January 8 · This Day in America
Behind a rampart of mud and cotton bales below New Orleans stands one of the strangest armies America has ever fielded: Tennessee and Kentucky frontiersmen, Louisiana regulars, free men of color, Choctaw warriors, and Jean Lafitte's pirates, all under a lean, furious general named Andrew Jackson. At dawn the British advance in disciplined ranks against the works. In barely half an hour it is over. The field, a survivor says, looks at first glance like a sea of blood — roughly two thousand British casualties to about seventy American. None of them know the war is already finished; the Treaty of Ghent was signed two weeks earlier in Europe, the news still crawling across the ocean. The battle changes nothing on paper and everything in the country's spirit. A young, doubted nation has stood and held. Jackson rides this day all the way to the White House.
Source: www.battlefields.org
Also on this day · 1935
In a shotgun house his father built by hand, Gladys Presley gives birth to a son, Elvis Aaron. His twin brother is stillborn thirty-five minutes before him. The family is poor enough that the house will later be lost over a fifteen-dollar debt. Nothing about the morning suggests it, but the child raised in those two rooms will fuse gospel, blues, and country into something the whole world has to dance to. America did not yet know it had just gotten its King.
Source: mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov