January 25 - Events

Events

• 41 – After a night of negotiation, Claudius is accepted as Roman Emperor by the Senate.
• 1327 – Edward III becomes King of England.
• 1494 – Alfonso II becomes King of Naples.
• 1533 – Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second wife Anne Boleyn.
• 1554 – Founding of São Paulo city, Brazil.
• 1573 – Battle of Mikatagahara, in Japan; Takeda Shingen defeats Tokugawa Ieyasu.
• 1575 – Luanda, the capital of Angola was founded by the Portuguese navigator Paulo Dias de Novais.
• 1755 – Moscow University is established on Tatiana Day.
• 1787 – American Daniel Shays leads a rebellion to seize Federal arsenal to protest debtor's prisons.
• 1791 – The British Parliament passes the Constitutional Act of 1791 and splits the old province of Quebecinto Upper and Lower Canada.
• 1792 – The London Corresponding Society is founded.
• 1858 – The Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn becomes a popular wedding recessional after it is played on this day at the marriage of Queen Victoria's daughter, Victoria, and Friedrich of Prussia.
• 1879 – The Bulgarian National Bank is founded.
• 1881 – Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Telephone Company.
• 1890 – Nellie Bly completes her round-the-world journey in 72 days.
• 1909 – Richard Strauss' opera Elektra receives its debut performance at the Dresden State Opera.
• 1915 – Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates U.S. transcontinental telephone service, speaking from New York to Thomas Watson in San Francisco.
• 1918 – The Ukraine declares independence from Bolshevik Russia.
• 1919 – The League of Nations is founded.
• 1924 – The 1924 Winter Olympics opens in Chamonix, France (in the French Alps), inaugurating the Winter Olympic Games.
• 1937 – The Guiding Light debuts on NBC radio from Chicago. In 1952 it moves to CBS television, where it remains until Sept. 18, 2009.
• 1941 – Pope Pius XII elevates the Apostolic Vicariate of the Hawaiian Islands to the dignity of a diocese. It becomes the Roman Catholic Diocese of Honolulu.
• 1942 – World War II: Thailand declares war on the United States and United Kingdom.
• 1945 – World War II: The Battle of the Bulge ends.
• 1946 – The United Mine Workers rejoins the American Federation of Labor.
• 1949 – At the Hollywood Athletic Club the first Emmy Awards are presented.
• 1955 – The Soviet Union ends state of war with Germany.
• 1960 – The National Association of Broadcasters reacts to the Payola scandal by threatening fines for any disc jockeys who accept money for playing particular records.
• 1961 – In Washington, D.C. John F. Kennedy delivers the first live presidential television news conference.
• 1969 – Brazilian Army captain Carlos Lamarca deserts in order to fight against the military dictatorship, taking with him 10 machine guns and 63 rifles.
• 1971 – Charles Manson and three female "Family" members are found guilty of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders.
• 1971 – Idi Amin leads a coup deposing Milton Obote and becomes Uganda's president.
• 1971 – Himachal Pradesh becomes the 18th Indian state.
• 1981 – Jiang Qing, the widow of Mao Zedong, is sentenced to death.
• 1986 – The National Resistance Movement topples the government of Tito Okello in Uganda.
• 1990 – The Burns' Day storm hits northwestern Europe.
• 1993 – Five people are shot outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia resulting in two murders.
• 1994 – The Clementine space probe launches.
• 1995 – The Norwegian Rocket Incident: Russia almost launches a nuclear attack after it mistakes Black Brant XII, a Norwegian research rocket, for a US Trident missile.
• 1996 – Billy Bailey became the last person to be hanged in the United States of America.
• 1998 – During a historic visit to Cuba, Pope John Paul II demands the release of political prisoners and political reforms while condemning US attempts to isolate the country.
• 1998 – A suicide attack by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam on Sri Lanka's Temple of the Tooth kills 8 people and injures 25 others.
• 1999 – A 6.0 Richter scale earthquake hits western Colombia killing at least 1,000.
• 2001 – A 50-year-old Douglas DC-3 crashes near Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela killing 24.
• 2002 – Wikipedia switches to the new version of its software ("Phase II"), aka Magnus Manske Day.
• 2004 – Opportunity rover (MER-B) lands on surface of Mars.
• 2005 – A stampede at the Mandher Devi temple in Mandhradevi in India kills at least 258.
• 2006 – Three independent observing campaigns announce the discovery of OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb through gravitational microlensing, the first cool rocky/icy extrasolar planet around a main-sequence star.
• 2010 – Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 crashes into the Mediterranean Sea shortly after take-off from Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport, killing all 90 people on-board.