Happy New year all! I hope you all had a good holiday break and had your cameras out snapping away. Maybe your images will one day be part of the Museum collection……you never know.
I’ve been doing a lot of image research lately around significant events, where an image is used to assist in telling a story. It is truly amazing the rich source of images that we have worldwide. With the internet images have become more readily available to search, view and reuse in publications, blogs, newspapers, websites, educational tools etc.
With this in mind, I thought I would set myself a challenge for January and see if I could illustrate this month in history using only Te Papa images. Was our own collection going to have a wide enough range of images to do so? Turns out the answer was yes!
Check out my image research below…. each one will take you to a Te Papa collection item that somehow will relate to historical event. Maybe you would like to give February a go?
1 January every year: New Year…. not much else to say about New Year really
2 January 1905: The Russians surrendered to the Japanese after the Battle of Port Arthur during the Russian-Japanese War.
3 January 1840: New Zealand Company surveyors arrive in Port Nicholson
4 January 1958: Sir Edmund Hillary leads NZ party to Pole.
5 January 1977: Occupation of Bastion Point begins.
6 January 1929: Mother Teresa arrives in Calcutta, India to begin her work among India’s poorest and sick people.
7 January 1931: Completion of first trans-Tasman solo flight in Avro Avian Southern Cross Junior, flown by Guy Menzies.
8 January 1863: Julius von Haast begins West Coast expedition.
9 January 1923: Death of Katherine Mansfield.
10 January 1863: The world’s first underground railway service opened in London, the Metropolitan line between Paddington and Farringdon.
11 January 1964: The U.S. Surgeon General declared cigarettes may be hazardous to health, the first such official government report.
12 January 1954: Queen Elizabeth II opens NZ Parliament.
13 January 1935: The population of the Saar region bordering France and Germany voted for incorporation into Hitler’s Reich. The 737 square-mile area with its valuable coal deposits had been under French control following Germany’s defeat in World War I.
14-23 January 1943: President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at Casablanca in Morocco to work on strategy during World War II. At the conclusion of the conference, Roosevelt and Churchill held a joint news conference at which Roosevelt surprisingly announced that peace would come “by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power. That means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy and Japan.”
15 January 1970: Anti-Vietnam War protestors greet US Vice President during his visit toNew Zealand.
16 January 1992: The twelve-year civil war in El Salvador ended with the signing of a peace treaty in Mexico City.
17 January 1773: The ship Resolution, sailing under Captain James Cook, became the first vessel to cross the Antarctic Circle.
18 January 1886: Modern field hockey is born with the formation of The Hockey Association in England.
19 January 1840: Antarctica discovered, Charles Wilkes expedition (U.S. claim).
20 January, 1936: King George V of England died at age 71.
21 January 1924: Soviet Russian leader Vladimir Lenin died of a brain haemorrhage. He led the Bolsheviks to victory over the Czar in the October Revolution of 1917 and had then established the world’s first Communist government. Lenin’s body was placed in a tomb in Red Square in Moscow and was a much venerated national shrine until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
22 January 1840: First European settlers arrive in Wellington, New Zealand.
23 January 1855: Massive earthquake hits Wellington region. A magnitude 8.2 earthquake lifted the southern end of the Rimutaka Range by 6 m.
24 January 1895: Hawaii’s monarchy ended as Queen Liliuokalani was forced to abdicate. Hawaii was annexed by theU.S. and remained a territory until statehood was granted in 1959.
25 January 1974: First day of competition at the Christchurch Commonwealth Games.
26 January 1788: The British established a settlement at Sydney Harbour inAustralia as 11 ships with 778 convicts arrived, setting up a penal colony to relieve overcrowded prisons in England.
27 January 1962: Peter Snell breaks world mile record. Widely considered one of the greatest middle distance runners of all time, Snell broke Herb Elliott’s world record on a grass track at Cook’s Gardens, Whanganui, covering the distance in 3 minutes 54.4 seconds.
28 January 1935: Iceland became the first country to legalize abortion.
29 January 1916: During World War I, the first aerial bombings of Paris by German zeppelins took place.
30 January 1911: Bookies were banned from NZ racecourses.
31 January 1968: Nauru gains independence fromAustralia.
By Becky Masters, Picture Library Manager
