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January 1: Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God (Catholicism)

• 1785 – The Times began publication in London as The Daily Universal Register.
• 1808 – As a result of the lobbying efforts by the abolitionist movement (emblem pictured), the importation of slaves into the United States was officially banned, although slavery itself was not yet abolished.
• 1928 – Joseph Stalin's personal secretary, Boris Bazhanov, crossed the Iranian border and defected from the Soviet Union.
• 1965 – The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which later helped the country become a republic, was founded.
• 2009 – A nightclub fire in Bangkok, Thailand, killed 66 patrons celebrating the New Year.

Marie-Louise Lachapelle (b. 1769) · J. D. Salinger (b. 1919) · Lhasa de Sela (d. 2010)

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

• 1680 – Trunajaya rebellion: Amangkurat II of Mataram of Java and his courtiers stabbed Trunajaya to death a week after the rebel leader surrendered to the Dutch.
• 1865 – Uruguayan War: Brazilian and Colorado Party forces captured the city of Paysandú from its Uruguayan defenders.
• 1920 – Under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, U.S. Department of Justice agents launched a series of raids against radical leftists and anarchists in more than 30 cities and towns across 23 states.
• 1959 – The Soviet spacecraft Luna 1 (replica pictured), the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon, was launched by a Vostok rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
• 1976 – An extratropical cyclone began affecting parts of western Europe, resulting in coastal flooding around the southern portions of the North Sea and leading to at least 82 deaths over the next few days.

Luisa Carvajal y Mendoza (b. 1566, d. 1614) · Bob Marshall (b. 1901) · Edgar Martínez (b. 1963)

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January 3

• 250 – Emperor Decius (bust pictured) ordered everyone in the Roman Empire (except Jews) to perform a sacrifice to the Roman gods, resulting in widespread persecution of Christians.
• 1833 – With the arrival of two British naval ships at the Falkland Islands, the United Kingdom re-asserted sovereignty there.
• 1911 – A 7.7 M_w earthquake destroyed the city of Almaty in Russian Turkestan.
• 1976 – The multilateral International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, part of the International Bill of Human Rights, came into effect.
• 1990 – United States invasion of Panama: General Manuel Noriega, the deposed strongman of Panama, surrendered to American forces.

Antoine Thomson d'Abbadie (b. 1810) · J. R. R. Tolkien (b. 1892) · Joy Adamson (d. 1980)

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

• 1847 – American gun inventor Samuel Colt (engraving shown) sold the first thousand of his Colt Walker revolvers to the Texas Rangers.
• 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.
• 1936 – Billboard magazine published its first music hit parade.
• 1972 – Rose Heilbron became the first female judge to sit at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales.
• 2004 – Spirit, the first of two rovers of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, successfully landed on Mars.

Moses Mendelssohn (d. 1786) · Clara Emilia Smitt (b. 1864) · Brian Horrocks (d. 1985)

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January 5: Earth at perihelion (07:48 UTC, 2020); Twelfth Night (Western Christianity)

• 1675 – Franco-Dutch War: French troops defeated Imperial and Brandenburg forces at the Battle of Turckheim in Alsace.
• 1875 – The Palais Garnier opera house in Paris was formally inaugurated.
• 1953 – Waiting for Godot by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, termed the "most significant English language play of the 20th century", premiered in Paris.
• 1970 – An earthquake registering M_w 7.1 struck Tonghai County in southern China, killing at least 10,000 people and eventually spurring the creation of the nation's largest earthquake monitoring system.
• 2005 – Eris (pictured), the most massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System, was discovered through image analysis by a team of astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in California.

George Johnston (d. 1823) · Konrad Adenauer (b. 1876) · Bradley Cooper (b. 1975)

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January 6: Little Christmas

• 1322 – Stefan Dečanski was crowned king of Serbia, succeeding his half-brother Stefan Konstantin, whom he later defeated in battle.
• 1536 – The oldest European school of higher learning in the Americas, the Colegio de Santa Cruz, was founded in Tlatelolco, Mexico City.
• 1912 – German geophysicist Alfred Wegener first presented his theory of continental drift, the precursor of plate tectonics.
• 1960 – National Airlines Flight 2511, traveling from New York City to Miami, exploded in mid-air due to a bomb placed by an unknown party, resulting in the deaths of all 34 people on board.
• 1994 – Two-time American Olympic figure-skating medalist Nancy Kerrigan (pictured) was hit on the leg with a police baton by an assailant hired by the ex-husband of her rival Tonya Harding.

Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares (b. 1587) · Hendrick Peter Godfried Quack (d. 1917) · Nigella Lawson (b. 1960)

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January 7: Christmas (Eastern Christianity; Julian calendar); Tenth of Tevet (Judaism, 2020); Victory over Genocide Day in Cambodia (1979); Festa del Tricolore in Italy (1797)

• 1610 – Through his telescope, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei made the first observation of Jupiter's Galilean moons: Io (pictured), 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 United States's first de facto central bank.
• 1940 – Winter War: Outnumbered Finnish troops decisively defeated Soviet forces at the Battle of Raate Road.
• 2010 – In Nag Hammadi, Egypt, Muslim gunmen opened fire on a crowd of Coptic Christians leaving church after attending Christmas Liturgy, killing eight of them, as well as one Muslim bystander.

Albert Bierstadt (b. 1830) · Edmund Barton (d. 1920) · Dorothea Douglass Lambert Chambers (d. 1960)

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January 8

• 1697 – Scottish student Thomas Aikenhead became the last person to be executed for blasphemy in Great Britain.
• 1790 – George Washington delivered the first State of the Union address in New York City, then the provisional capital of the United States.
• 1889 – American statistician Herman Hollerith received a patent for his electromechanical tabulating machine for punched-card data.
• 1972 – Following the country's defeat by India in the previous year's war, new Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto released Bangladeshi politician Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (pictured) from prison in response to international pressure.
• 2010 – Gunmen from an offshoot of the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda attacked the bus transporting the Togo national football team to the Africa Cup of Nations in Angola, killing three people.

Nikolay Nekrasov (d. 1878) · David Bowie (b. 1947) · Bernard Krigstein (d. 1990)

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January 9

• 1857 – An earthquake registering 7.9 M_w ruptured part of the San Andreas Fault in central and southern California.
• 1909 – Ernest Shackleton, leading the Nimrod Expedition, planted the British flag 97.5 nautical miles (180.6 km; 112.2 mi) from the South Pole, the farthest south explorers had reached at the time.
• 1972 – Seawise University, formerly RMS Queen Elizabeth (pictured), an ocean liner that sailed the Atlantic for Cunard Line, caught fire in Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong.
• 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.
• 2015 – Contaminated beer served at a funeral in Tete Province, Mozambique, killed 75 people and made at least 230 others ill.

Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon (b. 1818) · Samuel Gridley Howe (d. 1876) · Brigitte Askonas (d. 2013)

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January 10

• 976 – After the death of his guardian John I Tzimiskes, Basil II became the effective ruler and senior emperor of the Byzantine Empire.
• 1430 – Philip the Good established the Order of the Golden Fleece, referred to as the most prestigious, exclusive, and expensive order of chivalry in the world.
• 1812 – New Orleans, the first steamship on the Mississippi River, arrived in its namesake city to complete its maiden voyage.
• 1929 – The Adventures of Tintin, a series of popular comic albums created by Belgian artist Hergé, first appeared in Le Petit Vingtième, the youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle.
• 1985 – Sir Clive Sinclair launched the Sinclair C5 personal electric vehicle (pictured), "one of the great marketing bombs of postwar British industry", which later became a cult collectable.

Hugh I of Cyprus (d. 1218) · Katharine Burr Blodgett (b. 1898) · Hrithik Roshan (b. 1974)

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January 11

• 1693 – An intensity XI earthquake, the most powerful in Italian history, struck the island of Sicily.
• 1787 – German-born British astronomer William Herschel discovered two Uranian moons, later named by his son as Oberon and Titania.
• 1923 – Troops from France (pictured) and Belgium invaded the Ruhr to force the German Weimar Republic to pay its reparations in the aftermath of World War I.
• 1964 – In a landmark report, U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry issued the warning that smoking may be hazardous to people's health, concluding that it has a causative role in lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, and other illnesses.
• 2003 – After Chicago police detective Jon Burge was discovered to have forced confessions from more than 200 suspects, Governor of Illinois George Ryan commuted the death sentences of 167 prisoners and pardoned 4 more.

Nicolas Steno (b. 1638) · John Molson (d. 1836) · Eva Tanguay (d. 1947)

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January 12: Zanzibar Revolution Day in Tanzania (1964)

• 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, a Spanish mission that formed the basis of both the city of Santa Clara, California, and Santa Clara University, was established.
• 1899 – During a storm, the crew of the Lynmouth Lifeboat Station transported their 10-ton lifeboat 15 mi (24 km) overland in order to rescue a damaged schooner.
• 1969 – British rock band Led Zeppelin released their eponymous first album in the United States.
• 2007 – Comet McNaught (pictured) reached perihelion and became the brightest comet in over 40 years with an apparent magnitude of −5.5.
• 2010 – A 7.0 M_w earthquake struck Haiti, affecting an estimated three million people. (damage to National Palace pictured)

John Singer Sargent (b. 1856) · Hermann Göring (b. 1893) · Daniel Bensaïd (d. 2010)

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January 13: St. Knut's Day in Finland and Sweden; Coming of Age Day in Japan (2020)

• 1797 – French Revolutionary Wars: A naval battle (pictured) 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.
• 1878 – Ada Anderson, a record-setting pedestrian from England, completed her U.S. debut, walking 2,700 quarter-miles (1,086 km total) in 2,700 quarter-hours.
• 1915 – About 30,000 people in L'Aquila, Italy, were killed when an earthquake struck the province.
• 1953 – An article published in Pravda accused nine eminent doctors in Moscow of taking part in a plot to poison members of the top Soviet political and military leadership.
• 1963 – Togo's first president, Sylvanus Olympio, was assassinated by military officers in a coup d'état led by Emmanuel Bodjollé, Étienne Eyadéma, and Kléber Dadjo.

Sibyl Hathaway (b. 1884) · Michael Bond (b. 1926) · Winnie Byanyima (b. 1959)

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January 14: National Forest Conservation Day in Thailand; Ratification Day in the United States (1784)

• 1301 – The Árpád dynasty, which had ruled Hungary since the late 9th century, ended with the death of King Andrew III.
• 1724 – Philip V, the first Bourbon ruler of Spain, abdicated in favor of his eldest son Louis.
• 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 in Antarctica as a dependent territory.
• 1969 – A major fire and series of explosions broke out aboard the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (pictured), killing 28 sailors, injuring 314, and destroying 15 aircraft.

Ladislaus II of Hungary (d. 1163) · Berthe Morisot (b. 1841) · Steven Soderbergh (b. 1963)

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January 15: Mattu Pongal (Tamils, 2020); John Chilembwe Day in Malawi

• 1919 – A large molasses tank in Boston, Massachusetts, burst and a wave of molasses rushed through the streets , killing 21 people and injuring 150 others.
• 1933 – A teenage girl in Banneux, Belgium, reported the first of several Marian apparitions, now known as Our Lady of Banneux.
• 1991 – Elizabeth II, as Queen of Australia, signed letters patent allowing Australia to become the first Commonwealth realm to institute its own separate Victoria Cross award in its own honours system.
• 2001 – The internet encyclopedia Wikipedia (home page pictured in December 2001) was launched three days after the domain name "wikipedia.com" was registered.
• 2009 – US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of Canada geese during its initial climb out from New York City and made an emergency landing in the Hudson River.

Theophylact (d. 849) · Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (b. 1812) · Ben Shapiro (b. 1984)

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January 16

• 27 BC – Gaius Octavianus (statue pictured) was given the titles Augustus and Princeps by the Roman Senate when he became the first Roman emperor.
• 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 set the record for most goals in a Stanley Cup game when he scored 14 against the Dawson City Nuggets.
• 1920 – The League of Nations, the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation with a focus on peace and security, held its first council meeting in Paris.
• 1964 – The musical Hello, Dolly! opened at the St. James Theatre on Broadway, and went on to win ten Tony Awards, a record that stood for 37 years.

