From Viking Kings to Earth’s Changing Spin: Key Events That Shaped History on January 6
This is what happened today, back in the day.
Image: ChatGPT
Did you know?
Earth’s rotation is changing speed. It’s actually slowing. This means that, on average, the length of a day increases by around 1.8 seconds per century. 600 million years ago a day lasted just 21 hours.
On this day in history, January 6
1017 A Viking, Cnut the Great, gets to sit on the throne of England when he is crowned King of England by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
1842 About 4 500 British and Indian troops leave Kabul (present-day Afghanistan), but are massacred by tribesmen before reaching India.
1900 Having already besieged the fortress at Ladysmith, Boer forces attack it, but are driven back with heavy losses by British defenders.
1907 Maria Montessori opens a school and day-care centre for working-class children in Rome. Her teaching methods catch on and are still popular, including in South Africa.1929 Mother Teresa arrives in Calcutta to begin her work among India’s poorest.
1958 The prestigious Bollingen Prize for poetry goes to e.e. cummings – one of the best lyric poets of the English language. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and only uses lower-case spellings for poetic expression.
1995 Joe Slovo, the communist intellectual widely credited with being one of the masterminds of South Africa’s national reconciliation, dies of cancer.
2000 The last Pyrenean ibex is found dead after being crushed by a tree.
2017 Five die and six people are injured in a mass shooting at an airport in Florida, US.
2019 About 40 people are killed in a gold mine collapse in northern Afghanistan.
2023 A study finds that Roman concrete is stronger than the modern stuff because of the use of a hot-mixing technique, with quicklime that self-healed cracks over time.
2023 A US teacher is shot by her six-year-old pupil in Newport, Virginia. She survives.
2024 The Israeli army says it has destroyed Hamas’s command centre in northern Gaza and killed over 8 000 militants.
2024 An Alaskan Airlines airliner makes an emergency landing in Portland after a fuselage section blows out midair, with hundreds of planes then being grounded while safety checks are done on them.
2024 Nigerian film, A Tribe Called Judah, becomes the first Nollywood film to earn more than $1bn naira (R18.7 million) domestically.
2025 The once enormously popular Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau promises to resign.
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