Celebrations Today – January 26

Holidays and observances

• Christian feast day:
  • Alberic
  • Blessed Gabriele Allegra
  • Paula
  • Timothy and Titus
  • January 26 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
• Australia Day (Australia)
• Duarte Day (Dominican Republic)
• Engineer’s Day (Panama)
• International Customs Day
• Liberation Day (Uganda)
• Republic Day (India)

Celebrations Today – USA: January 26

National Green Juice Day
National Peanut Brittle Day
National Spouses Day
International Customs Day
National Lotus 1-2-3 Day
National Toad Hollow Day of Encouragement

Today in US History: January 26

The Capitulation Protocol

Accuratissima Brasiliæ tabula.
[Inset of Pernambuco.]
by Hendrik Hondius, 1630.
Map Collections

According to the terms of the capitulation protocol of January 26, 1654, Portugal decreed that Jewish and Dutch settlers had three months to leave Brazil.  Approximately 150 Jewish families of Portuguese descent fled the Brazilian city of Recife, in the state of Pernambuco. By September,  twenty-three of these refugees had established the first community of Jews in New Amsterdam.

Known as Sephardim (Jews of Spanish-Portuguese extraction), theirs was a complex saga. In December 1496, King Manuel I of Portugal decreed that all Jews leave Portugal by October 1497, causing many to flee to Holland where a climate of acceptance prevailed. From there, some migrated to Pernambuco, a colony of the Dutch West India Company in modern-day Brazil. The community flourished until the Dutch eventually surrendered Pernambuco to the Portuguese and the Sephardim were again forced to flee.

After being driven ashore in Jamaica by Spanish ships, twenty-three members of the community, along with a group of Dutch Calvinists, made their way to New Netherland (New York)—another colony run by the Dutch West India Company. Peter Stuyvesant governor of New Netherland, feared that the indigent newcomers would burden the colony but when he motioned to eject the Jewish newcomers the Company refused his petition (many of the company’s shareholders  were Jewish).

Old Cemetery, Shearith Israel,
New York, New York,
Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc., photographer, November 7, 1952.
Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America, 1935-1955

Shearith Israel Cemetery dates from the 1600s and contains the tombstone of Benjamin Bueno de Mesquita, a member of both the Recife, Brazil, and New Amsterdam Jewish communities.

The immigrants settled in the colony and soon formed Congregation Shearith Israel although the first synagogue was not built until 1730. Their community maintained traditions of Iberian origin  and contributed richly to the growth of the colony.  Around 1734 Isaac Mendes Seixas, born in Portugal,  arrived in New York from London. His son, Benjamin Mendes Seixas, was one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange.

By the time of the Revolutionary War, it is estimated that there were several hundred Portuguese (from every small town of the Azores Islands, Madeira, and the Portuguese mainland), both Christians and Jews, in the colonies. A number fought in the Revolution, including Jacob and Solomon Pinto, Jewish brothers who settled in New Haven in the 1750s. About fifteen percent of the enlisted personnel on board the first warship to fly the Stars and Stripes, the Bonhomme Richard, captained by John Paul Jones, were Portuguese.

While Hebrew was the language of prayer for the Congregation Shearith Israel (popularly known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue), Sephardic rites of worship were used during its first decades. Synagogue accounts were kept in Portuguese. By the middle of the 1700s, however, both Portuguese and Spanish gave way to English. Nevertheless, the group’s unique synagogue architecture, liturgical music, and lifestyle remained strong.

Amongst the nearly thirty million immigrants who poured into the U.S. between 1880 and 1925 were some 30,000 Sephardim. Many settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. During that same period nearly two million Ashkenazim—Jews mainly of Russian, German, and Polish descent with different religious and cultural traditions—also arrived in the U.S. Another wave of both Sephardic and Ashkenazi peoples emigrated at the time of World War II.

During the twentieth century both groups saw their old world languages and many of their folkways blend into the English-speaking American mainstream. Nevertheless, when the congregation assembles in the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue at 70th and Central Park West in New York it represents an unbroken line from the  from the community that originated in 1654.

• See the online exhibition The Portuguese in the United States, developed by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress.
• Search on the term immigrants or lower east side in the collection The Life of a City: Early Films of New York, 1898-1906 to see images of individuals who emigrated to the U.S. at the turn of the nineteenth century. See, for example, Emigrants Landing at Ellis Island or New York City “Ghetto” Fish Market, both from 1903.
• See the Immigrant Arrivals: A Guide To Published Sources from the Library’s Local History and Genealogy Reading Room. The Reading Room’s homepage also includes a link to JewishGen®, Inc., an Internet source connecting researchers of Jewish genealogy.
  Old Man Entering Jewish Synagogue for Afternoon Services,
  Colchester, Connecticut,
  Jack Delano, photographer, November 1940.
  Americafrom teh Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA/OWI, 1935-1945
• See the online exhibition From Haven to Home marking 350 years of Jewish life in America. For example, Haven contains images that reflect Sephardic life in colonial times. A timeline beginning in 1492 presents both a chronology and illustrations of  world events, American, and American-Jewish events.
• Early Virginia Religious Petitions: A Collaborative Project between The Library of Congress and The Library of Virginia presents petitions submitted to the Virginia legislature between 1774 and 1802 from more than eighty counties and cities. The petitions, from Christian churches, concern such topics as the historic debate over the separation of church and state championed by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, and the rights of dissenters such as Quakers and Baptists.
• The Yiddish theater developed as a uniquely American form in the Eastern European Jewish immigrant community in New York City during the early twentieth century. See Yiddish-Language Playscripts, a section of American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920, for unpublished manuscripts like Moishe the Fiddler: a Beadle and Musician (Moyshe der fidler: a shames un a klezmer) or Green Millionaire, a vehicle for Boris Thomashefsky, a driving force in Yiddish theater and director of the Anglo-Jewish theater unit of the Federal Theater. Also see the special presentation on Yiddish playscripts.
• The online exhibition Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, demonstrates that many of the colonies were settled by men and women of deep religious convictions who had crossed the Atlantic Ocean to practice their faiths freely. Part Two of the section America as a Religious Refuge: The Seventeenth Century contains information on the founding of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. Between the 1820s and 1880s the Congregation Shearith Israel assumed trusteeship of the Touro Synagogue.
• Search across American Memory on the term Portuguese or Brazilian for a assortment of information ranging from gunboats to embroidery stitches, including a 1767 Portuguese dance manual, and a piece of 1914 sheet music entitled “Bregeiro.”
• Also learn more about the holdings of The Hebraic Section of the Library of Congress.

