Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/January
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| An archive of historical anniversaries that appeared on the Main Page 2022 day arrangement | ||||||
January 1: Public Domain Day; Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God (Roman Rite Catholicism)
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Arrokoth
- 417 – Galla Placidia was forced by her brother Honorius into marriage with his magister militum, Constantius III.
- 1776 – American Revolutionary War: The town of Norfolk, Virginia, was burned and destroyed by the combined actions of British and Whig forces.
- 1945 – Second World War: The Luftwaffe launched Operation Bodenplatte in an attempt to cripple Allied air forces in the Low Countries.
- 1965 – The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which later helped the country become a republic, was founded.
- 2019 – The NASA space probe New Horizons flew by the trans-Neptunian object Arrokoth (pictured), making it the farthest object visited by a spacecraft.
- Maria Edgeworth (b. 1768)
- Alfred Ely Beach (d. 1896)
- Nay Win Maung (d. 2012)
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January 2: Feast day of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Saint Basil of Caesarea (Roman Rite Catholicism, Anglicanism)
Urbain Le Verrier
- 533 – Mercurius, a Roman priest, was elected Pope John II; he was apparently the first pope to adopt a new name upon elevation to the papacy.
- 1680 – Trunajaya rebellion: Amangkurat II of Mataram of Java and his courtiers stabbed Trunajaya to death a week after the rebel leader surrendered to VOC forces.
- 1860 – French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier (pictured) announced the putative discovery of the planet Vulcan at a meeting at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris.
- 1944 – World War II: The United States and Australia successfully landed 13,000 troops in Papua New Guinea in an attempt to cut off a Japanese retreat.
- 1963 – Vietnam War: The Viet Cong won its first major victory at the Battle of Ap Bac.
- Lodomer (d. 1298)
- Tex Rickard (b. 1870)
- Dnyaneshwar Agashe (d. 2009)
James Lick telescope
- 1521 – Pope Leo X issued Decet Romanum Pontificem, excommunicating Martin Luther for refusing to retract 41 alleged errors found in his 95 Theses and other writings.
- 1888 – The 36-inch (91 cm) refracting telescope (pictured) at the Lick Observatory near San Jose, California, the largest in the world until 1897, was used for the first time.
- 1919 – Emir Faisal of Iraq signed an agreement with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann on the development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and an Arab nation in a large part of the Middle East.
- 1976 – The multilateral International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, part of the International Bill of Human Rights, came into effect.
- 2002 – Israeli forces seized MV Karine A, which was carrying 50 tonnes of smuggled weapons on behalf of the Palestinian National Authority.
- William Leslie (d. 1777)
- Cyril Bassett (b. 1892)
- Frenchy Bordagaray (b. 1910)
January 4: Colonial Martyrs Repression Day in Angola (1961)
Rose Heilbron
- 1698 – Most of London's Palace of Whitehall, the main residence of English monarchs since 1530, was destroyed by fire.
- 1885 – Sino-French War: French troops under General Oscar de Négrier defeated a larger Qing Chinese force at the Battle of Núi Bop in northern Vietnam.
- 1948 – Burma achieved independence from the British Empire, with Sao Shwe Thaik as its first president.
- 1972 – Rose Heilbron (pictured) became the first female judge to sit at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales.
- 2010 – The Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest structure, officially opened in Dubai.
- Moses Mendelssohn (d. 1786)
- Johanna Westerdijk (b. 1883)
- Tom Acker (d. 2021)
January 5: Twelfth Night (Western Christianity)
Execution of Robert-François Damiens
- 1675 – Franco-Dutch War: French troops defeated Austrian and Brandenburg forces at the Battle of Turckheim in Alsace.
- 1757 – Louis XV of France survived an assassination attempt by Robert-François Damiens, who later became the last person in the country to be executed by being drawn and quartered (depicted).
- 1949 – In his State of the Union speech, U.S. president Harry S. Truman announced: "Every segment of our population, and every individual, has a right to expect from his government a fair deal."
- 2000 – Sri Lankan Tamil politician Kumar Ponnambalam was killed in an assassination suspected to have been sanctioned by President Chandrika Kumaratunga.
- Philippa of England (d. 1430)
- Joseph Erlanger (b. 1874)
- Edmund Herring (d. 1982)
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Maria Montessori
- 1066 – Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon monarch before the Norman Conquest, was crowned King of England.
- 1322 – Stefan Dečanski became King of Serbia, succeeding his half-brother Stefan Konstantin, whom he later defeated in battle.
