Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/January 15

This is a list of selected January 15 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.

Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article or picture of the day.

To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.

← January 14	January 16 →

Staging area

Images

Use only ONE image at a time

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  British Museum, London
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  The British Museum
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  Damage caused by the Boston Molasses Disaster
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  Wikipedia home page in February 2001
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  Aerial view of the Pentagon
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  USS President
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  Wilson Bentley taking a photograph of a snowflake
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  Regent's Park skating disaster
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  Fragment of the Derveni papyrus

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
Army Day and Jallikattu in India;	Armed Forces Day: refimprove; Jallikattu: refimprove section/convert list to prose
Armed Forces Day in Nigeria;	refimprove
Korean Alphabet Day in North Korea;	refimprove section
Makar Sankranti in India	multiple issues
1759 – The British Museum in London, today containing one of the largest and most comprehensive collections in the world, opened to the public in Montagu House, Bloomsbury.	Several unreferenced sections
1777 – The Vermont Republic (the precursor of the present-day U.S. state) declared independence from the jurisdictions and land claims of the British colony of Quebec, and the U.S. states of New Hampshire and New York.	unreferenced section
1908 – Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Greek-lettered sorority established and incorporated by African American college women, was founded at Howard University in Washington, D.C., by nine students.	primary sources
1919 – Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two prominent socialists in Germany, were tortured and murdered by the Freikorps.	Luxemburg: unreferenced section *rescue started 2022)
1993 – Salvatore Riina, one of the most powerful members of the Sicilian Mafia, was arrested in Palermo after 23 years as a fugitive.	refimprove section
1999 – Yugoslav forces massacred 45 Kosovo Albanians in the village of Račak, one of the main causes of the subsequent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.	outdated
2001 – The internet encyclopedia Wikipedia was launched three days after the domain name "wikipedia.com" was registered.	outdated, WP:NAVEL
Afonso V of Portugal |b|1432	unreferenced section, refimprove in another section

Eligible

• 1815 – War of 1812: The American frigate USS President, commanded by Commodore Stephen Decatur, was captured by a squadron of four British frigates.
• 1865 – American Civil War: The Union Army captured Fort Fisher, the last seaport of the Confederacy.
• 1867 – In Regent's Park, London, the ice on the lake broke, plunging skaters into the water and causing 40 deaths from drowning or hypothermia.
• 1885 – Wilson Bentley took the first known photograph of a snowflake by attaching a bellows camera to a microscope.
• 1910 – Construction on the Buffalo Bill Dam on the Shoshone River in the U.S. state of Wyoming, then the tallest dam in the world, was completed.
• 1919 – A large molasses tank in Boston, Massachusetts, burst and a wave of molasses rushed through the streets , killing 21 people and injuring 150 others.
• 1933 – A teenage girl in Banneux, Belgium, reported the first of several Marian apparitions, now known as Our Lady of Banneux.
• 1937 – Spanish Civil War: Nationalist and Republican forces both withdrew after suffering heavy losses at the Second Battle of the Corunna Road.
• 1947 – The mutilated corpse of the Black Dahlia, a 22-year-old woman whose murder is one of the most famous unsolved crimes in the United States, was found in Leimert Park, Los Angeles.
• 1943 – The highest-capacity office building in the world, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense known as the Pentagon, was dedicated.
• 1951 – Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a West German court.
• 1962 – The Derveni papyrus (fragment pictured), the oldest surviving manuscript in Europe, was discovered in Macedonia in northern Greece.
• 1967 – The Green Bay Packers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs in the American football championship game now known as Super Bowl I.
• 1970 – The Republic of Biafra surrendered following a failed attempt at secession from Nigeria, ending the Nigerian Civil War.
• 1975 – Portugal and the nationalist factions UNITA, the MPLA and the FNLA signed the Alvor Agreement, ending the Angolan War of Independence.
• 1981 – The American serial police-procedural television show Hill Street Blues aired its pilot episode, "Hill Street Station".
• Born/died this day: | Wang Jingchong |d|950| Philip Livingston |b|1716| Marjorie Fleming |b|1803| Peter Christen Asbjørnsen |b|1812| Friedrich Parrot |d|1841| Wilhelm Marx |b|1863| C. D. Howe |b|1886| Sylvia Lawler |b|1922| Ben Shapiro |b|1984| Bo Yibo |d|2007

Notes

• Super Bowl III appears on January 12, so Super Bowl I should not appear in the same year

January 15: John Chilembwe Day in Malawi

US Airways Flight 1549 crash and rescue

• 1857 – In British Hong Kong, hundreds of Europeans were non-lethally poisoned by arsenic in bread from a locally owned bakery, leading to geopolitical tension.
• 1934 – At least 10,700 people died when an earthquake registering 8.0 M_w struck Nepal and the Indian state of Bihar.
• 1974 – American serial killer Dennis Rader, also known as the "BTK killer", murdered his first four victims.
• 1991 – The Victoria Cross for Australia was instituted by letters patent; the first Commonwealth realm with a separate Victoria Cross award in its honours system.
• 2009 – US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of Canada geese during its climb out from New York City and made an emergency landing in the Hudson River (featured).

• Theophylact (d. 849)
• Martin Luther King Jr. (b. 1929)
• Regina Margareten (d. 1959)
• Millie Knight (b. 1999)

More anniversaries:

• January 14
• January 15
• January 16