January 3 Birthday
January 3, 1521: Pope Leo X issued the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem, formally excommunicating Martin Luther. Luther had been given sixty days to recant his 95 Theses. He did not. Instead, he publicly burned the papal bull that threatened him, along with a copy of canon law. The bonfire in Wittenberg was theatrical and deliberate — Luther understood the power of spectacle. By cutting himself off from the Catholic Church, he made reconciliation impossible and set the Reformation on an irreversible course. The wars that followed would kill millions and redraw the map of Europe. All because one monk would not say he was wrong. On this day in 1959, Alaska became the 49th state. It was purchased from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million — about two cents per acre. The purchase was widely mocked as "Seward's Folly," after Secretary of State William Seward who negotiated it. The discovery of gold in the 1890s proved the skeptics wrong, and the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in 1968 made it one of the best real estate deals in history. Alaska is more than twice the size of Texas and has a lower population than Washington, DC. Its statehood was delayed for decades by senators who worried that the population was too sparse and too different. J.R.R. Tolkien was born on this day in 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where his father worked as a bank manager. He moved to England at age three and never returned. His father died before he could follow. Tolkien fought in the Battle of the Somme, where most of his closest friends were killed. He began inventing languages as a child — not as a hobby but as a compulsion — and The Lord of the Rings exists primarily to give those languages a world to live in. He wrote it during the years between World Wars, watching his own sons go off to the same kind of war he had survived. The book is often dismissed as fantasy, but it is one of the most serious meditations on power, loss, and mortality written in the 20th century. In 1990, Manuel Noriega, the deposed dictator of Panama, surrendered to US forces after taking refuge in the Vatican embassy. The US military had surrounded the building and blasted rock music — including Van Halen and Guns N' Roses — at deafening volume for days. Noriega, who had been on the CIA payroll before he became an enemy, was tried and convicted of drug trafficking in the United States. The invasion of Panama had killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilians, a toll that received little attention in American media. People born on January 3 fall under the zodiac sign of Capricorn. The birthstone is Garnet and the birth flower is Carnation. Historical events on January 3 include 1521: Martin Luther excommunicated by Pope Leo X, 1959: Alaska becomes the 49th US state, 1990: Manuel Noriega surrenders to US forces at Vatican embassy. Famous people born on January 3 include J.R.R. Tolkien (1892), Mel Gibson (1956), John Paul Jones (1946).