- 1839 – The worst storm to hit Ireland in 300 years damaged or destroyed more than 20 per cent of houses in Dublin with 100-knot (190 km/h) winds.
- 1907 – Italian educator Maria Montessori (pictured) opened her first school and day-care centre for working-class children in Rome, employing the philosophy of education that now bears her name.
- 1994 – Two-time American Olympic figure-skating medalist Nancy Kerrigan was hit on the leg with a police baton by an assailant hired by the ex-husband of her rival Tonya Harding.
- Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros (b. 1756)
- Kahlil Gibran (b. 1883)
- Sybil Plumlee (d. 2012)
January 7: Christmas (Eastern Christianity); Victory over Genocide Day in Cambodia (1979); Flag Day in Italy (1797)
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Guy Menzies
- 1610 – Through his telescope, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei made the first observation of Jupiter's Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, although he was not able to distinguish the first two until the following night.
- 1782 – The Bank of North America opened in Philadelphia as the first de facto central bank of the United States.
- 1931 – Australian aviator Guy Menzies (pictured) flew from Sydney to New Zealand's West Coast, making the first solo trans-Tasman flight.
- 1989 – Representatives of Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini delivered a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, inviting him to consider Islam as an alternative to communism, and predicting the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc.
- 2012 – A hot air balloon flight from Carterton, New Zealand, collided with a power line while landing, causing it to crash and killing all eleven people on board.
- Nicholas Hilliard (d. 1619)
- Elizabeth Louisa Foster Mather (b. 1815)
- Juan Gabriel (b. 1950)
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman
- 1198 – Lotario de Conti was elected as Pope Innocent III; he later worked to restore papal power in Rome.
- 1889 – American statistician Herman Hollerith received a patent for his electromechanical tabulating machine for punched-card data.
- 1936 – Reza Shah issued the Kashf-e hijab decree in Iran, ordering police to physically remove hijabs from any women in public.
- 1972 – Following Pakistan's defeat in the Bangladesh Liberation War, President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto released Bangladeshi politician Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (pictured) from prison in response to international pressure.
- 1991 – Jeremy Wade Delle committed suicide in his high-school class in Richardson, Texas, inspiring the Pearl Jam song "Jeremy".
- Nicholas Biddle (b. 1786)
- Mór Kóczán (b. 1885)
- T. J. Hamblin (d. 2012)
Artist's rendition of PSR B1257+12 and its planets
- 1857 – An earthquake registering 7.9 Mw ruptured part of the San Andreas Fault in central and southern California.
- 1917 – First World War: Troops of the British Empire defeated Ottoman forces at the Battle of Rafa on the Sinai–Palestine border in present-day Rafah.
- 1972 – The Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association lost to the Milwaukee Bucks, ending a 33-game winning streak, the longest of any team in American professional sports.
- 1992 – Radio astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced the discovery of two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12 (depicted), generally considered the first definitive detection of an exoplanet.
- 2015 – Contaminated beer served at a funeral in Tete Province, Mozambique, killed 75 people and made at least 230 others ill.
- Demetrios Chalkokondyles (d. 1511)
- John B. Watson (b. 1878)
- Joseph Parker (b. 1992)
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January 10: Coming of Age Day in Japan (2022)
Construction of the Metropolitan Railway
- AD 9 – The Western Han dynasty of China ended after the throne was usurped by Wang Mang, who founded the Xin dynasty.
- 1475 – Moldavian–Ottoman Wars: Stephen the Great led Moldavian forces to defeat an Ottoman attack under Hadım Suleiman Pasha near Vaslui in what is now Romania.
- 1863 – Service began on the Metropolitan Railway (construction depicted) between Paddington and Farringdon Street, today the oldest segment of the London Underground.
- 1923 – Lithuanian residents of the Memel Territory rebelled against the League of Nations decision to leave the area as a mandated region under French control.
- 2007 – A general strike began in Guinea as an attempt to force President Lansana Conté to resign, eventually resulting in the appointment of two new prime ministers.
- Georg Forster (d. 1794)
- Issai Schur (b. 1875; d. 1941)
- Yip Pin Xiu (b. 1992)
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January 11: Prithvi Jayanti in Nepal (2022); Eugenio María de Hostos's birthday in Puerto Rico
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Byzantine coin showing Empress Theodora
- 1055 – Theodora Porphyrogenita (pictured) became the sole ruler of the Byzantine Empire after the death of her brother-in-law Constantine IX Monomachos.
- 1787 – German-born British astronomer William Herschel discovered two Uranian moons, later named Oberon and Titania by his son John.
