On This Day: January 11

This is the 11th day of the year.

Fact of the Day: cigarette

Cigarettes have a name of French origin, as a diminutive of cigare, thus 'little cigars'. The Aztecs smoked a hollow reed or cane tube stuffed with tobacco. Other natives of Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America crushed tobacco leaves and rolled the shreds in corn (maize) husk or other vegetable wrappers. But it was the cigar that the conquistadors brought back to Spain as a luxury for the wealthy. It is thought that as early as the 17th century, beggars in Sevilla (Seville) began to pick up discarded cigar butts, shred them, and roll them in scraps of paper (Spanish papeletes) for smoking, thus improvising the first cigarettes.

Holidays

Feast day of St. Salvius or Sauve of Amiens, and St. Theodosius the Cenobiarch.

Albania: Proclamation of the Republic Day (1946).

Nepal: National Unity Day.

Puerto Rico: De Hostos' Birthday (patriot).

Morocco: Independence Day.

Events

49 B.C.E. - Julius Caesar led his army across the Rubicon River, plunging Rome into civil war.

1775 - Francis Salvador, the first Jew to be elected in the Americas, took his seat on the South Carolina Provincial Congress.

1805 - The Michigan Territory was created.

1861 - Alabama seceded from the Union.

1922 - Leonard Thompson was the first person to be successfully treated with insulin, at Toronto General Hospital.

1935 - Aviator Amelia Earhart began a trip from Honolulu, Hawaii to Oakland, California, that made her the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean.

1940 - Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., became the United States Army's first black general.

1964 - US Surgeon General Luther Terry issued the first government report saying smoking may be hazardous to one's health.

1973 - The American League adopted the "designated hitter" rule in baseball.

2003 - Declaring the death penalty "arbitrary and capricious, and therefore immoral," Illinois Governor George Ryan commuted the sentences of 167 condemned inmates, emptying his state's death row two days before leaving office.

Births

1757 - Alexander Hamilton, U.S. statesman, first Secretary of the Treasury.

1885 - Alice Paul, American, chief strategist for the suffrage movement and author of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Deaths

1928 - Thomas Hardy, English poet and novelist.

2008 - Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand mountaineer and explorer, who, on May 29, 1953, became the first climber known to have reached the summit of Mount Everest.