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.
2001 – The British government launches pro-vaccine campaign
2003 – Hispanics are officially declared the largest minority group in the U.S.
2006 – Evo Morales is inaugurated as President of Bolivia, becoming the country’s first indigenous president
2014 – Water vapour is detected on the dwarf planet Ceres
2017 – Chile declares a State of Emergency and requests international assistance as wildfires rage out of control
2018 – Netflix becomes the largest digital media and entertainment company in the world worth $100 billion
2018 – US government ends three-day shutdown after an agreement in Congress to extend funding
2020 – China locks down the city of Wuhan and its 11 million people, in an effort to control COVID-19 with a then official death toll of 17 and over 500 people ill
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.
Music:
1968 – “Lady Soul” 14th studio album by Aretha Franklin is released (Billboard Album of the Year 1968)
