📜 This Day in History

January 15

• 1815War of 1812: The American frigate USS President, commanded by Commodore Stephen Decatur, was captured by a squadron of four British frigates.
• 1867In Regent's Park, London, the ice on the lake broke, plunging skaters into the water and causing 40 deaths from drowning or hypothermia.
• 1934At least 10,700 people died when a magnitude-8.0 earthquake struck Nepal and the Indian state of Bihar.
• 1951Ilse Koch, wife of Karl-Otto Koch, the Nazi commander of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a West German court.
• 1975Portugal and the nationalist factions UNITA, the MPLA and the FNLA signed the Alvor Agreement, ending the Angolan War of Independence.
• 2009US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of Canada geese during its climb out from New York City and made an emergency landing in the Hudson River (featured).

Born on this day

• 1622Molière, French actor and playwright (died 1673)
• 1809Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, French economist and politician (died 1865)
• 1918Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egyptian colonel and politician, second President of Egypt (died 1970)
• 1929Martin Luther King Jr., American minister and activist, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1968)