January 7 is the seventh day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 358 days remaining until the end of the year (359 in leap years).
Holidays
- Christian Feast Day:
- Canute Lavard
- Charles of Sezze
- St. André Bessette (Canada)
- Lucian of Antioch
- Raymond of Peñafort
- January 7 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
- Christmas (Eastern Orthodox Churches and Oriental Orthodox Churches using the Julian Calendar)
- Distaff Day (medieval Europe)
- Festival of Seven Herbs or Nanakusa no sekku (Japan)
- Pioneer’s Day (Liberia (controversial))
- Synaxis of John the Forerunner & Baptist (Julian Calendar)
- Tricolour day or Festa del Tricolore (Italy)
- Victory from Genocide Day (Cambodia)
In 1131, Canute Lavard was murdered at Haraldsted, Denmark by his cousin Magnus, which led to the civil war in Denmark (1131–34).
In 1325, Alfonso IV becomes King of Portugal.
In 1536, Catherine of Aragon (b. 1485) died at the age of 51. She was Queen of England from 1509 until 1533 as the first wife of King Henry VIII; she was previously Princess of Wales as the wife of Prince Arthur.
In 1566, Pope Pius V is elected.
In 1558, France takes Calais, the last continental possession of England.
In 1608, Fire destroys Jamestown, Virginia.
In 1610, Galileo Galilei makes his first observation of the four Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa, although he is not able to distinguish the last two until the following day.
In 1658, Theophilus Eaton, American farmer and politician (b. 1590) He was a merchant, farmer, and Puritan colonial leader who was the co-founder and first governor of New Haven Colony, Connecticut. Theophilus was also an agent for King Charles I to the Danish Court, then a merchant in London. He was a Puritan interested in colonial development and was one of the original patent holders and president of the Massachusetts Bay Company. One of his major accomplishments as governor was the creation of a written legal code for the colony in 1655 later to be known as the Blue Laws of Connecticut. For this, and the fact that he was the first president of the Massachusetts Bay Company, he is sometimes thought of as being the Father of American Law.
In 1782, The first American commercial bank, the Bank of North America, opens.
In 1785, Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon.
In 1797, The modern Italian flag is first used.
In 1835, HMS Beagle drops anchor off the Chonos Archipelago.
In 1876, A man named McLEAN was hanged near Jackson, Tenn., January 7, 1876, manifesting his “coolness and indifference” in his situation. MARTIN McLEAN was hanged about a half mile south of the Madison County courthouse in Jackson, Tennessee, at the foot of Liberty Street, on January 7, 1876, for having shot and killed THADDEUS POPE, April 25, 1874. The JACKSON SUN, January 7, 1876, reported the rather stoic demeanor of McLEAN in meeting his fate.
In 1894, William Kennedy Dickson receives a patent for motion picture film.
In 1899, Francis Poulenc (born 7 January 1899 – died 30 January 1963) was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include mélodies, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among his frequently performed pieces are the piano suite Trois mouvements perpétuels (1919), the ballet Les biches (1923), the Concert champêtre (1928) for harpsichord and orchestra, the opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), and the Gloria (1959) for soprano, choir and orchestra. Largely self-educated musically, he studied with the pianist Ricardo Viñes and was influenced by the avant-garde composer Erik Satie. Initially composing light-hearted and irreverent works, he also wrote serious, sombre and religious pieces beginning in the 1930s. He was an accomplished pianist, and toured Europe and America performing with the baritone Pierre Bernac and the soprano Denise Duval. One of the first composers to see the importance of the gramophone, he recorded extensively from 1928 onwards. This century has seen many new productions worldwide of his serious works, including Dialogues des Carmélites and La Voix humaine.
In 1904, The distress signal “CQD” is established only to be replaced two years later by “SOS“.
In 1919, Montenegrin guerrilla fighters rebel against the planned annexation of Montenegro by Serbia, but fail.
In 1920, The New York State Assembly refuses to seat five duly elected Socialist assemblymen.
In 1922, Dáil Éireann ratifies the Anglo-Irish Treaty by a 64-57 vote.
In 1927, The first transatlantic telephone service is established – from New York, New York to London, United Kingdom.
In 1931, Guy Menzies flies the first solo non-stop trans-Tasman flight (from Australia to New Zealand) in 11 hours and 45 minutes, crash-landing on New Zealand’s west coast.
In 1935, Benito Mussolini and French Foreign minister Pierre Laval sign the Franco-Italian Agreement.
In 1940, Winter War: The Finnish 9th Division stops and completely destroys the overwhelming Soviet forces on the Raate-Suomussalmi road.
In 1942, World War II: The siege of the Bataan Peninsula begins.
In 1945, World War II: British General Bernard Montgomery holds a press conference in which he claims credit for victory in the Battle of the Bulge.
In 1948, Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell crashes while in pursuit of a supposed UFO.
In 1954, Georgetown-IBM experiment: the first public demonstration of a machine translation system, is held in New York at the head office of IBM.
In 1959, The United States recognizes the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
In 1960, The Polaris missile is test launched.
In 1968, Surveyor Program: Surveyor 7, the last spacecraft in the Surveyor series, lifts off from launch complex 36A, Cape Canaveral.
In 1970, The Punjab Legislative Council (Abolition) Act, 1969 comes into effect.
In 1973, Mark Essex fatally shoots 10 people and wounds 13 others at Howard Johnson’s Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana, before being shot to death by police officers.
In 1979, Third Indochina War – Cambodian–Vietnamese War: Phnom Penh falls to the advancing Vietnamese troops, driving out Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
In 1980, U.S. President Jimmy Carter authorizes legislation giving $1.5 billion in loans to bail out the Chrysler Corporation.
In 1984, Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
In 1985, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launches Sakigake, Japan’s first interplanetary spacecraft and the first deep space probe to be launched by any country other than the United States or the Soviet Union.
In 1988, Trevor Howard,English actor (b. 1913) died. Trevor Howard (born Trevor Wallace Howard-Smith; 29 September 1913 – 7 January 1988) was a British film, stage and television actor.
In 1989, Prince Akihito is sworn in as the emperor of Japan after the death of his father Hirohito
In 1990, The interior of the Leaning Tower of Pisa is closed to the public for safety reasons.
In 1991, Roger Lafontant, former leader of the Tonton Macoute in Haiti under François Duvalier, attempts a coup d’état, which ends in his arrest.
In 1993, The Fourth Republic of Ghana is inaugurated with Jerry Rawlings as President.
In 1993, Bosnian War: The Bosnian Army executes a surprise attack on the village of Kravica in Srebrenica.
In 1999, The Senate trial in the impeachment of U.S. President Bill Clinton begins.
In 2001, James Carr, American singer (b. 1942) died. He was an American rhythm and blues and soul singer. Born to a Baptist preacher’s family in Coahoma, Mississippi, Carr began singing in church and was performing in gospel groups and making tables on an assembly line in Memphis, Tennessee, when he began recording in the mid-1960s for Goldwax Records, a small Memphis based independent record label. Carr first made the R&B charts in 1966 with “You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up”, followed by his most famous song “The Dark End of the Street“, written by Dan Penn and Chips Moman. Carr continued to record for Goldwax until the label closed in 1969 but failed to reach the same heights with his subsequent releases. Carr suffered from bipolar disorder for most of his life which affected his career. This was evident during a tour of Japan in the 1970s when he froze in front of an audience following an overdose of antidepressants. However he completed the Japan tour with much success. A resurgence in interest in his music, spurred by his portrayal in Peter Guralnick‘s 1986 book Sweet Soul Music, helped return Carr to the recording studio but failed to deliver any further chart success. James Carr died from lung cancer in a Memphis nursing home in 2001, aged 58.
In 2010, Muslim gunmen in Egypt open fire on a crowd of Coptic Christians, killing eight of them and one Muslim bystander.
In 2012, A hot air balloon crashes near Carterton, New Zealand, killing all 11 people on board.
In 2013, Ada Louise Huxtable, American critic (b. 1921) died. She was an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. The esteemed architecture critic Paul Goldberger, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner for architectural criticism, said of Huxtable: “Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue.” She was a great lover of cities, a great preservationist and the central planet around which every other critic revolved,” said architect Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale University School of Architecture.
In 2015, Two gunmen commit a mass shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing twelve people and injuring another eleven.
In 2015, A car bomb explodes outside a police college in the Yemeni capital Sana’a with at least 38 people reported dead and more than 63 injured.
In 2015, Trent Franks, R-AZ, and Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, introduced the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (H.R.36) in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill institutes a national ban on all abortions on babies who are 20 weeks or older, in order to prevent fetal pain. Congresswoman Blackburn said the bill must become law, because Americans “have a moral obligation to end dangerous late-term abortions in order to protect women and these precious babies from criminals like Kermit Gosnell and others who prey on the most vulnerable in our society. The United States is one of the few remaining countries in the world that allows abortion after 20 weeks.” The Congressional Budget Office and the Guttmacher Institute issued separate estimates that the bill would save between 10,000 and 15,000 unborn children a year.