1540: Henry VIII<\/a> meets his bride-to-be, Anne of Cleves<\/a><\/h4>\nBored of waiting for his bride, Henry had decided to welcome her with what he considered a hilarious prank. He and a group of friends rode to Rochester in matching hoods and capes, like Robin Hood<\/a> and his Merry Men. Out of politeness, though, he sent Browne ahead to warn her.<\/p>\nAs Anne stared at Browne in bewilderment, he knew she was wrong for Henry. He had, he later recalled, never been \u201cmore dismayed in all his life\u201d.<\/p>\n
2 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1769: The schools of the Royal Academy of Arts meet for their first session in Pall Mall, London<\/h4>\n
Academy President Joshua Reynolds delivers the first of his famous \u2018discourses\u2019 on art.<\/p>\n
3 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1888: Marvin Stone patents the paper drinking straw<\/h4>\n4 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1642: Charles I leads troops into the House of Commons<\/a> to arrest the Five Members<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Portrait of King Charles I by Sir Anthony van Dyck. (Photo by Fine Art Images\/Heritage Images via Getty Images).<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\nBy the end of 1641, relations between Charles I<\/a> and his parliament were close to collapse. And, on 4 January, Charles acted. In violation of convention, Charles I led a troop of armed men into the Commons and took the seat of the Speaker, William Lenthall. But as he looked around, the Five Members were nowhere to be seen. \u201cI see the birds have flown,\u201d Charles said drily, and asked Lenthall where they were. Lenthall fell to his knees. \u201cMay it please your majesty,\u201d he said, \u201cI have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here.\u201d<\/p>\nCharles strode out in high dudgeon, the five MPs still in hiding. Six days later he left London and began raising an army.<\/p>\n
5 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1919: The German Workers\u2019 Party, the forerunner of the Nazi Party, is formed in Munich<\/h4>\n
In September Adolf Hitler<\/a> joins the party, which will change its name in 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers\u2019 Party.<\/p>\n6 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1661: The Fifth Monarchists take up arms in an attempt to overthrow Charles II<\/a><\/h4>\nOn Sunday 6 January 1661, Thomas Venner launched his would-be revolution, bursting into St Paul\u2019s Cathedral with a group of armed men, waving banners carrying the words \u201cThe Lord God and Gideon\u201d and proclaiming that Christ, not Charles, was king. The lord mayor called out the London militia, but by the time they reached St Paul\u2019s, Venner and his men had retreated north.<\/p>\n
- Read more |\u00a0Was Charles II too randy to rule?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
For the next two days, the Fifth Monarchists lay low in the woods near Highgate. Then, on 9 January, they returned in force. Samuel Pepys was woken at six that morning by \u201cpeople running up and down\u2026 talking that the Fanatiques were up in arms in the City\u201d. Pepys was sufficiently worried to arm himself with a sword and pistol, and when he ventured out he found the shops shut and the place in uproar.<\/p>\n
Still, after hours of hard fighting, the remaining radicals were cornered in two City pubs, and Venner himself was taken after suffering 19 wounds and killing three men with a halberd. \u201cA thing that never was heard of,\u201d mused Pepys, \u201cthat so few men should dare and do so much mischief.\u201d<\/p>\n Famous births in January<\/h2>\n3 January 1892<\/h6>\n
John Ronald Reuel (JRR) Tolkein<\/a>, scholar and author\u00a0<\/p>\n4 January 1809<\/h6>\n
Louis Braille, developer of written communication for visually impaired people.<\/p>\n
8 January 1871<\/h6>\n
James Craig, later 1st Viscount Craigavon. The son of a prosperous whiskey distiller, Craig became the first prime minister of Northern Ireland in June 1921\u00a0<\/p>\n
10 January 1769<\/h6>\n
Michel Ney, who was dubbed \u201cthe Bravest of the Brave\u201d for his role as French marshal during Napoleon\u2019s retreat from Moscow<\/p>\n
15 January 1918<\/h6>\n
Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Egyptian leader<\/p>\n
16 January 1908<\/h6>\n
Ethel Merman, New York singer and star of a string of Broadway musicals including Anything Goes<\/em>, Annie Get Your Gun<\/em>, and Gypsy<\/em><\/p>\n17 January 1863<\/h6>\n
David Lloyd George<\/a>, who would replace Herbert Asquith as prime minister<\/p>\n18 January 1882<\/h6>\n
Alan Alexander \u2018AA\u2019 Milne, poet, playwright, and Winnie the Pooh<\/em> creator<\/p>\n19 January 1809<\/h6>\n
Edgar Allan Poe, poet, critic, and writer<\/p>\n
22 January 1561<\/h6>\n
Francis Bacon, statesman and philosopher<\/p>\n
22 January 1788<\/h6>\n
George Gordon Byron, poet, and the son of Captain John \u201cMad Jack\u201d Byron, a philandering spendthrift, and Catherine Gordon, a rich Scottish heiress | Read more about the scandolous Byrons<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nFamous deaths in January\u00a0<\/h2>\n3 January 1959<\/h6>\n
Edwin Muir, Orcadian poet, novelist, and academic<\/p>\n
4 January 1761<\/h6>\n
Stephen Hales, botanist, chemist, and inventor<\/p>\n
5 January 1858<\/h6>\n
Joseph Count Radetzky, a veteran of the\u00a0Napoleonic wars<\/a><\/p>\n11 January 1891<\/h6>\n
Georges-Eugene Haussmann, French civic planner who remodelled Paris in the 1850s and 1960s<\/p>\n
11 January 1928<\/h6>\n
Thomas Hardy, poet and novelist<\/p>\n
13 January 1941<\/h6>\n
James Joyce, Irish novelist and poet<\/p>\n
20 January 1779<\/h6>\n
David Garrick, actor and theatre manager<\/p>\n
21 January 1932<\/h6>\n
Lytton Strachey, writer, critic author, and a founder member of the Bloomsbury Group<\/p>\n
21 January 1959<\/h6>\n
Cecil B DeMille, American film director, producer and screenwriter<\/p>\n
26 January 1823<\/h6>\n
Edward Jenner, physician and pioneer of smallpox vaccine |\u00a0Read more about the history of vaccination<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n31 January 1788<\/h6>\n
Charles Edward Stuart, \u2018Bonnie Prince Charlie<\/a>\u2018<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section>
7 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1913: Standard Oil chemist William Merriam Burton receives a US patent for his thermal cracking process<\/h4>\n
This doubled the yield of gasoline from a barrel of crude oil.<\/p>\n
8 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1697: Britain\u2019s last execution<\/a> for blasphemy takes place<\/h4>\nIn the mid-1690s, Edinburgh\u2019s library had one of the finest collections in the country, including provocative, supposedly \u2018atheistical\u2019 works by philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. 20 year old Thomas Aikenhead plunged in with gusto. But he made the mistake of telling his friends what he was reading. This was no time to be a free thinker: the Scottish authorities had recently ordered a crackdown on \u201catheistical, erroneous or profane or vicious\u201d literature. Thomas\u2019s friends talked and, in the autumn of 1696, he was arrested and charged with blasphemy.<\/p>\n
On Christmas Eve, young Thomas was sentenced to death. Only the strictest punishment, insisted the Church of Scotland\u2019s General Assembly, would stamp out \u201cthe abounding of impiety and profanity in this land\u201d. On the morning of 8 January, he made the long walk to the gallows<\/a>. In a last letter, he insisted that it was only natural to \u201chave an insatiable inclination to the truth\u201d. He was the last person ever executed for blasphemy in Britain.<\/p>\n9 January<\/a><\/h2>\n2007: Steve Jobs unveils the first iPhone<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new iPhone that was introduced at Macworld on January 9, 2007 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by David Paul Morris\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n\u201cThank you for coming,\u201d said the thin, bespectacled man in the black polo neck and Levi\u2019s jeans. \u201cWe\u2019re going to make some history together today.\u201d<\/p>\n
At last it was time for the new product to be revealed. \u201cThis is a day I\u2019ve been looking forward to for two and a half years,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything\u2026 Well, today, we are introducing three revolutionary products.\u201d<\/p>\n
These were, he said, \u201ca widescreen iPod with touch controls\u201d, a \u201crevolutionary mobile phone\u201d, and a \u201cbreakthrough internet communications device\u201d. \u201cAn iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator,\u201d he repeated. \u201cAn iPod, a phone\u2026 are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it\u2026 iPhone.\u201d<\/p>\n
10 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1863: The London Underground opens to a sceptical public<\/h4>\n
\u201cFor the first time in the history of the world,\u201d said The Daily News<\/em>, \u201cmen can travel in pleasant carriages, and with considerable comfort, lower down than gas pipes and water pipes\u2026 lower down than the graveyard.\u201d<\/p>\n11 January<\/a><\/h2>\nAD 630: Muhammad conquers Mecca<\/h4>\n
After eight years away, having converted thousands to his cause, Muhammad returned to Mecca, with 10,000 armed supporters.<\/p>\n
There was remarkably little bloodshed. Only a few locals tried to resist, and those who weren\u2019t killed quickly surrendered. When Muhammad took control, he ordered virtually no reprisals. Only 10 of his leading opponents were arrested, and not all were killed. \u201cHe who lays down arms will be safe. He who locks his door will be safe,\u201d he told the people of Mecca. \u201cThere is no reproof against you. Go your way, for you are free.\u201d<\/p>\n
12 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1895: The National Trust is founded<\/h4>\n
The National Trust was rooted deep in the soil of Victorian Britain. The key figure was Octavia Hill, a high-minded reformer who had long believed that working people should have access to \u201cthe life-enhancing virtues of pure earth, clean air and blue sky\u201d.<\/p>\n
![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> A painting of Octavia Hill, by John Singer Sargent. (Photo By RDImages\/Epics\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\nBack in 1876 she had helped her sister Miranda found a Society for the Diffusion of Beauty, which campaigned for open spaces to \u201cbring beauty home to the poor\u201d. \u201cWe all want quiet,\u201d she explained, \u201ca few acres where the hill top enables the Londoner to rise above the smoke, to feel a refreshing air for a little time and to see the sun setting in coloured glory which abounds so in the Earth God made.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time, Hill was working with her friend Hardwicke Rawnsley, an Anglican clergyman, and the solicitor Sir Robert Hunter to protect the Lake District from quarrying in the fells. At the end of 1893, the three of them met at the office of the Commons Preservation Society, Britain\u2019s oldest conservation group, to discuss a new trust specifically to buy sites for the nation as a whole. Back in 1885, Hill had proposed calling it the Commons and Gardens Trust. But Hunter suggested a simpler name: the National Trust.<\/p>\n
13 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1898: Zola attacks France\u2019s anti-Semitism<\/h4>\n
As the people of Paris trudged to work on 13 January 1898, one title on the newsstands caught their attention. On the front page of the socialist newspaper L\u2019Aurore (\u2018The Dawn\u2019), the headline read simply: \u201cJ\u2019Accuse \u2026!\u201d In smaller print were the words: \u201cLetter to the president of the Republic. By Emile Zola.\u201d<\/p>\n
14 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1878: Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates the telephone to Queen Victoria at Osborne House, Isle of Wight<\/h4>\n
Calls are made to nearby Osborne Cottage as well as to Cowes, Southampton and London.<\/p>\n
