January 21

On the 21st in 1789, Boston, MA publishers Isaiah Thomas and Company published ‘The Power of Sympathy: or The Triumph of Nature, Founded in Truth. In two volumes’, by William Hill Brown. It is considered by many to be the first novel published in the United States.

January 20

King Charles I was King of England in the 17th century. He was perhaps more ambitious than most, because he was also King of Scotland, King of Ireland, and King of Scotland. Trust me; you did not want the job of designing his business cards. I imagine it would be a bit of an understatement to say that he was not particularly beloved by his subjects. On the 20th in 1649, Charles was put on trial for treason and other high crimes. One contribution Charles may have made to the justice system of his kingdoms was to streamline it; he was executed by beheading on the 30th.

January 19

It is never too early to give your children a push in the direction you see their careers heading. Frances II, whose father was Henry II, King of France, was born on the 19th in 1544. In 1548 Frances’s dad decided that his son had been a lazy do-nothing long enough and he arranged for the lad to marry Mary Stuart, who had been crowned Mary Queen of Scots on September 9, 1543, at the advanced age of 9 months.

January 18

Everyone knows that the South Pole cannot be reached easily. Even today, with the benefit of helicopters, airplanes, and sophisticated land vehicles the Pole can only be approached with extreme difficulty. Just imagine what it must have been like at the dawning of the 20th Century. British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, competing against Roald Amundsen in a ‘Race to the Pole,’ arrived at the South Pole on the 18th in 1912. Scott had spent a year in Antarctica preparing for his assault on the Pole. He really should have checked his email more often, because Amundsen had gotten there on the preceding December 14. Coming in second rather takes the fun out of it, and the fact that everyone in the party, including Scott, died, put a damper on the celebration.

January 17

If your travel plans happen to involve stopping off in South Carolina, you might want to throw a hazmat suit or two in the trunk of your car. On the 17th in 1966 a Strategic Air Command B-52, carrying four 70-ton hydrogen bombs collided with a KC-135 tanker during a refueling maneuver over the quaint fishing village of Palomares in Spain. One of the bombs went in to the sea, where it was recovered a little over two months later. The remaining three landed in Palomares, spilling their radioactive contents over a wide area. The Air Force was forced to excavate more than 1,750 tons of contaminated material from the village, which, of course, was sent back to the United States and disposed of in South Carolina.

January 16

Andre Michelin was born on the 16th in 1853. In 1900, Andre and his brother Edouard started a company to manufacture tires. It would not be inappropriate to call Andre the Michelin Man, although he wasn’t completely white and puffier than a marshmallow. In 1900, Andre began publication of the Michelin Guide, which not only encouraged people to travel everywhere by car but also provided very useful information concerning where to go in your car and where to sleep and eat once you got there. This was a rather sly way of generating business for the tire-manufacturing arm of the Michelin Empire.

January 15

Sir Hans Sloane was a wealthy English doctor who was in the habit of collecting things, so many things that it would not be incorrect to label him a pack rat. Granted, he was a pack rat with a great deal of money. In 1716, he was created a baronet, the first medical practioner to receive a hereditary title. When he died on the 11th in 1753, he bequeathed most of his stuff, amassed over a long career, the manuscripts, pictures, coins and more than 40,000 books that were gathering dust in the attic, to what would become the British Museum, which opened on the 15th in 1759, on the condition that his estate be paid £20,000, far less than the value of the collections. Sloane’s family didn’t seek more money because they were just glad to get all that junk out of the attic. This is a bit like some poets today (you know who you are) who are pleased when a university asks to be the repository of their papers and the poet is just happy to clean out the attic.