1689– Prince William of Orange (future King William III of Britain), summons Convention Parliament to discuss ruling jointly with his wife Mary (daughter of exiled King James II). 1840 – Under the leadership of British statesman Edward G. Wakefield, the first British colonists to New Zealand arrive at Port Nicholson on Auckland Island. 1879 –Battle of Rorke’s Drift: British garrison of 150 holds off 3,000-4,000 Zulu warriors. Eleven Victoria Crosses and a number of other decorations were awarded to the defenders. 1905– In St Petersburg, Russia, a large demonstration of workers led by Father Gapon, march to the Winter Palace with a petition to the Tsar; troops fire on protesters in what becomes known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. 1943 – All Japanese resistance in Papua, on the island of New Guinea, site of an important Allied base at Port Moresby in World War II, ceased. 1973– Roe vs Wade: US Supreme Court legalizes most abortions. 1998 – One of the most notorious domestic terrorists in U.S. history, Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, who killed three people and injured 22 in 16 attacks between 1979 and 1995, was sentenced to four terms of life in prison without parole. 1980 –Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov, the Soviet physicist who helped build the USSR’s first hydrogen bomb, is arrested after criticizing the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. 2003 – Hispanics are officially declared the largest minority group in the U.S.
Music: 1968– “Lady Soul” 14th studio album by Aretha Franklin is released (Billboard Album of the Year 1968)
Births & Deaths: 1898 – Sergey Eisenstein, a Russian film director and theorist known for such classics as Potemkin (1925), Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Ivan the Terrible (released in two parts, 1944 and 1958), was born. 1901 – The death of Queen Victoria on January 22, 1901, ends an era in which most of her British subjects know no other monarch. 1931 – American singer and songwriter Sam Cooke, one of the most influential black vocalists of the post-World War II era, was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
