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“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour'.”
Wikiquote (Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, DL, FRS, Hon. RA (November 30, 1874 – January 24, 1965) was a British politician, best known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the 20th century, he served as Prime Minister twice (1940–45 and 1951–55).)
Wikiquote ● Never was so much owed by so many to so few - Winston Churchill Speeches, Youtube 
January 31st, 314
Roman Empire:
314 - Pope Sylvester I begins his reign as Pope of the Catholic Church, succeeding Pope Miltiades.
Wikipedia Painting: Sylvester I and the Emperor Constantine;
Image: Relief from a 3rd-century sarcophagus depicting a battle between Romans and Germanic warriors; the central figure is perhaps the emperor Hostilian / Depiction of the Menorah on the Arch of Titus in Rome.
January 31st, 1504
France cedes Naples to Aragon.
Wikipedia Image: Western Europe Satellite, credit NASA.
January 31st, 1606
English Civil War:
1606 - Gunpowder Plot; Guy Fawkes is executed for his plotting against Parliament and James I of England.
Wikipedia Painting: English Civil War (1642–1651) was a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians (Roundheads) and Royalists (Cavaliers);
John Milton publishes Areopagitica;
Battle of Naseby, victory of the Parliamentarian New Model Army;
Battle of Marston Moor, 1644;
"Cromwell at Dunbar", by Andrew Carrick Gow; Oliver Cromwell; King Charles I, painted by Van Dyck;
"And when did you last see your father?" by William Frederick Yeames.
January 31st, 1747
The first venereal diseases clinic opens at London Lock Hospital.
Wikipedia Photo: Britain’s most established major trauma centre – the Royal London Hospital.
January 31st, 1862
Alvan Graham Clark discovers the white dwarf star Sirius B, a companion of Sirius, through an 18.5-inch (47 cm) telescope now located at Northwestern University.
Wikipedia Image: The white dwarf and its companion (Credits: Francesco Mereghetti, NASA, ESA and T.M. Brown).
January 31st, 1865
American Civil War:
1865 - The United States Congress passes the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, abolishing slavery, submitting it to the states for ratification.
Wikipedia Image: ● Lincoln Memorial; an American national monument built to honor the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln - located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. across from the Washington Monument.
● The northern army led by George McClellan and the southern army led by Robert E. Lee met at Antietam Creek, Maryland in September, 1862. It was a bloody battle where 13,000 Confederates and 12,000 Union troops died in just one day. McClellan had hesitated to attack before the battle thus letting the southern troops regroup. Also, he had saved reserves and refused to use them at the end of the battle thinking that Lee was holding reserves for a counterattack, even though those reserves didn't exist. The Union victory stopped Lee's northward advance and was a turning point in the war.
● Battle of Antietam / Stone Bridge at Antietam Battlefield - Sharpsburg, Maryland
● Battle of Mobile Bay (1890) by Xanthus Russell Smith.
● Although photography was still in its infancy, war correspondents produced thousands of images, bringing the harsh realities of the frontlines to those on the home front in a new and visceral way. The Atlantic.
January 31st, 1915
World War I:
1915 - Battle of Bolimów; Germany is the first to make large-scale use of poison gas in warfare against Russia.
1917 - U-boat Campaign; Germany announces that its U-boats will resume unrestricted submarine warfare hiatus.
1918 - Battle of May Island; A series of accidental collisions on a misty Scottish night leads to the loss of two Royal Navy submarines with over a hundred lives, and damage to another five British warships.
Wikipedia Photo: Trenches on the Western Front; a British Mark IV Tank crossing a trench; Royal Navy battleship HMS Irresistible sinking after striking a mine at the Battle of the Dardanelles; a Vickers machine gun crew with gas masks, and German Albatros D.III biplanes. National Archives and Records Administration.
January 31st, 1929
Russian Revolution:
1929 - The Soviet Union exiles Leon Trotsky Red Army, on its way to besiege Kiev, is met by a small group of military students.
Wikipedia Image: The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union.
January 31st, 1930
3M begins marketing Scotch Tape.
Wikipedia Image: 3M; scotch tape sculpture.
January 31st, 1942
World War II:
1942 - Battle of Malaya; Allied forces are defeated by the Japanese and retreat to the island of Singapore.
