2009 – Chesley Sullenberger lands US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in NYC. All passengers and crew members survive in what becomes known as the “Miracle on the Hudson”
588 BC – Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylon lays siege to Jerusalem under Zedekiah’s reign. The siege lasts until July 23, 586 BC.
0069 – Otho seizes power in Rome, proclaiming himself Emperor, only rules for three months before committing suicide
0946 – Caliph al-Mustaqfi blinded and ousted
1535 – King Henry VIII declares himself head of the Church in England
1552 – France signs secret treaty with German Protestants
1559 – Elizabeth I crowned Queen of England in Westminster Abbey
1582 – Russia cedes Livonia & Estonia to Poland, loses access to Baltic
1624 – Many riots occurred in Mexico when it was announced that all churches were to be closed.
1759 – The British Museum opens, Its collection comprises 8 million items and it is one of the most comprehensive collections in the world.
1759 – Voltaire’s satire “Candide” is published anonymously in five editions in five countries to scandalous acclaim
1777 – The people of New Connecticut (now the state of Vermont) declared their independence.
1782 – Robert Morris, Superintendent of Finance, recommends to U.S. Congress establishment of decimal coinage and a national mint
1844 – The University of Notre Dame received its charter from the state of Indiana.
1870 – A cartoon by Thomas Nast titled “A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion” appeared in “Harper’s Weekly.” The cartoon used the donkey to symbolize the Democratic Party for the first time.
1882 – French explorer Jules Nicholas Crevaux is the first European to discover an Inca City near Sarta, north-west Argentina
1892 – “Triangle” magazine in Springfield, MA, published the rules for a brand new game. The original rules involved attaching a peach baskets to a suspended board. It is now known as basketball.
1899 – Edwin Markham’s poem, “The Man With a Hoe,” was published for the first time.
1902 – Abdulaziz Ibn Saud leads 40 men over the walls of Riyadh and takes the city, marking the beginning of the Third Saudi State
1908 – Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority became America’s first Greek-letter organization established by African-American college women.
1919 – Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps
1919 – Two million gallons of molasses flood Boston Massachusetts in the “Great Molasses Flood” when a storage tank burst, drowning 21 and injuring 150
1927 – Tennessee Supreme Court overturns (on a technicality) John T. Scopes’ guilty verdict for teaching evolution, but the law itself remains in force
1936 – The first, all glass, windowless building was completed in Toledo, OH. The building was the new home of the Owens-Illinois Glass Company Laboratory.
1942 – US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sends his famed “Green Light Letter” to MLB Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, encouraging baseball to continue playing during World War II
1943 – The Pentagon was dedicated as the world’s largest office building just outside Washington, DC, in Arlington, VA. The structure covers 34 acres of land and has 17 miles of corridors.
1943 – 1st transport of Jews from Amsterdam to concentration camp Vught
1945 – Red Army frees Crakow-Plaszow concentration camp
1945 – The Manhattan Project’s G-5 Group, headed by Physicist’s Donald Kerst and Seth Neddermeyer, take their first betatron pictures of a nuclear implosion at the Los Alamos Laboratory
1951 – Ilse Koch, also known as “The Bitch of Buchenwald”, is sentenced to life imprisonment by a West German court
1951 – Supreme Court rule “clear & present danger” of incitement to riot is not protected speech & can be a cause for arrest
1953 – Harry S Truman became the first U.S. President to use radio and television to give his farewell as he left office.
1953 – East Germany’s first Minister of Foreign Affairs, Georg Dertingen arrested for “espionage”, beginning a purge of senior officials, accused of spying for ‘imperialistic powers’ and plotting against the state
1955 – The first solar-heated, radiation-cooled house was built by Raymond Bliss in Tucson, AZ.
1964 – Teamsters negotiate 1st national labor contract
1966 – Kaduna Nzeogwu and Emmanuel Ifeajuna lead a coup d’état in Nigeria, the Prime Minister of Nigeria and other senior political and military figures are killed
1967 – The first National Football League Super Bowl was played. The Green Bay Packers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League. The final score was 35-10.
1970 – Nigerian civil war officially ends after 2 1/2 years of fighting when the Republic of Biafra disbands and joins Nigeria
1973 – U.S. President Nixon announced the suspension of all U.S. offensive action in North Vietnam. He cited progress in peace negotiations as the reason.
1974 – TV sitcom “Happy Days” created by Garry Marshall and starring Ron Howard, Henry Winkler, Marion Ross, and Tom Bosley, begins an 11 year run on ABC
1976 – Sara Jane Moore sentenced to life for attempting to shoot US President Gerald Ford
1986 – President Reagan signed legislation making Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a national holiday to be celebrated on the third Monday of January.
1988 – NFL analyst Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder makes several questionable comments about African Americans during a lunchtime interview on CBS’ NFL Today; fired the next day
1991 – Elizabeth II signs letters patent that allows Australia to institute its own Victoria Cross, the first Commonwealth realm to do so
1992 – Croatia and Slovenia are internationally recognized as independent nations, The Yugoslav federation effectively collapsed as a result.
1997 – Diana, Princess of Wales, calls for an international ban on landmines, angering ministers in the UK
1999 – The Racak incident: 45 Albanians in the Kosovo village of Racak are killed by Yugoslav security forces
2003 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Congress had permission to repeatedly extend copyright protection.
2005 – An intense solar flare blasts X-rays across the solar system
2005 – ESA’s SMART-1 lunar orbiter discovers elements such as calcium, aluminum, silicon, iron, and other surface elements on the moon.
2006 – NASA’s Stardust space probe mission was completed when it’s sample return capsule returned to Earth with comet dust from comet Wild 2.
2007 – Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former Iraqi intelligence chief and half-brother of Saddam Hussein, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, former chief judge of the Revolutionary Court, are executed by hanging in Iraq.
2009 – Chesley Sullenberger lands US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in NYC. All passengers and crew members survive in what becomes known as the “Miracle on the Hudson”
2013 – 19 Egyptian Army recruits are killed and 120 are injured in a train accident in Giza
2013 – 83 people are killed and 150 are injured in a rocket attack on Aleppo University, Syria
2016 – American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan unveils newest exhibit replica skeleton of a Titanosaur dinosaur (found 2010 Argentina), largest known dinosaur at 70 tons, 37m
2016 – Islamist militants attack a hotel in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso killing 28, injuring 56
2018 – Operation in El Junquito, Venezuela, to capture terrorist group including Oscar Pérez, accused of mounting a coup, ends in 4 deaths
2019 – Beginning of humanity’s largest gathering, the Kumbh Mela Hindu festival with 15 million people bathing at the joining of Ganges and Yamuna rivers, India. 120 million expected over next 49 days.
2019 – Bomb blast and gunfight at DusitD2 hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, leaves at least 21 dead with militants group claiming responsibility al-Shabab
2019 – Plastic will outweigh fish in the world’s oceans by 2050 according to report by the World Economic Forum
2021 – Dutch government led by PM Mark Rutte resigns after falsely accusing thousands of families of welfare fraud
2022 – Oil spill at La Pampilla refinery off Peruvian coast after waves from the Tongan eruption cause almost 12,000 barrels to leak into the sea
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
