On January 16, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution came into effect as scheduled one year after ratification, marking the beginning of Prohibition. Learn more about Temperance and Prohibition from Professor K. Austin Kerr of the Ohio State University Department of History.
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On January 16, 1581, the English Parliament banned Roman Catholicism throughout the country during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. From that time on, Catholicism declined in England until the Catholic Emancipation of the late 18th century. Read the history of the Roman Catholic Church in England.
On January 15, 1991, the deadline issued by United Nations for Iraq to withdraw its troops from of Kuwait expired. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 678, giving Iraq until January 15, 1991 to leave.
On January 15, 1929, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University and listen to a clip from King’s 1963 'I Have a Dream' speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.
On January 14, 1639, the first written governmental constitution in modern history was adopted in the Colony of Connecticut. The Fundamental Orders represented the first time that a government was based upon a written constitution anywhere in the world. Along with the Mayflower Compact, the Fundamental Orders served as bases for United States Constitution 150 [...]
On January 14, 1986, the current constitution of Guatemala took effect. Read the Spanish-language text of the constitution, as amended in 1993.
On January 13, 1898, the French journalist and novelist Emile Zola published an open letter entitled J'accuse in defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army who had been dubiously convicted of spying. Learn more about the Dreyfus Affair. Sentenced to prison for libel, Zola fled to England; he was granted [...]
On January 13, 1990, Lawrence Douglas Wilder was sworn in as the governor of Virginia by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. Wilder was the first African-American to be elected governor of a U.S. state. He would also serve as Mayor of Richmond, the state’s capital city, from 2005 through 2009. Learn more about [...]
On January 12, 1998, nineteen European nations signed a treaty prohibiting human cloning within their jurisdictions. Review the terms of the Additional Protocol to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine, on the Prohibition of Cloning Human Beings.
On January 12, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt revived the National War Labor Board (NWLB) for World War II. In order to prevent wartime labor stoppages, the NWLB was set up to arbitrate labor disputes that arose during the war. The NWLB also managed wage controls over the airplane, automobile, shipping, mining, telegraph, and railway [...]
