This Day in History
* 98 - Trajan becomes Roman Emperor after the death of Nerva.
* 1142 - Wrongful execution of noted Song Dynasty General Yue Fei.
* 1186 - Henry VI, the son and heir of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, weds Constance of Sicily.
* 1343 - Pope Clement VI issues the Bull Unigenitus.
* 1593 - Vatican opens 7 year trial against scholar Giordano Bruno.
* 1606 - Gunpowder Plot: The trial of Guy Fawkes and other conspirators begins, and ending in their execution on January 31.
* 1695 - Mustafa II becomes the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul on the death of Ahmed II. Mustafa rules until his death in 1703.
* 1785 - The University of Georgia is founded, the first public university in the United States.
* 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."
* 1870 - The first college sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, is formed at DePauw University.
* 1888 - In Washington, D.C., the National Geographic Society is founded.
* 1909 - The Young Left is founded in Norway.
* 1918 - The first hostilities occurred in the Finnish Civil War.
* 1939 - First flight of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning.
* 1944 - World War II: The two-year Siege of Leningrad is lifted.
* 1945 - World War II: The Red Army arrives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.
* 1951 - Nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site begins with a one-kiloton bomb dropped on Frenchman Flats.
* 1967 - Apollo program: 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.
* 1967 - More than sixty nations sign the Outer Space Treaty banning nuclear weapons in space.
* 1973 - Paris Peace Accords officially end the Vietnam War, Colonel William Nolde falls, becoming the conflict's last recorded American combat casualty.
* 1983 - Pilot shaft of World's longest subaqueous tunnel (53.85 km) between the Japanese islands of Honshū and Hokkaidō breaks through.
* 1996 - Colonel Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara deposes the first democratically elected president of Niger, Mahamane Ousmane, in a military coup.
* 1996 - Germany first observes International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
* 2007 - Approximately 100,000 protesters converge on the Mall in Washington, D.C. for the January 27, 2007 anti-war protest sponsored by United for Peace and Justice.
