January 4
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Featured Event
LBJ Library photo by Arnold Newman
On this day in 1965, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered the first prime-time televised State of the Union address, transforming a traditionally somewhat boring afternoon speech to Congress into a media event aimed at the American people. [Read today’s edition of Today in History >>]
Featured Biography
Featured Biography
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Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.
Isaac Newton, born in England this day in 1643, was a leader of the scientific revolution whose Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) is among the most important single works in the history of modern science.
Famous Birthdays
More on January 4
© Ken Wolter/Dreamstime.com
2021
A group of several hundred workers at Google announced that they had created a trade union, a rarity among technology companies.
© Abrar Sharif/Dreamstime.com
2010
Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, officially opened in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. [Explore a list of the tallest buildings in the world.]
Office of U.S. House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi
2007
Nancy Pelosi was elected speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first woman to hold the office. [Read our list of seven female firsts in U.S. politics.]
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
1965
Poet and literary critic T.S. Eliot, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry with such works as The Waste Land (1922), died in London. [Test your knowledge of poetry.]
Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum
1960
Novelist and playwright Albert Camus, who received the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature, was killed in an automobile accident in France. [Why are there conspiracy theories around Camus’s death? And why are they wrong?]
Laurence Harris— AP/REX/Shutterstock.com
1948
Burma—today called Myanmar—formally gained independence from Great Britain, completing the peaceful transfer of power negotiated by Burmese leader Aung San and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee in 1947.
AP
1935
American professional boxer Floyd Patterson was born in Waco, North Carolina. [How much do you know about boxing?]
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)
1853
Solomon Northrup, a free Black man who had been kidnapped in Washington, D.C., and sold into slavery, legally obtained his freedom. He later wrote about his experiences in Twelve Years a Slave, which became the basis for an Oscar-winning movie. [Take our quiz about slavery and resistance through history.]
© Apic/Getty Images
1809
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. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about history makers.]