Today in History in 1896 Fannie Farmer publishes her first cookbook; in 1926 George Burns marries Gracie Allen; and in 1927 The Harlem Globetrotters play their first basketball game.

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 7 is the seventh day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 358 days remaining until the end of the year (359 in leap years). For Orthodox Christians, this is when Christmas is celebrated.

EVENTS

1325 – Alfonso IV becomes King of Portugal.

1350 – Guttorm Palsson, Bishop of Stavanger in Norway, dies, as the last known death from Europe's 1347–1350 plague epidemic.

1558 – France takes Calais, the last continental possession of England.

1566 – Pius V becomes Pope.

1598 – Boris Godunov seizes the throne of Russia.

1601 – Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex leads revolt in London against Queen Elizabeth I of England.

1608 – Fire destroys Jamestown, Virginia.

1610 – Galileo Galilei observes the four largest moons of Jupiter for the first time. He named them and in turn the four are called the Galilean moons.

1782 – The first American commercial bank opens (Bank of North America).

1785 – Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England to Calais, France in a gas balloon, becoming the first to cross the English Channel by air.

1789 – George Washington is elected the first President of the United States, taking office on April 30.

1797 – The parliament of the Repubblica Cisalpina adopts the Italian green–white–red tricolour as the official flag. It is the birthday of the flag of Italy.

1835 – HMS Beagle anchors off the Chonos Archipelago.

1894 – W.K. Dickson receives a patent for movie film.

1896 – Fannie Farmer publishes her first cookbook.

1901 – Alferd Packer is released from prison after serving 18 years for cannibalism.

1904 – The distress signal "CQD" is established only to be replaced two years later by "SOS."

1911 – Mary Pickford marries Owen Moore.

1919 – Montenegrin guerrilla fighters rebel against the planned annexation (take–over) of Montenegro by Serbia, but fail.

1922 – Dáil Éireann ratifies the Anglo-Irish Treaty by 64–57 votes.

1924 – George Gershwin completes "Rhapsody in Blue".

1926 – George Burns marries Gracie Allen.

1927 – First international telephone call – New York City to London.

1927 – The Harlem Globetrotters play their first basketball game.

1931 – Guy Menzies becomes the first person to, on his own, fly non–stop from Australia to New Zealand in 11 hours and 45 minutes, crash–landing on New Zealand's west coast after crossing the Tasman Sea.

1935 – World War II: Benito Mussolini and French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval sign the Italo-French agreements.

1940 – Winter War: The Finnish 9th Division stops and completely destroys the overwhelming Soviet forces on the Raate–Suomussalmi road.

1942 – World War II: Siege of the Bataan Peninsula begins.

1945 – British General Bernard Montgomery holds a press conference in which he claims credit for victory in the Battle of the Bulge.

1950 – A fire at Mercy Hospital in Davenport, Iowa kills 41 people.

1953 – President Harry Truman announces that the United States has developed a hydrogen bomb.

1954 – The first public demonstration of a machine translation system was held in New York at the head office of IBM.

1955 – Contralto Marian Anderson becomes the first African American person to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

1958 – Walter Hallstein becomes the first President of the European Commission.

1959 – The United States recognizes the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro.

1960 – The UGM-27 Polaris missile is test–launched.

1968 – The Surveyor 7 spacecraft is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

1972 – While landing on Ibiza, a Sud Caravelle airplane of the Iberia airline crashes, killing 104 people.

1973 – Mark Essex shoots 10 people dead and injures 13 at a Howard Johnson's hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana, before being shot dead by police.

1975 – OPEC agrees to raise crude oil prices by 10%.

1979 – Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia are overthrown by Vietnamese troops.

1980 – US President Jimmy Carter authorizes legislation giving $1.5 billion in loans to bail out Chrysler Corporation.

1984 – Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

1989 – Long–serving Japanese Emperor Hirohito dies aged 87; His son Akihito becomes Emperor of Japan.

1990 – The Leaning Tower of Pisa is closed to the public due to safety concerns.

1991 – Roger Lafontant attempts a coup in Haiti.

1993 – The Fourth Republic of Ghana is inaugurated, with Jerry Rawlings as President.

1993 – The Bosnian Army executes a surprise attack on the village of Kravica in Srebrenica.

1996 – One of the worst blizzards in American history hits eastern states killing more than 100.

1997 – A team of programmers at the University of Regensburg, Germany releases Tibia, one of the earliest graphical MMORPGs.

1999 – The impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton begins.

1999 – A series of landslides in Indonesia kills over 100 people.

2006 – In the UK, Charles Kennedy resigns as leader of the Liberal Democrats, having come under pressure after admitting that he had a drink problem.

2010 – Muslim gunmen in Egypt open fire on a crowd of Coptic Christians, killing 8 of them and one Muslim bystander.

2012 – A hot–air balloon crashes near Carterton, New Zealand, killing all 11 people on board.

2015 – A bomb attack in Sana'a, Yemen, kills at least 30 people.

2015 – Charlie Hebdo shooting: Islamic extremist gunmen storm the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing 12 people, including 2 police officers and several prominent French journalists and cartoonists. 11 people are seriously injured.