January 26 in History

January 26 is the 26th day of the year. There are 340 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1565 – Battle of Talikota led to the destruction of the last Hindu kingdom in India.
• 1700 – A magnitude 9 earthquake hit  the west coast of North America.
• 1836 – Michigan was admitted as the 26th US state.
• 1841 – The United Kingdom formally occupied Hong Kong, which China later ceded  to the UK.
• 1861 – Louisiana seceded from the Union.
• 1863 – The Governor of Massachusetts received permission from the US Secretary of War  to raise a militia for men of  African descent.
• 1892 – Bessie Coleman, American aviator and first African-American woman to hold a pilot’s license, was born. She died in 1926.
• 1905 – The world's largest diamond, weighing 3,106.75 carats was found at the Premier Mine near Pretoria, South Africa.
• 1911 – Glenn H. Curtiss flew the first successful American seaplane.
• 1924 – Saint Petersburg, Russia was renamed Leningrad.
• 1930 – The Indian National Congress declared 26 January as Independence Day.
• 1942 – During World War II, the first United States military forces arrive in Europe, landing in Northern Ireland.
• 1949 – The Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory saw first light under the direction of Edwin Hubble,  becoming the largest aperture optical telescope (until BTA-6 was built in 1976).
• 1961 – John F. Kennedy appointed Janet G. Travell as his physician, the first woman to hold the position.
• 1965 – Hindi became the official language of India.
• 1978 – The Great Blizzard of 1978, a blizzard with the lowest non-tropical atmospheric pressure ever recorded in the US, struck the Ohio-Great Lakes region with heavy snow and winds up to 100 mph.
• 1980 – Israel and Egypt established diplomatic relations.
• 1992 – Boris Yeltsin, President of Russia, announced that Russia would stop targeting United States’ cities with nuclear weapons.
• 2011 – The Syrian uprising began.