January 9

1324 – Italian explorer, Marco Polo dies

1431 – The trial of Joan of Arc begins in Rouen, France

1493 – Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sees manatees near the Dominican Republic and mistakes them for mermaids, describing them as “not half as beautiful as they are painted”

1554 – Gregory XV, Roman Catholic Pope, is born

1719 – Philip V of Spain declares war on France

1760 – The Afghans defeat the Marathas in the Battle of Barari Ghat

1768 – The first modern circus is held by Philip Astley in London

1776 – Thomas Paine publishes Common Sense, calling for complete independence in the colonies

1792 – The Ottomans sign a treaty with the Russians ending war

1793 – Jean Pierre Blanchard makes the first balloon flight in North America

1806 – British naval hero Lord Horatio Nelson is buried at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London

1839 – The Daguerreotype photo process is announced at the French Academy of Science

1861 – The Union ship Star of the West is prevented from entering Charleston Harbor on her way to Fort Sumter by Southern shellfire

1861 – Mississippi secedes from the Union

1873 – 1^st President of France, Napoleon III dies

1887 – Nearly an inch of snow falls every hour for 16 hours in the West, decimating cattle herds who had been poorly fed, losing millions of cattle in what was known as the “Great Die-Up”

1890 – Czech writer and playwright Karel Capek is born

1890 – German journalist Kurt Tucholsky is born

1905 – The Russian Revolution of 1905 begins when troops fired on petitioners to Czar Nicholas in St. Petersburg

1908 – Count Zeppelin announces plans for his airship to carry 100 passengers

1908 – German poet, painter, and illustrator, Wilhelm Busch dies

1908 – Russian author, playwright, and actor, Abraham Goldfaden dies

1909 – Ernest Shackleton leads a Polar exploration team 97 nautical miles short of the South Pole. The weather was too severe to continue

1912 – Colonel Theodore Roosevelt announces that if asked, he would run for president

1913 – 37^th US President Richard Nixon is born

1915 – Pancho Villa signs a treaty with the US to halt border conflicts

1917 – British troops launch an offensive against Turkish troops at Khadairi Bend, north of Kut, Mesopotamia

1922 – 1^st President of Guinea, Ahmed Sekou Toure is born

1924 – Ford Motor Co. stock is valued at almost $1 billion

1941 – American folk singer and activist, Joan Baez is born

1943 – Soviet planes drop leaflets on the surrounded Germans in Stalingrad requesting their surrender but they refuse

1944 – Musician, producer, and songwriter, Jimmy Page is born

1945 – US troops land on Luzon in the Philippines

1947 – French General Leclerc breaks off all talks with Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh

1952 – During his State of the Union, President Harry Truman warns Americans that they are “moving through a perilous time,” and a call for action against the Communist threat

1952 – Jackie Robinson becomes the highest paid player in Brooklyn Dodger history

1963 – American and Irish linguist and a leading expert in the computer encoding of scripts, Michael Averson is born

1964 – US forces kill six Panamanian student protestors who were demonstrating in the Panama Canal Zone

1965 – The James Bond movie “Goldfinger” features an Aston Martin Silver Birch DB5 sports car for the first time

1965 – General Nguyen Khanh and the Armed Forces Council agree to support the government of Premier Tran Van Huong

1967 – Singer, songwriter, guitarist, and actor, Dave Matthews is born

1967 – The Agency for International Development respond to reports in the media that widespread corruption and theft of supplies sent to South Vietnam was occurring

1968 – The last of America’s unmanned lunar probes, Surveyor 7, lands on the Moon

1972 – The ship Seawise University (renamed from the original, Queen Elizabeth) sinks in Hong Kong Harbor due to a fire

1972 – The Los Angeles Lakers 33-game winning streak is ended when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar leads the Milwaukee Bucks in victory over the Lakers

1974 – Cambodian government troops launch a drive to avert insurgent attack on Phnom Penh

1976 – Sylvester Stallone starts filming Rocky, a film born and written by Stallone and the first film in which he was cast in a leading role

1979 – The staging of the Music for UNICEF concert is held in New York, raising money for children facing extreme poverty, malnutrition and lack of access to education

1982 – Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (Catherine Elizabeth “Kate” Middleton), the

wife of Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, is born

1984 – Angelo Buono, one of the Hillside Stranglers, is sentenced to life in prison for his bit in the rape, torture and murder of 10 Los Angeles women

1992 – The Assembly of the Serb People in Bosnia and Herzegovina announces the creation of the Republika Srpska, a new state within Yugoslavia

1996 – Thousands of civilians are taken hostage during a raid by Chechen separatists in the city of Kizlyar

2005 – Mahmoud Abbas wins election to replace Yasser Arafat as President of the Palestinian National Authority

2005 – The Comprehensive Peace Agreement to end the Second Sudanese Civil War is signed by the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement

2007 – The first iPhone is unveiled by Steve Jobs, Apple CEO

2014 – American poet, activist, and actor, Amiri Baraka dies