January 6 ...

In 1540 King Henry VIII of England was married to Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife. (The marriage lasted about six months.) In 1720 the Committee of Inquiry on the South Sea Bubble published its findings. In 1759 George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis were married. In 1838 Samuel Morse demonstrated the telegraph for the first time. In 1878 poet, historian, and novelist Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, IL. In 1900 it was reported that millions of people were dying from starvation in India. In 1912 New Mexico became the 47th US state. In 1919 26th president of the United States Theodore Roosevelt died in Oyster Bay, NY, at age 60. In 1931 Thomas Edison executed his last patent application. In 1942 the first commercial around-the-world airline flight took place, when a Pan American Airlines flight landed in New York. In 1945 future president George Herbert Walker Bush married Barbara Pierce in Rye, NY. In 1950 Britain recognized the Communist government of China. In 1952 Peanuts debuted in Sunday papers across the United States. In 1963 Wild Kingdom premiered on NBC. In 1993 jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie died in Englewood, NJ, at age 75; also on this day, ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev died in Paris at age 54. In 1994 figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed on the right leg by an assailant at Cobo Arena in Detroit, MI. Four men were later sentenced to prison for the attack, including Tonya Harding's ex-husband. In 1998 the spacecraft Lunar Prospect was launched into orbit around the moon. The craft was crashed into the moon, in an effort to find water under the lunar surface, on July 31, 1999. In 2001 with the vanquished Vice President Al Gore presiding, Congress formally certified George W. Bush the winner of the achingly close and bitterly contested 2000 presidential election. In 2005 former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen was arrested 41 years after three civil rights workers were slain in Mississippi. (Killen was later convicted of manslaughter.)