#Middlebury
On Jan. 25, 1776, the Continental Congress authorizes the first national Revolutionary War memorial in honor of Gen. Richard Montgomery, who had been killed during an assault on Quebec on Dec. 31, 1775, one of the first generals of the American Revolution to lose his life on the battlefield.- On Jan. 30, 1835, Andrew Jackson becomes the first American president to experience an assassination attempt. Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter, shot at Jackson, but his gun misfired. A furious 67-year-old Jackson confronted his attacker, clubbing Lawrence several times with his walking cane.
- On Jan. 29, 1845, Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem, “The Raven,” beginning “Once upon a midnight dreary,” is published in the New York Evening Mirror.
- On Jan. 28, 1855, the Panama Railway, which carried thousands of unruly gold miners to California via the dense jungles of Central America, dispatches its first train across the Isthmus of Panama. The Panama Canal would parallel the railway 50 years later.
- On Jan. 31, 1944, D-Day is postponed until June when several key leaders agreed that there would not be enough ships available by May. D-Day would later be postponed once more, by a single day due to high winds. Finally, on the morning of June 6, the long-awaited invasion of France began.
- On Jan. 27, 1965, the Shelby GT 350, a version of a Ford Mustang developed by American auto racer Carroll Shelby, is launched. The sports car featured a 306 horsepower V-8 engine and remained in production through the end of the 1960s.
- On Jan. 26, 1970, U.S. Navy Lt. Everett Alvarez Jr. spends his 2,000th day in captivity in Southeast Asia. First taken prisoner when his plane was shot down Aug. 5, 1964, during one of the first bombing raids over North Vietnam, he became the longest-held POW in U.S. history.
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