1943 - German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrenders to the Soviets at Stalingrad, followed 2 days later by the remainder of his Sixth Army, ending one of World War II's fiercest battles.
1944 - American forces land on Kwajalein Atoll and other islands in the Japanese-held Marshall Islands.
1944 - Anzio campaign Battle of Cisterna Italy - 1st Ranger Battalion (Darby's Rangers) is destroyed behind enemy lines in a heavily outnumbered encounter.
1945 - United States Army private Eddie Slovik is executed for desertion, the first such execution of an American soldier since the American Civil War.
Post World War II:
1946 - Yugoslavia's new constitution, modeling the Soviet Union, establishes six constituent republics (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia).
Wikipedia Photo: Bombing of Dresden in World War II; August Schreitmüller's sculpture 'Goodness' surveys Dresden after a firestorm started by Allied bombers in 1945.
USS Bunker Hill was hit by kamikazes piloted by Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa and another airman on 11 May 1945. 389 personnel were killed or missing from a crew of 2,600; Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa, who flew his aircraft into the USS Bunker Hill during a Kamikaze mission on 11 May 1945; Kamikaze Missions - Lt Yoshinori Yamaguchi's Yokosuka D4Y3 (Type 33 Suisei) "Judy" in a suicide dive against USS Essex. The dive brakes are extended and the non-self-sealing port wing tank is trailing fuel vapor and/or smoke 25 November 1944.
German V1 flying-bomb and V2 Rockets - Preparations for a Salvo Launch of V-2 Rockets in the Heidelager near Blizna (Poland) (1944), credit German History in Documents and Images GHDI.
Eastern Front (World War II); Germans race towards Stalingrad. August 1942; Soviet children during a German air raid in the first days of the war, June 1941, by RIA Novosti archive; Soviet sniper Roza Shanina in 1944. About 400,000 Soviet women served in front-line duty units Caucasus Mountains, winter 1942/43; Finnish ski patrol: the invisible enemy of the Soviet Army with an unlimited supply of skis; Men of the German Engineers Corps cross a river which is swollen after the first autumn rains, to strengthen bridges linking the German positions on the central front in Russia. by Keystone / Getty Images. October 1942; Russian snipers fighting on the Leningrad front during a blizzard. Photo by Hulton Archive / Getty Images, 1943; German soldiers surrendering to the Russians in Stalingrad, the soldier holding the white flag of surrender is dressed in white so that there could be no doubt of his intentions, a Russian soldier is on the right of the photograph. by Keystone / Getty Images, January 1943.
January 31st, 1945
World War II: Holocaust;
1945 - About 3,000 inmates from the Stutthof concentration camp are forcibly marched into the Baltic Sea at Palmnicken (now Yantarny, Russia) and executed.
Wikipedia Photo: World War II, The Holocaust. Sources: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum USHMM, History 1900s, Internet Masters of Education Technology IMET, Techno Friends, Veterans Today, Concern.
January 31st, 1950
Cold War:
1950 - United States President Harry S. Truman announces a program to develop the hydrogen bomb.
Wikipedia Photo: Lockheed C-130 Hercules; RAF Menwith Hill, a large site in the United Kingdom, part of ECHELON and the UKUSA Agreement; New Zealand nuclear test, British nuclear tests near the Malden and Christmas Islands in the mid-Pacific in 1957 and 1958; Nevada nuclear tests, Nevada Division of Environmental Protection Bureau of Federal Facilities.
January 31st, 1953
North Sea flood of 1953 causes over 1,800 deaths in the Netherlands and over 300 in the United Kingdom.
Wikipedia Image: Cyclonic storm over Western Europe, photo: Eumetsat; Giant waves on the seafront at Seaham, County Durham, credit Ian Britton, Flickr; November 2007 storm surge eroding the western Netherlands dunes, credit Marcel Bakker, Geological Survey of the Netherlands; Storm surge barriers for The Netherlands, credit William Merrill.
January 31st, 1958
Explorer program, Explorer 1 The first successful launch of an American satellite.
Wikipedia Photo: The launch of Explorer 6; designed for photographing the Earth's cloud cover, and transmitted the first pictures of Earth from orbit.
January 31st, 1958
James Van Allen discovers the Van Allen radiation belt.
