Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/January

---

---

January 1: Public Domain Day; Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God (Roman Rite Catholicism)

• 1739 – Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic Ocean, the most remote island in the world, was discovered by French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier.
• 1773 – The hymn "Amazing Grace" was probably first used in a prayer meeting in Olney, England, without the music familiar to modern listeners.
• 1892 – The immigration station on Ellis Island (pictured) in New York Harbor opened, and would process almost 12 million immigrants to the United States over the course of its existence.
• 1928 – Joseph Stalin's personal secretary, Boris Bazhanov, crossed the Iranian border and defected from the Soviet Union.
• 1998 – Argentinian physicist Juan Maldacena published a landmark paper initiating the study of AdS/CFT correspondence, which links string theory and quantum gravity.

---

January 2: Feast day of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Saint Basil of Caesarea (Roman Rite Catholicism, Anglicanism)

• 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: United States and Australian forces successfully landed 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.

---

January 3

• 1521 – Pope Leo X issued the papal bull 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.
• 1911 – A gun battle in the East End of London left two dead and sparked a political row over the operational involvement of Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary.
• 1973 – CBS announced the sale of the New York Yankees professional baseball team to a group of investors headed by American businessman George Steinbrenner.
• 1976 – The multilateral International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, part of the International Bill of Human Rights, came into effect.

---

January 4: Colonial Repression Martyrs' Day in Angola (1961)

• 1853 – Solomon Northup regained his freedom after having been sold into slavery in the American South; his memoir Twelve Years a Slave later became a bestseller.
• 1909 – British explorer Aeneas Mackintosh (pictured), a member of the Nimrod Expion, escaped death by fleeing across ice floes.
• 1951 – Korean War: Chinese and North Korean troops captured Seoul from United Nations forces.
• 1973 – Last of the Summer Wine, the longest-running sitcom in the world, premiered as an episode of the BBC's Comedy Playhouse.
• 2020 – Sembawang Hot Spring Park in Singapore reopened after being redeveloped by the National Parks Board.

---

January 5: Twelfth Night (Western Christianity)

• 1922 – Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton (pictured) died of a heart attack during his final expion.
• 1941 – Second World War: Australian and British troops defeated Italian forces in Bardia, Libya, the first battle of the war in which an Australian Army formation took part.
• 2005 – The dwarf planet Eris was discovered by a team using images from the Samuel Oschin telescope at Palomar Observatory.
• 2007 – The Taiwan High Speed Rail opened, connecting Taipei and Kaohsiung.
• 2009 – In Eng Foong Ho v Attorney-General, the Court of Appeal of Singapore held that equality before the law was satisfied by a "reasonable nexus" between state action and the object of the law.

---

January 6: Little Christmas

• 1066 – Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon monarch before the Norman Conquest, was crowned King of England.
• 1322 – Stefan Dečanski was crowned King of Serbia, succeeding his half-brother Stefan Konstantin, whom he later defeated in battle.
• 1839 – The worst storm to impact 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 a 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.

---

January 7: Christmas (Eastern Christianity); Victory over Genocide Day in Cambodia (1979); Tricolour Day in Italy (1797)

• 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 (pictured) opened in Philadelphia as the de facto first central bank of the United States.
• 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.
• 1993 – The Fourth Republic of Ghana was inaugurated with Jerry Rawlings, the country's former military ruler, as president.
• 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.

---

January 8: Eugenio María de Hostos's birthday in Puerto Rico (2024)

• 1198 – Lotario dei 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, ordering Iranian police to 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, an event that inspired the Pearl Jam song "Jeremy".

---

January 9: Coming of Age Day in Japan (2023); Eugenio María de Hostos's birthday in Puerto Rico (2023)

• 1857 – An earthquake registering 7.9 M_w ruptured part of the San Andreas Fault in central and southern California.
• 1970 – The Presidential Council for Minority Rights, an appointed body to review legislation and prevent discrimination against minorities, was created in Singapore.
• 1978 – Iranian Revolution: Protests took place in Qom after an article insulting Ruhollah Khomeini was published.
• 1991 – Representatives from the United States and Iraq met at the Geneva Peace Conference to find a peaceful resolution to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
• 2011 – In poor weather conditions, Iran Air Flight 277 (plane pictured) crashed near Urmia Airport, Iran, killing 78 of the 105 people on board.

