On January 17, 1820, Anne Brontë, the youngest of the six Brontë children, is born in Yorkshire, England. Their mother died when Anne was still an infant, and the children were left largely to their own devices in the bleak parsonage in Haworth, a remote village in Yorkshire, where their father was a clergyman. Anne’s four older […]

After a two-month ordeal, the expedition of British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrives at the South Pole only to find that Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer, had preceded them by just over a month. Disappointed, the exhausted explorers prepared for a long and difficult journey back to their base camp. Scott, a British naval officer, […]

On January 17, 1916, a group of golf professionals and several leading amateur golfers gather at the Taplow Club in New York City, in a meeting that will result in the founding of the Professional Golfers Association (PGA). The lunch meeting occurred at the invitation of Rodman Wanamaker, the son of the pioneering founder of […]

Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Bolshevik revolution and early architect of the Soviet state, is deported by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to Alma-Ata in remote Soviet Central Asia. He lived there in internal exile for a year before being banished from the USSR forever by Stalin. Born in Ukraine of Russian-Jewish parents in 1879, […]

11 men steal more than $2 million from the Brink's Armored Car depot in Boston, Massachusetts. It was the largest bank robbery in U.S. history at the time. The robbers weren’t caught until January 1956.

On January 17, 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower ends his presidential term by warning the nation about the increasing power of the military-industrial complex. His remarks, issued during a televised farewell address to the American people, were particularly significant since Ike had famously served the nation as military commander of the Allied forces during WWII. Eisenhower […]

On January 17, 1966, the National Broadcasting Corporation orders 32 episodes of a new TV show, “The Monkees,” for its upcoming fall schedule. Little did producers know that the fake pop music band they were launching would become an actual pop culture sensation—whose records would even outsell the Beatles. Indeed, the inspiration for “The Monkees” […]

Gary Gilmore, convicted in a double murder, is shot to death by a firing squad in Utah, becoming the first person to be executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, in violation of the eighth Amendment to the Constitution, the death […]

On January 17, 1995, the Los Angeles Rams announce they are leaving Southern California after 49 years and moving to St. Louis. The team, which reportedly lost $6 million in 1994, is lured to Missouri with a package that includes a new $260 million stadium and a $15 million practice facility. The Rams’ move, which […]

The Republic of Ireland legally grants a divorce for the first time following a 1995 referendum. The first divorce in Ireland, granted to a terminally ill man who wished to marry his new partner, was a harbinger of the decline of the Catholic Church’s power over the Republic. The Irish Constitution of 1937 specifically forbade […]