Shimla, Jan
2010
Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, officially opened in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
2007
U.S. politician Nancy Pelosi was elected speaker of the House of Representatives, becoming the first woman to hold the office.
1965
American-English author T.S. Eliot, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922), died in London.
1965
In his State of the Union message, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed his vision of a “Great Society” and called for an enormous program of social welfare legislation.
1960
French novelist and playwright Albert Camus, who received the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature, was killed in an automobile accident.
1935
American professional boxer Floyd Patterson was born in Waco, North Carolina.
1853
Solomon Northrup, a free Black man who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery, legally obtained his freedom, and he later wrote about his experiences in Twelve Years a Slave (1853).
From Twelve years a slave Narrative of Solomon Northup, a citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River, in Louisiana; Derby and Miller (Auburn, Buffalo; 1853)
1809
French educator Louis Braille, who developed a system of printing and writing that is extensively used by the blind and that was named for him, was born near Paris.
