* On Jan. 5, 1914, Henry Ford made the welcome announcement that he was doubling his assembly-line employees’ pay. However, there was a perhaps notso- welcome catch -- home inspections to check for alcohol consumption and untidy living quarters.
* On Jan. 6, 1996, snow began blanketing Washington, D.C., and the eastern seaboard in a blizzard that killed 154 people and ended up costing more than a billion dollars in damages before it ended.
* On Jan. 7, 1891, future novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama. Though she would eventually publish more books than any other Black woman in America, by the time she died in 1960 she’d failed to gain a mainstream audience and was poor and alone in a welfare hotel. Today she is considered one of the most important Black writers in American history.
* On Jan. 8, 1963, LEOnardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, was exhibited for the first time in the U.S. at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. More than 2,000 dignitaries, including President John F. Kennedy, came out to view it. The exhibit opened to the public the following day.
* On Jan. 9, 1984, Angelo Buono, one of the Hillside Stranglers, was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the rape, torture and murder of 10 young women in Los Angeles. His cousin and partner in crime, Kenneth Bianchi, testified against Buono to escape the death penalty himself.
* On Jan. 10, 1863, the London Tube, the world’s first urban underground railway, opened. Since its first tunnel ran under the River Thames and had no ventilation, it was always filled with smoke.
* On Jan. 11, 1775, Francis Salvador, the first Jewish person to hold an elected office in the Americas, took his seat on the South Carolina Provincial Congress. In July he earned the nickname the “Southern Paul Revere” when he rode 30 miles to warn of a Cherokee attack on backcountry settlements, and just a month later he became the first recorded Jewish soldier to be killed in the Revolutionary War.
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