O LORD, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and in the night before Thee.

Psalm 88:1 

0211: Death of Septimus Severus of Rome

0846: Death of St. Joannicius

0855: Rabanus Maurus, archbishop of Mainz, dies

0900: Coronation of Louis, "the Child," King of Germany

1189: Death of St. Gilbert of Sempringham

1194: Richard I, King of England, is freed from captivity in Germany.

1498: Death of Antonio Pollaivolo, sculptor

1505: Death of St. Joan of France, deposed Queen

1508: Proclamation of Trent.

1555: Canon John Rogers burnt for heresy

1600: Tycho Brahe & Johannes Kepler meet for 1st time, outside of Prague

1615: One "Leclerc" is condemned for witchcraft, in France

1657: Resettlement Day (of the Jews in England)

1715: A letter describes a German's visit to the Venice theater where Vivaldi was music director. The performance was praised, but the striking thing the letter reported was the habit of people in box seats of spitting on the people in cheap seats below.

1783: Britain declared a formal cessation of hostilities with its former colonies, the United States of America.

1787: Shay’s Rebellion, an uprising of debt-ridden Massachusetts farmers, fails.

1789: Electors unanimously chose George Washington to be the first president of the United States.

1793: Slavery is abolished in all French territories.

1801: John Marshall was sworn in as chief justice of the United States.

1861: At a convention in Montgomery, Ala., six states- Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina- elected Jefferson Davis president of the Confederacy.

1861: The Apache Wars began at Apache Pass, Arizona, when Army Lt. George Bascom arrested Apache Chief Cochise for raiding a ranch. The war lasted 25 years under the leadership of Cochise and later, Geronimo.

1904: Russia offers Korea to Japan and defends its right to occupy Manchuria.

1906: The New York Police Department begins finger print identification.

1909: California law segregates Japanese schoolchildren.

1913: Louis Perlman of New York City received a patent for his "demountable tire-carrying rims."

1915: Germans decree British waters part of war zone; all ships to be sunk without warning.

1923: Henry Finck was writing an article on Schoenberg for the next day's New York Post in which he attacked most of Schoenberg's music, but made an exception for "Transfigured Night," which he said held, quote, "some rather pretty things, buried in bombasts and gasbags."

1927: British driver Malcolm Campbell broke the world land speed record in his car "Bluebird," driving at 174.224 miles per hour.

1932: New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the Winter Olympic Games at Lake Placid.

1938: The Thornton Wilder play "Our Town" opened on Broadway.

1941: The United Service Organizations (USO) started.

1945: President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin began a wartime conference at Yalta.

1948: The island nation of Ceylon -- now Sri Lanka -- became an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth.

1957: Smith-Corona Manufacturing Inc. of New York began selling portable electric typewriters. The first machine was a 'portable' that weighed 19 pounds.

1966: Senate Foreign Relations Committee begins televised hearings on the Vietnam War.

1969: Bowie Kuhn became Commissioner of Baseball. He served a six-month term, succeeding General William Eckert.

1971: British carmaker Rolls Royce declared itself bankrupt

1974: Patricia Hearst, the 19-year-old daughter of San Francisco publisher Randolph Hearst, was abducted from her apartment in Berkeley, Calif., by urban guerrillas.

1974: Mao Tse-tung proclaims a new "cultural revolution" in China.

1976: An earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter Scale killed nearly 23,000 people in Guatemala and Honduras.

1976: Lourenco Marques, the capital of Mozambique, was renamed Maputo.

1976: Winter Olympics open in Innsbruck.

1977: 11 people were killed when two cars of a Chicago Transit Authority train fell off elevated tracks after a collision with another train.

1980: Syria withdraws its peacekeeping force in Beirut.

1982: Great Britain's Laker Airways, a pioneer of cheap transatlantic fares, collapsed.

1982: President Reagan announced a plan to eliminate all medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe.

1983: President Reagan celebrated his 72nd birthday two days early when his wife, Nancy, surprised him with a cake during a nationally televised White House news conference.

1983: Singer Karen Carpenter died in Downey, California, at age 32. Heart problems due to anorexia nervosa was the cause of death.

