The first full week in January is always the official week of buckling down, returning to pre-holiday routines and hunkering down for another few months of winter (let’s hope we don’t see a return to the sub-zero temps we had here in Nebraska in the weeks before the holidays). January may not be as crazy as December, but over the years many important events have still happened this month. Let’s take a look, shall we?

January 5, 1972 – President Richard Nixon orders the development of an organized space shuttle program.

Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, by David Hitt, Owen Garriott, and Joe Kerwin, tells the story of what happened next, after astronauts stopped merely exploring space and began also living there.

January 6, 1912 – New Mexico becomes the the 47th U.S. state.

The states and regions in which Americans live can affect their accents, their preferences for certain foods and types of entertainment, the styles of homes they live in, the way they dress and, of course, which sports teams they cheer for. Likewise, the place in which an author lives often affects the way he or she writes, as detailed in Regionalism and the Humanities, edited and with an introduction by Timothy R. Mahoney and Wendy J. Katz.

January 7, 1789: The United States of America holds its first presidential election.

We all know how that election turned out, just as how we all know about that before he was president, George Washington was the leader of American forces during the Revolutionary War. But what many of us don’t know is that as American forces were fighting the British, they were also fighting the Native Americans who Washington thought stood in the way of white settlement, a topic explored in George Washington’s War on Native America by Barbara Alice Mann.

January 8, 1877: Crazy Horse fights his last battle, losing to U.S. Calvary in Montana.

The University of Nebraska Press first published Mari Sandoz’s famous biography of the Oglala Sioux leader in 1942. The New York Times praised the book, titled simply Crazy Horse, as “a glorious hero tale told with beauty and power . . . the story of a great American.” The University of Nebraska Press published a third edition of the book in 2008, and has published other books about Crazy Horse as well.

January 9, 1908: Simone de Beauvoir, a French philosopher, feminist and writer perhaps best known for her 1949 book Second Sex, is born.

Views from the Margins, edited and with an introduction by Kevin J. Callahan and Sarah A. Curtis, explores what it means to be French, and how class, gender, nationality, religion and other factors play into the French identity. 

I hope this week’s edition of This Week in History taught you something new (or at least brought back memories from high school history classes). Remember you can find all of these titles and more at the University of Nebraska Press website.