Nikephoros Choumnos (d. 1327) · William Hall-Jones (b. 1851) · Pauline Phillips (d. 2013)

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January 17

• 1773 – On James Cook's second voyage, his ship HMS Resolution became the first to cross the Antarctic Circle.
• 1893 – Lorrin A. Thurston, along with the Citizens' Committee of Public Safety, led the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii and the government of Queen Liliʻuokalani.
• 1945 – Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg (pictured), who had saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, was taken into Soviet custody while in Hungary and was never seen in public again.
• 1961 – Former Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was murdered in circumstances suggesting the support and complicity of the governments of Belgium and the United States.
• 1989 – Patrick Purdy opened fire in an elementary school in Stockton, California, killing 5 and wounding 32 others.

Martino Zaccaria (d. 1345) · David Beatty, 1st Earl Beatty (b. 1871) · Sunanda Pushkar (d. 2014)

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January 18

• 1535 – Gabriel Moreira Romaní founded Ciudad de los Reyes, present-day Lima, Peru, as the capital of the lands conquered for the Spanish Crown by Francisco Pizarro.
• 1871 – A number of independent German states unified into the German Empire, with Prussian King Wilhelm I being proclaimed as its first Emperor.
• 1943 – World War II: In Operation Iskra, the Red Army established a narrow land corridor to Leningrad, partially easing the protracted German siege.
• 1956 - Navvab Safavi, Iranian Shia cleric and founder of Fada'iyan-e Islam group, was executed.
• 1958 – Black Canadian Willie O'Ree of the Boston Bruins played his first game in the National Hockey League, breaking the colour barrier in professional ice hockey.
• 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.

Isabella Jagiellon (b. 1519) · Aleksandra Ekster (b. 1882) · Goose Tatum (d. 1967)

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January 19: World Religion Day (2020)

• 649 – War against the Western Turks: The forces of Kucha surrendered after a siege, establishing Tang control over the northern Tarim Basin in what is now Xinjiang.
• 1795 – The Batavian Republic was established, a day after William V, Prince of Orange fled the Dutch Republic as a result of the Batavian Revolution in Amsterdam.
• 1920 – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is founded.
• 1930 – Racial violence occurs in Watsonville, California against Filipino American farm workers
• 1975 – A magnitude 6.8 M_s earthquake struck northern Himachal Pradesh in India, causing extensive damage to the region.

Dōgen (b. 520) · Edgar Allan Poe (b. 1809) · Hedy Lamarr (pictured, d. 2000)

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January 20: Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States (2020)

• 1156 – According to legend, Lalli slew Bishop Henry of Finland with an axe on the ice of Lake Köyliönjärvi in Köyliö.
• 1843 – Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão, Marquis of Paraná (pictured), became the de facto first prime minister of the Empire of Brazil.
• 1942 – The Holocaust: Reinhard Heydrich and other senior Nazi officials met at the Wannsee Conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss implementation of the "Final Solution to the Jewish question".
• 1969 – Bengali student activist Amanullah Asaduzzaman was shot and killed by East Pakistani police, one of the events that led to the Bangladesh Liberation War.
• 2009 – In Washington, D.C., more than one million people attended the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States.

David Wilmot (b. 1814) · Sarah Conlon (b. 1926) · Claudio Abbado (d. 2014)

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January 21

• 763 – The Abbasid Caliphate crushed the Alid revolt when one of the rebel leaders was mortally wounded in battle near Basra, in what is now Iraq.
• 1789 – The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown, widely considered to be the first American novel, was published.
• 1919 – The First Dáil Éireann (members pictured) first convened at the Mansion House in Dublin, adopting a declaration of independence calling for a new sovereign state: the Irish Republic.
• 1972 – Tripura, part of the former independent Twipra Kingdom, became a full-fledged state in India.
• 2017 – An estimated five million people worldwide participated in demonstrations to advocate legislation and policies regarding human rights and other issues.

