January 3 · This Day in America
Cornwallis thinks he has Washington trapped against the Assunpink Creek and means to finish him at first light. But in the dark, the Americans build up their campfires, muffle their cannon wheels with rags, and march away — a wide loop through the freezing night, around the entire British army. At dawn near Princeton they collide with British regiments. General Hugh Mercer is overrun and mortally bayoneted; his men break. Then Washington rides into the gap himself, into the musket fire, calling his soldiers back, refusing to leave the field. The line holds. The British rout. In ten days this ragged, unpaid, half-shod army has won at Trenton and now Princeton, and the Revolution that looked dead in December is suddenly, impossibly, alive. An amateur army has beaten professionals twice in a row. People begin to believe it can be done.
Source: www.battlefields.org
Also on this day · 1959
Ninety-two years after Secretary of State William Seward bought it from Russia for two cents an acre — mocked as "Seward's Folly," a frozen icebox no one wanted — Alaska is admitted to the Union. President Eisenhower signs the proclamation, and the largest state in the country, guardian of the northern frontier in the Cold War, finally trades territorial status for a star on the flag. The sucked orange, it turned out, held gold, oil, and a coastline longer than all the others combined.
Source: www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov