12 Dey 1399

Events

• 1776 (250 years ago) General George Washington hoists the first United States flag, the Continental Union Flag, at Prospect Hill.
• 1804 (222 years ago) French rule ends in Haiti. Haiti becomes the first black-majority republic and second independent country in North America after the United States.
• 1901 (125 years ago) The British colonies of New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia federate as the Commonwealth of Australia; Edmund Barton is appointed the first Prime Minister.
• 1927 (99 years ago) New Mexican oil legislation goes into effect, leading to the formal outbreak of the Cristero War.
• 1928 (98 years ago) Boris Bazhanov defects through Iran to seek asylum in France. He is the only member of Joseph Stalin's secretariat to have defected from the Soviet Union.
• 1973 (53 years ago) Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom are admitted into the European Economic Community.
• 1995 (31 years ago) Austria, Finland and Sweden join the EU.
• 2024 (2 years ago) A 7.5 Mww earthquake strikes the western coast of Japan, killing more than 500 people and injuring over 1,000 others. A majority of direct deaths were due to collapsed homes.

Births

• 1431 (595 years ago) Pope Alexander VI,
• 1449 (577 years ago) Lorenzo de' Medici, Italian politician (died 1492)
• 1484 (542 years ago) Huldrych Zwingli, Swiss pastor and theologian (died 1531)
• 1823 (203 years ago) Sándor Petőfi, Hungarian poet and activist (died 1849)
• 1863 (163 years ago) Pierre de Coubertin, French historian and educator, founded the International Olympic Committee (died 1937)
• 1879 (147 years ago) E. M. Forster, English author and playwright (died 1970)
• 1919 (107 years ago) J. D. Salinger, American soldier and author (died 2010)
• 1956 (70 years ago) Christine Lagarde, French lawyer and politician; Managing Director, International Monetary Fund

Deaths

• 1515 (511 years ago) Louis XII, king of France (born 1462)
• 1748 (278 years ago) Johann Bernoulli, Swiss mathematician and academic (born 1667)
• 1782 (244 years ago) Johann Christian Bach, German composer (born 1735)
• 1894 (132 years ago) Heinrich Hertz, German physicist and academic (born 1857)
• 1953 (73 years ago) Hank Williams, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (born 1923)
• 1972 (54 years ago) Maurice Chevalier, French actor and singer (born 1888)
• 1992 (34 years ago) Grace Hopper, American computer scientist and admiral, co-developed COBOL (born 1906)
• 1995 (31 years ago) Eugene Wigner, Hungarian-American physicist and mathematician, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1902)

All 515 events, births and deaths of January 1