Today is Sunday, Jan. 6, the sixth day of 2019. There are 359 days left in the year.
On Jan. 6, 1945, George Herbert Walker Bush married Barbara Pierce at the First Presbyterian Church in Rye, N.Y.
In 1759, George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis were married in New Kent County, Va.
In 1838, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail gave the first successful public demonstration of their telegraph in Morristown, N.J.
In 1912, New Mexico became the 47th state.
In 1919, the 26th president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, died in Oyster Bay, N.Y., at age 60.
In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his State of the Union address, outlined a goal of “Four Freedoms”: Freedom of speech and expression; the freedom of people to worship God in their own way; freedom from want; freedom from fear.
In 1968, a surgical team at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, Calif., led by Dr. Norman Shumway performed the first U.S. adult heart transplant, placing the heart of a 43-year-old man in a 54-year-old patient (the recipient died 15 days later).
In 1974, year-round daylight saving time began in the United States on a trial basis as a fuel-saving measure in response to the OPEC oil embargo.
In 1993, authorities rescued Jennifer Stolpa and her infant son, Clayton, after Jennifer’s husband, James, succeeded in reaching help, ending the family’s eight-day ordeal after becoming lost in the snow-covered Nevada desert. Jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, 75, died in Englewood, N.J.; ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev died in suburban Paris at 54.
In 1994, figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed on the leg by an assailant at Detroit’s Cobo Arena; four men, including the ex-husband of Kerrigan’s rival, Tonya Harding, went to prison for their roles in the attack. (Harding pleaded guilty to conspiracy to hinder prosecution, but denied any advance knowledge about the assault.)
In 1998, In a new bid to expand health insurance, President Clinton unveiled a proposal to offer Medicare coverage to hundreds of thousands of uninsured Americans between the ages of 55 to 64.
In 2001, with Vice President Al Gore presiding in his capacity as president of the Senate, Congress formally certified George W. Bush the winner of the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election.
In 2003, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein accused U.N. inspectors of engaging in “intelligence work” instead of searching for suspected nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in his country.