History of the Day for:
January 10
- 1645: William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, was beheaded for treason.
- 1776: "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine is published.
- 1778: Carolus Linnaeus, Swedish botanist, born. He founded the modern scientific system for naming plants and animals.
- 1840: the Penny Post mail system is started.
- 1861: Florida became the third American state to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy.
- 1863: The world's first underground train service, London's Metropolitan line between Paddington and Farringdon, was opened.
- 1912: The first flying boat, designed by Glenn Curtiss, made its maiden flight at Hammondsport, N.Y.
- 1917: William Frederick Cody, army scout and Indian fighter known as Buffalo Bill, died.
- 1920: The League of Nations came into being.
- 1934: Marinus van der Lubbe was guillotined in Germany for allegedly burning down the Reichstag.
- 1945: Los Angeles Railway (with 5 streetcar lines) forced to close.
- 1946: The League of Nations was officially superseded by the United Nations when the first meeting of the General Assembly began in London.
- 1961: Samuel Dashiell Hammett, U.S. crime writer, died. He wrote the "The Maltese Falcon" and influenced a generation of crime writers.
- 1964: Panama severed diplomatic relations with the United States after what it termed "unjustifiable aggression" by U.S. troops the previous day.
- 1969: Sweden announced it had established diplomatic relations with North Vietnam, the first Western country to do so.
- 1971: French fashion designer Coco Chanel died.
- 1984: In Bulgaria, 50 people were killed when a Bulgarian Tupolev 134 crashed as it was about to land at Sofia airport.
- 1990: China lifted martial law, imposed after the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
- 1990: Time Warner is formed from the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications Inc.
- 1994: Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan agreed to abolish trade tariffs and form a common market.
- 1994: U.S. President Bill Clinton, visiting Kiev, announced a deal under which Ukraine would give up the world's third largest nuclear arsenal.
- 1996: Israel freed hundreds of Palestinian prisoners to jubilant relatives in the West Bank and Gaza, days before the first Palestinian national elections.
- 1997: Italian tenor Alvinio Misciano, a singing teacher of superstar Luciano Pavarotti, was killed in a fall from a window of his home in Milan; Right-winger Arnoldo Aleman was sworn in as president of Nicaragua in what was billed as the first democratic, peaceful transfer of power in the country's modern history.
- 2001: A large piece of the chalk cliff at Beachy Head collapses into the sea.
- 2005: A mudslide occurs in La Conchita, California, killing 10 people, injuring many more and closing the Highway 101, the main coastal corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles, for 10 days.