15 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1559: The coronation of Queen Elizabeth I<\/a> takes place in Westminster Abbey<\/h4>\nThe date had been specially chosen on the astrological advice of the noted Tudor scholar and mystic Dr John Dee. The previous day Elizabeth had ridden in state from the Tower of London to Whitehall in a display of pageantry that cost the Queen alone the sum of \u00a316,000. Most of England\u2019s bishops were too old, infirm, unacceptable to the Queen or unwilling to serve so it is left to the very junior Bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe, to carry out the actual coronation ceremony.<\/p>\n
16 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1912: Scott\u2019s Antarctic dreams are dashed<\/h4>\n
Tuesday 16 January 1912 ought to have been the happiest day of Robert Falcon Scott\u2019s life. After years of preparations, his British expedition team were only a few miles from the south pole, and on the brink of one of the greatest achievements in the history of exploration. And then \u2013 disaster.<\/p>\n
Scott\u2019s journal entry that night captured his dreadful disappointment. \u201cThe worst has happened, or nearly the worst,\u201d he wrote. Not long after they had set off in the morning, one of his men had spotted a mysterious \u2018black speck\u2019 in the distance. \u201cWe marched on, and found that it was a black flag tied to a sledge bearer; near by the remains of a camp; sledge tracks and ski tracks going and coming and the clear trace of dogs\u2019 paws \u2013 many dogs. This told us the whole story. The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the pole.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not even Scott\u2019s habitual sang-froid could mask his shock that the rival Norwegian team, led by Roald Amundsen, had got there first.<\/p>\n
17 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1929: Popeye the Sailor makes his first appearance as a minor character in Elzie Crisler Segar\u2019s long-running Thimble Theater comic strip<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Popeye reaches for a can of spinach in a still from a film, c. 1945. (Photo by Paramount Pictures\/Courtesy of Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n18 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1283: During the final stages of his second war of conquest in Wales, Edward I<\/a> gained control of the Conwy valley by capturing the native Welsh castle of Dolwyddelan<\/h4>\n19 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1511: Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon<\/a> made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk to give thanks for the birth of a son<\/h4>\nThe king presented a ruby collar to be hung around the neck of the shrine\u2019s statue of the Virgin Mary. A few weeks later, however, the royal child died. In 1538, during Henry\u2019s dissolution of the monasteries<\/a>, such shrines were destroyed, and the statue of the Virgin was taken to Chelsea to be publicly burned alongside other religious images.<\/p>\n20 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1265: England\u2019s first parliament meets<\/h4>\n
The first parliament in English history met on 20 January 1265, but it was so different from its modern-day equivalent that the two can barely be compared. It was called not by the king \u2013 the decent, dithering Henry III<\/a> \u2013 but by the rebellious magnate Simon de Montfort, who had become the standard-bearer for the cause of the barons against the monarchy.<\/p>\n- Read more |\u00a09 things you didn\u2019t know about the history of parliament<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Little detail about this first parliament survives, and it seems to have broken up within a month. But it established a vital principle, and when Henry\u2019s son Edward I summoned the \u2018Model Parliament\u2019 30 years later, he too invited knights and burgesses, as well as representatives from each city, all of whom were elected.<\/p>\n
So perhaps de Montfort\u2019s reputation as the accidental godfather of parliamentary democracy is not entirely false, even if he was far from being a democrat.<\/p>\n
21 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1663: Wiltshire antiquary John Aubrey is elected a member of the Royal Society<\/h4>\n
Although an early student of the stone circles at both Avebury and Stonehenge, Aubrey is best known for his collection of biographical essays, Brief Lives<\/em>.<\/p>\n22 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1901: Queen Victoria<\/a> dies after 63 years on the throne<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Engraved portrait of Queen Victoria, by H B Hall. (Photo by Kean Collection\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\nThe queen breathed her last at about 6.30pm on 22 January, with almost all her family gathered around her bed. At the top were her doctor, Sir James Reid, and \u2013 of all people \u2013 her bombastic grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was typically determined to hog the limelight. When she died, Turi was placed on her deathbed to honour her last request.<\/p>\n
23 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1571: Queen Elizabeth I opens and names London\u2019s Royal Exchange<\/h4>\n
It had been founded five years earlier by Sir Thomas Gresham in a bid to compete with the Antwerp Bourse as a centre for foreign trade.<\/p>\n
24 January<\/a><\/h2>\nAD 41: Claudius becomes emperor<\/h4>\n
When the Roman aristocrat Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus, better known simply as Claudius, awoke on 24 January AD 41, he never imagined he would end the day as emperor. His nephew Caligula, in charge for almost four years, was still a young man. A sickly, scholarly figure, Claudius was 50 years old and had never been seen as a serious political figure. There seemed no reason for that to change.<\/p>\n
And then, suddenly, everything was thrown into flux. During the Palatine Games, which were held to honour his ancestor Augustus, Caligula was murdered by the Praetorian Guard. The conspirators hoped \u2013 among other aims \u2013 to restore senatorial rule, but in the meantime, Caligula\u2019s German bodyguards rampaged through the palace.<\/p>\n
- Read more |\u00a0How did the Romans conquer Britain?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Claudius ran for his life. \u201cIn great terror at the news of the murder,\u201d wrote the biographer Suetonius, \u201che stole away to a balcony hard by and hid among the curtains which hung before the door.\u201d But there he was spotted by a soldier called Gratus \u2013 and for a moment, it seemed that his luck had run out.<\/p>\n
Gibbering in fear, Claudius begged for mercy. But according to the historian Josephus, \u201cGratus smiled upon him, and took him by the right hand, and said: \u2018Leave off, sir, these low thoughts of saving yourself, while you ought to have greater thoughts, even of obtaining the empire\u2026 Go to, therefore, and accept the throne of thy ancestors.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Claudius was still too terrified to walk, so Gratus and his friends carried him. Here, they shouted, was their new emperor.<\/p>\n
25 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1971: Idi Amin<\/a> seizes power in Uganda while the country\u2019s president, Dr Milton Obote, is out of the country attending a Commonwealth conference in Singapore<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> President Idi Amin. (Photo by GettyImages)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n26 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1871: The Rugby<\/a> Football Union is founded at the Pall Mall Restaurant on Regent Street<\/h4>\nTwenty-one clubs were represented at the meeting. The London club Wasps were not present \u2013 although invited, they turned up at the wrong pub on the wrong day.<\/p>\n
27 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1820: Explorers catch sight of Antarctica<\/a> for the first time<\/h4>\n
As Anne stared at Browne in bewilderment, he knew she was wrong for Henry. He had, he later recalled, never been \u201cmore dismayed in all his life\u201d.<\/p>\n
2 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1769: The schools of the Royal Academy of Arts meet for their first session in Pall Mall, London<\/h4>\n
Academy President Joshua Reynolds delivers the first of his famous \u2018discourses\u2019 on art.<\/p>\n
3 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1888: Marvin Stone patents the paper drinking straw<\/h4>\n4 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1642: Charles I leads troops into the House of Commons<\/a> to arrest the Five Members<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Portrait of King Charles I by Sir Anthony van Dyck. (Photo by Fine Art Images\/Heritage Images via Getty Images).<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\nBy the end of 1641, relations between Charles I<\/a> and his parliament were close to collapse. And, on 4 January, Charles acted. In violation of convention, Charles I led a troop of armed men into the Commons and took the seat of the Speaker, William Lenthall. But as he looked around, the Five Members were nowhere to be seen. \u201cI see the birds have flown,\u201d Charles said drily, and asked Lenthall where they were. Lenthall fell to his knees. \u201cMay it please your majesty,\u201d he said, \u201cI have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here.\u201d<\/p>\nCharles strode out in high dudgeon, the five MPs still in hiding. Six days later he left London and began raising an army.<\/p>\n
5 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1919: The German Workers\u2019 Party, the forerunner of the Nazi Party, is formed in Munich<\/h4>\n
In September Adolf Hitler<\/a> joins the party, which will change its name in 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers\u2019 Party.<\/p>\n6 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1661: The Fifth Monarchists take up arms in an attempt to overthrow Charles II<\/a><\/h4>\nOn Sunday 6 January 1661, Thomas Venner launched his would-be revolution, bursting into St Paul\u2019s Cathedral with a group of armed men, waving banners carrying the words \u201cThe Lord God and Gideon\u201d and proclaiming that Christ, not Charles, was king. The lord mayor called out the London militia, but by the time they reached St Paul\u2019s, Venner and his men had retreated north.<\/p>\n
- Read more |\u00a0Was Charles II too randy to rule?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
For the next two days, the Fifth Monarchists lay low in the woods near Highgate. Then, on 9 January, they returned in force. Samuel Pepys was woken at six that morning by \u201cpeople running up and down\u2026 talking that the Fanatiques were up in arms in the City\u201d. Pepys was sufficiently worried to arm himself with a sword and pistol, and when he ventured out he found the shops shut and the place in uproar.<\/p>\n
Still, after hours of hard fighting, the remaining radicals were cornered in two City pubs, and Venner himself was taken after suffering 19 wounds and killing three men with a halberd. \u201cA thing that never was heard of,\u201d mused Pepys, \u201cthat so few men should dare and do so much mischief.\u201d<\/p>\n Famous births in January<\/h2>\n3 January 1892<\/h6>\n
John Ronald Reuel (JRR) Tolkein<\/a>, scholar and author\u00a0<\/p>\n4 January 1809<\/h6>\n
Louis Braille, developer of written communication for visually impaired people.<\/p>\n
8 January 1871<\/h6>\n
James Craig, later 1st Viscount Craigavon. The son of a prosperous whiskey distiller, Craig became the first prime minister of Northern Ireland in June 1921\u00a0<\/p>\n
10 January 1769<\/h6>\n
Michel Ney, who was dubbed \u201cthe Bravest of the Brave\u201d for his role as French marshal during Napoleon\u2019s retreat from Moscow<\/p>\n
15 January 1918<\/h6>\n
Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Egyptian leader<\/p>\n
16 January 1908<\/h6>\n
