History of the Day for:
January 31
- 1797: Composer Franz Schubert was born in Vienna, Austria.
- 1851: Gail Borden announced the invention of evaporated milk.
- 1865: Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery; General Robert E. Lee was named commander-in-chief of the Confederate armies.
- 1874: Jesse James and his gang robbed a train near Gadshill, Mich. He then handed the engineer a press release describing the robbery and told his victims to alert the press.
- 1917: Germany served notice that it was beginning a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.
- 1928: Scotch tape was first marketed by 3M Company.
- 1930: 3M begins marketing Scotch Tape.
- 1936: "The Green Hornet" radio show was first heard on WXYZ Radio in Detroit.
- 1943: German Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus surrenders to the Soviets at Stalingrad, followed 2 days later by the remainder of his Sixth Army, ending one of World War II's fiercest battles.
- 1944: World War II: During Anzio campaign 1st Ranger Battalion (Darby's Rangers) is destroyed behind enemy lines in a heavily outnumbered encounter at Battle of Cisterna, Italy.
- 1944: Operation Overlord (D-Day) was postponed until June; U.S. forces began invading Kwajalein Atoll and other parts of the Japanese-held Marshall Islands.
- 1945: Private Eddie Slovik became the only American soldier since the Civil War to be executed for desertion. He was shot by an American firing squad in France.
- 1946: Yugoslavia's new constitution, modeling the Soviet Union, establishes six constituent republics (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia).
- 1949: "These Are My Children," the first TV daytime soap opera, was broadcast from the NBC station in Chicago.
- 1950: President Harry S. Truman announced he had ordered development of the hydrogen bomb.
- 1958: The United States entered the Space Age with its first successful launch of a satellite from Cape Canaveral into orbit, the Explorer I, from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
- 1961: Ham the chimp became the first animal sent into space by the United States in a test of the Mercury/Redstone 2 space capsule, 158 miles above the earth.
- 1969: The Beatles performed their last live gig together with an impromptu 42-minute concert on the roof of their Apple headquarters in London.
- 1971: Astronauts Alan B. Shepard Junior, Edgar D. Mitchell and Stuart A. Roosa blasted off aboard Apollo 14 on a mission to the moon.
- 1984: Edwin Newman retired from NBC News after 35 years with the network.
- 1986: Mary Lund of Kensington, Minn., became the first female recipient of an artificial heart.
- 1990: McDonald's Corporation opened its first fast-food restaurant in Moscow.