December 28, 2015
A New Month, A New Year
By Eloise Graham
Editor-in-Chief
January is a new beginning, right in the middle of the dead of winter.
New Year’s resolutions and New Year traditions are big topics that first week of January. In fact, there are a couple of articles in this magazine featuring those topics.
But what are some other “firsts” that happen later in the month?
January 5, 1925 – Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming became the first female governor inaugurated in the U.S.
January 5, 1968 – Alexander Dubcek became first secretary of Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party. He introduced liberal reforms known as “Communism with a human face” which resulted in Soviet Russian troops invading Prague to crack down.
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, 1782 – The first U.S. commercial bank opened as the Bank of North America in Philadelphia.
January 9, 1960 – With the first blast of dynamite, construction work began on the Aswan High Dam across the Nile River in southern Egypt. One third of the project’s billion-dollar cost was underwritten by Soviet Russia. The dam created Lake Nasser, one of the world’s largest reservoirs, at nearly 2,000 square miles and irrigated over 100,000 acres of surrounding desert. The dam was opened in January of 1971 by President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and President Nikolai Podgorny of the Soviet Union.
January 12, 1932 – Hattie W. Caraway, a Democrat from Arkansas, was appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the term of her deceased husband. Later in the year, she became the first woman elected to the Senate.
January 13, 1990 – Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the first African American governor in the U.S. as he took the oath of office in Richmond.
January 17, 1773 – The ship Resolution, sailing under Captain James Cook, became the first vessel to cross the Antarctic Circle. January 20, 1996 – Yasir Arafat became the first democratically-elected leader of the Palestinian people with 88.1 percent of the vote. January 21, 1954 – The USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear powered submarine, was launched at Groton, Connecticut.
January 21, 1976 – The Concorde supersonic jet had its first passenger service flight from London to Bahrain and Paris to Rio de Janeiro, cruising at twice the speed of sound (Mach 2) at an altitude up to 60,000 feet.
