On This Day - January 15th

On this day in the year 588 before the common era (BCE) the great-king Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, having invaded Judea nine years earlier, begins the siege of Jerusalem. It lasts until July 23, 586 BCE, at which time the exilic-period begins, followed by the first great diaspora. Nebuchadnezzar kills or removes the leading families of Jerusalem and Judea, including those connected to the Royal House, along with about twenty-five percent of the population. In the year 539 BCE, after the Babylonian Dynasty is overthrown by king Cyrus of Persia, the Jewish people who had been taken into captivity, and their descendants were granted the right of return.

On this day in the year 1535 of the common era (CE) king Henry VIII, the second Tudor king, declares himself head of the Church of England; twenty-four years later his daughter by Anne Bolyn (whom Henry had beheaded) is crowned Elizabeth I, Queen of England at Westminster Abbey in London.

On this day in 1846 CE, Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky's first novel Poor Folk is published in the St Petersburg Collection Almanac.

In 1892 CE the rules of basketball are first published in Triangle magazine, James Naismith.

In 1919 CE, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two prominent German socialists are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps, on this same day in Boston, Massachusetts, two million gallons of molasses flood the streets in the “Great Molasses Flood” when a storage tank bursts; one hundred and fifty people were injured and twenty-one died by drowning. Fifteen years after that, while robbing the First National Bank in East Chicago, Indianapolis, John Dillinger is shot several times by officer William O'Malley, but survives because he is wearing a bullet proof vest; twelve years later the brutalized corpse of Elizabeth Short, the “Black Dahlia," is found in Leimert Park, in Los Angeles, California

1945 CE the Manhattan Project's G-5 Group, headed by Physicist's Donald Kerst and Seth Neddermeyer, take their first betatron pictures of a nuclear implosion at the Los Alamos Laboratory; thirty-two years later the Coneheads debut on Saturday Night Live.

In 2019 CE the Kumbh Mela Hindu festival began (humanity’s largest gathering) with fifteen million people bathing at the joining of Ganges and Yamuna rivers, and an additional one hundred million people attending the Hindu religious festival as observers over next 49 days; thirty people were crushed death in a human stampede, and sixty others were injured.