AncientPages.com – On January 16, 378, warlord Siyaj K’ak’ (or ‘Fire is Born’) conquered Tikal, Uaxactun, and the city of Copan. Siyaj K’ak’ – the emissary of Spear-Thrower-Owl – was a prominent political figure mentioned in many glyphs of Maya

AncientPages.com – On January 15, 1929, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was born in Atlanta, Georgia. King was twentieth-century America’s most compelling civil rights leader. After entering Morehouse College at age fifteen, King followed his father and grandfather into the Baptist

AncientPages.com – On January 14, 1784, the American Revolution ended, after almost a decade of bloodshed. The Congress of the United States ratified the Treaty of Paris, the official peace treaty, which was signed earlier in September 1783. The war was

AncientPages.com – On January 13, 1404, the Act Against Multipliers was signed into law. English alchemists were forbidden to use their knowledge to create precious metals. The British parliament introduced the law under Henry IV. Alchemist Sendivogius (1566–1636) by Jan Matejko, 1867 It was

AncientPages.com – On January 12, 1976, the ‘Queen of Crime’, Agatha Christie died. She was a detective mystery writer whose work sold over two billion copies and was translated into over a hundred languages. Agatha Miller was born in 1890 in

AncientPages.com – On January 11, 1935, Amelia Earhart became the first aviator to fly solo from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California. Earhart completed a 2,400-mile trip from Wheeler Field in Hawaii to Oakland Airport in California. At a cruising speed

AncientPages.com – On January 10, 1645, William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was executed at Tower Hill in London, England. Laud (1573–1645) was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633, during the reign of Charles I, and a loyal supporter of the

AncientPages.com – On 9 January 681,  the Twelfth Council of Toledo was initiated by the new King Erwig, a king of the Visigoths in Hispania (680–687). One of its first actions was to release the population from the laws of Wamba

AncientPages.com – On January 8, 378 AD,  a warlord Siyaj K’ak’, conquered Waka (El Perú), now known as a pre-Columbian Maya archaeological site occupied from about 500 BC to 800 AD). The site was the capital of a Maya city-state

AncientPages.com – On January 6, 1852, died Louis Braille, creator of the Braille Alphabet For Blind People. Braille was a French teacher who devoted his life to developing and teaching the Braille system of reading and writing that could help blind

AncientPages.com – On 5 January 1896, an Austrian newspaper reported a discovery of a new type of radiation known today as X-rays. Wilhelm Roentgen, a German professor of physics, was the first to discover electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range. Left:

AncientPages.com – On January 4,  871 AD, the Danes surprised the people of Wessex by arriving on horseback in a lightning raid that swiftly took the town of Reading. Left: Statue of Alfred the Great in Wantage, Oxfordshire; Credit: Steve Daniels –

AncientPages.com – On January 3, 1521, Martin Luther was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Using the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem, Pope Leo X cast Luther out of the Catholic Church. Luther at Erfurt, which depicts Martin Luther discovering the doctrine

AncientPages.com – On January 2, 1920, Isaac Asimov, a science fiction creator, was born. He grew up in New York, but during his two decades in Boston, he achieved great success as a master of science fiction and a writer of

AncientPages.com – On January 1, 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi (1746-1846), a Catholic priest at the Academy of Palermo, Sicily, discovered a faint, distant object, correctly believing it to lie in the orbital region between Mars and Jupiter. Left: Portrait of the astronomer