[CaptainCrunch]

Jan 19th

379 – Emperor Gratian elevates Flavius Theodosius at Sirmium to Augustus, and gives him authority over all the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire.

1661 – Thomas Venner is hanged, drawn and quartered in London.

1764 – John Wilkes is expelled from the British House of Commons for seditious libel.

1788 – The second group of ships of the First Fleet arrive at Botany Bay

1829 – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy receives its premiere performance.

1839 – The British East India Company captures Aden.

1861 – American Civil War: Georgia joins South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama in declaring secession from the United States.

1862 – American Civil War: Battle of Mill Springs: The Confederacy suffers its first significant defeat in the conflict.

1883 – The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires, built by Thomas Edison, begins service at Roselle, New Jersey.

1915 – German strategic bombing during World War I: German zeppelins bomb the towns of Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn in the United Kingdom killing at least 20 people, in the first major aerial bombardment of a civilian target.

1920 – The United States Senate votes against joining the League of Nations.

1920 – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is founded.

1937 – Howard Hughes sets a new air record by flying from Los Angeles to New York City in 7 hours, 28 minutes, 25 seconds.

1940 – You Nazty Spy!, the very first Hollywood film of any kind to satirize Adolf Hitler and the Nazis premieres, starring The Three Stooges, with Moe Howard as the character "Moe Hailstone" satirizing Hitler.

1942 – World War II: The Japanese conquest of Burma begins.

1945 – World War II: Soviet forces liberate the Łódź Ghetto. Of more than 200,000 inhabitants in 1940, less than 900 had survived the Nazi occupation.

1946 – General Douglas MacArthur establishes the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo to try Japanese war criminals.

1953 – Almost 72% of all television sets in the United States are tuned into I Love Lucy to watch Lucy give birth.

1960 – Japan and the United States sign the US–Japan Mutual Security Treaty

1969 – Student Jan Palach dies after setting himself on fire three days earlier in Prague's Wenceslas Square to protest about the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union in 1968. His funeral turns into another major protest.

1977 – President Gerald Ford pardons Iva Toguri D'Aquino (a.k.a. "Tokyo Rose").

1978 – The last Volkswagen Beetle made in Germany leaves VW's plant in Emden. Beetle production in Latin America continues until 2003.

1981 – Iran hostage crisis: United States and Iranian officials sign an agreement to release 52 American hostages after 14 months of captivity.

1983 – Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie is arrested in Bolivia.

1983 – The Apple Lisa, the first commercial personal computer from Apple Inc. to have a graphical user interface and a computer mouse, is announced.

1986 – The first IBM PC computer virus is released into the wild. A boot sector virus dubbed (c)Brain, it was created by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter unauthorized copying of the software they had written.

1991 – Gulf War: Iraq fires a second Scud missile into Israel, causing 15 injuries.

1993 – Czech Republic and Slovakia join the United Nations.

1997 – Yasser Arafat returns to Hebron after more than 30 years and joins celebrations over the handover of the last Israeli-controlled West Bank city.

1999 – British Aerospace agrees to acquire the defence subsidiary of the General Electric Company plc, forming BAE Systems in November 1999.

2007 – Turkish-Armenian Journalist Hrant Dink is assassinated in front of his newspaper's Istanbul office by 17-year-old Turkish ultra-nationalist Ogün Samast.

2012 – The Hong Kong-based file-sharing website Megaupload is shut down by the FBI.