January 24 in History

In January 1848, a carpenter named James W. Marshall spotted flakes of gold in the tailrace of a sawmill he was building for John Sutter on the American River, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The discovery set off one of the largest voluntary migrations in American history. Within a few years, some 300,000 people had arrived in California, transforming a sparsely settled frontier into a booming, multiethnic society and pulling the nation's economic center of gravity toward the Pacific.

In 1908, the British Army officer Robert Baden-Powell published Scouting for Boys, a book that sparked one of the largest youth movements in history. Within a few years, boys across Britain and then around the world were forming patrols, wearing uniforms, and learning outdoor skills. Scouting grew into an international organization that has involved hundreds of millions of young people, and it shaped ideas about youth education, citizenship, and character building throughout the twentieth century.