- 1863 – American Civil War: The Battle of Arkansas Post concluded with the Union Army capturing a fort near the mouth of the Arkansas River.
- 1923 – Troops from France and Belgium invaded the Ruhr to force the Weimar Republic to pay reparations in the aftermath of World War I.
- 2013 – French special forces failed in an attempted rescue of a DGSE agent, who had been taken hostage in 2009 by al-Shabaab, in Buulo Mareer, Somalia.
- Domenico Ghirlandaio (d. 1494)
- Bayard Taylor (b. 1825)
- Peter Badcoe (b. 1934)
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Mission Santa Clara
- 1554 – Bayinnaung, who later assembled the largest empire in the history of mainland Southeast Asia, was crowned king of the Burmese Toungoo dynasty.
- 1777 – Mission Santa Clara de Asís (pictured), a Spanish mission in California that formed the basis of both the city of Santa Clara and Santa Clara University, was established by the Franciscans.
- 1918 – An underground explosion at a coal mine in Staffordshire, England, killed 155 men and boys.
- 1964 – Rebels led by John Okello overthrew Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah, ending 200 years of Arab dominance in Zanzibar.
- 2010 – Iranian physicist Massoud Ali-Mohammadi was assassinated while leaving home for the University of Tehran, where he was a professor.
- Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor (d. 1519)
- Étienne Lenoir (b. 1822)
- Austin Chapman (d. 1926)
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January 13: Saint Knut's Day in Finland and Sweden
Wreck of Costa Concordia
- 1797 – French Revolutionary Wars: A naval battle off the coast of Brittany between two British frigates and a French ship of the line ended with hundreds of deaths when the latter ran aground.
- 1842 – First Anglo-Afghan War: William Brydon, an assistant surgeon in the British Army, arrived at Jalalabad as the sole European of the 14,000 people retreating from Kabul to evade capture or death.
- 1915 – About 30,000 people were killed when an earthquake struck the Province of L'Aquila in Italy.
- 1972 – Bernice Gera won a sex-discrimination lawsuit against the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, allowing her to become the first female professional baseball umpire.
- 2012 – The Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground on a reef and capsized (wreck pictured) off Isola del Giglio, Tuscany.
- Lucy Filippini (b. 1672)
- Salmon P. Chase (b. 1808)
- Guido Dessauer (d. 2012)
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January 14: Ratification Day in the United States (1784); Revolution and Youth Day in Tunisia (2011)
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Kripalu Maharaj
- 1301 – King Andrew III died without any male heirs, ending the Árpád dynasty, which had ruled Hungary since the late 9th century.
- 1900 – Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca, based on the play La Tosca by French dramatist Victorien Sardou, premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome.
- 1939 – Norway claimed Queen Maud Land, a 2.7-million km2 (1.0-million sq mi) region of Antarctica, as a dependent territory.
- 1957 – Hindu spiritual leader Kripalu Maharaj (pictured) was named the fifth original jagadguru, meaning 'world teacher'.
- 1973 – Elvis Presley's concert Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite was broadcast live, setting a record as the most watched broadcast by an individual entertainer in television history.
- Mehmed VI (b. 1861)
- James P. Hagerstrom (b. 1921)
- Arfa Karim (d. 2012)
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January 15: John Chilembwe Day in Malawi
Fragment of the Derveni papyrus
- 1815 – War of 1812: American frigate USS President, commanded by Commodore Stephen Decatur, was captured by a squadron of four British frigates.
- 1937 – Spanish Civil War: Nationalist and Republican forces both withdrew after suffering heavy losses, ending the Second Battle of the Corunna Road.
- 1947 – The mutilated corpse of the Black Dahlia, a 22-year-old woman whose murder is one of the most famous unsolved crimes in the U.S., was found in Leimert Park, Los Angeles.
- 1962 – The Derveni papyrus (fragment pictured), the oldest surviving manuscript in Europe, was discovered in Macedonia, northern Greece.
- 1975 – Portugal and the nationalist factions UNITA, the MPLA and the FNLA signed the Alvor Agreement, ending the Angolan War of Independence.
- Wilhelm Marx (b. 1863)
- Sylvia Lawler (b. 1922)
- Bo Yibo (d. 2007)
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January 16: World Religion Day (2022)
Frank McGee
- 1537 – Sir Francis Bigod began an armed rebellion of English Catholics against King Henry VIII and the English Parliament.
