This Day in History

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January 23

Today is Nat'l Pie Day in the U.S.


Events

971 – Using crossbows, Song dynasty troops soundly defeat a war elephant corps of the Southern Han at Shao.

1556 – The deadliest earthquake in history, the Shaanxi earthquake, hits Shaanxi province, China. The death toll may have been as high as 830,000.

1570 – James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray, regent for the infant King James VI of Scotland, is assassinated by firearm, the first recorded instance of such.

1656 – Blaise Pascal publishes the first of his Lettres provinciales.

1795 – After an extraordinary charge across the frozen Zuiderzee, the French cavalry captured 14 Dutch ships and 850 guns, in a rare occurrence of a battle between ships and cavalry.

1849 – Elizabeth Blackwell is awarded her M.D. by the Geneva Medical College of Geneva, New York, becoming the United States' first female doctor.

1870 – In Montana, U.S. cavalrymen kill 173 Native Americans, mostly women and children, in what becomes known as the Marias Massacre.

1909 – RMS Republic, a passenger ship of the White Star Line, becomes the first ship to use the CQD distress signal after colliding with another ship, the SS Florida, off the Massachusetts coastline, an event that kills six people. The Republic sinks the next day.

1920 – The Netherlands refuses to surrender the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany to the Allies.

1957 – American inventor Walter Frederick Morrison sells the rights to his flying disc to the Wham-O toy company, which later renames it the "Frisbee".

1960 – The bathyscaphe USS Trieste breaks a depth record by descending to 10,911 metres (35,797 ft) in the Pacific Ocean.

1967 – Milton Keynes (England) is founded as a new town by Order in Council, with a planning brief to become a city of 250,000 people.

1973 – United States President Richard Nixon announces that a peace accord has been reached in Vietnam.

1986 – The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts its first members: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Fats Domino, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley.

1997 – Madeleine Albright becomes the first woman to serve as United States Secretary of State.

1998 – Netscape announced Mozilla, with the intention to release Communicator code as open source.

2002 – U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl is kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan and subsequently murdered.

2003 – A very weak signal from Pioneer 10 (launched Mar 3, 1972) is detected for the last time, but no usable data can be extracted.

Births

1737 – John Hancock; 1832 – Édouard Manet; 1855 – John Browning; 1898 – Randolph Scott; 1907 – Dan Duryea; 1910 – Django Reinhardt; 1913 – Wally Parks; 1919 – Ernie Kovacs; 1920 – Walter Frederick Morrison; 1933 – Chita Rivera; 1943 – Gil Gerard; 1944 – Rutger Hauer; 1950 – Richard Dean Anderson; 1951 – Chesley Sullenberger; 1953 – Robin Zander; 1964 – Mariska Hargitay; 1974 – Tiffani Thiessen

Deaths

1622 – William Baffin; 1803 – Arthur Guinness; 1883 – Gustave Doré; 1944 – Edvard Munch; 1973 – Kid Ory; 1976 – Paul Robeson; 1977 – Toots Shor; 1978 – Jack Oakie; 1989 – Salvador Dalí; 2003 – Nell Carter; 2004 – Bob Keeshan; 2005 – Johnny Carson; 2011 – Jack LaLanne; 2015 – Ernie Banks