1330 – Wallachian Voievode Basarab I defeats the Hungarian army by ambush.
1439 – Plymouth becomes the first town incorporated by the English Parliament.
1793 – Jean Sylvain Bailly, the first Mayor of Paris, is guillotined.
1893 – Abdur Rahman Khan accepts the Durand Line as the border between Afghanistan and the British Raj.
1912 – King George I of Greece makes a triumphal entry into Thessaloniki after its liberation from 482 years of Ottoman rule.
1912 – The frozen bodies of Robert Scott and his men are found on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica.
1927 – Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union.
1940 – The Battle of Gabon ends as Free French Forces take Libreville, Gabon, and all of French Equatorial Africa from Vichy French forces.
1942 – Naval Battle of Guadalcanal between Japanese and American forces begins. The battle lasts for three days and ends with an American victory.
1948 – In Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far Eastsentences seven Japanese military and government officials, including General Hideki Tojo, to death for their roles in World War II.
1954 – Ellis Island ceased operations.
1956 – Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia join the United Nations.
1956 – In the midst of the Suez Crisis, Palestinian refugees are shot dead in Rafah by Israeli soldiers following the invasion of the Gaza Strip.
1971 – As part of Vietnamization, US President Richard Nixon sets February 1, 1972 as the deadline for the removal of another 45,000 American troops from Vietnam.
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The Thinker
at the Musee Rodin in Paris
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1980 – The space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn and takes the first images of its rings.
1990 – Tim Berners-Lee publishes a formal proposal for the World Wide Web.
1995 – Erdut Agreement regarding the peaceful resolution to the Croatian War of Independence was reached.
1997 – Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
2003 – In Nasiriyah, Iraq, at least 23 people, among them the first Italian casualties of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, are killed in a suicide bomb attack on an Italian police base.
1840 – Auguste Rodin, French sculptor and illustrator, best known for The Thinker (d. 1917)
1906 – George Dillon, American soldier and poet (d. 1968)
2012 – Daniel Stern, American psychologist and theorist (b. 1934)