Ethel Merman, New York singer and star of a string of Broadway musicals including Anything Goes<\/em>, Annie Get Your Gun<\/em>, and Gypsy<\/em><\/p>\n17 January 1863<\/h6>\n
David Lloyd George<\/a>, who would replace Herbert Asquith as prime minister<\/p>\n18 January 1882<\/h6>\n
Alan Alexander \u2018AA\u2019 Milne, poet, playwright, and Winnie the Pooh<\/em> creator<\/p>\n19 January 1809<\/h6>\n
Edgar Allan Poe, poet, critic, and writer<\/p>\n
22 January 1561<\/h6>\n
Francis Bacon, statesman and philosopher<\/p>\n
22 January 1788<\/h6>\n
George Gordon Byron, poet, and the son of Captain John \u201cMad Jack\u201d Byron, a philandering spendthrift, and Catherine Gordon, a rich Scottish heiress | Read more about the scandolous Byrons<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nFamous deaths in January\u00a0<\/h2>\n3 January 1959<\/h6>\n
Edwin Muir, Orcadian poet, novelist, and academic<\/p>\n
4 January 1761<\/h6>\n
Stephen Hales, botanist, chemist, and inventor<\/p>\n
5 January 1858<\/h6>\n
Joseph Count Radetzky, a veteran of the\u00a0Napoleonic wars<\/a><\/p>\n11 January 1891<\/h6>\n
Georges-Eugene Haussmann, French civic planner who remodelled Paris in the 1850s and 1960s<\/p>\n
11 January 1928<\/h6>\n
Thomas Hardy, poet and novelist<\/p>\n
13 January 1941<\/h6>\n
James Joyce, Irish novelist and poet<\/p>\n
20 January 1779<\/h6>\n
David Garrick, actor and theatre manager<\/p>\n
21 January 1932<\/h6>\n
Lytton Strachey, writer, critic author, and a founder member of the Bloomsbury Group<\/p>\n
21 January 1959<\/h6>\n
Cecil B DeMille, American film director, producer and screenwriter<\/p>\n
26 January 1823<\/h6>\n
Edward Jenner, physician and pioneer of smallpox vaccine |\u00a0Read more about the history of vaccination<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n31 January 1788<\/h6>\n
Charles Edward Stuart, \u2018Bonnie Prince Charlie<\/a>\u2018<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section>
7 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1913: Standard Oil chemist William Merriam Burton receives a US patent for his thermal cracking process<\/h4>\n
This doubled the yield of gasoline from a barrel of crude oil.<\/p>\n
8 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1697: Britain\u2019s last execution<\/a> for blasphemy takes place<\/h4>\nIn the mid-1690s, Edinburgh\u2019s library had one of the finest collections in the country, including provocative, supposedly \u2018atheistical\u2019 works by philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. 20 year old Thomas Aikenhead plunged in with gusto. But he made the mistake of telling his friends what he was reading. This was no time to be a free thinker: the Scottish authorities had recently ordered a crackdown on \u201catheistical, erroneous or profane or vicious\u201d literature. Thomas\u2019s friends talked and, in the autumn of 1696, he was arrested and charged with blasphemy.<\/p>\n
On Christmas Eve, young Thomas was sentenced to death. Only the strictest punishment, insisted the Church of Scotland\u2019s General Assembly, would stamp out \u201cthe abounding of impiety and profanity in this land\u201d. On the morning of 8 January, he made the long walk to the gallows<\/a>. In a last letter, he insisted that it was only natural to \u201chave an insatiable inclination to the truth\u201d. He was the last person ever executed for blasphemy in Britain.<\/p>\n9 January<\/a><\/h2>\n2007: Steve Jobs unveils the first iPhone<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new iPhone that was introduced at Macworld on January 9, 2007 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by David Paul Morris\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n\u201cThank you for coming,\u201d said the thin, bespectacled man in the black polo neck and Levi\u2019s jeans. \u201cWe\u2019re going to make some history together today.\u201d<\/p>\n
At last it was time for the new product to be revealed. \u201cThis is a day I\u2019ve been looking forward to for two and a half years,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything\u2026 Well, today, we are introducing three revolutionary products.\u201d<\/p>\n
These were, he said, \u201ca widescreen iPod with touch controls\u201d, a \u201crevolutionary mobile phone\u201d, and a \u201cbreakthrough internet communications device\u201d. \u201cAn iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator,\u201d he repeated. \u201cAn iPod, a phone\u2026 are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it\u2026 iPhone.\u201d<\/p>\n
10 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1863: The London Underground opens to a sceptical public<\/h4>\n
\u201cFor the first time in the history of the world,\u201d said The Daily News<\/em>, \u201cmen can travel in pleasant carriages, and with considerable comfort, lower down than gas pipes and water pipes\u2026 lower down than the graveyard.\u201d<\/p>\n11 January<\/a><\/h2>\nAD 630: Muhammad conquers Mecca<\/h4>\n
After eight years away, having converted thousands to his cause, Muhammad returned to Mecca, with 10,000 armed supporters.<\/p>\n
There was remarkably little bloodshed. Only a few locals tried to resist, and those who weren\u2019t killed quickly surrendered. When Muhammad took control, he ordered virtually no reprisals. Only 10 of his leading opponents were arrested, and not all were killed. \u201cHe who lays down arms will be safe. He who locks his door will be safe,\u201d he told the people of Mecca. \u201cThere is no reproof against you. Go your way, for you are free.\u201d<\/p>\n
12 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1895: The National Trust is founded<\/h4>\n
The National Trust was rooted deep in the soil of Victorian Britain. The key figure was Octavia Hill, a high-minded reformer who had long believed that working people should have access to \u201cthe life-enhancing virtues of pure earth, clean air and blue sky\u201d.<\/p>\n
![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> A painting of Octavia Hill, by John Singer Sargent. (Photo By RDImages\/Epics\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\nBack in 1876 she had helped her sister Miranda found a Society for the Diffusion of Beauty, which campaigned for open spaces to \u201cbring beauty home to the poor\u201d. \u201cWe all want quiet,\u201d she explained, \u201ca few acres where the hill top enables the Londoner to rise above the smoke, to feel a refreshing air for a little time and to see the sun setting in coloured glory which abounds so in the Earth God made.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time, Hill was working with her friend Hardwicke Rawnsley, an Anglican clergyman, and the solicitor Sir Robert Hunter to protect the Lake District from quarrying in the fells. At the end of 1893, the three of them met at the office of the Commons Preservation Society, Britain\u2019s oldest conservation group, to discuss a new trust specifically to buy sites for the nation as a whole. Back in 1885, Hill had proposed calling it the Commons and Gardens Trust. But Hunter suggested a simpler name: the National Trust.<\/p>\n
13 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1898: Zola attacks France\u2019s anti-Semitism<\/h4>\n
As the people of Paris trudged to work on 13 January 1898, one title on the newsstands caught their attention. On the front page of the socialist newspaper L\u2019Aurore (\u2018The Dawn\u2019), the headline read simply: \u201cJ\u2019Accuse \u2026!\u201d In smaller print were the words: \u201cLetter to the president of the Republic. By Emile Zola.\u201d<\/p>\n
14 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1878: Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates the telephone to Queen Victoria at Osborne House, Isle of Wight<\/h4>\n
Calls are made to nearby Osborne Cottage as well as to Cowes, Southampton and London.<\/p>\n
15 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1559: The coronation of Queen Elizabeth I<\/a> takes place in Westminster Abbey<\/h4>\nThe date had been specially chosen on the astrological advice of the noted Tudor scholar and mystic Dr John Dee. The previous day Elizabeth had ridden in state from the Tower of London to Whitehall in a display of pageantry that cost the Queen alone the sum of \u00a316,000. Most of England\u2019s bishops were too old, infirm, unacceptable to the Queen or unwilling to serve so it is left to the very junior Bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe, to carry out the actual coronation ceremony.<\/p>\n
16 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1912: Scott\u2019s Antarctic dreams are dashed<\/h4>\n
Tuesday 16 January 1912 ought to have been the happiest day of Robert Falcon Scott\u2019s life. After years of preparations, his British expedition team were only a few miles from the south pole, and on the brink of one of the greatest achievements in the history of exploration. And then \u2013 disaster.<\/p>\n
Scott\u2019s journal entry that night captured his dreadful disappointment. \u201cThe worst has happened, or nearly the worst,\u201d he wrote. Not long after they had set off in the morning, one of his men had spotted a mysterious \u2018black speck\u2019 in the distance. \u201cWe marched on, and found that it was a black flag tied to a sledge bearer; near by the remains of a camp; sledge tracks and ski tracks going and coming and the clear trace of dogs\u2019 paws \u2013 many dogs. This told us the whole story. The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the pole.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not even Scott\u2019s habitual sang-froid could mask his shock that the rival Norwegian team, led by Roald Amundsen, had got there first.<\/p>\n
17 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1929: Popeye the Sailor makes his first appearance as a minor character in Elzie Crisler Segar\u2019s long-running Thimble Theater comic strip<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Popeye reaches for a can of spinach in a still from a film, c. 1945. (Photo by Paramount Pictures\/Courtesy of Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n18 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1283: During the final stages of his second war of conquest in Wales, Edward I<\/a> gained control of the Conwy valley by capturing the native Welsh castle of Dolwyddelan<\/h4>\n19 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1511: Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon<\/a> made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk to give thanks for the birth of a son<\/h4>\nThe king presented a ruby collar to be hung around the neck of the shrine\u2019s statue of the Virgin Mary. A few weeks later, however, the royal child died. In 1538, during Henry\u2019s dissolution of the monasteries<\/a>, such shrines were destroyed, and the statue of the Virgin was taken to Chelsea to be publicly burned alongside other religious images.<\/p>\n20 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1265: England\u2019s first parliament meets<\/h4>\n
The first parliament in English history met on 20 January 1265, but it was so different from its modern-day equivalent that the two can barely be compared. It was called not by the king \u2013 the decent, dithering Henry III<\/a> \u2013 but by the rebellious magnate Simon de Montfort, who had become the standard-bearer for the cause of the barons against the monarchy.<\/p>\n- Read more |\u00a09 things you didn\u2019t know about the history of parliament<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Little detail about this first parliament survives, and it seems to have broken up within a month. But it established a vital principle, and when Henry\u2019s son Edward I summoned the \u2018Model Parliament\u2019 30 years later, he too invited knights and burgesses, as well as representatives from each city, all of whom were elected.<\/p>\n
So perhaps de Montfort\u2019s reputation as the accidental godfather of parliamentary democracy is not entirely false, even if he was far from being a democrat.<\/p>\n
21 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1663: Wiltshire antiquary John Aubrey is elected a member of the Royal Society<\/h4>\n