1984: Space officials delayed the launch of a second satellite from the shuttle "Challenger," one day after the first satellite misfired and disappeared after deployment.

1985: President Reagan sent to Congress a fiscal 1986 budget totaling $973.7 billion and projecting a deficit of $180 billion.

1986: President Reagan, in his fifth State of the Union address, proclaimed "a great American comeback" from years of economic woes, and told a joint session of Congress that America was "growing stronger every day.""

1987: Flamboyant pianist Liberace, born Wladziu Valentino Liberace, died at his Palm Springs, California, home at age 67, Cause of death was AIDS.

1988: Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole twice confronted Vice President George Bush on the floor of the Senate, accusing his G-O-P presidential rival of condoning a campaign attack that amounted to "groveling in the mud."

1989: Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze wrapped up four days of high-level talks in China, the first visit by a Soviet foreign minister in three decades.

1990: Hundreds of thousands of cheering protesters filled Moscow streets to demand that the Communists surrender their stranglehold on power.

1990: Nine people were killed as guerrillas attacked a bus carrying Israeli tourists near Cairo, Egypt.

1991: Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani offered to hold talks with Iraq and the United States in an attempt to mediate an end to the Gulf War. 

1991: President Bush sent Congress a $1.45 trillion budget for fiscal 1992 containing a deficit of $280.9 billion.

1992: President Bush defended his economic recovery plan before a National Grocers Association meeting in Orlando, Florida.

1993: A jury in Atlanta found General Motors negligent in the fuel-tank design of a pickup truck and awarded 105-point-two million dollars to the parents of a teen-ager killed in a fiery 1989 crash.

1994: The Federal Reserve increased interest rates for the first time in five years in a announcement that triggered a huge sell-off on Wall Street; the Fed said the move was to head off any recurrence of high inflation.

1995: A standoff between the United States and China escalated into a trade war, with each country ordering stiff tariffs against the other.

1996: 24 people were killed when a Colombian cargo plane in Paraguay caught fire shortly after takeoff and crashed into a suburban neighborhood.

1996: Secretary of State Warren Christopher concluded a three-nation visit to the Balkans as he met in Belgrade with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

1997: A civil jury in Santa Monica, California, found O.J. Simpson liable for the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, awarding $8.5 million in compensatory damages to Goldman's parents. (Six days later, the jury added $25 million in punitive damages to go to Nicole Brown Simpson's estate and Goldman's father.)

1997: President Clinton delivered his State of the Union address. Seventy-three Israeli soldiers were killed in the collision of two helicopters.

1998: An estimated five-thousand people were killed when an earthquake hit northeast Afghanistan with a magnitude of six-point-one.  

1998: President Clinton vowed that "one way or the other" he would deny Iraq any weapons of mass destruction and said he was encouraged by an international consensus that Baghdad obey U.N. mandates.

1998: The strongest winter storm of the season lashed the U.S. Atlantic seaboard, flooding rivers and coastal areas and dumping more than a foot of snow in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. The storm, a classic northeaster, pounded beaches in Virginia and the Carolinas with strong winds and heavy surf and carried Atlantic moisture hundreds of miles inland where it fell as rain, sleet and wet snow. The storm swept through the Gulf Coast, whipping Florida and Cuba with heavy rain and wind, and intensified as it moved into the Atlantic, picking up moisture and dumping heavy precipitation.

1998: Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates got a face full of custard pie during his visit to Brussels. The attack took place as Gates was about to attend a reception given by the Belgian Flemish community. Organizers said five people, equipped with stocks of pies, appeared to be involved in what was believed to have been a prank with commercial intent.

1999: Gravely ill with lymphatic cancer, Jordan's King Hussein left the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and was flown home.

1999: In a case which has drawn much controversy, Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, was shot and killed in front of his Bronx home by four plainclothes New York City police officers during a nighttime search for a rape suspect.

1999: Senators at President Clinton's impeachment trial voted to permit the showing of portions of Monica Lewinsky's videotaped deposition.

2000: Austrian President Thomas Klestil swore in a coalition government that included Joerg Haider's far-right Freedom Party, a development which triggered European Union sanctions. 

2000: Singer Doris Kenner-Jackson of the Shirelles died in Goldsboro, North Carolina, at age 58.