- 1780 – Anglo-Spanish War: The Royal Navy gained their first major naval victory over their European enemies in the war when they defeated a Spanish squadron in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent.
- 1905 – Despite being blind in one eye, ice hockey player Frank McGee (pictured) set the record for most goals in a Stanley Cup game when he scored 14 against the Dawson City Nuggets.
- 1942 – TWA Flight 3 crashed into Potosi Mountain in Nevada, killing actress Carole Lombard and all of the other 21 people on board.
- 2016 – After gunmen took hostages the previous night at a restaurant in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, government commandos stormed the premises to bring the situation to an end.
- John C. Breckinridge (b. 1821)
- Osip Brik (b. 1888)
- Lorna Kesterson (d. 2012)
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January 17: Tu BiShvat (Judaism, 2022); Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States (2022)
Patrice Lumumba
- 1562 – Catherine de' Medici, the regent of France, promulgated the Edict of Saint-Germain, providing limited tolerance to the Protestant Huguenots.
- 1899 – The United States took possession of Wake Island in the Pacific Ocean.
- 1912 – Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition reached the South Pole, only to find that Roald Amundsen's team had beaten them by 33 days.
- 1961 – Former Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba (pictured) was murdered in circumstances suggesting the support and complicity of the Belgian and US governments and the UN.
- 2002 – Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo began erupting, killing hundreds and leaving about 120,000 people homeless in the nearby town of Goma.
- Henry of Asti (d. 1345)
- Thomas Jaggar (d. 1953)
- Zhao Ziyang (d. 2005)
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Marion Barry
- 474 – Seven-year-old Leo II became sole Byzantine emperor upon the death of his grandfather Leo I.
- 1535 – Francisco Pizarro founded Ciudad de los Reyes (present-day Lima, Peru) as the capital of the lands he conquered for the Spanish crown.
- 1866 – Wesley College, one of the largest schools in Australia by enrolment, was established in Melbourne.
- 1958 – Willie O'Ree of the Boston Bruins played his first game in the National Hockey League, becoming the first black Canadian who competed in the NHL.
- 1990 – In a sting operation conducted by the FBI, Marion Barry (pictured), the mayor of Washington, D.C., was arrested for possession of crack cocaine.
- Jobst of Moravia (d. 1411)
- Marthinus Nikolaas Ras (b. 1853)
- Vinod Kambli (b. 1972)
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Klaus Barbie
- 649 – Conquest of the Western Turks: Kuchean forces surrendered after a siege, establishing Tang control over the northern Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang, China.
- 1511 – War of the League of Cambrai: Troops led by Pope Julius II captured Mirandola after a brief siege.
- 1930 – In Watsonville, California, tensions between nativists and Filipino Americans escalated into riots that later spread to other cities in the state.
- 1972 – The French newspaper L'Aurore revealed that the former Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie (pictured), the "Butcher of Lyon", had been found to be living in Peru.
- 2012 – The Hong Kong–based file-sharing website Megaupload was shut down by the FBI.
- Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (d. 1636)
- Arthur Morris (b. 1922)
- Sarah Burke (d. 2012)
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January 20: Day of Nationwide Sorrow in Azerbaijan (1990)
2009 inauguration of Barack Obama
- 1356 – Edward Balliol, whose father John was briefly King of Scotland, gave up his claim to the throne in exchange for an English pension.
- 1877 – The Constantinople Conference concluded with the Great Powers declaring the need for political reforms, which the Ottoman Empire refused to undertake, later resulting in the Russo-Turkish War.
- 1942 – The Holocaust: Reinhard Heydrich and other senior Nazi officials met at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin to discuss the implementation of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".
- 1992 – Air Inter Flight 148 crashed into the Vosges while circling to land at Strasbourg Airport, France, resulting in 87 deaths.
- 2009 – In Washington, D.C., more than one million people attended the inauguration of Barack Obama (pictured) as the first African-American president of the United States.
- Wulfstan (d. 1095)
- Carl Linnaeus the Younger (b. 1741)
- Naomi Parker Fraley (d. 2018)
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Members of the First Dáil
- 763 – The Abbasid Caliphate crushed the Alid revolt when a rebel leader was mortally wounded in battle near Basra in present-day Iraq.
- 1789 – The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown, widely considered to be the first American novel, was published.
- 1919 – The First Dáil (members pictured) convened at the Mansion House in Dublin and adopted a declaration of independence calling for the establishment of the Irish Republic.
- 1972 – Tripura, formerly part of the independent Twipra Kingdom, became a state of India.