Although an early student of the stone circles at both Avebury and Stonehenge, Aubrey is best known for his collection of biographical essays, Brief Lives<\/em>.<\/p>\n22 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1901: Queen Victoria<\/a> dies after 63 years on the throne<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Engraved portrait of Queen Victoria, by H B Hall. (Photo by Kean Collection\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\nThe queen breathed her last at about 6.30pm on 22 January, with almost all her family gathered around her bed. At the top were her doctor, Sir James Reid, and \u2013 of all people \u2013 her bombastic grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was typically determined to hog the limelight. When she died, Turi was placed on her deathbed to honour her last request.<\/p>\n
23 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1571: Queen Elizabeth I opens and names London\u2019s Royal Exchange<\/h4>\n
It had been founded five years earlier by Sir Thomas Gresham in a bid to compete with the Antwerp Bourse as a centre for foreign trade.<\/p>\n
24 January<\/a><\/h2>\nAD 41: Claudius becomes emperor<\/h4>\n
When the Roman aristocrat Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus, better known simply as Claudius, awoke on 24 January AD 41, he never imagined he would end the day as emperor. His nephew Caligula, in charge for almost four years, was still a young man. A sickly, scholarly figure, Claudius was 50 years old and had never been seen as a serious political figure. There seemed no reason for that to change.<\/p>\n
And then, suddenly, everything was thrown into flux. During the Palatine Games, which were held to honour his ancestor Augustus, Caligula was murdered by the Praetorian Guard. The conspirators hoped \u2013 among other aims \u2013 to restore senatorial rule, but in the meantime, Caligula\u2019s German bodyguards rampaged through the palace.<\/p>\n
- Read more |\u00a0How did the Romans conquer Britain?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Claudius ran for his life. \u201cIn great terror at the news of the murder,\u201d wrote the biographer Suetonius, \u201che stole away to a balcony hard by and hid among the curtains which hung before the door.\u201d But there he was spotted by a soldier called Gratus \u2013 and for a moment, it seemed that his luck had run out.<\/p>\n
Gibbering in fear, Claudius begged for mercy. But according to the historian Josephus, \u201cGratus smiled upon him, and took him by the right hand, and said: \u2018Leave off, sir, these low thoughts of saving yourself, while you ought to have greater thoughts, even of obtaining the empire\u2026 Go to, therefore, and accept the throne of thy ancestors.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Claudius was still too terrified to walk, so Gratus and his friends carried him. Here, they shouted, was their new emperor.<\/p>\n
25 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1971: Idi Amin<\/a> seizes power in Uganda while the country\u2019s president, Dr Milton Obote, is out of the country attending a Commonwealth conference in Singapore<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> President Idi Amin. (Photo by GettyImages)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n26 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1871: The Rugby<\/a> Football Union is founded at the Pall Mall Restaurant on Regent Street<\/h4>\nTwenty-one clubs were represented at the meeting. The London club Wasps were not present \u2013 although invited, they turned up at the wrong pub on the wrong day.<\/p>\n
27 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1820: Explorers catch sight of Antarctica<\/a> for the first time<\/h4>\n
1888: Marvin Stone patents the paper drinking straw<\/h4>\n4 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1642: Charles I leads troops into the House of Commons<\/a> to arrest the Five Members<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Portrait of King Charles I by Sir Anthony van Dyck. (Photo by Fine Art Images\/Heritage Images via Getty Images).<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\nBy the end of 1641, relations between Charles I<\/a> and his parliament were close to collapse. And, on 4 January, Charles acted. In violation of convention, Charles I led a troop of armed men into the Commons and took the seat of the Speaker, William Lenthall. But as he looked around, the Five Members were nowhere to be seen. \u201cI see the birds have flown,\u201d Charles said drily, and asked Lenthall where they were. Lenthall fell to his knees. \u201cMay it please your majesty,\u201d he said, \u201cI have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here.\u201d<\/p>\nCharles strode out in high dudgeon, the five MPs still in hiding. Six days later he left London and began raising an army.<\/p>\n
5 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1919: The German Workers\u2019 Party, the forerunner of the Nazi Party, is formed in Munich<\/h4>\n
In September Adolf Hitler<\/a> joins the party, which will change its name in 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers\u2019 Party.<\/p>\n6 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1661: The Fifth Monarchists take up arms in an attempt to overthrow Charles II<\/a><\/h4>\nOn Sunday 6 January 1661, Thomas Venner launched his would-be revolution, bursting into St Paul\u2019s Cathedral with a group of armed men, waving banners carrying the words \u201cThe Lord God and Gideon\u201d and proclaiming that Christ, not Charles, was king. The lord mayor called out the London militia, but by the time they reached St Paul\u2019s, Venner and his men had retreated north.<\/p>\n
- Read more |\u00a0Was Charles II too randy to rule?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
For the next two days, the Fifth Monarchists lay low in the woods near Highgate. Then, on 9 January, they returned in force. Samuel Pepys was woken at six that morning by \u201cpeople running up and down\u2026 talking that the Fanatiques were up in arms in the City\u201d. Pepys was sufficiently worried to arm himself with a sword and pistol, and when he ventured out he found the shops shut and the place in uproar.<\/p>\n
Still, after hours of hard fighting, the remaining radicals were cornered in two City pubs, and Venner himself was taken after suffering 19 wounds and killing three men with a halberd. \u201cA thing that never was heard of,\u201d mused Pepys, \u201cthat so few men should dare and do so much mischief.\u201d<\/p>\n Famous births in January<\/h2>\n3 January 1892<\/h6>\n
John Ronald Reuel (JRR) Tolkein<\/a>, scholar and author\u00a0<\/p>\n4 January 1809<\/h6>\n
Louis Braille, developer of written communication for visually impaired people.<\/p>\n
8 January 1871<\/h6>\n
James Craig, later 1st Viscount Craigavon. The son of a prosperous whiskey distiller, Craig became the first prime minister of Northern Ireland in June 1921\u00a0<\/p>\n
10 January 1769<\/h6>\n
Michel Ney, who was dubbed \u201cthe Bravest of the Brave\u201d for his role as French marshal during Napoleon\u2019s retreat from Moscow<\/p>\n
15 January 1918<\/h6>\n
Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Egyptian leader<\/p>\n
16 January 1908<\/h6>\n
Ethel Merman, New York singer and star of a string of Broadway musicals including Anything Goes<\/em>, Annie Get Your Gun<\/em>, and Gypsy<\/em><\/p>\n17 January 1863<\/h6>\n
David Lloyd George<\/a>, who would replace Herbert Asquith as prime minister<\/p>\n18 January 1882<\/h6>\n
Alan Alexander \u2018AA\u2019 Milne, poet, playwright, and Winnie the Pooh<\/em> creator<\/p>\n19 January 1809<\/h6>\n
Edgar Allan Poe, poet, critic, and writer<\/p>\n
22 January 1561<\/h6>\n
Francis Bacon, statesman and philosopher<\/p>\n
22 January 1788<\/h6>\n
George Gordon Byron, poet, and the son of Captain John \u201cMad Jack\u201d Byron, a philandering spendthrift, and Catherine Gordon, a rich Scottish heiress | Read more about the scandolous Byrons<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nFamous deaths in January\u00a0<\/h2>\n3 January 1959<\/h6>\n
Edwin Muir, Orcadian poet, novelist, and academic<\/p>\n
4 January 1761<\/h6>\n
Stephen Hales, botanist, chemist, and inventor<\/p>\n
5 January 1858<\/h6>\n
Joseph Count Radetzky, a veteran of the\u00a0Napoleonic wars<\/a><\/p>\n11 January 1891<\/h6>\n
Georges-Eugene Haussmann, French civic planner who remodelled Paris in the 1850s and 1960s<\/p>\n
11 January 1928<\/h6>\n
Thomas Hardy, poet and novelist<\/p>\n
13 January 1941<\/h6>\n
James Joyce, Irish novelist and poet<\/p>\n
20 January 1779<\/h6>\n
David Garrick, actor and theatre manager<\/p>\n
21 January 1932<\/h6>\n
Lytton Strachey, writer, critic author, and a founder member of the Bloomsbury Group<\/p>\n
21 January 1959<\/h6>\n
Cecil B DeMille, American film director, producer and screenwriter<\/p>\n
26 January 1823<\/h6>\n
Edward Jenner, physician and pioneer of smallpox vaccine |\u00a0Read more about the history of vaccination<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n31 January 1788<\/h6>\n
Charles Edward Stuart, \u2018Bonnie Prince Charlie<\/a>\u2018<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section>
7 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1913: Standard Oil chemist William Merriam Burton receives a US patent for his thermal cracking process<\/h4>\n
This doubled the yield of gasoline from a barrel of crude oil.<\/p>\n
8 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1697: Britain\u2019s last execution<\/a> for blasphemy takes place<\/h4>\nIn the mid-1690s, Edinburgh\u2019s library had one of the finest collections in the country, including provocative, supposedly \u2018atheistical\u2019 works by philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. 20 year old Thomas Aikenhead plunged in with gusto. But he made the mistake of telling his friends what he was reading. This was no time to be a free thinker: the Scottish authorities had recently ordered a crackdown on \u201catheistical, erroneous or profane or vicious\u201d literature. Thomas\u2019s friends talked and, in the autumn of 1696, he was arrested and charged with blasphemy.<\/p>\n
On Christmas Eve, young Thomas was sentenced to death. Only the strictest punishment, insisted the Church of Scotland\u2019s General Assembly, would stamp out \u201cthe abounding of impiety and profanity in this land\u201d. On the morning of 8 January, he made the long walk to the gallows<\/a>. In a last letter, he insisted that it was only natural to \u201chave an insatiable inclination to the truth\u201d. He was the last person ever executed for blasphemy in Britain.<\/p>\n9 January<\/a><\/h2>\n2007: Steve Jobs unveils the first iPhone<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new iPhone that was introduced at Macworld on January 9, 2007 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by David Paul Morris\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n\u201cThank you for coming,\u201d said the thin, bespectacled man in the black polo neck and Levi\u2019s jeans. \u201cWe\u2019re going to make some history together today.\u201d<\/p>\n
At last it was time for the new product to be revealed. \u201cThis is a day I\u2019ve been looking forward to for two and a half years,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything\u2026 Well, today, we are introducing three revolutionary products.\u201d<\/p>\n
These were, he said, \u201ca widescreen iPod with touch controls\u201d, a \u201crevolutionary mobile phone\u201d, and a \u201cbreakthrough internet communications device\u201d. \u201cAn iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator,\u201d he repeated. \u201cAn iPod, a phone\u2026 are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it\u2026 iPhone.\u201d<\/p>\n
10 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1863: The London Underground opens to a sceptical public<\/h4>\n
\u201cFor the first time in the history of the world,\u201d said The Daily News<\/em>, \u201cmen can travel in pleasant carriages, and with considerable comfort, lower down than gas pipes and water pipes\u2026 lower down than the graveyard.\u201d<\/p>\n11 January<\/a><\/h2>\nAD 630: Muhammad conquers Mecca<\/h4>\n
