Today in History in 1733 James Oglethorpe and 130 colonists arrive at Charleston, South Carolina; in 1942 Henry Ford patents a plastic automobile; and in 2018 An alert falsely claiming there was an incoming missile causes panic in Hawaii.

The On This Day In History archives at “Simple English Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia” contains over 200,000 events, birthdays and deaths from 6,000 years of history. Here is a roundup of a few of them:

January 13 is the 13th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 352 days remaining until the end of the year (353 in leap years).

EVENTS

888 – Odo, Count of Paris becomes King of the Franks.

1328 – Edward III of England marries Philippa of Hainault.

1733 – James Oglethorpe and 130 colonists arrive at Charleston, South Carolina.

1750 – Spain and Portugal sign the Treaty of Madrid to agree on their colonial policy.

1822 – The design of the Flag of Greece is adopted by the First National Assembly at Epidaurus.

1830 – The Great Fire of New Orleans begins.

1840 – The steamship Lexington burns and sinks 4 miles off Long Island, New York, killing 139 people.

1893 – The independent British Labour Party holds its first meeting.

1893 – United States marines land in Honolulu, Hawaii from the ship USS Boston to prevent Queen Liliuokalani from abandoning the Bayonet Constitution.

1898 – Émile Zola's J'accuse exposes the Dreyfus affair.

1908 – The Rhoads Opera House fire in Boyertown, Pennsylvania, killing 171 people.

1910 – The first public radio broadcast takes place from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.

1915 – An earthquake in Avezzano, Italy, kills 29,800 people.

1917 – A train crash near Ciurea, Romania, kills between 600 and 1,000 people.

1930 – An expedition led by Douglas Mawson discovers the Aagaard Islands off Antarctica.

1935 – Most voters in Saarland decide to become part of Germany.

1939 – The Black Friday bush fires burn 20,000 square kilometres of land in Australia, killing 71 people.

1942 – Henry Ford patents a plastic automobile.

1951 – First Indochina War: The Battle of Vinh Yen begins, later ending in French victory.

1953 – Josip Broz Tito is chosen as the President of Yugoslavia.

1963 – A coup in Togo kills the country's first President, Sylvanus Olympio.

1964 – An Anti–Muslim riot in Calcutta leaves 100 people dead.

1964 – Karol Woityla, later Pope John Paul II, becomes archbishop of Krakow.

1972 – A coup occurs in Ghana.

1974 – Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport opens to the public.

1982 – Air Florida Flight 90, a Boeing 737 jet, crashes into Washington, DC's 14th Street Bridge, shortly after take–off, and falls into the Potomac River, killing 74 people on board, and 4 motorists on the bridge.

1985 – Africa's worst rail disaster occurs in Awash, northeastern Ethiopia, when a train plunges into a ravine, killing 428 people.

1986 – Voyager 2 discovers three moons of Uranus: Desdemona, Belinda and Rosalind.

1986 – A civil war begins in Yemen.

1990 – The US' first elected African American state Governor, L. Douglas Wilder, takes office in Virginia.

1991 – Soviet troops crush a pro–independence demonstration in Vilnius, Lithuania, killing 14 people, and wounding over 1,000.

1993 – Space Shuttle Endeavour lifts off, as STS-54 launches from Cape Canaveral.

1993 – Erich Honecker and his wife Margot go into exile in Chile.

2001 – An earthquake that was 7.6 on the Richter scale hits all of El Salvador, killing over 800 people.

2012 – The 2012 Winter Youth Olympics begin in Innsbruck, Austria. These are the first Winter Youth Olympics.

2012 – Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia crashes onto rocks off the island of Giglio, off the coast of Tuscany, Italy, killing 32 people.

2018 – 2018 Hawaii false missile alert: An alert falsely claiming there was an incoming missile causes panic in Hawaii.

2019 – Pawel Adamowicz, Mayor of the Polish city of Gdansk, is stabbed during a charity event; he dies the next day, aged 53.