---

January 10

• 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 present-day 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 Klaipėda Region began a revolt, ahead of a League of Nations decision on their future which they expected to be against their interest.
• 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.

---

January 11: Prithvi Jayanti in Nepal

• 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 from Confederate forces 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 Bulo Marer, Somalia.

---

January 12

• 1554 – Bayinnaung, who later assembled what was probably the largest empire in the history of mainland Southeast Asia, was crowned as the 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 – Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah was overthrown by rebels led by John Okello, ending 200 years of Arab dominance in Zanzibar.
• 2010 – Iranian physicist Massoud Ali-Mohammadi was assassinated while leaving his home for the University of Tehran, where he was a professor.

---

January 13: Saint Knut's Day in Finland and Sweden

• 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, was the sole European of the 14,000 people retreating from Kabul to Jalalabad who evaded capture or death.
• 1915 – About 30,000 people were killed when an earthquake struck the Province of L'Aquila in Italy.
• 1963 – Togo's first president, Sylvanus Olympio (pictured), was assassinated by military officers in a coup d'état led by Emmanuel Bodjollé, Étienne Eyadéma, and Kléber Dadjo.
• 2012 – The Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground on a reef and capsized off Isola del Giglio, Tuscany.

---

January 14: Ratification Day in the United States (1784)

• 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 was named the fifth original jagadguru, meaning 'world teacher'.
• 1973 – Elvis Presley's (pictured) concert Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite was broadcast live to audiences in Asia and Oceania.

---

January 15: John Chilembwe Day in Malawi; World Religion Day (2023)

• 1815 – War of 1812: The 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 at 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 United States, was found in Leimert Park, Los Angeles.
• 1962 – The Derveni papyrus (fragment pictured), the oldest surviving manuscript in Europe, was discovered in Macedonia in northern Greece.
• 1975 – Portugal and the nationalist factions UNITA, the MPLA and the FNLA signed the Alvor Agreement, ending the Angolan War of Independence.

---

January 16: Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States (2023)

• 1537 – Sir Francis Bigod began an armed rebellion against King Henry VIII and the English Parliament.
• 1780 – American Revolutionary 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.
• 1883 – The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, establishing the United States Civil Service, is enacted by the U.S. Congress.
• 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.
• 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.

---

January 17

• 1562 – Representatives of Catherine de' Medici, the regent of France, drew up the Edict of Saint-Germain, providing limited tolerance to the Protestant Huguenots.
• 1773 – On James Cook's second voyage, his vessel HMS Resolution became the first vessel to cross the Antarctic Circle.
• 1912 – Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova Expion reached the South Pole, only to find that Roald Amundsen's team had beaten them by 33 days.
• 1961 – Patrice Lumumba (pictured), a former prime minister of Congo-Léopoldville, was murdered in circumstances suggesting the support and complicity of the Belgian and US governments.
• 2002 – Mount Nyiragongo, a volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, began an eruption that killed hundreds and left about 120,000 people homeless in the nearby town of Goma.

---

January 18

• 474 – The young child Leo II became the 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.
• 1788 – The armed tender HMS Supply, the first ship of the First Fleet, arrived at Botany Bay, Australia.
• 1943 – World War II: In Operation Iskra, the Red Army established a narrow land corridor to Leningrad, partially easing the protracted German siege.
• 1958 – Willie O'Ree of the Boston Bruins played his first game in the National Hockey League, becoming the first black Canadian to compete 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.

---

January 19

• 1419 – Hundred Years' War: The Siege of Rouen ended with English troops capturing the city from Norman French forces.
• 1511 – War of the League of Cambrai: Troops led by Pope Julius II captured Mirandola after a brief siege.
• 1920 – The American Civil Liberties Union was founded by the directors of the National Civil Liberties Bureau.
• 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.

---

January 20: Day of Nationwide Sorrow in Azerbaijan (1990)

• 1356 – Edward Balliol, whose father John was briefly King of Scotland, gave up his claim to the throne in exchange for an English pension.
• 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".
• 2009 – In Washington, D.C., Barack Obama was inaugurated (pictured) as the first African American president of the United States.

---

January 21

• 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 – Millions of people participated in the worldwide Women's March, to advocate for legislation and policies on human rights and other issues.

