#TodayInHistory – January 9

January 9 – Some important events on this day

1431 👉🏼 Judges’ investigations for the trial of Joan of Arc begin in Rouen, France, the seat of the English occupation government
1570 👉🏼 Tsar Ivan the Terrible kills 1,000-2,000 residents of Novgorod
1760 👉🏼 Afghans defeat Marathas in battle of Barari Ghat
1768 👉🏼 Philip Astley stages the world’s first modern circus in London

1839 👉🏼 Daguerreotype photo process announced at French Academy of Science.
In early 1838, Louis Daguerre used his famous daguerreotype process of photography to snap a photo of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. The streets in the photo appear deserted: this is because the exposure time for the photo was so long that the cars and trams could not be captured.
Thus only the man having his shoes shined and the shoeshiner were motionless enough to be caught. This is thus the first known photograph of a person.
The daguerreotype was the first publicly available process of photography, announced in 1839, and for the following 20 years it was the most commonly used process.

1839 👉🏼 Thomas Henderson measures 1st stellar parallax (Alpha Centauri)
1847 👉🏼 1st San Francisco newspaper published (California Star)

1861 👉🏼 A Union merchant ship, the Star of the West, is fired upon as it tries to deliver supplies to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.
The American Civil War raged from 1861 to 1865, killing between 600,000 to 1 million Americans on both sides of the divide. After a long and intense crisis over slavery, Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, and the Confederate States seceded shortly after.
The first battle of the war took place at Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina, which had been the first state to seceded the union. After a long period of shortages in the fort due to a Confederate blockade, the first crisis of Lincoln’s administration was to resupply the fort. After an ultimatum from the South to evacuate the fort was ignored, Confederate forces attacked on April 12, 1861, beginning the civil war.

1909 👉🏼 Ernest Shackleton as part of the British Nimrod Expedition reaches a record farthest South latitude (88°23′ south)
1941 👉🏼 6,000 Jews exterminated in pogrom in Bucharest, Romania
1969 👉🏼 First trial flight of Concorde supersonic jetliner, Bristol, England
2001 👉🏼 Apple launches iTunes, revolutionizing how people consume music
2002 👉🏼 Michael Jackson receives the Artist of the Century award at the American music awards
2007 👉🏼 Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs announces the iPhone