Michigan Joins the Union

Birds Eye View of the City of Port Huron, Michigan,
drawn and published by A. Ruger, 1867.
Panoramic Maps, 1847-1921

Michigan entered the Union as the twenty-sixth state on January 26, 1837. More than two hundred years earlier, when French explorer Étienne Brulé visited the region in 1622, some twelve to fifteen thousand Native Americans lived there. Sault Sainte Marie, the state’s oldest town, was founded in 1668 at a site where French missionaries had held services for two thousand Ojibwa in 1641. The Ojibwa, along with the Ottawa, helped the French establish a thriving fur trade in the Great Lakes region.

Great Britain acquired control of present-day Michigan in 1763 and administered it as a part of Canada until 1783, when it was ceded to the United States under the provisions of the Treaty of Paris. Organized as part of the Northwest Territory in 1787, Michigan became a separate territory in 1805.

Bishop Frederic Baraga,
Bishop of Marquette and Saulte Ste. Marie, Michigan,
circa 1844-circa 1860.
America’s First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839-1862

With French Catholics as its first European settlers, Michigan maintained its strong Catholic identity in the early nineteenth century, attracting a large number of Catholic immigrants. Dioceses were established at Detroit (1833), Marquette, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Saginaw, Gaylord, and Kalamazoo.

The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 prepared the way for a great influx of settlers between 1830 and the Civil War. Michigan made a significant contribution in that conflict. Some 90,000 Michigan soldiers fought for the Union and 14,000 gave their lives.

Lumbering, mining, and agriculture defined the Michigan economy in the nineteenth century. After 1910, the automobile industry emerged as the dominant economic engine in the state. Manufacturing jobs attracted newcomers, many of whom left homes in the rural South and migrated to Michigan’s urban areas. Today, approximately half the state population resides in the Detroit metropolitan area.

Riverfront Panorama,
Detroit, Michigan, 1908.
Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991

The American Memory collections feature a wide variety of material highlighting the history of Michigan:

• Penned by Irving Berlin in 1914, “I Want to Go Back to Michigan” was a hit that year. Later it was a success in vaudeville and later still, in its most famous rendition, sung by Judy Garland in the film Easter Parade (MGM, 1948). Of all the “phonograph singers,” none made or sold more records than Billy Murray, whose version is featured here. He recorded for all the major record companies of the period—Victor, Columbia, and Edison. His renditions of the era’s popular songs, recorded on cylinder and disc, numbered in the hundreds and sold in the millions.
  “I Want to Go Back to Michigan,”
  by Irving Berlin, 1914.
  Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1851

  “I Want to Go Back to Michigan,”
  performed by Billy Murray and Chorus,
  Edison Company Sound Recording 50198-L,
  recorded 1914.
  American Variety Stage Audio Sampler
  
  Real Audio Format
  
  wav Format
  

• Locate more images of Michigan’s sites and cities. Search across the pictorial collections on terms such as Belle Island, Detroit, Lansing, Benton Harbor, or Ann Arbor.
• Albert Ruger began his panoramic mapping career by sketching Michigan cities. Search on the keywords Ruger and Michigan in Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929 to see outstanding examples of his work such as Grand Rapids (1868), Lansing (1866), Saginaw (1867), and Kalamazoo (1874). Other mapmakers drew views of towns such as Detroit (about 1889) and Marquette (1897).
• Search on Michigan in Railroad Maps, 1828-1900 to find nineteenth-century railroad maps. See, for example, Railroads in Michigan, with Steamboat Routes on the Great Lakes.
• Search on Michigan in Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910 for a wide variety of materials concerning the state, including a Medical History of Michigan (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2) and a history of The National Grange in Michigan. Also, see the special presentation History of the Upper Midwest: An Overview for background on the northernmost tier of states in the Old Northwest.
• Henry R. Schoolcraft’s work on Indian myths and legends inspired Longfellow to write “Hiawatha.” Read Schoolcraft’s Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers (1851) which gives detailed geographic, geological, political, military, folkloric, historical, and ethnographic information regarding the area that became Michigan.
• The collection The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920 contains a proclamation made by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 establishing the Michigan National Forest. Learn more about the environmental ramifications of the region’s rapid industrial growth by viewing a House Report on the dumping of refuse material into Lake Michigan near Chicago and the statute enacted to remedy the problem.

Today in History – January 26-External Links

Today’s Weather in History
Today in Earthquake History
This Day in Naval History
Today’s Document from the National Archives
Today’s Events, Births & Deaths –Wikipedia
Today in History by AP
On this Day -1950 to 2005 – Today’s Story–BBC
On This Day: The New York Times
This Day in History –History.com
Today in Canadian History – Canada Channel
History of Britain that took place On This Day
Russia in History –Russiapedia