Jan. 28. 1861: American Miners Association, first national coal miners' union, founded.

Jan. 29. 1737: Thomas Paine, radical writer, born, Thetford, Britain.

Jan. 30. 1956: As Martin Luther King, Jr. stands at the pulpit, leading a mass meeting during the Montgomery, AL, bus boycott, his home is bombed. King's wife and 10-week-old baby escape unharmed. Later in the evening, 1,000 angry African Americans assemble on King's lawn. When King appears on his devastated front porch, he tells them, "If you have weapons, take them home...We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence...We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us."

Jan. 31. 1963: US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara declares, "The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed." 1968: Tet Offensive catches South Vietnam off guard as war escalates. Seventy thousand Viet Cong troops attack 100 cities. Puts the lie to numerous US government, military, and media fantasies of American victory being "in hand."

Feb. 1. 1960: Four black students sit in at a Woolworths' lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, to protest segregation. 1961: First anniversary of the Greensboro sit-in: demonstrations all across the south. Nine students arrested at lunch counter in Rock Hill, SC, choose to take 30 days hard labor on a road gang. Next week, four other students repeat the sit-in and also choose jail.

Feb. 2. 1956: Autherine J. Lucy is the first African American student to attend the University of Alabama.

Feb. 3. 1931: The Arkansas state legislature passes a motion to pray for the soul of newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken after he calls the state "the apex of moronia."

Feb. 4. 1987: Congress overrides Pres. Reagan's veto of Clean Water Act.

Feb. 5. 1846: Birth of Bavarian-born American anarchist Johann Most, advocate of "propaganda by the deed."

Feb. 6. 1956: Autherine Lucy is suspended from the University of Alabama after three days of riots due to her presence. It is not clear why the University, in its vast academic wisdom, did not elect to suspend the rioters.

Feb. 7. 1968: After US and South Vietnamese air and artillery strikes level the city of Bentre in South Vietnam (pop. 50,000), a US Army major explains that "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

Feb. 8. 1921: Death of Peter Kropotkin, Russian anarchist. His funeral five days later, attended by 100,000 people, is the last non-state-sponsored mass assembly in Russia for 70 years.

Feb. 9. 1982: Reagan Vice President George H. W. Bush (aka "Poppy") denies he ever used the phrase "voodoo economics" to describe Reagan's supply side economic prescriptions and challenges "anybody to find it." NBC's Ken Bode promptly broadcasts the 1980 tape with the phrase.

Feb. 10. 1794: Suicide of Jacques Roux (1752-1794) in his Paris prison cell. French revolutionist, known as the pitiless and sometimes cruel "Red Priest," but also a precursor of socialism and modern anarchism. Denounced monopolizers of the revolution, speculators, merchants, and the government. A spokesman of the poorest "sans-culottes," he also incited women to assert their rights.