1856 John Singer Sargent, portrait painter, was born in Florence.
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1879 the British declared war on the Zulu leader Cetewayo.
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1948 the London Co-op opened the first supermarket in the capital at Manor Park.
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1950 64 submariners and dockyard workers were killed when the tanker Divina struck Truculent on the Thames.
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1970 a Boeing 747 landed at Heathrow after its first flight from New York.
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1976 Agatha Christie, crime novelist, died aged 85.
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2010 316,000 people died in an earthquake in Haiti.
13 JANUARY (#ulink_9e523253-4d48-5dc8-8ec2-bb1ac0bfad9b)
1893 the Independent Labour Party formed by Keir Hardie to promote working-class representation.
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1906 Aleksandr Popov, who used radio waves to transmit a message in 1896, independently of Guglielmo Marconi, died in St Petersburg.
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1929 Wyatt Earp, gambler and law officer involved in the gunfight at the OK Corral in 1881, died.
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1941 James Joyce, novelist, died in Zurich aged 58.
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1978 Nasa selected its first women astronauts.
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1989 the Friday the 13th virus struck at IBM-compatible computers.
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2004 Harold Shipman, who killed more than 250 people, hanged himself in prison.
14 JANUARY (#ulink_bd29dc49-94f3-5997-88de-6926d5f4dec3)
1874 Johann Philipp Reis, whose telephone was not a commercial success, died.
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1878 the first demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s newly invented telephone given to Queen Victoria on the Isle of Wight.
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1898 Rev Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, died.
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1957 Humphrey Bogart, actor (Casablanca), died of cancer aged 57.
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1977 Anthony Eden, prime minister 1955–57, died.
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1983 Metropolitan Police officers shot and gravely injured film editor Stephen Waldorf, mistakenly believing him to be an escaped convict.
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1989 Muslims in Bradford ritually burnt a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
15 JANUARY (#ulink_8326619e-0fa4-561d-8ad0-a95be0827de7)
1559 Elizabeth I crowned Queen of England.
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1759 the British Museum opened at Montague House, London.
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1815 Emma, Lady Hamilton, mistress of Lord Nelson, died in poverty at Calais.
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1867 40 skaters drowned when the ice broke on Regent’s Park lake, London.
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