January 10

January 10, 49 BCE, is understood to be the date on which an ambitious Julius Caesar led his army across the River Rubicon, which separated Roman-controlled northeastern Italy from the province of Gaul, and instantly began the Civil War against his rivals Pompey, elected consuls and the Senate. Caesar’s 10 years of successful campaigns in Gaul (France and Germany) and Hibernia (Britain) had made him wildly popular. Crossing the Rubicon without surrendering his “imperium” (command) was a supreme act of insurrection – and a risky gamble. Historian Suetonius tells us Caesar uttered the words “Alea iacta est” ("The die has been cast"), meaning he was now irrevocably committed to his quest for power and could not turn back. Romans were avid gamblers, so dice were common objects. Pictured: Ancient Roman dice in lapis lazuli, carnelian and bone.

January 9

On January 9, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt declared Muir Woods in California a National Monument. Part of the National Park Service on the Pacific coast in Marin County, the land includes 240 acres of old-growth Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forests, one of a few such stands remaining in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ancestors of redwoods and sequoias grew across the United States 150 million years ago, but they exist today only in a narrow, cool band from Monterey, Calif., to Oregon. An estimated 2 million acres of old-growth forests grew in California before the logging industry cut most of them down. Muir Woods, named after naturalist John Muir, was saved in the inaccessible Redwood Canyon area with the help of U.S. Congressman William Kent and his wife, who bought and donated the land to the Federal government, averting further destruction.

January 8

Elvis Aaron Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in a two-room shotgun house in Tupelo, Mississippi. His twin brother was stillborn. As a teenager living in public housing in Memphis, he became intensely interested in the guitar, learned country songs by heart, and listened to gospel and African-American music at every chance. His eponymous first recording for RCA (pictured), which included “Blue Suede Shoes,” was released in March 1956. It spent ten weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart and was the first rock and roll album to do so. That year, Elvis had No. 1 hits with "Heartbreak Hotel," "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You," "Don't Be Cruel," "Hound Dog" and "Love Me Tender." In recording “Hound Dog,” he insisted on 31 takes before he was satisfied with it. “The King” never received formal music training or learned to read music. He studied and played by ear.

January 7

French composer and pianist Francis Poulenc was born on January 7, 1899, in Paris. Largely self-taught, he is regarded as one of the most important modern composers of religious music, which he produced after an awakening in 1936, including the Stabat Mater (1950), his ethereal O Magnum Mysterium (1952), and his celebrated choral work, Gloria (1961). He also composed a wide range of secular solo piano music, ballet music, French art songs, and chamber, choral, orchestral and organ music. In the 1920s he was a leading figure in the avant-garde group called Les Six, including Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud, who steered music away from Impressionism, formality and intellectualism. He was partly influenced by Stravinsky, but also by Satie and Debussy. Much of Poulenc’s music is marked by lyrical melody, often contrasting the witty and ironic with the melancholy.

January 6

Early archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was born on January 6, 1822, in the German Confederation. He was a fast-moving, fast-talking businessman who got rich cornering the market on commodities and munitions. His passion for Homer drove him to seek the site of the actual Troy in what is now Turkey. Eventually, his excavations of nine levels of archaeological remains starting in 1871 at Hissarlik – using dynamite – destroyed major historical artifacts, including the level thought to be that of the historical city. He also dug at the ancient sites of Mycenae and Tiryns in Greece, but died before he could get his hands on the Palace of Knossos on Crete. Pictured: The so-called “Mask of Agamemnon” (1550-1500 BCE), in repoussé gold, discovered by Schliemann in a burial vault at Mycenae in 1876. It predates the time of an historical King Agamemnon.

January 5

“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.’ … Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play, Waiting for Godot, was premièred on January 5, 1953, in the Théâtre de Babylone, a tiny space on Paris’ Left Bank. The play’s two characters, Vladimir and Estragon (inspired by Laurel and Hardy, in bowler hats), wait endlessly and in vain for the arrival of someone named Godot, whom they claim is an acquaintance – though they hardly know him and would not recognize him. Stranded near a tree on a barren stretch of road, they inhabit a semi-comical drama that takes place in their own consciousness, passing the time (eating, sleeping, arguing, swapping hats, contemplating suicide) "to hold the terrible silence at bay." Now a cornerstone of modern literature, Beckett wrote the play in French in 1948-1949, capturing the post-War existentialist zeitgeist.

January 4

German philologist and cultural researcher Jacob Grimm was born on January 4, 1785. He developed Grimm's Law in linguistics (dealing with Germanic sound shifts) and co-edited with his brother, Wilhelm, the massive German Dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch, 1854) and Grimm's Fairy Tales, first published in 1812 as Children's and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen). The brothers were patriots seeking to preserve Germanic folktales and only inadvertently entertainers. Their collected stories offered life as generations of central Europeans knew it: capricious and cruel, laced with murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest. Tales included Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel and Snow White. The brothers subsequently softened, sweetened and sanitized the tales in multiple editions through the 1850s.

January 3

English author, scholar and philologist John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in South Africa. He was taken to England at age 3. After service in World War I, he was employed at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W. Later he produced A Middle English Vocabulary and a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In 1925 he became a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, where he wrote The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1937-1949). His 1936 lectures on "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" enhanced modern understanding of the Old English epic as a dramatic poem that addresses human destiny. Tolkien detested the side effects of industrialization and disdained automobiles, preferring to ride a bicycle.

January 2

Russian-born author and biochemist Isaac Asimov observed his birthday on January 2 (1920). He grew up in Brooklyn and taught himself to read at age 5. Best known for his science fiction and popular science works, he was one of the world’s most prolific writers, having written or edited more than 500 books and published works in all 10 major Dewey Decimal categories. His most famous work is the Foundation Series, and his 1964 "Nightfall" is considered one of the best science fiction short stories. I, Robot is a 1950 collection of nine short stories (pictured) sharing a theme of morality in the interaction of humans and robots; taken together they tell Asimov's fictional history of robotics. He is credited with introducing the words “positronic,” “psychohistory” and “robotics” into English. He coined the last of these without suspecting it might be an original word.

January 1

150 years ago: On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the final Emancipation Proclamation, ending slavery in the rebel states. The act expanded the Civil War’s goal from reunification to include abolition. It also shrewdly sabotaged Confederate efforts to be recognized by foreign governments, especially Great Britain (which had abolished slavery in 1833). After the Proclamation, the Southern cause became a defense of slavery, thus jeopardizing foreign aid. Lincoln admitted that he never "felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper." The tradition of a “Watch Night” was established on Dec. 31, 1862, as abolitionists and others waited for word (via telegraph, newspaper or word of mouth) that the Proclamation had been issued. Pictured: Commemorative stamp, designed as a broadside, U.S. Postal Service, 2013.