Today is the Feast of the Epiphany in Christianity. According to various traditions, it is the twelfth day of Christmas, the day the Magi (the Three Wise Men) came to the baby Jesus bearing gifts of adoration. In Eastern Christian traditions, the date marks the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River.

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In his 1941 State of the Union speech, delivered on this date in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt listed four freedoms that every human is entitled to: the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom to worship God in his own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Film from 1941 (after the jump):

 
Roosevelt said, in part:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
 
The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
 
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
 
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.
 
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
 
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

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The Presidential Election of 2000 was declared over on this date 16 years ago, when a joint session of Congress (presided over by the Vice-President, Al Gore, who was also the losing candidate) met to certify the results of the Electoral College. Twenty members of Congress rose to voice objections to the results from the state of Florida, but under Electoral Commission law, these objections require sponsorship of a sitting senator along with a member of the House. Because no senator joined the objections, Gore was forced by law to rule each one of the objections out of order, and George W. Bush was finally declared the next President.

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President Theodore Roosevelt died on this date in 1919. Dizzy Gillespie died in 1993 on this date. Rudolf Nureyev died on this date in 1993. Lou Rawls died eleven years ago today.

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Danny Thomas was born on this date in 1912. The late Ralph Branca was born on this date in 1926. (He died November 23, 2016.) E. L. Doctorow was born in 1931 on this date. Syd Barrett was born on this date in 1946.

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Dr. Lou Holtz is 80. Kim Wilson is 66 today. Malcolm Young is 64. Rowan Atkinson is 62. Nancy Lopez is 60. Nigella Lawson is 57 today. Gabrielle Reece is 47.

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