Starting January 2022 I will offer a monthly calendar organized around important dates in nature, culture, childhood, teaching and learning!
January the Month of Endurance, the Full Wolf Moon, Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Bear Cubs and Owlets, Snow, Ice and Cold
January 1st
New Years Day
Emancipation Proclamation “goes into effect” in 1863
Haitian Independence (Haiti becomes a free republic after a revolution, declaring independence for ALL PEOPLE
January 2
New Moon
January 3
Alma Flora Ada, outstanding writer, curator and educator specializing in children’s literature and bilingual education
January 5
National Bird day ( learn about the birds where you live)
January 6
British mercenary/colonist John Smith captured by a Powhatan Native hunting party and later released under contested circumstances ( aka the role of Pocahantas)
January 7
International Silly Walk Day ( Monty Python)
Zora Neale Hurston folklorist , anthropologist and African American author born in 1891
January 9
Simone de Beauvoir, feminist philosopher and writer of The Second Sex, born 1908
January 10
Francisco Ferrer Spanish educator and anarchist born in 1859. He founded the Barcelona Modern School, Escuela Moderna, which sought to provide a secular, libertarian curriculum as an alternative to the religious dogma and compulsory lessons common within Spanish schools. Ferrer’s pedagogy borrowed from a tradition of 18th century rationalism and 19th century romanticism. He held that children should wield freewheeling liberties at the expense of conformity, regulation, and discipline. His school eschewed punishments, rewards, and exams, and encouraged practical experience over academic study. The school hosted lectures for adults, a school for teacher training, and a radical printing press, which printed textbooks and the school’s journal.
In 1776, Thomas Paine publishes Common Sense, setting forth the arguments for American independence
January 13
Horatio Alger, author of young adult rags to riches novels about boys who rise up out of poverty and find riches and renown, born in 1839
January 16
Pierre Joseph Proudhon, French anarchist and philosopher, born in 1809. “Anarchy is order, government is civil war.”
January 17th
Queen Liliuokalani of Hawai’i is overthrown and arrested by American marines in 1893
January 17th
Full Wolf Moon
Martin Luther King Day
January 18th
A.A. Milne, author of the Winnie the Pooh books, born in 1882
January 19th
Edgar Allen Poe, horror writer and author of “The Tell Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Imp of the Perverse” born in 1809
January 20th
Frances Willard, feminist educator, Christian temperance advocate, and bicycle activist, learns to ride a bike at age 53 in 1894
January 22nd
In 1973, Roe versus Wade Supreme Court strikes down state laws barring abortion and affirms every women’s right to choose or not choose an abortion
January 23rd
Antonio Gramsci, Italian communist philosopher who introduced the notions of hegemony, counter hegemony and the class fraction, born in 1891 “[L]earning takes place especially through a spontaneous and autonomous effort of the pupil, with the teacher only exercising a function of friendly guide—as happens or should happen in the university. To discover a truth oneself, without external suggestions or assistance, is to create—even if the truth is an old one. It demonstrates a mastery of the method, and indicates that in any case one has entered the phase of intellectual maturity in which one may discover new truths.”
January 24th
Arturo Schomburg, a Puerto Rican of African and German descent and historian, writer, collector, and activist who championed African Latin American culture, was born in 1874
“We need the historian and philosopher to give us with trenchant pen, the story of our forefathers, and let our soul and body, with phosphorescent light, brighten the chasm that separates us. We should cling to them just as blood is thicker than water.”
January 25th
Sojourner Truth addresses first Black Women’s Rights Convention in Akron Ohio, 1851
Virgina Woolf, feminist author of “A Room of One’s Own” Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, born in 1882
January 26th
Angela Davis, educator, scholar, activist and founder of Critical Resistance which calls for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, was born in 1944
Bessie Coleman, first African American woman and Native American to hold an aviator license and earn an international pilot’s license, was born in 1892. She tragically died in 1921 when her plane had an engine failure.
January 27th
Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson, author of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and amateur photographer, born in 1832
Pete Seeger, folk singer and activist, died in 2014
January 29
National Seed Swap Day, let this be a reminder that spring will follow winter and that today is an excellent day to to get together with other gardeners and farmers to swap seeds, talk gardening and make big plans
January 31
Gerald Mcdermott, children’s picture book author and illustrator, interested in mythology and folklore from around the world, not without his detractors!
Jackie Robinson, first African American allowed to play outside the Negro League in Major League Baseball, born in 1919
