History of the Day for:
January 2
- 1776: George Washington designed the first U.S. flag with thirteen red and white stripes and a Union Jack in the corner.
- 1788: Georgia became the fourth U.S. state to be admitted to the Union.
- 1811: U.S. Senator Thomas Pickering became the first senator to be censured when he revealed confidential documents communicated by the president of the United States.
- 1839: French pioneering photographer Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the moon.
- 1870: Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge began.
- 1890: Alice Sanger became the first female White House staffer.
- 1900: A company set up by Emile Verlinger, the inventor of the Gramophone, began manufacturing seven-inch, single-sided records in Montreal.
- 1903: President Theodore Roosevelt shut down the post office in Indianola, Miss., for refusing to accept its appointed postmistress because she was black.
- 1910: The first junior high school in the U.S. opened in Berkeley, Calif.
- 1913: The National Woman's Party was formed to take direct action in earning women the right to vote.
- 1921: Religious services were broadcast on radio for the first time as KDKA in Pittsburgh aired the regular Sunday service of the city's Calvary Episcopal Church.
- 1929: The United States and Canada reached agreement on joint action to preserve Niagara Falls.
- 1935: Bruno Richard Hauptmann went on trial in Flemington, N.J., on charges of kidnapping and murdering the infant son of aviator Charles A. and Anne Lindbergh.
- 1938: Book publisher Simon and Schuster was founded.
- 1942: The Japanese captured the Philippines capital of Manila and the nearby air base at Cavite.
- 1959: The first lunar space shot to escape the Earth's gravitational pull, the unmanned Luna I, was launched by the Soviet Union. It passed to within 4,600 miles of the moon before moving on to a solar orbit.
- 1960: Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.
- 1965: Martin Luther King Jr. began a drive to register black voters.
- 1971: A barrier collapsed at Ibrox Park football ground at the end of a soccer match in Glasgow, Scotland, killing 66 people.
- 1979: The Sid Vicious murder trial opened in New York. Vicious was formally accused of the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in their Greenwich Village apartment.
- 1983: The musical play "Annie," based on the "Little Orphan Annie" comic strip, closed on Broadway after 2,377 performances; Gary Trudeau took a 20-month break from writing his comic strip "Doonesbury."
- 1984: W. Wilson Goode, the son of a sharecropper, was sworn in as Philadelphia's first black mayor.
- 1995: The most distant galaxy yet discovered was found by scientists using the Keck telescope in Hawaii. It was estimated to be 15 billion light years away.
- 1999: A brutal snowstorm smashes into the Midwestern United States, causing 14 inches (359 mm) of snow in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and 19 inches (487 mm) in Chicago, where temperatures plunge to -13°F (-25°C); 68 deaths are reported.
- 2001: Sila Calderón becomes the first female Governor of Puerto Rico.
- 2002: Eduardo Duhalde is appointed interim President of Argentina by the Legislative Assembly.
- 2004: Stardust successfully flies past Comet Wild 2, collecting samples that it will return to Earth two years later.