Chaim of Volozhin (b. 1749) · Eusapia Palladino (b. 1854) · Frances Gertrude McGill (d. 1959)

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January 22: Day of Unity of Ukraine in Ukraine (1919)

• 1273 – Muhammad II became the Sultan of Granada after the death of his father in a riding accident.
• 1689 – The Convention Parliament convened to justify the overthrow of James II, the last Roman Catholic King of England, who had vacated the throne when he fled to France in 1688.
• 1906 – SS Valencia was wrecked off the coast of Vancouver Island, in a location so treacherous it was known as the Graveyard of the Pacific.
• 1943 – World War II: The Battle of Buna–Gona on New Guinea ended with an Allied victory after two months of fighting in which the Japanese fought with a resolve and tenacity not previously encountered.
• 1969 – Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (pictured) survived what was seen as an assassination attempt, an incident that was not revealed to the public until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

John Donne (b. 1572) · Gisela Januszewska (b. 1867) · Ali Hassan Salameh (d. 1979)

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January 23

• 1565 – The Deccan sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire at the Battle of Talikota in present-day Karnataka, ending the last great Hindu kingdom in South India.
• 1793 – The Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia partitioned the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth for the second time.
• 1957 – American inventor Fred Morrison sold the rights to his "flying disc" to the Wham-O toy company, who later renamed it the "Frisbee" (example pictured).
• 2001 – Five people attempted to in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, an act that many people later claimed was staged by the Communist Party of China to frame and thus escalate .

Muthu Coomaraswamy (b. 1834) · Mykola Leontovych (d. 1921) · Louisa Cadamuro (b. 1987)

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January 24

• 41 – Cassius Chaerea and the disgruntled Praetorian Guards murdered Roman emperor Caligula (bust pictured), replacing him with his uncle Claudius.
• 914 – The Fatimid Caliphate began their first invasion of Egypt.
• 1915 – First World War: British Grand Fleet ships intercepted and surprised a German High Seas Fleet squadron in the North Sea, sinking a German cruiser and damaging several other vessels.
• 1989 – American serial killer Ted Bundy was executed via electric chair in Florida after confessing to the murders of 30 young women.
• 2011 – A suicide bomber killed 37 people at Domodedovo International Airport in Moscow.

Pope Stephen IV (d. 817) · Constance Naden (b. 1858) · August Meyszner (d. 1947)

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January 25: Feast day of Gregory of Nazianzus (Eastern Orthodox Church); Tatiana Day in Russia

• 1573 – Sengoku period: The forces of Takeda Shingen defeated those of Tokugawa Ieyasu at the Battle of Mikatagahara (pictured), north of Hamamatsu, Mikawa Province, Japan.
• 1704 – English colonists from the Province of Carolina and their native allies began a series of raids against a largely peaceful population of Apalachee in Spanish Florida.
• 1949 – The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences presented the first Emmy Awards to honor excellence in the American television industry.
• 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.
• 2011 – The Day of Anger during the Egyptian revolution began, eventually leading to the removal of Hosni Mubarak after nearly 30 years of rule.

Leo IV the Khazar (b. 750) · Helene Bresslau Schweitzer (b. 1879) · Ali Hassan al-Majid (d. 2010)

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

• 1699 – The signing of the Treaty of Karlowitz to conclude the Great Turkish War marked the end of Ottoman control in much of Central Europe and the rise of the Habsburg Monarchy as the dominant power in the region.
• 1788 – Captain Arthur Phillip (pictured) and the British First Fleet landed at Sydney Cove on the shore of Port Jackson in present-day Sydney, establishing the first permanent European settlement in Australia.
• 1905 – The Cullinan Diamond, the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found at 3,107 carats (621 g; 1.37 lb), was discovered at the Premier Mine in Cullinan, Gauteng, South Africa.
• 1949 – The Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory in California, the largest aperture optical telescope in the world for 28 years, saw first light.
• 2009 – Rioting broke out in Antananarivo, Madagascar, sparking a political crisis that led to the deposal of President Marc Ravalomanana.

