BY THE LEARNING NETWORK

 JANUARY 12, 2012 4:03 AM

Library of Congress George Grantham Bain Collection Two suffragists holding a National Woman Suffrage Association banner in 1913. The United States did not amend the Constitution to grant women the right to vote until 1920.

On Jan. 12, 1915, the United States House of Representatives voted, 204-174, to reject a constitutional amendment to give women the right to vote.

The New York Times recounted the House’s 10 hours of debate in front of galleries packed with suffragists. The Times noted that it was a “solemn day in the galleries” as the “women there were slow to laugh, and they seemed too much awed by the speaker’s call for order to applaud even their strongest champion.”

The speaker ordered silence from the galleries three times, once for hissing during a speech made by anti-suffrage Representative Stanley Bowdle of Ohio. Mr. Bowdle proclaimed: “The women of this smart capital are beautiful. Their beauty is disturbing to business; their feet are beautiful; their ankles are beautiful, but here I must pause — for they are not interested in the state.”

The vote was the second defeat for a suffrage amendment in less than a year, as the Senate had voted against one in March 1914. Nonetheless, suffragist leaders were pleased to have had the issue discussed in Congress, which had gone 46 years without voting on whether women should be allowed to vote. The only other time was in 1868, when the suffrage amendment was first brought before Congress.

The optimism of the suffragists was well founded. In 1918, a suffrage amendment was passed in the House, but fell two votes short in the Senate. The next year, the House and the Senate voted in favor of suffrage, passing the 19th Amendment, which declared that the right “to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

On January 12, 2010, Haiti is devastated by a massive earthquake. It drew an outpouring of support from around the globe but the small nation has yet to fully recover.

Haiti has a history of seismic activity—devastating earthquakes were recorded there in 1751, 1770, 1842 and 1946. The island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, lies mostly between two large tectonic plates, the North American and the Caribbean. The Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince practically straddles this fault line. Despite this knowledge and warnings from seismologists that another earthquake was likely in the near future, the country’s poverty meant that infrastructure and emergency services were not prepared to handle the effects of a natural disaster.

The 2010 earthquake struck just before 5 pm. The tremor was felt as far away as Cuba and Venezuela, but the epicenter of the 7.0-magnitude quake was just 16 miles away from Port-au-Prince. Eight aftershocks followed the same day, and at least 52 were recorded over the next two weeks. The effects were catastrophic. All of the capital’s hospitals, as well as three facilities run by Doctors Without Borders, sustained serious damage, as did Port-au-Prince’s airport and its seaport, which was rendered inoperable. Telecoms services were greatly affected, major roads were rendered impassible, and close to 300,000 buildings, most of which were residences, were damaged beyond repair. The National Assembly building and Port-au-Prince Cathedral were also destroyed.

Source: history.com

49 BC – Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River signaling a war between Rome and Gaul.

1519 – Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I died.

1773 – The first public museum in America was established in Charleston, SC.

1866 – The Royal Aeronautical Society was founded in London.

1875 – Kwang-su was made emperor of China.

1879 – The British-Zulu War began when the British invaded Zululand.

1882 – Thomas Edison’s central station on Holborn Viaduct in London began operation.

1895 – The first performance of King Arthur took place at the Lyceum Theatre.

1896 – At Davidson College, several students took x-ray photographs. They created the first X-ray photographs to be made in America.

1904 – Henry Ford set a new land speed record when he reached 91.37 miles per hour.

1908 – A wireless message was sent long-distance for the first time from the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

1915 – The U.S. House of Representatives rejected a proposal to give women the right to vote.

1915 – The U.S. Congress established the Rocky Mountain National Park.

1926 – “Sam ‘n’ Henry” debuted on WGN Radio in Chicago, IL.

1932 – Hattie W. Caraway became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate.

1938 – Austria recognized the Franco government in Spain.

1940 – Soviet bombers raided cities in Finland.

1942 – U.S. President Roosevelt created the National War Labor Board.

1943 – The Office of Price Administration announced that standard frankfurters/hot dogs/wieners would be replaced by ‘Victory Sausages.’

1945 – During World War II, Soviet forces began a huge offensive against the Germans in Eastern Europe.

1948 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not discriminate against law-school applicants because of race.

1949 – “Arthur Godfrey and His Friends” was debuted on CBS-TV. The show stayed on the network for seven years.

1949 – “Kukla, Fran and Ollie”, the Chicago-based children’s show, made its national debut on NBC-TV.

