Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/January 4

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 * 1853 – Solomon Northup regained his freedom after having been sold into slavery in the American South; his memoir Twelve Years a Slave later became a bestseller.
 * 1909 – British explorer Aeneas Mackintosh (pictured), a member of the Nimrod Expedition, escaped death by fleeing across ice floes.
 * 1951 – Korean War: Chinese and North Korean troops captured Seoul from United Nations forces.
 * 1972 – Rose Heilbron (pictured) became the first female judge to sit at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales.
 * 1973 – Last of the Summer Wine, the longest-running sitcom in the world, premiered as an episode of the BBC's Comedy Playhouse.
 * 1977 – The English punk-rock band Sex Pistols lewd and disruptive behaviour at Heathrow Airport prompts the record label EMI to end their contract with them
 * 2007 – Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, becoming the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government.
 * 2010 – The Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest structure, officially opened in Dubai.
 * 2018 – A passenger train collided with a truck and derailed in the Free State, South Africa, killing 21 people and injuring 254 others.
 * 2020 – Sembawang Hot Spring Park in Singapore reopened after being redeveloped by the National Parks Board.


 * Born/died this day: | Moses Mendelssohn |d|1786| Louis Braille |b|1809|  George Tryon |b|1832| Johanna Westerdijk |b|1883| Doreen Valiente |b|1922| Erwin Schrödinger |d|1961| T. S. Eliot |d|1965|  David Berman |b|1967| Brian Horrocks |d|1985 |Tom Acker |d|2021

January 4: Colonial Repression Martyrs' Day in Angola (1961)


 * 1698 – Most of London's Palace of Whitehall, the main residence of English monarchs since 1530, was destroyed by fire.
 * 1798 – After his appointment as Prince of Wallachia, Constantine Hangerli arrived in Bucharest to assume the throne.
 * 1936 – Billboard published its first music hit parade.
 * 1989 – Two American F-14 Tomcats shot down two Libyan MiG-23 Floggers that appeared to be attempting to engage them over the Gulf of Sidra.
 * 2004 – Spirit (artist's impression depicted), the first of two rovers of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, successfully landed on Mars.