0066 5th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet
1340 English king Edward III proclaimed king of France
1531 Lisbon hit by Earthquake; about 30,000 die
1611 Madame de Poutrincourt leaves Dieppe, France with Jesuits Pierre Biard and Enémond Masse and her son, Charles Biencourt; first titled lady, first Jesuits in Canada
1654 Portuguese troops conquer last Dutch base on Recife
1666 France declares war on England &Münster
1689 Jean Racine's "Esther," premieres in Saint-Cyr
1697 Isaac Newton receives Jean Bernoulli's 6 month time-limit problem, solves problem before going to bed that same night
1699 Venice, Poland &Austria sign peace treaty with Turkey
1700 This great earthquake occurred about 9 pm on the Cascadia Fault, the boundary between the North American and Juan de Fuca plates. This was almost 100 years before the first European explorers made contact with native peoples on the west coast. This was one of the world's great earthquakes with a magnitude estimated at 9.
1736 Stanislaw Lesczynski flees Polish throne
1748 England, Netherlands, Austria &Sardinia sign anti-French treaty
1784 Ben Franklin expresses unhappiness over the eagle as America's symbol
1788 Captain Arthur Phillip forms English colony at Sydney, Botany Bay New South Wales as a penal colony
1788 The first group of European settlers arrives in Australia.
1789 John Odell signs contract for £336 to build St Peter's church (Bronx)
1797 Russia, Prussia &Austria sign treaty
1802 Congress passes an act calling for a US Capitol library
1802 The Italian republic created January 26 from the former Cisalpine republic with Napoleon Bonaparte as president annexes Piedmont September 21 and annexes Parma and Piacenza in October
1833 Gaetano Donizetti's opera "Lucrezia Borgia," premieres in Milan
1837 Michigan admitted as 26th US state
1838 Tennessee becomes first state to prohibit alcohol
1841 Hong Kong proclaimed a sovereign territory of Britain
1861 Louisiana becomes 6th state to secede
1862 Lincoln issues General War Order #1, calling for a Union offensive McClellan ignores order