- 2017 – An estimated five million people participated in the worldwide Women's March, to advocate for legislation and policies on human rights and other issues.
- Theodor Fliedner (b. 1800)
- Edith Tolkien (b. 1889)
- Vincent Lingiari (d. 1988)
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January 22: Day of Unity of Ukraine (1919)
Depiction of a 19th-century Swiss Guard
- 1506 – The first contingent of 150 Swiss Guards (example depicted) arrived in Rome to provide security for the pope.
- 1689 – The Convention Parliament met to decide the fate of the throne after James II, the last Catholic monarch of England, fled to France following the Glorious Revolution.
- 1906 – SS Valencia was wrecked off the coast of Vancouver Island, Canada, in a location so treacherous it was known as the Graveyard of the Pacific.
- 1987 – After being convicted of receiving bribes, Pennsylvania state treasurer R. Budd Dwyer shot and killed himself in front of television cameras during a press conference.
- 2012 – Croatia held a referendum, in which it voted to become a member of the European Union.
- Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset (d. 1552)
- Frigyes Riesz (b. 1880)
- Pope Benedict XV (d. 1922)
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Elizabeth Blackwell
- 1556 – One of the deadliest earthquakes in history struck Shaanxi, China, resulting in at least 100,000 direct deaths.
- 1849 – Elizabeth Blackwell (pictured) graduated from Geneva Medical College in New York, making her the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.
- 1909 – Two men committed an armed robbery in Tottenham, London, and led police on a two-hour chase, partially by tram, that ended in the perpetrators' suicides.
- 1942 – World War II: Japan began an invasion of the island of New Britain in the Australian Territory of New Guinea.
- 2002 – American journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and later murdered by al-Qaeda agents in Karachi, Pakistan.
- Hai Rui (b. 1514)
- Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama (b. 1880)
- Salvador Dalí (d. 1989)
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January 24: Mother's Day in Iran (2022): Day of the Unification of the Romanian Principalities in Romania
University of Calcutta shortly after its founding
- AD 41 – Cassius Chaerea and disgruntled Praetorian Guards murdered the Roman emperor Caligula, replacing him with his uncle Claudius.
- 1857 – The University of Calcutta (pictured), the first modern university in the Indian subcontinent, was established.
- 1915 – First World War: British ships of the Grand Fleet intercepted and surprised a German High Seas Fleet squadron in the North Sea, sinking a cruiser and damaging several other vessels.
- 1966 – Air India Flight 101, en route to London from Bombay, crashed into Mont Blanc in France, killing all 117 people on board.
- 1989 – American serial killer Ted Bundy was executed by electric chair in Florida for the murders of 30 young women.
- George Rooke (d. 1709)
- Signe Rink (b. 1836)
- Mary Lou Retton (b. 1968)
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January 25: Feast day of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus (Eastern Orthodoxy) and Dwynwen (Wales)
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Laurentic
- 1704 – English colonists from the Province of Carolina and their native allies began a series of raids against the largely peaceful population of Apalachee in Spanish Florida.
- 1792 – Thomas Hardy founded the London Corresponding Society to seek a "radical reform of parliament", later influencing the reform movements of early-19th-century England.
- 1917 – Serving as an armed merchant cruiser, HMS Laurentic (depicted in merchant service) was sunk by German mines off the northern coast of Ireland, resulting in 354 deaths.
- 1967 – South Vietnamese junta leader Nguyễn Cao Kỳ fired rival Nguyễn Hữu Có while the latter was overseas on a diplomatic visit.
- 1995 – A team of Norwegian and American scientists launched a Black Brant XII sounding rocket, which was mistaken for a Trident missile by Russian forces.
- Mihrimah Sultan (d. 1578)
- John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher (b. 1841)
- Mikhail Suslov (d. 1982)
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January 26: Australia Day (1788); Republic Day in India (1950)
Cullinan Diamond
- 661 – Ali, the fourth Islamic caliph, was assassinated, effectively ending the Rashidun Caliphate.
- 1700 – An earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 9.0 occurred off the Pacific Northwest coast of North America, as evidenced by Japanese records of tsunamis.
- 1905 – The 3,107-carat (621 g; 1.37 lb) Cullinan Diamond (pictured), the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found, was discovered at the Premier Mine in Gauteng, South Africa.
- 1952 – Spontaneous anti-British riots erupted in Cairo following the killings of 50 Egyptian auxiliary police officers the previous day.
- 1972 – JAT Flight 367 exploded in mid-air over Czechoslovakia; the only survivor of the 28 on board, flight attendant Vesna Vulović, fell 10,160 m (33,330 ft), setting the record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute.
