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January 3: James Merritt Ives, partner in the famous print-making firm of Currier and Ives, died on this date in 1894.

January 2: Elected to Congress and the developer of the Potter Building at 38 Park Row in Manhattan 1882-1886, the latest in fireproof construction (and now a New York City Landmark), Orlando Bronson Potter also co-founded the New York Architectural Terra Cotta Company to build other fireproof buildings. He died on this date in 1894.

January 1: Tom Hyer was born on this date in 1819; he would win the bare-knuckle boxing championship of America in 1841, triumphing in 101 rounds.

December 31: On this date in 1862, the the pioneering ironclad ship, USS Monitor, sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras despite the heroic efforts of Acting Master Louis Napoleon Stodder.

December 30: William Hallock Park, who established the first municipal bacteriological diagnostics laboratory in the United States, was born on this date in 1863; he died in 1939.

December 29: Louis Michel Eilshemius, eccentric artist, died on this date in 1941.

December 28: William B. Sampson, who successfully argued for the priest-penitent privilege, died on this date in 1836.

December 27: Hamilton Fish Kean, who represented the State of New Jersey in the United States Senate 1929-1935, died on this date in 1941.

December 26: On this date in 1941, Winston Churchill, grandson of Leonard and Clara Hall Jerome, became the first British prime minister to address a joint session of Congress.

December 25: Leonard Bernstein, on this date in 1989, conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.