After eight years away, having converted thousands to his cause, Muhammad returned to Mecca, with 10,000 armed supporters.<\/p>\n
There was remarkably little bloodshed. Only a few locals tried to resist, and those who weren\u2019t killed quickly surrendered. When Muhammad took control, he ordered virtually no reprisals. Only 10 of his leading opponents were arrested, and not all were killed. \u201cHe who lays down arms will be safe. He who locks his door will be safe,\u201d he told the people of Mecca. \u201cThere is no reproof against you. Go your way, for you are free.\u201d<\/p>\n
12 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1895: The National Trust is founded<\/h4>\n
The National Trust was rooted deep in the soil of Victorian Britain. The key figure was Octavia Hill, a high-minded reformer who had long believed that working people should have access to \u201cthe life-enhancing virtues of pure earth, clean air and blue sky\u201d.<\/p>\n
![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> A painting of Octavia Hill, by John Singer Sargent. (Photo By RDImages\/Epics\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\nBack in 1876 she had helped her sister Miranda found a Society for the Diffusion of Beauty, which campaigned for open spaces to \u201cbring beauty home to the poor\u201d. \u201cWe all want quiet,\u201d she explained, \u201ca few acres where the hill top enables the Londoner to rise above the smoke, to feel a refreshing air for a little time and to see the sun setting in coloured glory which abounds so in the Earth God made.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time, Hill was working with her friend Hardwicke Rawnsley, an Anglican clergyman, and the solicitor Sir Robert Hunter to protect the Lake District from quarrying in the fells. At the end of 1893, the three of them met at the office of the Commons Preservation Society, Britain\u2019s oldest conservation group, to discuss a new trust specifically to buy sites for the nation as a whole. Back in 1885, Hill had proposed calling it the Commons and Gardens Trust. But Hunter suggested a simpler name: the National Trust.<\/p>\n
13 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1898: Zola attacks France\u2019s anti-Semitism<\/h4>\n
As the people of Paris trudged to work on 13 January 1898, one title on the newsstands caught their attention. On the front page of the socialist newspaper L\u2019Aurore (\u2018The Dawn\u2019), the headline read simply: \u201cJ\u2019Accuse \u2026!\u201d In smaller print were the words: \u201cLetter to the president of the Republic. By Emile Zola.\u201d<\/p>\n
14 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1878: Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates the telephone to Queen Victoria at Osborne House, Isle of Wight<\/h4>\n
Calls are made to nearby Osborne Cottage as well as to Cowes, Southampton and London.<\/p>\n
15 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1559: The coronation of Queen Elizabeth I<\/a> takes place in Westminster Abbey<\/h4>\nThe date had been specially chosen on the astrological advice of the noted Tudor scholar and mystic Dr John Dee. The previous day Elizabeth had ridden in state from the Tower of London to Whitehall in a display of pageantry that cost the Queen alone the sum of \u00a316,000. Most of England\u2019s bishops were too old, infirm, unacceptable to the Queen or unwilling to serve so it is left to the very junior Bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe, to carry out the actual coronation ceremony.<\/p>\n
16 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1912: Scott\u2019s Antarctic dreams are dashed<\/h4>\n
Tuesday 16 January 1912 ought to have been the happiest day of Robert Falcon Scott\u2019s life. After years of preparations, his British expedition team were only a few miles from the south pole, and on the brink of one of the greatest achievements in the history of exploration. And then \u2013 disaster.<\/p>\n
Scott\u2019s journal entry that night captured his dreadful disappointment. \u201cThe worst has happened, or nearly the worst,\u201d he wrote. Not long after they had set off in the morning, one of his men had spotted a mysterious \u2018black speck\u2019 in the distance. \u201cWe marched on, and found that it was a black flag tied to a sledge bearer; near by the remains of a camp; sledge tracks and ski tracks going and coming and the clear trace of dogs\u2019 paws \u2013 many dogs. This told us the whole story. The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the pole.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not even Scott\u2019s habitual sang-froid could mask his shock that the rival Norwegian team, led by Roald Amundsen, had got there first.<\/p>\n
17 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1929: Popeye the Sailor makes his first appearance as a minor character in Elzie Crisler Segar\u2019s long-running Thimble Theater comic strip<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Popeye reaches for a can of spinach in a still from a film, c. 1945. (Photo by Paramount Pictures\/Courtesy of Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n18 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1283: During the final stages of his second war of conquest in Wales, Edward I<\/a> gained control of the Conwy valley by capturing the native Welsh castle of Dolwyddelan<\/h4>\n19 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1511: Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon<\/a> made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk to give thanks for the birth of a son<\/h4>\nThe king presented a ruby collar to be hung around the neck of the shrine\u2019s statue of the Virgin Mary. A few weeks later, however, the royal child died. In 1538, during Henry\u2019s dissolution of the monasteries<\/a>, such shrines were destroyed, and the statue of the Virgin was taken to Chelsea to be publicly burned alongside other religious images.<\/p>\n20 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1265: England\u2019s first parliament meets<\/h4>\n
The first parliament in English history met on 20 January 1265, but it was so different from its modern-day equivalent that the two can barely be compared. It was called not by the king \u2013 the decent, dithering Henry III<\/a> \u2013 but by the rebellious magnate Simon de Montfort, who had become the standard-bearer for the cause of the barons against the monarchy.<\/p>\n- Read more |\u00a09 things you didn\u2019t know about the history of parliament<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Little detail about this first parliament survives, and it seems to have broken up within a month. But it established a vital principle, and when Henry\u2019s son Edward I summoned the \u2018Model Parliament\u2019 30 years later, he too invited knights and burgesses, as well as representatives from each city, all of whom were elected.<\/p>\n
So perhaps de Montfort\u2019s reputation as the accidental godfather of parliamentary democracy is not entirely false, even if he was far from being a democrat.<\/p>\n
21 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1663: Wiltshire antiquary John Aubrey is elected a member of the Royal Society<\/h4>\n
Although an early student of the stone circles at both Avebury and Stonehenge, Aubrey is best known for his collection of biographical essays, Brief Lives<\/em>.<\/p>\n22 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1901: Queen Victoria<\/a> dies after 63 years on the throne<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Engraved portrait of Queen Victoria, by H B Hall. (Photo by Kean Collection\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\nThe queen breathed her last at about 6.30pm on 22 January, with almost all her family gathered around her bed. At the top were her doctor, Sir James Reid, and \u2013 of all people \u2013 her bombastic grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was typically determined to hog the limelight. When she died, Turi was placed on her deathbed to honour her last request.<\/p>\n
23 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1571: Queen Elizabeth I opens and names London\u2019s Royal Exchange<\/h4>\n
It had been founded five years earlier by Sir Thomas Gresham in a bid to compete with the Antwerp Bourse as a centre for foreign trade.<\/p>\n
24 January<\/a><\/h2>\nAD 41: Claudius becomes emperor<\/h4>\n
When the Roman aristocrat Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus, better known simply as Claudius, awoke on 24 January AD 41, he never imagined he would end the day as emperor. His nephew Caligula, in charge for almost four years, was still a young man. A sickly, scholarly figure, Claudius was 50 years old and had never been seen as a serious political figure. There seemed no reason for that to change.<\/p>\n
And then, suddenly, everything was thrown into flux. During the Palatine Games, which were held to honour his ancestor Augustus, Caligula was murdered by the Praetorian Guard. The conspirators hoped \u2013 among other aims \u2013 to restore senatorial rule, but in the meantime, Caligula\u2019s German bodyguards rampaged through the palace.<\/p>\n
- Read more |\u00a0How did the Romans conquer Britain?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Claudius ran for his life. \u201cIn great terror at the news of the murder,\u201d wrote the biographer Suetonius, \u201che stole away to a balcony hard by and hid among the curtains which hung before the door.\u201d But there he was spotted by a soldier called Gratus \u2013 and for a moment, it seemed that his luck had run out.<\/p>\n
Gibbering in fear, Claudius begged for mercy. But according to the historian Josephus, \u201cGratus smiled upon him, and took him by the right hand, and said: \u2018Leave off, sir, these low thoughts of saving yourself, while you ought to have greater thoughts, even of obtaining the empire\u2026 Go to, therefore, and accept the throne of thy ancestors.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Claudius was still too terrified to walk, so Gratus and his friends carried him. Here, they shouted, was their new emperor.<\/p>\n
25 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1971: Idi Amin<\/a> seizes power in Uganda while the country\u2019s president, Dr Milton Obote, is out of the country attending a Commonwealth conference in Singapore<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> President Idi Amin. (Photo by GettyImages)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n26 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1871: The Rugby<\/a> Football Union is founded at the Pall Mall Restaurant on Regent Street<\/h4>\nTwenty-one clubs were represented at the meeting. The London club Wasps were not present \u2013 although invited, they turned up at the wrong pub on the wrong day.<\/p>\n
27 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1820: Explorers catch sight of Antarctica<\/a> for the first time<\/h4>\n
1642: Charles I leads troops into the House of Commons<\/a> to arrest the Five Members<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Portrait of King Charles I by Sir Anthony van Dyck. (Photo by Fine Art Images\/Heritage Images via Getty Images).<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\nBy the end of 1641, relations between Charles I<\/a> and his parliament were close to collapse. And, on 4 January, Charles acted. In violation of convention, Charles I led a troop of armed men into the Commons and took the seat of the Speaker, William Lenthall. But as he looked around, the Five Members were nowhere to be seen. \u201cI see the birds have flown,\u201d Charles said drily, and asked Lenthall where they were. Lenthall fell to his knees. \u201cMay it please your majesty,\u201d he said, \u201cI have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here.\u201d<\/p>\nCharles strode out in high dudgeon, the five MPs still in hiding. Six days later he left London and began raising an army.<\/p>\n
5 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1919: The German Workers\u2019 Party, the forerunner of the Nazi Party, is formed in Munich<\/h4>\n
