Today in History....January 11

* 1759, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the first American life insurance company is incorporated

* 1787, William Herschel discovers Titania and Oberon, two moons of Uranus

* 1805, Michigan Territory is created

* 1861, Alabama secedes from the United States

* 1880. a total solar eclipse blackens the sky of San Francisco one day after the funeral of Emperor Norton

* 1902, Popular Mechanics magazine is published for the first time

* the Grand Canyon National Monument was created with a proclamation by President Theodore Roosevelt. (It became a national park in 1919.)

* 1913, the first sedan-type automobile, a Hudson, went on display at the 13th Automobile Show in New York

* 1922, first use of insulin to treat diabetes in a human patient

* 1935, Amelia Earhart is the first woman to fly solo from Hawaii to California

* 1943, the United States and United Kingdom give up territorial rights in China

* 1949, first recorded case of snowfall in Los Angeles, California.

* 1962, an avalanche on Huascaran in Peru causes 4,000 deaths

* 1964, the United States Surgeon General Dr. Luther Leonidas Terry, M.D., publishes a report saying that smoking may be hazardous to health.
It is the first such statement ever made by the U.S. government

* 1972, East Pakistan renames itself Bangladesh

* 1974, the world's first surviving set of sextuplets are born to Susan Rosenkowitz in Cape Town, South Africa

* 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

* 2001, the Federal Trade Commission approves the merger of AOL and Time Warner to form AOL Time Warner

* 2003, calling the death penalty process "arbitrary and capricious, and therefore immoral," Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences of
167 condemned inmates, clearing his state's death row two days before leaving office

* 2007, President Bush's plan for a surge of American troops to Iraq ran into a wall of criticism on Capitol Hill as administration officials drew confrontational challenges from both Democrats and Republicans