This is a list of selected January 15 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Before doing so, please review the selected anniversaries guidelines. If your suggestion is potentially controversial or relates to a day currently or soon to appear on the Main Page, post it on the talk page instead.
Please note:
- Events listed on the Main Page are selected based on article quality and to provide a diverse range of topics, rather than solely on the importance or significance of the events.
- Only four or five events are featured each day; therefore, not all important or significant events can be included.
- An event is generally excluded if it is already the subject of the scheduled featured article, featured list or picture of the day.
To report an error in content currently on the Main Page, see Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors. If a listed event is inaccurate, please first seek consensus and update the corresponding article before making changes here.
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Staging area
Images
Use only ONE image at a time
British Museum, London
The British Museum
Damage caused by the Boston Molasses Disaster
Wikipedia home page in March 2001
Aerial view of the Pentagon
USS President
Ineligible
| Blurb | Reason |
|---|---|
| Army Day and Jallikattu in India; | Armed Forces Day: refimprove; Jallikattu: refimprove section/convert list to prose |
| Armed Forces Day in Nigeria; | refimprove |
| Korean Alphabet Day in North Korea; | refimprove section |
| Makar Sankranti in India | refimprove section |
| 1759 – The British Museum in London, today containing one of the largest and most comprehensive collections in the world, opened to the public in Montagu House, Bloomsbury. | refimprove section |
| 1777 – The Vermont Republic (the precursor of the present-day U.S. state) declared independence from the jurisdictions and land claims of the British colony of Quebec, and the U.S. states of New Hampshire and New York. | Lack of references |
| 1919 – Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two prominent socialists in Germany, were tortured and murdered by the Freikorps. | Luxemburg: unreferenced section (Ancestry) |
| 1943 – The highest-capacity office building in the world, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense known as the Pentagon, was dedicated. | lots of CN tags |
| 1999 – Yugoslav forces massacred 45 Kosovo Albanians in the village of Račak, one of the main causes of the subsequent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. | outdated |
| 2001 – The internet encyclopedia Wikipedia was launched three days after the domain name "wikipedia.com" was registered. | outdated |
Eligible
- 1815 – War of 1812: American frigate USS President, commanded by Commodore Stephen Decatur, was captured by a squadron of four British frigates.
- 1908 – Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Greek-lettered sorority established and incorporated by African American college women, was founded at Howard University in Washington, D.C., by nine students.
- 1910 – Construction on the Buffalo Bill Dam on the Shoshone River in the US state of Wyoming, then the tallest dam in the world, was completed.
- 1919 – A large molasses tank in Boston, Massachusetts, burst and a wave of molasses rushed through the streets , killing 21 people and injuring 150 others.
- 1933 – A teenage girl in Banneux, Belgium, reported the first of several Marian apparitions, now known as Our Lady of Banneux.
- 1934 – At least 10,700 people died when an 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal and the Indian state of Bihar.
- 1937 – Spanish Civil War: Nationalists and Republican forces both withdrew after suffering heavy losses, ending the Second Battle of the Corunna Road.
- 1951 – Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a West German court.
- 1962 – The Derveni papyrus, the oldest surviving manuscript in Europe, was discovered in Macedonia, northern Greece.
- 1967 – The Green Bay Packers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs in the American football championship game now known as Super Bowl I.
- 1974 – American serial killer Dennis Rader blinded, tortured, and killed his first three victims, earning him the nickname "BTK killer".
- 1981 – Hill Street Blues, one of American television's most critically acclaimed shows, aired its pilot episode, "Hill Street Station".
- 1991 – Elizabeth II, as Queen of Australia, signed letters patent allowing Australia to become the first Commonwealth realm to institute its own separate Victoria Cross award in its own honours system.
- 2009 – US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of Canada geese during its initial climb out from New York City and made an emergency landing in the Hudson River.
- Born/died this day: Theophylact (d. 849) · Wang Jingchong (d. 950) · Marjorie Fleming (b. 1803) · Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (b. 1812) · Ben Shapiro (b. 1984) · Millie Knight (b. 1999)
Notes
- Super Bowl III appears on January 12, so Super Bowl I should not appear in the same year
January 15: John Chilembwe Day in Malawi
Wilson Bentley taking a
photograph of a snowflake
photograph of a snowflake
- 1865 – American Civil War: The Union Army captured Fort Fisher, the last seaport of the Confederacy.
- 1885 – Wilson Bentley took the first known photograph of a snowflake by attaching a bellows camera to a microscope (process pictured).
- 1947 – The mutilated corpse of the "Black Dahlia", a 22-year-old woman whose murder is one of the most famous unsolved crimes in the U.S., was found in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.
- 1975 – Portugal signed the Alvor Agreement with the nationalist factions of UNITA, the MPLA, and the FNLA, ending the Angolan War of Independence.
- 1993 – Salvatore Riina, one of the most powerful members of the Sicilian Mafia, was arrested in Palermo after 23 years as a fugitive.
Philip Livingston (b. 1716) · Friedrich Parrot (d. 1841) · Sylvia Lawler (b. 1922)
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