January 7 in History

Historical Events on January 7

1131

Canute Lavard was murdered at Haraldsted, Denmark by his cousin, Magnus I of Sweden.
1325

Alfonso IV becomes King of Portugal.
1558

France takes Calais, the last continental possession of England.
1566

Pope Pius V is elected.
1608

Fire destroys Jamestown, Virginia.
1610

Galileo Galilei makes his first observation of the four Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa, although he is not able to distinguish the last two until the following day.
1782

The first American commercial bank, the Bank of North America, opens.
1785

Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon.
1835

HMS Beagle drops anchor off the Chonos Archipelago.
1894

William Kennedy Dickson receives a patent for motion picture film.
1904

The distress signal "CQD" is established only to be replaced two years later by "SOS".
1919

Montenegrin guerrilla fighters rebel against the planned annexation of Montenegro by Serbia, but fail.
1920

The New York State Assembly refuses to seat five duly elected Socialist assemblymen.
1922

Dáil Éireann ratifies the Anglo-Irish Treaty by a 64-57 vote.
1927

The first transatlantic telephone service is established from New York City to London.
1931

Guy Menzies flies the first solo non-stop trans-Tasman flight (from Australia to New Zealand) in 11 hours and 45 minutes, crash-landing on New Zealand's west coast.
1935

Benito Mussolini and French Foreign minister Pierre Laval sign the Franco-Italian Agreement.
1940

Winter War: The Finnish 9th Division stop and completely destroy the numerically superior Soviet forces on the Raate-Suomussalmi road.
1942

World War II: The siege of the Bataan Peninsula begins.
1945

World War II: British General Bernard Montgomery holds a press conference in which he claims credit for victory in the Battle of the Bulge.
1948

Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell crashes while in pursuit of a supposed UFO.
1954

Georgetown-IBM experiment: The first public demonstration of a machine translation system, is held in New York at the head office of IBM.
1955

Contralto Marian Anderson becomes the first person of color to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in Giuseppe Verdi's Un ballo in maschera.
1959

The United States recognizes the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
1968

Surveyor Program: Surveyor 7, the last spacecraft in the Surveyor series, lifts off from launch complex 36A, Cape Canaveral.
1973

Mark Essex fatally shoots ten people and wounds 13 others at Howard Johnson's Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana, before being shot to death by police officers.
1979

Third Indochina War: Cambodian-Vietnamese War: Phnom Penh falls to the advancing Vietnamese troops, driving out Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
1980

U.S. President Jimmy Carter authorizes legislation giving $1.5 billion in loans to bail out the Chrysler Corporation.
1984

Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
1985

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launches Sakigake, Japan's first interplanetary spacecraft and the first deep space probe to be launched by any country other than the United States or the Soviet Union.
1991

Roger Lafontant, former leader of the Tonton Macoute in Haiti under François Duvalier, attempts a coup d'état, which ends in his arrest.
1992

The Jeep Grand Cherokee is introduced at the Detroit Auto Show.
1993

The Fourth Republic of Ghana is inaugurated with Jerry Rawlings as President.
1993

Bosnian War: The Bosnian Army executes a surprise attack at the village of Kravica in Srebrenica.
1999

The Senate trial in the impeachment of U.S. President Bill Clinton begins.
2012

A hot air balloon crashes near Carterton, New Zealand, killing all 11 people on board.
2015

Two gunmen commit mass murder at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, shooting twelve people execution style, and wounding eleven others.
2015

A car bomb explodes outside a police college in the Yemeni capital Sana'a with at least 38 people reported dead and more than 63 injured.

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