1948 – Harry S. Truman defeated Thomas E. Dewey for the U.S. presidency. The Chicago Tribune published an early edition that had the headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” The Truman victory surprised many polls and newspapers
1048 – All Soul’s Day declared. A Christian day dedicated to all departed souls of the faithful, especially those in purgatory
1208 – Peace treaty between the Chinese Jin and Song dynasties, the Song resume paying tribute after two years of fighting
1355 – English invasion army under King Edward lands at Calais
1642 – Second Battle of Breitenfeld, aka First Battle of Leipzig; victory for the Swedish army under Field Marshal Lennart Torstenson over Holy Roman Empire army under Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria
1648 – 12,000 Jews massacred by Chmielnicki hordes in Narol, Podlia (POLAND)
1675 – A combined attack by the Plymouth, Rhode Island, Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonies attacks the Great Swamp Fort, owned by the Narragansetts during King Philip’s War
1698 – Scottish settlers make landfall in Panama, establishing the ill-fated ‘Darien Venture’ colony
1721 – Peter the Great (Peter I), ruler of Russia, changed his title to emperor.
1749 – English Ohio Trade Company forms first trading post
1776 – During the American Revolutionary War, William Demont, became the first traitor of the American Revolution when he deserted.
1783 – U.S. Gen. George Washington gave his “Farewell Address to the Army” near Princeton, NJ.
1824 – US popular presidential vote 1st recorded; Andrew Jackson beats John Quincy Adams
1835 – 2nd Seminole War begins in Osceola
1841 – Akbar Khan successfully revolts against Shah Shuja in Afghanistan
1859 – American abolitionist John Brown found guilty of murder, inciting slaves to revolt, and treason against the Virginia Territory during his raid of Harpers Ferry Armory, and sentenced to hang
1867 – “Harpers Bazaar” magazine was founded.
1889 – North Dakota and South Dakota were admitted into the union as the 39th and 40th states.
1899 – The Boers begin their 118 day siege of British held Ladysmith during the Second Boer War.
1907 – US banker J. P. Morgan locks over 40 bankers in his library to force them to find ways to avert New York banking crisis
1914 – Russia declares war on the Ottoman Empire.
1917 – Balfour Declaration – Originally sent as a letter on this day to Baron Rothschild from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, it declared BRitish support for a Jewish state in Palestine. The letter was eventually added to Sevres peace treaty.
1920 – The first commercial radio station in the U.S., KDKA of Pittsburgh, PA, began regular broadcasting.
1930 – Haile Selassie was crowned emperor of Ethiopia.
1932 – The “Great Emu War” begins: Australian soldiers armed with Lewis Guns sought to cull the Emu population over crop destruction in Campion district, Western Australia
1938 – Canadian Broadcasting Corporation established
1943 – In a few days, 50,000 Jews in the Lublin region are deported and shot in ditches behind the Majdanek gas chambers.
1947 – Howard Hughes flew his “Spruce Goose,” a huge wooden airplane, for eight minutes in California. It was the plane’s first and only flight. The “Spruce Goose,” nicknamed because of the white-gray color of the spruce used to build it, never went into production.
1948 – Harry S. Truman defeated Thomas E. Dewey for the U.S. presidency. The Chicago Tribune published an early edition that had the headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” The Truman victory surprised many polls and newspapers.
1956 – Hungary appeals for UN assistance against Soviet invasion
1959 – Charles Van Doren, a game show contestant on the NBC-TV program “Twenty-One” admitted that he had been given questions and answers in advance.
1960 – In London, the novel “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” was found not guilty of obscenity.
1962 – U.S. President Kennedy announced that the U.S.S.R. was dismantling the missile sites in Cuba.
1963 – South Vietnamese President Ngo Dihn Diem was assassinated in a military coup.
1964 – King Saud of Saudi Arabia is deposed by a family coup, and replaced by his half-brother King Faisal
1965 – Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker, sets himself on fire in front of the river entrance to the Pentagon to protest the use of napalm in the Vietnam war
1966 – The Cuban Adjustment Act allows 123,000 Cubans to apply for permanent residence in the U.S.
1972 – Government of the Republic of Ireland introduce a bill to remove the special position of the Catholic Church from the Irish Constitution
1974 – 78 die when the Time Go-Go Club in Seoul, South Korea burns down. Six of the victims jumped to their deaths from the seventh floor after a club official barred the doors after the fire started
1977 – Microbiologist Carl R. Woese and scientists from the University of Illinois announce the identification of methanogens, a form of microbial life (Archaea) dating back some 3.5 billion years
1979 – Joanna Chesimard, a black militant escaped from a New Jersey prison, where she’d been serving a life sentence for the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper.
1983 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed a bill establishing a federal holiday on the third Monday of January in honor of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
1984 – Velma Barfield became the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1962. She had been convicted of the poisoning death of her boyfriend.
1985 – The South African government imposed severe restrictions on television, radio and newspaper coverage of unrest by both local and foreign journalists.
1986 – American hostage David Jacobson was released after being held in Lebanon for 17 months by Shiite Muslims kidnappers.
1988 – The Morris worm, the first internet-distributed computer worm to gain significant mainstream media attention, is launched from MIT
1993 – The U.S. Senate called for full disclosure of Senator Bob Packwood’s diaries in a sexual harassment probe.
1995 – Former South African defence minister General Magnus Malan and 10 other former senior military officers are arrested and charged with murdering 13 black people in 1987, (all the accused are later acquitted)
1998 – U.S. President Clinton gave his first in-depth interview since the White House sex scandal to Black Entertainment Television talk show host and political commentator Tavis Smiley on the network’s “BET Tonight with Tavis Smiley.”
2003 – In the U.S., the Episcopal Church diocese consecrated the church’s first openly gay bishop.
2014 – 60 people were killed and 110 injured by a suicide bombing in Lahore, Pakistan
2017 – Jerome Powell nominated by US President Donald Trump to be next Chair of the Federal Reserve
2018 – Tiger thought to have killed 13 people shot dead after month-long hunt near Pandharkawada, central India
2020 – Gunmen storm Kabul University, Afghanistan, shooting at least 22 dead with Islamic State group claiming responsibility
2021 – Jihadist gunman ambush and kill 69 people, including a local mayor in south-west Niger, adding to the 530 killed in 2021 to date
2022 – US Federal Reserve hikes interest rates for a fourth straight time to range of between 3.75% and 4.00%, its highest since 2008 in an effort to fight ongoing inflation
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
