January 9

Invading Jurchen forces of the Jin dynasty capture Bianjing (Kaifeng), the capital of China's Song dynasty.

The Jin dynasty's Jurchen forces, having already inflicted major defeats on the Song military, besieged and captured the Song capital, taking Emperor Qinzong and his father, the retired Emperor Huizong, prisoner. The disaster, known as the Jingkang Incident, forced the Song court to flee south and re-establish itself as the Southern Song dynasty, permanently losing control of northern China.

The Jewish population of Basel is rounded up and killed after being wrongly blamed for the ongoing Black Death.

As the Black Death swept through Europe, killing perhaps a third of the population, communities across the continent scapegoated Jewish residents, falsely accusing them of poisoning wells. In Basel, the city's Jewish population was rounded up and burned in a specially built structure on an island in the Rhine, one of many such massacres that devastated European Jewish communities during the plague years.

The trial of Joan of Arc begins in Rouen, France.

Joan of Arc, the young peasant woman who had helped turn the tide of the Hundred Years' War in France's favor, was tried by a pro-English ecclesiastical court on charges of heresy and cross-dressing after being captured by Burgundian forces. The politically motivated trial concluded with her execution by burning at the stake months later; she was posthumously exonerated and later canonized as a saint.

Connecticut becomes the fifth U.S. state to ratify the United States Constitution.

Connecticut's ratification came with relatively little controversy, reflecting broad support in the state for a stronger national government capable of regulating trade and providing for common defense. It became the fifth of the required nine states needed to bring the Constitution into force, part of a wave of early, relatively uncontested ratifications by smaller states.

The French Academy of Sciences announces the invention of the daguerreotype photography process.

The announcement, made by physicist François Arago to the French Academy, revealed Louis Daguerre's process for fixing a permanent image using a silver-coated copper plate and light-sensitive chemicals. The French government purchased the rights and released the process freely to the world as a gift, and "daguerreotypes" quickly became the first widely practical form of photography.

The magnitude 7.9 Fort Tejon earthquake strikes Central and Southern California.

The Fort Tejon earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded in California, ruptured roughly 225 miles of the San Andreas Fault. Because the region was sparsely populated at the time, only two deaths were reported despite the quake's immense power, but seismologists still study it today as a benchmark for understanding the potential scale of future major earthquakes along the fault.

The Battle of Gallipoli concludes with an Ottoman Empire victory during World War I.

The withdrawal of Allied troops from the Gallipoli peninsula ended an eight-month campaign that had aimed to seize the Dardanelles strait and knock the Ottoman Empire out of World War I. The costly failure, which produced roughly 250,000 Allied casualties, became a defining national memory for Australia and New Zealand, whose forces suffered heavily, and contributed to Winston Churchill's political downfall at the time.

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser opens construction on the Aswan Dam.

The Aswan High Dam project, backed by Soviet financing and engineering after the United States withdrew its support amid Cold War tensions, aimed to control the Nile's flooding, generate hydroelectric power, and expand Egypt's irrigated farmland. Completed in 1970, it created Lake Nasser, one of the world's largest reservoirs, though it also displaced tens of thousands of people and submerged ancient Nubian monuments.

Astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announce the first confirmed discovery of planets outside our solar system.

Wolszczan and Frail detected the planets orbiting a pulsar, the rapidly spinning remnant of an exploded star, using precise timing variations in the pulsar's radio signals. Their discovery was the first confirmed detection of planets beyond our solar system, though these strange, radiation-blasted worlds around a dead star differ enormously from the more Earth-like exoplanets found by later missions like Kepler.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveils the original iPhone at the Macworld conference in San Francisco.

Jobs unveiled the first iPhone after years of secretive development, describing it as a combination of a phone, an iPod, and an internet communication device. Its multi-touch screen and lack of a physical keyboard were radical departures from existing smartphones, and the device's success fundamentally reshaped the mobile phone industry and how people interact with technology.