In September Adolf Hitler<\/a> joins the party, which will change its name in 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers\u2019 Party.<\/p>\n6 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1661: The Fifth Monarchists take up arms in an attempt to overthrow Charles II<\/a><\/h4>\nOn Sunday 6 January 1661, Thomas Venner launched his would-be revolution, bursting into St Paul\u2019s Cathedral with a group of armed men, waving banners carrying the words \u201cThe Lord God and Gideon\u201d and proclaiming that Christ, not Charles, was king. The lord mayor called out the London militia, but by the time they reached St Paul\u2019s, Venner and his men had retreated north.<\/p>\n
- Read more |\u00a0Was Charles II too randy to rule?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
For the next two days, the Fifth Monarchists lay low in the woods near Highgate. Then, on 9 January, they returned in force. Samuel Pepys was woken at six that morning by \u201cpeople running up and down\u2026 talking that the Fanatiques were up in arms in the City\u201d. Pepys was sufficiently worried to arm himself with a sword and pistol, and when he ventured out he found the shops shut and the place in uproar.<\/p>\n
Still, after hours of hard fighting, the remaining radicals were cornered in two City pubs, and Venner himself was taken after suffering 19 wounds and killing three men with a halberd. \u201cA thing that never was heard of,\u201d mused Pepys, \u201cthat so few men should dare and do so much mischief.\u201d<\/p>\n Famous births in January<\/h2>\n3 January 1892<\/h6>\n
John Ronald Reuel (JRR) Tolkein<\/a>, scholar and author\u00a0<\/p>\n4 January 1809<\/h6>\n
Louis Braille, developer of written communication for visually impaired people.<\/p>\n
8 January 1871<\/h6>\n
James Craig, later 1st Viscount Craigavon. The son of a prosperous whiskey distiller, Craig became the first prime minister of Northern Ireland in June 1921\u00a0<\/p>\n
10 January 1769<\/h6>\n
Michel Ney, who was dubbed \u201cthe Bravest of the Brave\u201d for his role as French marshal during Napoleon\u2019s retreat from Moscow<\/p>\n
15 January 1918<\/h6>\n
Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Egyptian leader<\/p>\n
16 January 1908<\/h6>\n
Ethel Merman, New York singer and star of a string of Broadway musicals including Anything Goes<\/em>, Annie Get Your Gun<\/em>, and Gypsy<\/em><\/p>\n17 January 1863<\/h6>\n
David Lloyd George<\/a>, who would replace Herbert Asquith as prime minister<\/p>\n18 January 1882<\/h6>\n
Alan Alexander \u2018AA\u2019 Milne, poet, playwright, and Winnie the Pooh<\/em> creator<\/p>\n19 January 1809<\/h6>\n
Edgar Allan Poe, poet, critic, and writer<\/p>\n
22 January 1561<\/h6>\n
Francis Bacon, statesman and philosopher<\/p>\n
22 January 1788<\/h6>\n
George Gordon Byron, poet, and the son of Captain John \u201cMad Jack\u201d Byron, a philandering spendthrift, and Catherine Gordon, a rich Scottish heiress | Read more about the scandolous Byrons<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nFamous deaths in January\u00a0<\/h2>\n3 January 1959<\/h6>\n
Edwin Muir, Orcadian poet, novelist, and academic<\/p>\n
4 January 1761<\/h6>\n
Stephen Hales, botanist, chemist, and inventor<\/p>\n
5 January 1858<\/h6>\n
Joseph Count Radetzky, a veteran of the\u00a0Napoleonic wars<\/a><\/p>\n11 January 1891<\/h6>\n
Georges-Eugene Haussmann, French civic planner who remodelled Paris in the 1850s and 1960s<\/p>\n
11 January 1928<\/h6>\n
Thomas Hardy, poet and novelist<\/p>\n
13 January 1941<\/h6>\n
James Joyce, Irish novelist and poet<\/p>\n
20 January 1779<\/h6>\n
David Garrick, actor and theatre manager<\/p>\n
21 January 1932<\/h6>\n
Lytton Strachey, writer, critic author, and a founder member of the Bloomsbury Group<\/p>\n
21 January 1959<\/h6>\n
Cecil B DeMille, American film director, producer and screenwriter<\/p>\n
26 January 1823<\/h6>\n
Edward Jenner, physician and pioneer of smallpox vaccine |\u00a0Read more about the history of vaccination<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n31 January 1788<\/h6>\n
Charles Edward Stuart, \u2018Bonnie Prince Charlie<\/a>\u2018<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section>
7 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1913: Standard Oil chemist William Merriam Burton receives a US patent for his thermal cracking process<\/h4>\n
This doubled the yield of gasoline from a barrel of crude oil.<\/p>\n
8 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1697: Britain\u2019s last execution<\/a> for blasphemy takes place<\/h4>\nIn the mid-1690s, Edinburgh\u2019s library had one of the finest collections in the country, including provocative, supposedly \u2018atheistical\u2019 works by philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. 20 year old Thomas Aikenhead plunged in with gusto. But he made the mistake of telling his friends what he was reading. This was no time to be a free thinker: the Scottish authorities had recently ordered a crackdown on \u201catheistical, erroneous or profane or vicious\u201d literature. Thomas\u2019s friends talked and, in the autumn of 1696, he was arrested and charged with blasphemy.<\/p>\n
On Christmas Eve, young Thomas was sentenced to death. Only the strictest punishment, insisted the Church of Scotland\u2019s General Assembly, would stamp out \u201cthe abounding of impiety and profanity in this land\u201d. On the morning of 8 January, he made the long walk to the gallows<\/a>. In a last letter, he insisted that it was only natural to \u201chave an insatiable inclination to the truth\u201d. He was the last person ever executed for blasphemy in Britain.<\/p>\n9 January<\/a><\/h2>\n2007: Steve Jobs unveils the first iPhone<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new iPhone that was introduced at Macworld on January 9, 2007 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by David Paul Morris\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n\u201cThank you for coming,\u201d said the thin, bespectacled man in the black polo neck and Levi\u2019s jeans. \u201cWe\u2019re going to make some history together today.\u201d<\/p>\n
At last it was time for the new product to be revealed. \u201cThis is a day I\u2019ve been looking forward to for two and a half years,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything\u2026 Well, today, we are introducing three revolutionary products.\u201d<\/p>\n
These were, he said, \u201ca widescreen iPod with touch controls\u201d, a \u201crevolutionary mobile phone\u201d, and a \u201cbreakthrough internet communications device\u201d. \u201cAn iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator,\u201d he repeated. \u201cAn iPod, a phone\u2026 are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it\u2026 iPhone.\u201d<\/p>\n
10 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1863: The London Underground opens to a sceptical public<\/h4>\n
\u201cFor the first time in the history of the world,\u201d said The Daily News<\/em>, \u201cmen can travel in pleasant carriages, and with considerable comfort, lower down than gas pipes and water pipes\u2026 lower down than the graveyard.\u201d<\/p>\n11 January<\/a><\/h2>\nAD 630: Muhammad conquers Mecca<\/h4>\n
After eight years away, having converted thousands to his cause, Muhammad returned to Mecca, with 10,000 armed supporters.<\/p>\n
There was remarkably little bloodshed. Only a few locals tried to resist, and those who weren\u2019t killed quickly surrendered. When Muhammad took control, he ordered virtually no reprisals. Only 10 of his leading opponents were arrested, and not all were killed. \u201cHe who lays down arms will be safe. He who locks his door will be safe,\u201d he told the people of Mecca. \u201cThere is no reproof against you. Go your way, for you are free.\u201d<\/p>\n
12 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1895: The National Trust is founded<\/h4>\n
The National Trust was rooted deep in the soil of Victorian Britain. The key figure was Octavia Hill, a high-minded reformer who had long believed that working people should have access to \u201cthe life-enhancing virtues of pure earth, clean air and blue sky\u201d.<\/p>\n
![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> A painting of Octavia Hill, by John Singer Sargent. (Photo By RDImages\/Epics\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\nBack in 1876 she had helped her sister Miranda found a Society for the Diffusion of Beauty, which campaigned for open spaces to \u201cbring beauty home to the poor\u201d. \u201cWe all want quiet,\u201d she explained, \u201ca few acres where the hill top enables the Londoner to rise above the smoke, to feel a refreshing air for a little time and to see the sun setting in coloured glory which abounds so in the Earth God made.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time, Hill was working with her friend Hardwicke Rawnsley, an Anglican clergyman, and the solicitor Sir Robert Hunter to protect the Lake District from quarrying in the fells. At the end of 1893, the three of them met at the office of the Commons Preservation Society, Britain\u2019s oldest conservation group, to discuss a new trust specifically to buy sites for the nation as a whole. Back in 1885, Hill had proposed calling it the Commons and Gardens Trust. But Hunter suggested a simpler name: the National Trust.<\/p>\n
13 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1898: Zola attacks France\u2019s anti-Semitism<\/h4>\n
As the people of Paris trudged to work on 13 January 1898, one title on the newsstands caught their attention. On the front page of the socialist newspaper L\u2019Aurore (\u2018The Dawn\u2019), the headline read simply: \u201cJ\u2019Accuse \u2026!\u201d In smaller print were the words: \u201cLetter to the president of the Republic. By Emile Zola.\u201d<\/p>\n
14 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1878: Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates the telephone to Queen Victoria at Osborne House, Isle of Wight<\/h4>\n
Calls are made to nearby Osborne Cottage as well as to Cowes, Southampton and London.<\/p>\n
15 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1559: The coronation of Queen Elizabeth I<\/a> takes place in Westminster Abbey<\/h4>\nThe date had been specially chosen on the astrological advice of the noted Tudor scholar and mystic Dr John Dee. The previous day Elizabeth had ridden in state from the Tower of London to Whitehall in a display of pageantry that cost the Queen alone the sum of \u00a316,000. Most of England\u2019s bishops were too old, infirm, unacceptable to the Queen or unwilling to serve so it is left to the very junior Bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe, to carry out the actual coronation ceremony.<\/p>\n
16 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1912: Scott\u2019s Antarctic dreams are dashed<\/h4>\n
Tuesday 16 January 1912 ought to have been the happiest day of Robert Falcon Scott\u2019s life. After years of preparations, his British expedition team were only a few miles from the south pole, and on the brink of one of the greatest achievements in the history of exploration. And then \u2013 disaster.<\/p>\n
Scott\u2019s journal entry that night captured his dreadful disappointment. \u201cThe worst has happened, or nearly the worst,\u201d he wrote. Not long after they had set off in the morning, one of his men had spotted a mysterious \u2018black speck\u2019 in the distance. \u201cWe marched on, and found that it was a black flag tied to a sledge bearer; near by the remains of a camp; sledge tracks and ski tracks going and coming and the clear trace of dogs\u2019 paws \u2013 many dogs. This told us the whole story. The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the pole.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not even Scott\u2019s habitual sang-froid could mask his shock that the rival Norwegian team, led by Roald Amundsen, had got there first.<\/p>\n
