Flashback

Today is Saturday, Jan. 6, the sixth day of 2007. There are 359 days left in the year.

Today’s highlight in history: On Jan. 6, 1412, according to tradition, Joan of Arc was born in Domremy.

On this date:

In 1912, New Mexico became the 47th state.

In 1919, the 26th president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, died in Oyster Bay, N.Y., at age 60.

In 1942, the Pan American Airways Pacific Clipper arrived in New York after making the first round-the-world trip by a commercial airplane.

In 1945, George Herbert Walker Bush married Barbara Pierce in Rye, N.Y.

In 1967, U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese troops launched Operation Deckhouse V, an offensive in the Mekong River delta.

In 1982, truck driver William G. Bonin was convicted in Los Angeles of being the “freeway killer” who had murdered 14 young men and boys.

In 1987, the U.S. Senate voted 88-4 to establish an 11-member panel to hold public hearings on the Iran-Contra affair.

Ten years ago: House Speaker Newt Gingrich met behind closed doors with Republican lawmakers, answering questions about his admitted ethics violations as he appealed for support in the speaker’s election to be held the next day.

Five years ago: Argentina announced the devaluation of its peso, ending a decade-long policy pegging the currency one-to-one with the U.S. dollar. (In the year that followed, the peso lost 70 percent of its value against the dollar.)

One year ago: Al-Qaida’s No. 2 official, Ayman al-Zawahri, said in a videotape that a recent U.S. decision to withdraw some troops from Iraq represented “the victory of Islam.” Hugh Thompson Jr., a former Army helicopter pilot honored for rescuing Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre, died in Alexandria, La., at age 62. The 115-year-old Pilgrim Baptist Church of Chicago was destroyed by fire.