January 6

Harold Godwinson is confirmed as King of England, setting off the succession crisis that leads to the Norman Conquest later that year.

Harold's confirmation as king came the day after Edward the Confessor's death, based on Edward's reported deathbed wish, but his claim was disputed by William, Duke of Normandy, and Norwegian king Harald Hardrada. Harold defeated the Norwegian invasion at Stamford Bridge in September, only to be killed weeks later at the Battle of Hastings, opening England to Norman rule.

King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain enter Granada, completing the Reconquista.

The monarchs' ceremonial entry into the Alhambra palace marked the formal end of the decade-long Granada War and completed the centuries-long Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule. The victory freed Spanish resources and prestige just as Columbus was preparing his westward voyage, which Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to fund later that same year.

King Henry VIII of England marries his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.

The marriage was arranged for political reasons, to forge an alliance with German Protestant states, but Henry reportedly found Anne unattractive in person compared to her portrait. The union was never consummated and was annulled just six months later. Anne negotiated a generous settlement and, unlike two of Henry's other wives, kept both her head and her freedom.

New Mexico is admitted as the 47th U.S. state.

New Mexico's admission followed decades of delay, partly due to congressional concerns about its large Spanish-speaking population and territorial size. Its statehood, along with Arizona's the following month, completed the addition of the contiguous 48 states, a process that had begun over a century earlier and would only be finished later by Alaska and Hawaii in 1959.

Geophysicist Alfred Wegener presents his theory of continental drift to the scientific community for the first time.

Wegener proposed that Earth's continents had once been joined in a single landmass, since separated and drifted apart, based on matching coastlines, fossils, and rock formations across oceans. The scientific community largely rejected his theory for decades, since he could not explain the mechanism, but plate tectonics later vindicated his core idea in the mid-20th century.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers his "Four Freedoms" speech during the State of the Union address.

Delivered months before the U.S. entered World War II, Roosevelt's speech outlined four essential liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, that he argued should be enjoyed everywhere in the world. The speech helped build American public support for eventually joining the Allied cause and later influenced the framing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

National Airlines Flight 2511 is destroyed by an onboard bomb, killing all aboard.

The bomb, hidden in the cargo hold, detonated while the plane was over North Carolina, killing all 34 people aboard. Investigators determined it had been planted as part of an apparent murder-suicide and insurance fraud scheme by a passenger. It remains one of the deadliest acts of aircraft sabotage in U.S. aviation history.

Figure skater Nancy Kerrigan is attacked by an assailant connected to rival skater Tonya Harding.

The attack, in which an assailant clubbed Kerrigan's knee just weeks before the Winter Olympics, was later traced to associates of rival skater Tonya Harding, including Harding's ex-husband. The scandal became a sensational national media story, and Harding was ultimately banned from competitive figure skating for life after admitting she knew about the plot afterward.

Edgar Ray Killen is indicted for his role in the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.

Killen, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, had organized the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi, during the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration campaign. Federal charges in the 1960s had ended in a hung jury, but Mississippi authorities reopened the case decades later, finally convicting Killen of manslaughter in 2005.

Supporters of President Trump storm the United States Capitol in an attempt to disrupt certification of the 2020 election results.

A crowd of Trump supporters, urged on by the president's false claims of a stolen election, breached security barriers and entered the Capitol as Congress met to certify Joe Biden's victory, forcing lawmakers to evacuate. Five people died in connection with the events, and the riot led to Trump's second impeachment and hundreds of subsequent criminal prosecutions.