17 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1929: Popeye the Sailor makes his first appearance as a minor character in Elzie Crisler Segar\u2019s long-running Thimble Theater comic strip<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Popeye reaches for a can of spinach in a still from a film, c. 1945. (Photo by Paramount Pictures\/Courtesy of Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n18 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1283: During the final stages of his second war of conquest in Wales, Edward I<\/a> gained control of the Conwy valley by capturing the native Welsh castle of Dolwyddelan<\/h4>\n19 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1511: Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon<\/a> made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk to give thanks for the birth of a son<\/h4>\nThe king presented a ruby collar to be hung around the neck of the shrine\u2019s statue of the Virgin Mary. A few weeks later, however, the royal child died. In 1538, during Henry\u2019s dissolution of the monasteries<\/a>, such shrines were destroyed, and the statue of the Virgin was taken to Chelsea to be publicly burned alongside other religious images.<\/p>\n20 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1265: England\u2019s first parliament meets<\/h4>\n
The first parliament in English history met on 20 January 1265, but it was so different from its modern-day equivalent that the two can barely be compared. It was called not by the king \u2013 the decent, dithering Henry III<\/a> \u2013 but by the rebellious magnate Simon de Montfort, who had become the standard-bearer for the cause of the barons against the monarchy.<\/p>\n- Read more |\u00a09 things you didn\u2019t know about the history of parliament<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Little detail about this first parliament survives, and it seems to have broken up within a month. But it established a vital principle, and when Henry\u2019s son Edward I summoned the \u2018Model Parliament\u2019 30 years later, he too invited knights and burgesses, as well as representatives from each city, all of whom were elected.<\/p>\n
So perhaps de Montfort\u2019s reputation as the accidental godfather of parliamentary democracy is not entirely false, even if he was far from being a democrat.<\/p>\n
21 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1663: Wiltshire antiquary John Aubrey is elected a member of the Royal Society<\/h4>\n
Although an early student of the stone circles at both Avebury and Stonehenge, Aubrey is best known for his collection of biographical essays, Brief Lives<\/em>.<\/p>\n22 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1901: Queen Victoria<\/a> dies after 63 years on the throne<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Engraved portrait of Queen Victoria, by H B Hall. (Photo by Kean Collection\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\nThe queen breathed her last at about 6.30pm on 22 January, with almost all her family gathered around her bed. At the top were her doctor, Sir James Reid, and \u2013 of all people \u2013 her bombastic grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was typically determined to hog the limelight. When she died, Turi was placed on her deathbed to honour her last request.<\/p>\n
23 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1571: Queen Elizabeth I opens and names London\u2019s Royal Exchange<\/h4>\n
It had been founded five years earlier by Sir Thomas Gresham in a bid to compete with the Antwerp Bourse as a centre for foreign trade.<\/p>\n
24 January<\/a><\/h2>\nAD 41: Claudius becomes emperor<\/h4>\n
When the Roman aristocrat Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus, better known simply as Claudius, awoke on 24 January AD 41, he never imagined he would end the day as emperor. His nephew Caligula, in charge for almost four years, was still a young man. A sickly, scholarly figure, Claudius was 50 years old and had never been seen as a serious political figure. There seemed no reason for that to change.<\/p>\n
And then, suddenly, everything was thrown into flux. During the Palatine Games, which were held to honour his ancestor Augustus, Caligula was murdered by the Praetorian Guard. The conspirators hoped \u2013 among other aims \u2013 to restore senatorial rule, but in the meantime, Caligula\u2019s German bodyguards rampaged through the palace.<\/p>\n
- Read more |\u00a0How did the Romans conquer Britain?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Claudius ran for his life. \u201cIn great terror at the news of the murder,\u201d wrote the biographer Suetonius, \u201che stole away to a balcony hard by and hid among the curtains which hung before the door.\u201d But there he was spotted by a soldier called Gratus \u2013 and for a moment, it seemed that his luck had run out.<\/p>\n
Gibbering in fear, Claudius begged for mercy. But according to the historian Josephus, \u201cGratus smiled upon him, and took him by the right hand, and said: \u2018Leave off, sir, these low thoughts of saving yourself, while you ought to have greater thoughts, even of obtaining the empire\u2026 Go to, therefore, and accept the throne of thy ancestors.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Claudius was still too terrified to walk, so Gratus and his friends carried him. Here, they shouted, was their new emperor.<\/p>\n
25 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1971: Idi Amin<\/a> seizes power in Uganda while the country\u2019s president, Dr Milton Obote, is out of the country attending a Commonwealth conference in Singapore<\/h4>\n ![\"""\"]( "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> President Idi Amin. (Photo by GettyImages)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n26 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1871: The Rugby<\/a> Football Union is founded at the Pall Mall Restaurant on Regent Street<\/h4>\nTwenty-one clubs were represented at the meeting. The London club Wasps were not present \u2013 although invited, they turned up at the wrong pub on the wrong day.<\/p>\n
27 January<\/a><\/h2>\n1820: Explorers catch sight of Antarctica<\/a> for the first time<\/h4>\n
![\"""\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/01\/GettyImages-1309915289-920a21a-e1674124730750.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C412"\" "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>By the end of 1641, relations between Charles I<\/a> and his parliament were close to collapse. And, on 4 January, Charles acted. In violation of convention, Charles I led a troop of armed men into the Commons and took the seat of the Speaker, William Lenthall. But as he looked around, the Five Members were nowhere to be seen. \u201cI see the birds have flown,\u201d Charles said drily, and asked Lenthall where they were. Lenthall fell to his knees. \u201cMay it please your majesty,\u201d he said, \u201cI have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here.\u201d<\/p>\n Charles strode out in high dudgeon, the five MPs still in hiding. Six days later he left London and began raising an army.<\/p>\n In September Adolf Hitler<\/a> joins the party, which will change its name in 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers\u2019 Party.<\/p>\n On Sunday 6 January 1661, Thomas Venner launched his would-be revolution, bursting into St Paul\u2019s Cathedral with a group of armed men, waving banners carrying the words \u201cThe Lord God and Gideon\u201d and proclaiming that Christ, not Charles, was king. The lord mayor called out the London militia, but by the time they reached St Paul\u2019s, Venner and his men had retreated north.<\/p>\n For the next two days, the Fifth Monarchists lay low in the woods near Highgate. Then, on 9 January, they returned in force. Samuel Pepys was woken at six that morning by \u201cpeople running up and down\u2026 talking that the Fanatiques were up in arms in the City\u201d. Pepys was sufficiently worried to arm himself with a sword and pistol, and when he ventured out he found the shops shut and the place in uproar.<\/p>\n Still, after hours of hard fighting, the remaining radicals were cornered in two City pubs, and Venner himself was taken after suffering 19 wounds and killing three men with a halberd. \u201cA thing that never was heard of,\u201d mused Pepys, \u201cthat so few men should dare and do so much mischief.\u201d<\/p>\n John Ronald Reuel (JRR) Tolkein<\/a>, scholar and author\u00a0<\/p>\n Louis Braille, developer of written communication for visually impaired people.<\/p>\n James Craig, later 1st Viscount Craigavon. The son of a prosperous whiskey distiller, Craig became the first prime minister of Northern Ireland in June 1921\u00a0<\/p>\n Michel Ney, who was dubbed \u201cthe Bravest of the Brave\u201d for his role as French marshal during Napoleon\u2019s retreat from Moscow<\/p>\n Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Egyptian leader<\/p>\n Ethel Merman, New York singer and star of a string of Broadway musicals including Anything Goes<\/em>, Annie Get Your Gun<\/em>, and Gypsy<\/em><\/p>\n David Lloyd George<\/a>, who would replace Herbert Asquith as prime minister<\/p>\n Alan Alexander \u2018AA\u2019 Milne, poet, playwright, and Winnie the Pooh<\/em> creator<\/p>\n Edgar Allan Poe, poet, critic, and writer<\/p>\n Francis Bacon, statesman and philosopher<\/p>\n George Gordon Byron, poet, and the son of Captain John \u201cMad Jack\u201d Byron, a philandering spendthrift, and Catherine Gordon, a rich Scottish heiress | Read more about the scandolous Byrons<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Edwin Muir, Orcadian poet, novelist, and academic<\/p>\n Stephen Hales, botanist, chemist, and inventor<\/p>\n Joseph Count Radetzky, a veteran of the\u00a0Napoleonic wars<\/a><\/p>\n Georges-Eugene Haussmann, French civic planner who remodelled Paris in the 1850s and 1960s<\/p>\n Thomas Hardy, poet and novelist<\/p>\n James Joyce, Irish novelist and poet<\/p>\n David Garrick, actor and theatre manager<\/p>\n Lytton Strachey, writer, critic author, and a founder member of the Bloomsbury Group<\/p>\n Cecil B DeMille, American film director, producer and screenwriter<\/p>\n Edward Jenner, physician and pioneer of smallpox vaccine |\u00a0Read more about the history of vaccination<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Charles Edward Stuart, \u2018Bonnie Prince Charlie<\/a>\u2018<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> This doubled the yield of gasoline from a barrel of crude oil.<\/p>\n In the mid-1690s, Edinburgh\u2019s library had one of the finest collections in the country, including provocative, supposedly \u2018atheistical\u2019 works by philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. 20 year old Thomas Aikenhead plunged in with gusto. But he made the mistake of telling his friends what he was reading. This was no time to be a free thinker: the Scottish authorities had recently ordered a crackdown on \u201catheistical, erroneous or profane or vicious\u201d literature. Thomas\u2019s friends talked and, in the autumn of 1696, he was arrested and charged with blasphemy.<\/p>\n On Christmas Eve, young Thomas was sentenced to death. Only the strictest punishment, insisted the Church of Scotland\u2019s General Assembly, would stamp out \u201cthe abounding of impiety and profanity in this land\u201d. On the morning of 8 January, he made the long walk to the gallows<\/a>. In a last letter, he insisted that it was only natural to \u201chave an insatiable inclination to the truth\u201d. He was the last person ever executed for blasphemy in Britain.<\/p>\n \u201cThank you for coming,\u201d said the thin, bespectacled man in the black polo neck and Levi\u2019s jeans. \u201cWe\u2019re going to make some history together today.\u201d<\/p>\n At last it was time for the new product to be revealed. \u201cThis is a day I\u2019ve been looking forward to for two and a half years,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything\u2026 Well, today, we are introducing three revolutionary products.\u201d<\/p>\n These were, he said, \u201ca widescreen iPod with touch controls\u201d, a \u201crevolutionary mobile phone\u201d, and a \u201cbreakthrough internet communications device\u201d. \u201cAn iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator,\u201d he repeated. \u201cAn iPod, a phone\u2026 are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it\u2026 iPhone.