1955 – Rod Serling’s career began with the TV production of “Patterns.”

1960 – Dolph Schayes of the Syracuse Nationals became the first pro basketball player in the NBA to score more than 15,000 points in his career.

1964 – Leftist rebels in Zanzibar began their successful revolt against the government and a republic was proclaimed.

1966 – U.S. President Johnson said in his State of the Union address that the United States should stay in South Vietnam until Communist aggression there was ended.

1966 – “Batman” debuted on ABC-TV.

1967 – “Dragnet” returned to NBC-TV after being off the network schedule for eight years.

1970 – The breakaway state of Biafra capitulated and the Nigerian civil war came to an end.

1970 – Nigeria’s civil war ended.

1971 – “All In the Family” debuted on CBS-TV.

1973 – Yassar Arafat was re-elected as head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

1986 – Space shuttle Columbia blasted off with a crew that included the first Hispanic-American in space, Dr. Franklin R. Chang-Diaz.

1991 – The U.S. Congress passed a resolution authorizing President Bush to use military power to force Iraq out of Kuwait.

1995 – Northern Ireland Secretary Patrick Mayhew announced that as of January 16 British troops would no longer carry out daylight street patrols in Belfast.

1998 – Tyson Foods Inc. pled guilty to giving $12,000 to former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy. Tyson was fined $6 million.

1998 – 19 European nations agreed to prohibit human cloning.

1998 – Linda Tripp provided Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s office with taped conversations between herself and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

1999 – Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball was sold at auction in New York for $3 million to an anonymous bidder.

2000 – The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, gave police broad authority to stop and question people who run at the sight of an officer.

2000 – Charlotte Hornets guard Bobby Phills was killed in a crash during a drag race.

2005 – NASA launched “Deep Impact”. The spacecraft was planned to impact on Comet Tempel 1 after a six-month, 268 million-mile journey.

2006 – The U.S. Mint began shipping new 5-cent coins to the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks. The coin has an image of Thomas Jefferson taken from a 1800 Rembrandt Peale portrait in which the president is looking forward. Since 1909, when presidents were first depicted on circulating coins, all presidents had been shown in profile.

The National War Labor Board was reestablished by President Roosevelt on January 12, 1942, under the chairmanship of William Hammatt Davis. It became a tripartite body and was charged with acting as an arbitration tribunal in labor-management dispute cases, thereby preventing work stoppages which might hinder the war effort. It administered wage control in national industries such as automobiles, shipping, railways, airlines, telegraph lines, and mining. The Board was originally divided into twelve Regional Administrative Boards which handled both labor dispute settlement and wage stabilization functions for specific geographic regions. The National Board further decentralized in 1943, when it established special tripartite commissions and panels to deal with specific industries on a national base. It ceased operating on December 31, 1945, some four months after the war’s close. Labor disputes were thereafter handled by the National Labor Relations Board, originally set up in 1935. Second incarnation

The National War Labor Board (NWLB) was a United States federal agency created in two different incarnations, the first by President Woodrow Wilson from 1918–19 during World War I and the second by President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1942–45 during World War II. In both cases the board’s purpose was to arbitrate disputes between workers and employers in order to ensure labor reliability and productivity during war.

The board began operations on April 8, 1918, after Wilson’s action. It was composed of twelve representatives from business and labor, and co-chaired by former President William Howard Taft. The decisions of the NWLB generally supported and strengthened the position of labor. Although it opposed the disruption of war production by strikes, it supported an eight-hour day for workers, equal pay for women, and the right to organize unions and bargain collectively. Although the NWLB did not have any coercive enforcement power, Wilson generally ensured compliance with its decisions.

In general, the relative strength of organized labor in America grew substantially during the war. Union membership almost doubled after the formation of the NWLB. Of note, the AFL membership rose from 2 million in 1916 to 3.2 million in 1919. By the end of the decade, 15 percent of the nonagricultural work force was unionized.

In all, the board ruled on 1,245 cases. Almost 90 percent of them sprang from worker complaints, and five skilled trades accounted for 45 percent. Of the cases, 591 were dismissed, 315 were referred to other federal labor agencies, and 520 resulted in formal awards or findings. In reaching decisions, the board was aided by an office and investigative staff of 250 people. Approximately 700,000 workers in 1,000 establishments were directly affected.

The board was disbanded on May 31, 1919, some six and a half months after the war’s close.

military.wikia.org