (the Leader). Fascism has been the favorite tool of socialists ever since.

January 3, 1946 – An Englishman known during World War II as “Lord Haw Haw” (William Joyce) was hanged for treason in London. Joyce had broadcast Nazi propaganda via radio from Germany to Britain during the war.

January 3, 1959 – Alaska was admitted as the 49th U.S. state with a land mass almost one-fifth the size of the lower 48 states together.

January 4, 1577 – Execution by fire of Hans Bret, a young Anabaptist Protestant in Antwerp. He had been tortured for months in an attempt to force him to deny his faith but kept such a bold testimony his persecutors clamped and seared his tongue so that he could not preach to the crowd when taken to the stake.

January 4, 1790 – President George Washington delivered the first State of the Union address.

January 4, 1947 – Presbyterian clergyman Peter Marshall (“A Man Called Peter”), 45, was elected Chaplain of the U.S. Senate. He was the 54th chaplain chosen in the Senate’s history, and the first Presbyterian appointed since 1879.

January 5, 1892 – Mining classes begin at the University of Minnesota as Professor William R. Appleby instructs a class of four students.

January 5, 1919 – The German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) was founded by Anton Drexler in Munich. Adolf Hitler became member No. 7 and changed the name in April of 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) commonly shortened to Nazi.

January 5, 1976 – In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot announced a new constitution which legalized the Communist government and renamed the country, Kampuchea. During the reign of Pol Pot, over 1 million persons died in “the killing fields” as he forced people out of the cities into the countryside to create an idyllic agrarian society. Educated and professional city people were especially targeted for murder and were almost completely annihilated. In January of 1979, Pol Pot was overthrown by Cambodian rebels and Vietnamese troops.

January 5, 2021 – President Donald Trump issues executive order addressing the threat posed by applications and other software developed or controlled by Chinese companies. However, his order was revoked on June 9, 2021 by executive order from Democrat President Joe Biden, thus increasing the risk of privacy breaches against Americans and endangering U.S. national security.

January 6, 548 – The last year the Church in Jerusalem observed the birth of Jesus on this date. (Celebrating Christmas on December 25th began in the late 300s in the Western Church.)

January 6, 1412 – Joan of Arc, the French peasant mystic Christian who became a national heroine and her country’s patron saint. She was eventually captured and sold to the British who tried her for heresy and burned her at the stake.

January 6, 1850 – Charles Spurgeon, who would become one of the greatest preachers of all time, converts to Christianity after receiving a vision, “not a vision to my eyes, but to my heart. I saw what a Savior Christ was.”

January 6, 1976 – After presiding over the Reserve Mining lawsuit for two and a half years, Minnesota Judge Miles Lord is removed from the case for bias against the company.

January 6, 1992 – Naimat Ahmer, a Christian educator and poet in Pakistan, is stabbed seventeen times in earshot of students by a Muslim who claims Ahmer has insulted Mohammad. Ahmer taught that Christ is the only way to salvation.

January 6, 2014 – Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton orders all schools in the state closed due to cold-weather predictions. This will be the first of many temperature-related closures this winter, leading districts to develop related policies. The 2013–2014 winter was the coldest since 1978–1979. Global warming?

January 7, 1714 – A patent was issued for the first typewriter designed by British inventor Henry Mill “for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another, as in writing.”

January 7, 1890 – Black American inventor William Purvis receives a patent for the fountain pen.

January 7, 1873 – The Blizzard of 1873 strikes western and southern Minnesota, with temperatures of 49 degrees below zero and winds of 75 mph. Over the next two days, at least 70 people die. Conditions are so blinding that in New Ulm a boy who has to cross the street from a barn to his home is found frozen eight miles away, and a rural man and his ox team froze to death just ten feet from his house.

January 7, 2018 – President Donald Trump signs historic executive order to expand broadband access to rural areas.

January 8, 1642 – Mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and devout Christian, Galileo Galilei, dies in Arcetri, Italy, under house arrest by the Inquisition. Also on this date in 1610, Galileo discovered four satellites of Jupiter with the aid of the newly invented telescope. His discovery revolutionized astronomy, and led Galileo to adopt the Copernican (heliocentric) model of the solar system in place of the older Ptolemaic (earth-centered) view.

January 8, 1815 – The Battle of New Orleans occurred as General Andrew Jackson and American troops defended themselves against a British attack, inflicting over 2,000 casualties. Both sides in this battle were unaware that peace had been declared two weeks earlier with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812.

January 8, 1867 – Congressional Republicans override Democrat President Andrew Johnson’s veto, thus granting blacks the right to vote.

January 8, 1956 – Missionaries Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, and Pete Fleming are killed by Ecuadorean Indians they sought to evangelize. The story of the missionaries and their deaths along the Curaray River was publicized by Elliot’s widow, Elisabeth, in Through Gates of Splendor, published the following year.

January 8, 1971 – Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota, is established.

January 8, 1982 – The American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) Company was broken up as a result of an antitrust suit. AT&T gave up 22 local Bell system companies, opening the U.S. telephone system to competition.

January 8, 2018 – President Donald Trump issues executive order streamlining and expediting requests to locate broadband facilities in rural America.

January 9, 1970 – After 140 years of unofficial racism, the Mormon cult, Church of the Latter Day Saints, issued an official statement declaring that blacks were not yet to receive the priesthood “for reasons which we believe are known to God, but which He has not made fully known to man.”

January 9, 2007 – Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs announces the iPhone.

January 9, 2019 – President Trump signs into law the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.