Wikipedia Photo: Van Allen radiation belt is composed of two torus-shaped layers of energetic charged particles (plasma) around the planet Earth, held in place by its magnetic field
January 31st, 1961
Project Mercury: Mercury-Redstone 2 Ham the Chimp travels into outer space.
Wikipedia Photo: Little Joe 1B launches from Wallops Flight Facility on January 21, 1960; Miss Sam the Rhesus monkey.
January 31st, 1968
Vietnam War:
1968 - Viet Cong attack the United States embassy in Saigon, and other attacks, in the early morning hours, later grouped together as the Tet Offensive.
1971 - Winter Soldier Investigation, organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to publicize war crimes and atrocities by Americans and allies in Vietnam, begin in Detroit, Michigan.
Wikipedia Photo: Vietnam_War; Side view of an HH-53 helicopter of the 40th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron as seen from the gunner's position on an A-1 of the 21st Specialist Operations Squadron. (USAF Photo by Ken Hackman), Boston Globe;
Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, credit Free Republic;
Vietnam War: The Big Picture / Boston Globe.
January 31st, 1971
Apollo Program: Apollo 14; Astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell, aboard a Saturn V lift off for a mission to the Fra Mauro Highlands on the Moon.
Wikipedia Photo: Apollo Program: Apollo 11 first manned Moon landing and the first walk on the surface on the moon. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin walks on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module Eagle. Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong took this photograph with a 70mm lunar surface camera. Armstrong and Aldrin explored the Sea of Tranquility for two and a half hours while crewmate Michael Collins orbited above in the command module Columbia.
The Blue Marble is a famous photograph of the Earth, taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft, at a distance of about 45,000 kilometres (28,000 mi).
January 31st, 2000
Aviation accidents and incidents:
2000 - Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crash: An MD-83, experiencing horizontal stabilizer problems, crashes in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Point Mugu, California, killing all 88 aboard.
2001 - In the Netherlands, a Scottish court convicts Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and acquits another Libyan citizen for their part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.
Wikipedia Photo: ● Pan AM 747 ● U.S. Airways flight 1549 also known as the "Miracle on the Hudson" navigates an exit ramp near Burlington, New Jersey, June 5, 2011 ● Passengers stand on the wings of a U.S. Airways plane as a ferry pulls up to it after it landed in the Hudson River in New York, Reuters ● US Airways plane crashes into New York Hudson River, Photo: AP
January 31st, 2010
Avatar became the first film to gross over $2 billion worldwide.
Wikipedia Image: Avatar is a 2009 American epic science fiction film.
January 31st, 2009
North American blizzard: hits North America for the second time in the same month, causing damages across the United States and Canada and killing 24 people.
Wikipedia Image: Land Hurricane: United States NOAA Satellite; Huge wave slams the lighthouse on Grand Marais Harbor credit, Minnesota.publicradio.org.
January 31st, 2009
Modern conflicts in the Middle East, social unrest and terrorist attacks:
2017 - Molo fire; In Kenya, at least 113 people are killed and over 200 injured following an oil spillage ignition in Molo, days after a massive fire at a Nakumatt supermarket in Nairobi at least 25 people.
Wikipedia Photo: Middle East satellite image, NASA. ● Camels are seen early morning on a beach in the Marina area of Dubai October 16, 2008. (Steve Crisp, Reuters) ● A portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad burns during clashes between rebels and Syrian troops in Selehattin, near Aleppo, on July 23, 2012. (Bulent Kilic, AFP / GettyImages) ● Egyptians gather in their thousands in Tahrir Square to mark the one year anniversary of the revolution on Jan. 25, 2012 in Cairo Egypt. Tens of thousands have gathered in the square on the first anniversary of the Arab uprising which toppled President Hosni Mubarak. (Jeff J Mitchell, Getty Images) ● Black smoke rises above the Tehran skyline as supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi burn tires and other material in the streets as they fight running battles with police to protest the declared results of the Iranian presidential election in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, June 13, 2009. (Ben Curtis, AP) ● The Iron Dome defense system fires to interecpt incoming missiles from Gaza in the port town of Ashdod, Thursday, Nov. 15, 2012. (Tsafrir Abayov, AP)