- Manuel do Cenáculo (d. 1814)
- Seán MacBride (b. 1904)
- Suleman octuplets (b. 2009)
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Entrance to Auschwitz I
- 945 – Brothers Stephen and Constantine Lekapenos, having deposed their father as Byzantine emperor a few weeks earlier, were themselves overthrown by Constantine VII, their co-emperor.
- 1820 – A Russian expedition led by naval officers Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev made the first sighting of the coast of Antarctica.
- 1945 – The Soviet Red Army liberated about 7,000 prisoners left behind by the Nazis in Auschwitz concentration camp (entrance pictured), in present-day Oświęcim, Poland.
- 1974 – Brisbane, Australia, was flooded when the Brisbane River broke its banks.
- 2003 – The first selections for the United States National Recording Registry were announced by the Library of Congress.
- Marcian (d. 457)
- Titumir (b. 1782)
- Perfecto Yasay Jr. (b. 1947)
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Lego bricks
- 1142 – Despite having saved the southern Song dynasty from attempts by the northern Jin dynasty to conquer it, Chinese general Yue Fei was executed by the Song government.
- 1568 – Delegates of the Three Nations of Transylvania adopted the Edict of Torda, allowing local communities to freely elect their preachers in an unprecedented act of religious tolerance.
- 1933 – Choudhry Rahmat Ali published a pamphlet in which he called for the creation of a Muslim state in north-western India that he termed "Pakstan".
- 1958 – The Lego Group, a Danish toy company, filed a patent in Denmark for the design of Lego bricks (pictured).
- 1981 – U.S. president Ronald Reagan lifted price controls from petroleum products, contributing to the 1980s oil glut.
- Paul Luther (b. 1533)
- Gregor Werner (b. 1693)
- Helen Sawyer Hogg (d. 1993)
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"Mantra-Rock Dance" poster
- 1814 – War of the Sixth Coalition: At the Battle of Brienne, both sides' commanders, Napoleon and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, were nearly captured.
- 1891 – Liliʻuokalani, the last monarch and only queen regnant of the Hawaiian Kingdom, ascended the throne.
- 1943 – World War II: The Battle of Rennell Island, the last major naval engagement between the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Guadalcanal campaign, began.
- 1967 – The Mantra-Rock Dance (poster pictured), called the "ultimate high" of the hippie era, took place in San Francisco, featuring Swami Bhaktivedanta, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Allen Ginsberg.
- 1991 – The first major ground engagement of the Gulf War began with the Iraqi invasion of Khafji, Saudi Arabia, recaptured three days later by Coalition forces.
- Pope Gelasius II (d. 1119)
- Geraldine Pittman Woods (b. 1921)
- Colleen McCullough (d. 2015)
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January 30: Martyrs' Day in India
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Naro-1
- 1018 – The German–Polish War ended with the signing of the Peace of Bautzen between Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor, and Bolesław I, the Piast ruler of Poland.
- 1661 – Two years after his death, Oliver Cromwell's remains were exhumed for a posthumous execution and his head was placed on a spike above Westminster Hall in London, where it remained until 1685.
- 1972 – The Troubles: On Bloody Sunday, members of the British Parachute Regiment shot 26 civil-rights protesters in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing at least thirteen people.
- 2013 – The Korea Aerospace Research Institute launched Naro-1 (pictured), South Korea's first carrier rocket and their first launch vehicle to achieve Earth orbit.
- Giovanni Pietro Francesco Agius de Soldanis (d. 1770)
- Franklin D. Roosevelt (b. 1882)
- John Bardeen (d. 1991)
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January 31: Independence Day in Nauru (1968)
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Ham the Chimp
- 314 – Sylvester I, during whose pontificate many churches in Rome were constructed by Constantine the Great, began his reign as pope.
- 1747 – The London Lock Hospital, the first voluntary hospital specialising in the treatment of venereal diseases, opened.
- 1900 – Datu Muhammad Salleh, leader of a series of major disturbances in North Borneo, was shot dead in Tambunan, but his followers did not give up for five more years.
- 1961 – Aboard NASA's Mercury-Redstone 2, Ham the Chimp (pictured) became the first hominid launched into outer space.
- 2013 – A gas leak underneath the Pemex Executive Tower in Mexico City caused an explosion that killed at least 37 people and injured another 121.
- John Francis Regis (b. 1597)
- Zina D. H. Young (b. 1821)
- Adelaide Tambo (d. 2007)
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