January 5 in History

The bulk carrier Lake Illawarra was loaded with 10,000 tonnes of zinc concentrate when it struck two concrete pylons of the Tasman Bridge on January 5, 1975. Two of the bridge's spans collapsed onto the ship's deck, and the vessel sank in 35 meters of water in under a minute. Twelve people died: seven crew members aboard the ship and five motorists whose cars plunged into the river when the roadway gave way beneath them. The Tasman Bridge was the primary connection between Hobart's eastern and western shores across the Derwent River. Without it, the city was effectively severed in two. The alternative road route added 50 kilometers to what had been a five-minute drive. The economic and social consequences were immediate and severe. Families with members working on the opposite shore had to relocate. Businesses on the eastern shore lost access to half their customers overnight. Schools, hospitals, and emergency services were disrupted. The Tasmanian government declared a state of emergency and arranged temporary ferry services, but the ferries could handle only a fraction of the traffic the bridge had carried. Reconstruction took nearly two and a half years. The bridge reopened to traffic in October 1977, and Hobart slowly knit itself back together. The disaster led to significant changes in Australian maritime navigation regulations, particularly regarding the passage of large vessels under bridges. The wreck of the Lake Illawarra remains at the bottom of the Derwent, too expensive and too dangerous to remove, a permanent reminder of the afternoon a cargo ship cut a city in half.

Charles the Bold spent his reign building Burgundy into something between a kingdom and an empire — richer than France, more powerful than most actual monarchies. At Nancy on January 5, 1477, his luck ran out. His frozen body was found in a pond three days after the battle, face down in the mud, half-eaten by wolves. Burgundy dissolved immediately. Louis XI absorbed the duchy. The Low Countries went to the Habsburgs through Charles's daughter Mary. The map of Europe reset.

Felix Manz helped found the Anabaptist movement in Zurich, one of the earliest groups to insist on adult baptism and the separation of church and state. The city council of Zurich found that threatening enough to drown him in the Limmat River on January 5, 1527. The method was deliberate mockery: he'd been re-baptized as an adult, so they'd give him water again. He was 29. Manz had been part of the circle around Huldrych Zwingli, the leading reformer in Zurich. But Manz and his associate Conrad Grebel pushed further than Zwingli was willing to go. They rejected infant baptism on the grounds that it had no scriptural basis. Only adults who consciously chose faith should be baptized, they argued. The first adult baptism in the Reformation took place in January 1525, in Manz's mother's house. Zurich's city council, which had backed Zwingli's moderate reforms, saw adult re-baptism as a threat to social order. Infant baptism was woven into the legal fabric of European society: it was how births were recorded, how citizenship was established, how the state counted its subjects. Rejecting it meant rejecting the state's authority over religious life. The council banned adult baptism under penalty of drowning. Manz was arrested, released, arrested again, and finally executed on January 5, 1527. His death made him the first Protestant martyr killed by other Protestants, a distinction that reveals how quickly the Reformation fractured. George Blaurock, who had performed the first adult baptism, was later burned at the stake in the Tyrol. The Anabaptists didn't stop. Their theological descendants include the Mennonites, the Amish, the Hutterites, and the Baptists.

French forces under Marshal Turenne routed a Brandenburg-Imperial army at Colmar on January 5, 1675, and drove them back across the Rhine. It was the decisive battle of the Franco-Dutch War's winter campaign in Alsace and one of Turenne's most brilliant operations. Turenne had marched his army through the Vosges Mountains in the dead of winter, a move his opponents considered impossible. The mountain passes were snowbound. The roads were barely passable. He moved his forces in separate columns to avoid detection and reassembled them on the eastern side of the mountains, appearing behind the enemy position when the Brandenburg and Imperial commanders expected him to be in winter quarters. The battle itself was less spectacular than the approach march. The surprised Allied forces fought a rearguard action and retreated toward the Rhine crossings. French cavalry pursued. The allied army lost several thousand men in the battle and subsequent retreat. Within weeks, France controlled Alsace, the strategically vital region between the Rhine and the Vosges. Turenne was killed by a cannonball six months later at the Battle of Salzbach, depriving France of its greatest field commander. The territory he secured at Colmar would stay French for over two centuries, then flip back and forth between France and Germany four more times: France lost it in 1871, regained it in 1918, lost it again in 1940, and took it back in 1944-1945. The Franco-German contest for Alsace, which Turenne's victory intensified, was not fully resolved until the European integration project of the 1950s made the border irrelevant.

