On this day
On January 6, 1866, the Hawaiian Kingdom's Board of Health sent the first twelve people diagnosed with leprosy (Hansen's disease) — most of them Native Hawaiian — to the isolated Kalaupapa peninsula on Molokaʻi aboard the schooner Warwick. Some 8,000 people would be forcibly exiled there, torn from their families, until the isolation policy ended in 1969.
Content note: yes.
Royalists led by Robert Wilcox mounted an armed attempt to restore Queen Liliʻuokalani and the Hawaiian Kingdom; the Republic crushed it in three days, then arrested the Queen on Jan 16 and forced her abdication on Jan 24.
On January 6, 1975, March Fong Eu was sworn in as California Secretary of State — the first Asian American elected to statewide constitutional office in the United States, and earlier the first Asian American woman elected to the California legislature.