| 1. | 98 - Trajan becomes Roman Emperor after the death of Nerva. |
| 2. | 672 - St. Vitalian ends his reign as Catholic Pope. |
| 3. | 847 - Sergius II ends his reign as Catholic Pope. |
| 4. | 1142 - Wrongful execution of noted Song Dynasty General Yue Fei. |
| 5. | 1186 - Henry VI, the son and heir of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, weds Constance of Sicily. |
| 6. | 1343 - Pope Clement VI issues the Bull Unigenitus. |
| 7. | 1593 - Vatican opens 7 year trial against scholar Giordano Bruno. |
| 8. | 1606 - Gunpowder Plot: The trial of Guy Fawkes and other conspirators begins, and ending in their execution on January 31. |
| 9. | 1695 - Mustafa II becomes the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul on the death of Ahmed II. Mustafa rules until his death in 1703. |
| 10. | 1785 - The University of Georgia is founded. |
| 11. | 1825 - U.S. Congress approves Indian Territory (in what is present-day Oklahoma), clearing the way for forced relocation of the Eastern Indians on the "Trail of Tears." |
| 12. | 1870 - The first college sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, is formed at DePauw University. |
| 13. | 1880 - Thomas Edison files a patent for his electric incandescent lamp. |
| 14. | 1888 - In Washington, D.C., the National Geographic Society is founded. |
| 15. | 1900 - Boxer Rebellion: Foreign diplomats in Peking, China demand that the Boxer rebels be disciplined. |
| 16. | 1909 - The Young Left is founded in Norway. |
| 17. | 1915 - United States Marines occupy Haiti. |
| 18. | 1926 - John Logie Baird demonstrates the first television broadcast. |
| 19. | 1939 - United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt approves the sale of U.S. war planes to France. |
| 20. | 1941 - World War II: Fighting at Derna, Libya, begins. Following the capture of Tobruk, two brigades of the 6th Australian Division under Major General Iven Mackay pursue the Italians westwards and encounters an Italian rear guard at Derna. |
| 21. | 1943 - World War II: Fifty bombers mount the first entirely American air raid against Germany, targeting Wilhelmshaven. |
| 22. | 1944 - World War II: The two-year Siege of Leningrad is lifted. |
| 23. | 1945 - World War II: The Red Army arrives at Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland and find the Nazi concentration camp. |
| 24. | 1951 - Nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site begins with a one-kiloton bomb dropped on Frenchman Flats. |
| 25. | 1967 - Project Apollo: Apollo 1 - Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee are killed in a fire during a test of the spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center. |
| 26. | 1967 - More than sixty nations sign the Outer Space Treaty banning nuclear weapons in space. |
| 27. | 1969 - The present-day Hetch Hetchy Moccasin Powerhouse, rated at 100,000KVA was completed and placed in operation. |
| 28. | 1973 - Paris Peace Accords officially end the Vietnam War, Colonel William Nolde falls, becoming the conflict's last recorded American combat casualty. |
| 29. | 1977 - Record company EMI sacks the controversial United Kingdom punk rock group the Sex Pistols. |
| 30. | 1983 - World's longest subaqueous tunnel (53.90 km) opens in Japan connecting the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido. |
| 31. | 1984 - Carl Lewis beats his own indoor world jumping record by 9¼ inches (23.5 centimeters) with a 28-foot, 10¼-inch (8.795-meter) jump. |
| 32. | 1996 - Colonel Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara deposes the first democratically elected president of Niger, Mahamane Ousmane, in a military coup. |
| 33. | 1996 - Germany observes its 1st Holocaust Remembrance Day. |
| 34. | 1997 - It is revealed that French museums have nearly 2,000 pieces of art that were stolen by Nazis. |
| 35. | 1998 - American First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton appears on The Today Show, calling the attacks against her husband part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. |
| 36. | 2001 - Ten members of the Oklahoma State University men's basketball team and support staff die in a plane crash in Colorado. |
| 37. | 2002 - Several explosions at a military dump in Lagos, Nigeria, kill more than 1,000. |