Benedict Arnold had defected to the British eighteen months earlier. On January 5, 1781, he made the war personal. Leading 1,600 British troops up the James River in a swift amphibious operation, he captured and burned Richmond, Virginia, then the state capital. Governor Thomas Jefferson fled with three hours' notice. Arnold's force sailed from New York on December 20, 1780, and entered the Chesapeake Bay under favorable winds. Virginia's defenses were thin. The state militia was scattered. The few Continental regulars in the area couldn't concentrate fast enough. Arnold landed at Westover Plantation on January 4 and marched 25 miles overland to Richmond the following day. He found a city that couldn't defend itself. The state government had moved to Richmond from Williamsburg only the year before, and no fortifications had been built. Arnold looted warehouses, destroyed the foundry that manufactured weapons for the Continental Army, and torched everything military. He was in and out in a day, retreating to Westover and then down the James River before any organized resistance could form. The raid humiliated Jefferson, who faced criticism for years afterward over his failure to defend the capital. Two weeks later, Washington sent a force south specifically to capture Arnold, offering a substantial reward for taking him alive. They didn't succeed. Arnold continued raiding in Virginia and Connecticut through 1781. His treason and his subsequent military effectiveness against his former countrymen made him the most despised figure of the American Revolution. The burning of Richmond demonstrated that the former patriot general was willing to wage war against the country he'd once fought to create.

The House of Representatives voted 163 to 54 on January 5, 1846, to terminate the joint occupation agreement with Britain over the Oregon Territory. Both countries had shared the region since an 1818 convention, but American settlers had been flooding in for years, and the political pressure to claim the entire territory was intense. "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight" was the rallying cry. The Democratic Party, which had won the 1844 election partly on the platform of Oregon annexation, demanded American sovereignty up to the 54th parallel, which would have included all of present-day British Columbia. The slogan suggested war with Britain if the territory wasn't conceded in full. The vote gave Britain the required one-year notice to terminate the joint occupation. Both sides understood this as the opening move in a negotiation, not a declaration of war. Secretary of State James Buchanan and British Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen had been communicating through diplomatic channels about a compromise boundary. The Oregon Treaty, signed six months later in June 1846, drew the border at the 49th parallel from the Rocky Mountains to the Strait of Georgia, then through the Juan de Fuca Strait to the Pacific. Britain kept Vancouver Island and the territory that became British Columbia. The United States got everything south to California, including present-day Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Neither side got everything it wanted. Both sides avoided a war that neither could afford while the United States was simultaneously headed toward conflict with Mexico over Texas. The compromise created the longest undefended border in the world.

Rontgen had discovered X-rays in November 1895 but told almost no one. On January 5, 1896, a Vienna newspaper broke the story, complete with an image of his wife Anna's hand showing the bones and her wedding ring. The image electrified the public. Within days, the discovery was front-page news across Europe and North America. Wilhelm Rontgen had been experimenting with cathode ray tubes at the University of Wurzburg when he noticed that a fluorescent screen across the room was glowing, even though the tube was enclosed in black cardboard. Something invisible was passing through the cardboard and exciting the screen. He spent six weeks investigating the phenomenon before publishing his paper, "On a New Kind of Rays," on December 28, 1895. The medical community grasped the implications immediately. Within weeks, hospitals across Europe were experimenting with X-ray equipment. Doctors could see broken bones without surgery. Foreign objects swallowed by children could be located. Battlefield surgeons could find bullets and shrapnel. The technology was crude, exposures took minutes rather than milliseconds, and the radiation doses were dangerously high, but the diagnostic value was revolutionary. Rontgen refused to patent the discovery, saying it belonged to humanity. He won the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 and donated the prize money to the University of Wurzburg. He never profited from X-rays. Within a decade, radiation injuries among early practitioners revealed the technology's dangers. Marie Curie's hands were scarred from years of exposure. Thomas Edison's assistant Clarence Dally died of radiation poisoning in 1904. The same rays that could see inside the body could also destroy it.