---

January 22: Chinese New Year (2023), Day of Unity of Ukraine (1919)

• 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.
• 1973 – The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, striking down laws restricting abortion during the first two trimesters of pregnancy.
• 2012 – Croatia held a referendum, in which it voted to become a member of the European Union.

---

January 23

• 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.
• 1993 – The first version of Mosaic, created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, was released, becoming the first popular web browser.

---

January 24: Day of the Unification of the Romanian Principalities in Romania (1859)

• AD 41 – Cassius Chaerea and disgruntled Praetorian Guards murdered the Roman emperor Caligula, leading to him being succeeded by his uncle Claudius.
• 1857 – The University of Calcutta (pictured) was established as the first modern university in the Indian subcontinent.
• 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 from Bombay to London, 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 thirty young women.

---

January 25: Feast day of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus (Eastern Orthodoxy) and Dwynwen (Wales)

• 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.
• 1917 – Serving as a British armed merchant cruiser, Laurentic (pictured) was sunk by German naval mines off the northern coast of Ireland, resulting in 354 deaths.
• 1967 – South Vietnamese junta leader Nguyễn Cao Kỳ fired his 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 by Russian forces for a Trident missile.

---

January 26: Australia Day (1788); Republic Day in India (1950)

• 1700 – An earthquake with a moment magnitude of around 9.0 occurred off the Pacific Northwest coast of North America, as evidenced by Japanese records of tsunamis.
• 1841 – Commodore Gordon Bremer took formal possession of Hong Kong Island for the United Kingdom at Possession Point.
• 1905 – The 3,106-carat (621 g) Cullinan Diamond (pictured), the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found, was discovered at the Premier Mine in Gauteng, South Africa.
• 1945 – Audie Murphy engaged in action at the Colmar Pocket that won him a Medal of Honor and made him one of the most famous and decorated U.S. soldiers of World War II.

---

January 27

• 945 – The 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 expion led by the 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).
• 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.

---

January 28

• 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.
• 1547 – Nine-year-old Edward VI, the first English monarch to be raised as a Protestant, became king.
• 1813 – English author Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice was published, using material from an unpublished manuscript originally written between 1796 and 1797.
• 1958 – The Lego Group, a Danish toy company, filed a patent in Denmark for the design of Lego bricks (pictured).
• 1984 – Tropical Storm Domoina made landfall in southern Mozambique, causing some of the most severe flooding recorded in the region.

---

January 29

• 904 – Sergius III (pictured), whose pontificate was marked by feudal violence and disorder in central Italy, returned from exile to take over the papacy from the deposed antipope Christopher.
• 1863 – American Indian Wars: The U.S. Army led by Patrick Edward Connor massacred Chief Bear Hunter and Shoshone forces at the Bear River Massacre in present-day Franklin County, Idaho.
• 1911 – Mexican Revolution: The Magonista rebellion began when Mexican Liberal Party troops captured the town of Mexicali.
• 2017 – A lone gunman carried out a mass shooting at a mosque in Quebec City, Canada, killing six people and injuring up to nineteen others.

---

January 30: Martyrs' Day in India (1948)

• 1607 – Low-lying places around the coasts of the Bristol Channel of Britain were flooded, resulting in an estimated 2,000 deaths.
• 1835 – Richard Lawrence became the first person to attempt to assassinate a sitting US president when he failed to kill Andrew Jackson at the US Capitol (assassination attempt pictured) and was subdued by the crowd.
• 1939 – In a speech to the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler threatened the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe".
• 1972 – The Troubles: On Bloody Sunday, members of the British Parachute Regiment shot 26 civil-rights protesters in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing at least 13 people.

---

January 31: Independence Day in Nauru (1968)

• 1208 – King Sverker II of Sweden was defeated at the Battle of Lena by Eric Knutsson, who succeeded to the throne.
• 1578 – Eighty Years' War: Spain won a crushing victory at the Battle of Gembloux, threatening the States General of the Netherlands and contributing to its move from Brussels to Antwerp.
• 1957 – A DC-7B operated by Douglas Aircraft collided in mid-air with a U.S. Air Force F-89 and crashed into a schoolyard in Pacoima, California.
• 1988 – Doug Williams (pictured) became the first African-American quarterback to play in a Super Bowl, leading the Washington Redskins to victory in Super Bowl XXII.
• 2010 – James Cameron's Avatar became the first film to earn over US$2 billion worldwide.

---

---