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor the first time in the history of the world,\u201d said The Daily News<\/em>, \u201cmen can travel in pleasant carriages, and with considerable comfort, lower down than gas pipes and water pipes\u2026 lower down than the graveyard.\u201d<\/p>\n After eight years away, having converted thousands to his cause, Muhammad returned to Mecca, with 10,000 armed supporters.<\/p>\n There was remarkably little bloodshed. Only a few locals tried to resist, and those who weren\u2019t killed quickly surrendered. When Muhammad took control, he ordered virtually no reprisals. Only 10 of his leading opponents were arrested, and not all were killed. \u201cHe who lays down arms will be safe. He who locks his door will be safe,\u201d he told the people of Mecca. \u201cThere is no reproof against you. Go your way, for you are free.\u201d<\/p>\n The National Trust was rooted deep in the soil of Victorian Britain. The key figure was Octavia Hill, a high-minded reformer who had long believed that working people should have access to \u201cthe life-enhancing virtues of pure earth, clean air and blue sky\u201d.<\/p>\n Back in 1876 she had helped her sister Miranda found a Society for the Diffusion of Beauty, which campaigned for open spaces to \u201cbring beauty home to the poor\u201d. \u201cWe all want quiet,\u201d she explained, \u201ca few acres where the hill top enables the Londoner to rise above the smoke, to feel a refreshing air for a little time and to see the sun setting in coloured glory which abounds so in the Earth God made.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, Hill was working with her friend Hardwicke Rawnsley, an Anglican clergyman, and the solicitor Sir Robert Hunter to protect the Lake District from quarrying in the fells. At the end of 1893, the three of them met at the office of the Commons Preservation Society, Britain\u2019s oldest conservation group, to discuss a new trust specifically to buy sites for the nation as a whole. Back in 1885, Hill had proposed calling it the Commons and Gardens Trust. But Hunter suggested a simpler name: the National Trust.<\/p>\n As the people of Paris trudged to work on 13 January 1898, one title on the newsstands caught their attention. On the front page of the socialist newspaper L\u2019Aurore (\u2018The Dawn\u2019), the headline read simply: \u201cJ\u2019Accuse \u2026!\u201d In smaller print were the words: \u201cLetter to the president of the Republic. By Emile Zola.\u201d<\/p>\n Calls are made to nearby Osborne Cottage as well as to Cowes, Southampton and London.<\/p>\n The date had been specially chosen on the astrological advice of the noted Tudor scholar and mystic Dr John Dee. The previous day Elizabeth had ridden in state from the Tower of London to Whitehall in a display of pageantry that cost the Queen alone the sum of \u00a316,000. Most of England\u2019s bishops were too old, infirm, unacceptable to the Queen or unwilling to serve so it is left to the very junior Bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe, to carry out the actual coronation ceremony.<\/p>\n Tuesday 16 January 1912 ought to have been the happiest day of Robert Falcon Scott\u2019s life. After years of preparations, his British expedition team were only a few miles from the south pole, and on the brink of one of the greatest achievements in the history of exploration. And then \u2013 disaster.<\/p>\n Scott\u2019s journal entry that night captured his dreadful disappointment. \u201cThe worst has happened, or nearly the worst,\u201d he wrote. Not long after they had set off in the morning, one of his men had spotted a mysterious \u2018black speck\u2019 in the distance. \u201cWe marched on, and found that it was a black flag tied to a sledge bearer; near by the remains of a camp; sledge tracks and ski tracks going and coming and the clear trace of dogs\u2019 paws \u2013 many dogs. This told us the whole story. The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the pole.\u201d<\/p>\n Not even Scott\u2019s habitual sang-froid could mask his shock that the rival Norwegian team, led by Roald Amundsen, had got there first.<\/p>\n The king presented a ruby collar to be hung around the neck of the shrine\u2019s statue of the Virgin Mary. A few weeks later, however, the royal child died. In 1538, during Henry\u2019s dissolution of the monasteries<\/a>, such shrines were destroyed, and the statue of the Virgin was taken to Chelsea to be publicly burned alongside other religious images.<\/p>\n The first parliament in English history met on 20 January 1265, but it was so different from its modern-day equivalent that the two can barely be compared. It was called not by the king \u2013 the decent, dithering Henry III<\/a> \u2013 but by the rebellious magnate Simon de Montfort, who had become the standard-bearer for the cause of the barons against the monarchy.<\/p>\n Little detail about this first parliament survives, and it seems to have broken up within a month. But it established a vital principle, and when Henry\u2019s son Edward I summoned the \u2018Model Parliament\u2019 30 years later, he too invited knights and burgesses, as well as representatives from each city, all of whom were elected.<\/p>\n So perhaps de Montfort\u2019s reputation as the accidental godfather of parliamentary democracy is not entirely false, even if he was far from being a democrat.<\/p>\n Although an early student of the stone circles at both Avebury and Stonehenge, Aubrey is best known for his collection of biographical essays, Brief Lives<\/em>.<\/p>\n The queen breathed her last at about 6.30pm on 22 January, with almost all her family gathered around her bed. At the top were her doctor, Sir James Reid, and \u2013 of all people \u2013 her bombastic grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was typically determined to hog the limelight. When she died, Turi was placed on her deathbed to honour her last request.<\/p>\n It had been founded five years earlier by Sir Thomas Gresham in a bid to compete with the Antwerp Bourse as a centre for foreign trade.<\/p>\n When the Roman aristocrat Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus, better known simply as Claudius, awoke on 24 January AD 41, he never imagined he would end the day as emperor. His nephew Caligula, in charge for almost four years, was still a young man. A sickly, scholarly figure, Claudius was 50 years old and had never been seen as a serious political figure. There seemed no reason for that to change.<\/p>\n And then, suddenly, everything was thrown into flux. During the Palatine Games, which were held to honour his ancestor Augustus, Caligula was murdered by the Praetorian Guard. The conspirators hoped \u2013 among other aims \u2013 to restore senatorial rule, but in the meantime, Caligula\u2019s German bodyguards rampaged through the palace.<\/p>\n Claudius ran for his life. \u201cIn great terror at the news of the murder,\u201d wrote the biographer Suetonius, \u201che stole away to a balcony hard by and hid among the curtains which hung before the door.\u201d But there he was spotted by a soldier called Gratus \u2013 and for a moment, it seemed that his luck had run out.<\/p>\n Gibbering in fear, Claudius begged for mercy. But according to the historian Josephus, \u201cGratus smiled upon him, and took him by the right hand, and said: \u2018Leave off, sir, these low thoughts of saving yourself, while you ought to have greater thoughts, even of obtaining the empire\u2026 Go to, therefore, and accept the throne of thy ancestors.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Claudius was still too terrified to walk, so Gratus and his friends carried him. Here, they shouted, was their new emperor.<\/p>\n Twenty-one clubs were represented at the meeting. The London club Wasps were not present \u2013 although invited, they turned up at the wrong pub on the wrong day.<\/p>\n5 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1919: The German Workers\u2019 Party, the forerunner of the Nazi Party, is formed in Munich<\/h4>\n
6 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1661: The Fifth Monarchists take up arms in an attempt to overthrow Charles II<\/a><\/h4>\n
Famous births in January<\/h2>\n
3 January 1892<\/h6>\n
4 January 1809<\/h6>\n
8 January 1871<\/h6>\n
10 January 1769<\/h6>\n
15 January 1918<\/h6>\n
16 January 1908<\/h6>\n
17 January 1863<\/h6>\n
18 January 1882<\/h6>\n
19 January 1809<\/h6>\n
22 January 1561<\/h6>\n
22 January 1788<\/h6>\n
Famous deaths in January\u00a0<\/h2>\n
3 January 1959<\/h6>\n
4 January 1761<\/h6>\n
5 January 1858<\/h6>\n
11 January 1891<\/h6>\n
11 January 1928<\/h6>\n
13 January 1941<\/h6>\n
20 January 1779<\/h6>\n
21 January 1932<\/h6>\n
21 January 1959<\/h6>\n
26 January 1823<\/h6>\n
31 January 1788<\/h6>\n
7 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1913: Standard Oil chemist William Merriam Burton receives a US patent for his thermal cracking process<\/h4>\n
8 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1697: Britain\u2019s last execution<\/a> for blasphemy takes place<\/h4>\n
9 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
2007: Steve Jobs unveils the first iPhone<\/h4>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>10 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1863: The London Underground opens to a sceptical public<\/h4>\n
11 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
AD 630: Muhammad conquers Mecca<\/h4>\n
12 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1895: The National Trust is founded<\/h4>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>13 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1898: Zola attacks France\u2019s anti-Semitism<\/h4>\n
14 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1878: Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates the telephone to Queen Victoria at Osborne House, Isle of Wight<\/h4>\n
15 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1559: The coronation of Queen Elizabeth I<\/a> takes place in Westminster Abbey<\/h4>\n
16 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1912: Scott\u2019s Antarctic dreams are dashed<\/h4>\n
17 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1929: Popeye the Sailor makes his first appearance as a minor character in Elzie Crisler Segar\u2019s long-running Thimble Theater comic strip<\/h4>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>18 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1283: During the final stages of his second war of conquest in Wales, Edward I<\/a> gained control of the Conwy valley by capturing the native Welsh castle of Dolwyddelan<\/h4>\n
19 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1511: Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon<\/a> made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk to give thanks for the birth of a son<\/h4>\n
20 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1265: England\u2019s first parliament meets<\/h4>\n
21 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1663: Wiltshire antiquary John Aubrey is elected a member of the Royal Society<\/h4>\n
22 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1901: Queen Victoria<\/a> dies after 63 years on the throne<\/h4>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>23 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1571: Queen Elizabeth I opens and names London\u2019s Royal Exchange<\/h4>\n
24 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
AD 41: Claudius becomes emperor<\/h4>\n
25 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1971: Idi Amin<\/a> seizes power in Uganda while the country\u2019s president, Dr Milton Obote, is out of the country attending a Commonwealth conference in Singapore<\/h4>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>26 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1871: The Rugby<\/a> Football Union is founded at the Pall Mall Restaurant on Regent Street<\/h4>\n
27 January<\/a><\/h2>\n
1820: Explorers catch sight of Antarctica<\/a> for the first time<\/h4>\n