Harry Ricardo (b. 1885) · Athanase David (d. 1953) · David Kato (d. 2011)

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January 27

• 1343 – Pope Clement VI issued the papal bull Unigenitus to justify the power of the pope and the use of indulgences.
• 1820 – A Russian expedition led by naval officers Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev became the first explorers to see the coast of Antarctica.
• 1945 – The Soviet Red Army liberated more than 7,500 prisoners left behind by Nazi personnel in the Auschwitz concentration camp (entrance pictured) in what is now Oświęcim, Poland.
• 1967 – The Outer Space Treaty, a treaty that forms the basis of international space law, opened for signature in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.
• 1996 – Mahamane Ousmane, the first democratically elected president of Niger, was deposed by Colonel Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara in a military coup d'état.

George Byng, 1st Viscount Torrington (b. 1663) · Eunice Hale Waite Cobb (b. 1803) · Paul Zorner (d. 2014)

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January 28

• 1547 – Nine-year-old Edward VI became monarch of England, the first to be raised as a Protestant.
• 1754 – Horace Walpole coined the word "serendipity" in a letter he wrote to a friend, saying that he derived the term from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip.
• 1933 – Choudhry Rahmat Ali published a pamphlet titled Now or Never in which he called for the creation of a Muslim state in northwest India that he termed "Pakstan".
• 1958 – The Lego Group, a Danish toy company, patented the design of Lego bricks (pictured).
• 1981 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan lifted price controls from petroleum products, helping usher in the 1980s oil glut.

Gregor Werner (b. 1693) · Monty Noble (b. 1873) · Helen Sawyer Hogg (d. 1993)

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January 29

• 1814 – War of the Sixth Coalition: In the Battle of Brienne, both commanders of the opposing forces, Napoleon and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, were nearly captured by their enemies.
• 1845 – American poet Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" (illustration shown) appeared in The Evening Mirror, its first publication attributed to Poe.
• 1959 – The first Melodifestivalen, an annual Swedish music competition that determines the country's representative for the Eurovision Song Contest, was held in Stockholm.
• 2009 – The Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt ruled that people who did not adhere to one of the three government-recognised religions are also eligible to receive government identity documents.

Emanuel Swedenborg (b. 1688) · Mary Whitwell Hale (b. 1810) · Jean-Marie Doré (d. 2016)

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January 30: Martyrs' Day in India

• 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.
• 1835 – Richard Lawrence became the first person to make an assassination attempt on a sitting U.S. president when he failed to kill Andrew Jackson (assassination attempt pictured) and was subdued by the crowd.
• 1900 – The day before he was to be sworn in as Governor of Kentucky, William Goebel was shot by an unknown assailant and mortally wounded, making him the only U.S. state governor to be assassinated while in office.
• 1945 – World War II: Allied forces liberated over 500 prisoners of war from a Japanese POW camp near Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija, Philippines.
• 2000 – Kenya Airways Flight 431 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near Ivory Coast shortly after takeoff, killing 169 on board.

Everard Digby (d. 1606) · Patrick Heron (b. 1920)  · Professor Longhair (d. 1980)

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January 31: Independence Day in Nauru (1968)

• 1578 – Eighty Years' War: Spain won a crushing victory in the Battle of Gembloux, leading to a break up of the United Seventeen Provinces into the Union of Arras (Catholic South) and Union of Utrecht (Protestant North).
• 1747 – The London Lock Hospital, the first clinic specialising in the treatment of venereal diseases, opened.
• 1862 – American astronomer Alvan Graham Clark first observed the faint white dwarf companion of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.
• 1961 – Aboard NASA's Mercury-Redstone 2, Ham the Chimp (pictured) became the first hominid launched into outer space.
• 2007 – Suspects were arrested in Birmingham, England, accused of plotting to kidnap, and eventually behead, a Muslim British soldier serving in Iraq.

Franz Schubert (b. 1797) · Cilibi Moise (d. 1870) · Adelaide Tambo (d. 2007)

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Selected anniversaries / On this day archive
All · January · February · March · April · May · June · July · August · September · October · November · December

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Recent changes · Editing guidelines

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