John Redmond called for revolt against British rule on January 5, 1900, a dramatic departure from the constitutional nationalism that had defined his career. Redmond was the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the political heir of Charles Stewart Parnell, and a man who had spent years working within the British parliamentary system to achieve Irish home rule. The call for revolt came at a moment of imperial overreach. Britain was fighting the Boer War in South Africa, and Irish nationalists drew parallels between the Boers' struggle against British imperialism and their own. Redmond's rhetorical escalation was partly tactical, designed to maintain his leadership of a fractious nationalist movement that included more radical elements. He later pulled back from revolutionary rhetoric and pursued home rule through Parliament with renewed determination. His strategy bore fruit in 1914 when the Home Rule Act was signed into law, granting Ireland a measure of self-governance. It was the achievement of a generation. Then it was suspended for the duration of World War I. The suspension destroyed Redmond's credibility. He had supported Irish participation in the war effort, urging Irish Volunteers to enlist. Over 200,000 Irishmen served in the British military. But the longer the war lasted without home rule being implemented, the more support drained from Redmond to the Sinn Fein movement and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The Easter Rising of 1916, which Redmond opposed, shifted Irish politics toward separatism. He died in March 1918, months before the war ended, watching everything he'd worked for unravel. The constitutional path to Irish self-governance died with him.

Kappa Alpha Psi was founded at Indiana University on January 5, 1911, by ten Black students at a campus where they were excluded from most campus life. Indiana University had no formal policy against Black students, but informal segregation governed everything from housing to social clubs. The fraternity's founders — Elder Watson Diggs chief among them — chose Greek letters and organized around achievement and scholarship rather than simple social bonding. The fraternity grew into one of the largest historically Black fraternities in America. Indiana University eventually acknowledged its founders with a permanent memorial more than a century later.

The Prague Party Conference of January 1912 wasn't supposed to be a rupture. Lenin called it as a general meeting of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The Mensheviks refused to attend, calling it a factional grab. They were right. Lenin used the conference to expel the Menshevik leadership and reconstitute the Central Committee entirely with Bolsheviks. The party split became permanent that week. Five years later, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. The Mensheviks, who wanted democratic socialism and opposed the October coup, were eventually suppressed, imprisoned, or exiled. The argument that started in Prague ended in the Gulag.

Greek admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis forced the Ottoman fleet back into the Dardanelles at the Battle of Lemnos on January 5, 1913. The Ottoman navy didn't venture out again for the rest of the First Balkan War. Greek control of the Aegean was established, and with it, the strategic foundation for Greece's territorial expansion. The Ottoman fleet had been avoiding decisive engagement since Greece's naval victory at the Battle of Elli in December 1912. The Turks had retreated into the Dardanelles and stayed there, unwilling to risk their remaining capital ships. Kountouriotis, commanding from his flagship Averof, a fast armored cruiser that was the most powerful warship in either fleet, forced a confrontation by threatening to attack Turkish positions near the strait's entrance. The Averof was the key to Greek naval superiority. It was faster than the Ottoman battleships and more heavily armed than their cruisers. Kountouriotis charged ahead of his own fleet, drawing Ottoman fire while his slower ships closed in. The Ottoman flagship Hayreddin Barbarossa took hits from Averof's 9.2-inch guns and retreated. The rest of the Ottoman fleet followed. The naval dominance that Lemnos confirmed allowed Greece to seize the Aegean islands that the Ottoman Empire had controlled for centuries. Lemnos, Lesbos, Chios, and Samos became Greek territory. The strategic consequence extended far beyond the Balkan Wars. Greek control of the Aegean shaped the naval balance in the eastern Mediterranean for the rest of the century and influenced the campaigns of World War I, when the Dardanelles became the site of the Gallipoli disaster.