Today in History....January 11

On this day in …

1775, Francis Salvador, the first Jew to be elected in the Americas, takes his seat on the South Carolina Provincial Congress. In June 1776, Salvador, a Patriot, became known as the "Southern Paul Revere" when he warned Charleston, South Carolina, of the approaching British naval fleet. Thanks to Salvador's intelligence information, Fort Sullivan in Charleston harbor was able to prepare for the British attack, and the half-completed fort successfully repelled an attack by a British fleet under Sir Peter Parker.
On August 1 of the same year, while leading a militia group under the general command of Major Wilkinson, Salvador and his men were ambushed by a group of Cherokees and Loyalists near present-day Seneca, South Carolina. Salvador was wounded and then scalped by the Cherokees. He was the first recorded Jewish soldier killed in the American War for Independence 1805, the Michigan Territory was created by an act of Congress

1861, Alabama seceded from the Union

1908, declaring that "The ages had been at work on it, and man can only mar it," President Theodore Roosevelt designates the mighty Grand Canyon a national monument

1928, Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Bolshevik revolution and early architect of the Soviet state, is deported by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to Alma-Ata in remote Soviet Central Asia. He lived there in internal exile for a year before being banished from the USSR forever by Stalin.

1935, aviator Amelia Earhart began a trip from Honolulu to Oakland, Calif., that made her the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean

1943, the United States and Britain signed treaties relinquishing extraterritorial rights in China

1977, France set off an international uproar by releasing Abu Daoud, a PLO official and practitioner of that "religion of peace", who was behind the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

1989, President Reagan gives his farewell address

2006, a Georgian court convicted a man of trying to assassinate President Bush and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili with a grenade in Tbilisi on May 10, 2005, and sentenced him to life in prison