No. 81 - January 23, 2014 - January 25th - A Day in History

by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

January 25th is the 25th day of the Gregorian Calendar. This new calendar was adopted in 1582, deemed necessary to correct the drift of Easter after the Julian Calendar, adopted at the Nicean Council in A. D. 325, had drifted 10 days, placing the Spring Equinox on March 11th. Mostly our lives go forward without even thinking about this. The 25th of January marks dates which changed the world.

On this date in 1533 – Henry VIII of England secretly married a second time to Anne Boleyn. Queen Anne, the mother of Elizabeth I of England, did not last, but since Henry was still married to Catherine of Aragon this resulted in the founding of the Anglican Church of England. The Episcopal Church, the American version, declared its independence from Great Britain in 1790.

The first uprising after the American Revolution had taken place on January 25th,

1787, outside the Springfield Armory, results in the killing of four rebels and the wounding of twenty. The issue was the taxation of small farmers and the lack of currency in which taxes could be paid, an issue the wealthy mechants of the Eastern seaboard could not understand. A monument to the last battle of Shay's Revolt on February 27 that year in Sheffield, Massachusetts.

The music played at weddings in America dates from January 25^th, 1858 when The Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn was played at the marriage of Queen Victoria's daughter, Victoria, and Friedrich of Prussia.

And on this date in 1881 significant patterns for ownership and communications were laid when Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell formed the Oriental Telephone Company.

Development of the technology by a series of people had been continuing since Antonio Meucci's work with constructing telephone-like devices in 1854. Bell was the first to patent a device and claim the profits.

On this day in 1945 the detailed contingency planning of General George Patton stopped the advance on Paris by Germany with the end of The Battle of the Bulge.

And on January 25th, 1961 John F. Kennedy delivered the first live presidential television news conference. The 37 minute conference began with a statement concerning the scheduling of the Geneva negotiations for a nuclear test ban.

The phone and television began a series of rapid innovations in our world. Preceding the Internet, changes in technology have altered how we see the world and understand ourselves.