January 1st: Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877.

January 2nd: The Russians surrendered to the Japanese, ending the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.

January 3rd: Alaska was admitted as the 49th U.S. state in 1959.

January 4th: President George Washington delivered the first State of the Union address in 1790.

January 5th: Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming became the first female governor inaugurated in the U.S. in 1925.

January 6th:  Harold, Earl of Wessex, was crowned King of England following the death of his brother-in-law Edward the Confessor in 1066.

January 7th: The first U.S. commercial bank opened as the Bank of North America in Philadelphia in 1782.

January 8th: Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1935.

January 9th: The state of Mississippi declared secession from the U.S. in 1861.

January 10th: The League of Nations came into existence in 1920.

January 11th: Alexander Hamilton was born in the British West Indies in 1755.

January 12th: In Southern Africa, the Zulu War began between the British and the natives of Zululand in 1879.

January 13th: Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the first African American governor in the U.S. as he took the oath of office in Richmond in 1990.

January 14th: FDR announced in 1943 that peace will only come “by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power. That means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy and Japan.”

January 15th: Henry VIII became Supreme Head of the Church in England as a result of the Act of Supremacy following his break with the Papacy in 1535.

January 16th: The twelve-year civil war in El Salvador ended in 1992 with the signing of a peace treaty in Mexico City. The conflict had claimed over 75,000 lives.

January 17th: The ship Resolution, sailing under Captain James Cook, became the first vessel to cross the Antarctic Circle in 1773.

January 18th: Robert Clifton Weaver was sworn in as the first African American cabinet member in U.S. history, becoming President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 1966.

January 19th:  Indira Gandhi was elected prime minister of India in 1966.

January 20th: Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated to an unprecedented fourth term as president of the United States in 1945.

January 21st: The USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear powered submarine, was launched at Groton, Connecticut in 1954.

January 22nd: Queen Victoria of England died after reigning for 64 years in 1901.

January 23rd: Charles Curtis of Kansas became the first person of Native American ancestry to serve in the U.S Senate in 1907.

January 24th: Hawaii’s monarchy ended as Queen Liliuokalani was forced to abdicate in 1895.

January 25th: Gangster Al Capone, who once controlled organized crime in Chicago, died in Miami at age 48 from syphilis in 1947.

January 26th: The British established a settlement at Sydney Harbor in Australia as 11 ships with 778 convicts arrived, setting up a penal colony to relieve overcrowded prisons in England in 1788.

January 27th: Three American astronauts were killed as a fire erupted inside Apollo 1 during a launch simulation test at Cape Kennedy, Florida in 1967.

January 28th: Iceland became the first country to legalize abortion in 1935.

January 29th: Russian playwright Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, Russia.

January 30th: King Charles I of England was beheaded for treason by order of Parliament under the direction of Oliver Cromwell 1649.

January 31st: German troops surrendered at Stalingrad in 1943, marking the first big defeat of Hitler’s armies in World War II.

Source:

 https://www.historyplace.com/specials/calendar/january.htm