Something to think about.Something to discover.Something to remember.Every day.
⌕ My Time Capsule

Explore 24 January

Explore 24 January: officers of his own guard murder the Roman emperor Caligula, the Hungarian nobles choose Matthias Corvinus as king, a carpenter finds gold at Sutter’s Mill in California and Indira Gandhi becomes India’s first woman prime minister. Meet Hadrian, Frederick the Great and Edith Wharton, born on 24 January.

This day through time →8 verified events across 4 eras

⌛8Full
Timeline ◈4Historic
Moments ♙6Born
Today ✦3Lives
Remembered ◉1Firsts &
Discoveries ☉1Observances
A marble bust of the emperor Caligula in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.
A marble bust of the emperor Caligula in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.
Image creditSergey Sosnovskiy from Saint-Petersburg, Russia · CC BY-SA 2.0Resized and cropped for display.
41

The emperor Caligula is murdered by his own guards

Gaius Caesar, known from boyhood by his nickname Caligula, ‘little boot’, became Roman emperor in AD 37 to great rejoicing. Within months his rule turned cruel and erratic: ancient writers describe executions on a whim, ruinous spending and his demand to be worshipped as a god.

On 24 January 41, during games on the Palatine Hill, he was attacked in a passage near his palace by Cassius Chaerea, a tribune of the Praetorian Guard whom he had often mocked, and other officers, and stabbed to death. His wife and daughter were also killed. The guardsmen found his uncle Claudius hiding in the palace and proclaimed him emperor.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Caligula ↗
King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary in profile, a portrait attributed to Andrea Mantegna.
King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary in profile, a portrait attributed to Andrea Mantegna.
Image creditAndrea Mantegna · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1458

Hungary’s nobles choose Matthias Corvinus as king

When the young king Ladislas V died suddenly in 1457, Hungary had no obvious heir. The nobles gathered at Buda and Pest, and on 24 January 1458 they elected the fifteen-year-old Matthias Hunyadi, son of the great general János Hunyadi, who had defeated the Ottomans at Belgrade. He was the first king of medieval Hungary without royal ancestry.

Matthias became one of the most powerful rulers of his age. He built a standing army, the Black Army, conquered Moravia, Silesia and even Vienna, and made his court at Buda a centre of the Italian Renaissance, with a library of illuminated manuscripts, the Corvinas, that was famous across Europe.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Matthias I ↗
Sutter's sawmill at Coloma, California, from a daguerreotype of about 1850 by R. H. Vance; the man in front has long been said to be James Marshall, though that is doubtful.
Sutter’s sawmill at Coloma, California, from a daguerreotype of about 1850 by R. H. Vance; the man in front has long been said to be James Marshall, though that is doubtful.
Image creditR. H. Vance · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1848

A carpenter finds gold at Sutter’s Mill

James Marshall, a carpenter from New Jersey, was building a water-powered sawmill for the Swiss settler John Sutter on the American River at Coloma, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. On the morning of 24 January 1848 he went to check the tailrace, the channel that carried water away from the wheel.

‘My eye was caught by something shining in the bottom of the ditch,’ he later said. It was gold. Sutter tried to keep the find quiet, but by the end of the year the news had spread around the world, and in 1849 some 80,000 fortune-seekers, the ‘forty-niners’, poured into California. The gold rush transformed the territory, which became a state in 1850, and devastated its Native peoples.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: California State Parks: Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park ↗
Indira Gandhi photographed in March 1977.
Indira Gandhi photographed in March 1977.
Image creditAnefo · CC0Resized and cropped for display.
1966

Indira Gandhi becomes India’s first woman prime minister

When the prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri died suddenly in Tashkent in January 1966, the leaders of the Congress party looked for a successor. They chose Indira Gandhi, the daughter of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, partly because they expected her to be easy to guide. She beat the veteran Morarji Desai for the party’s leadership by 355 votes to 169.

She was sworn in on 24 January 1966, India’s first and so far only woman prime minister. She proved far tougher than her backers had imagined, leading India to victory over Pakistan in 1971, and she ruled for sixteen years in all, including the Emergency of 1975-77, before her assassination in 1984.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Prime Minister of India: Smt. Indira Gandhi ↗
♙
PEOPLE

Born Today

Hadrian
Image creditDjehouty · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 76

Hadrian

Roman emperor from 117 who built the wall across northern Britain and rebuilt the Pantheon.

Frederick the Great
Image creditJohann Georg Ziesenis · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1712

Frederick the Great

King of Prussia from 1740, general, flute player and friend of Voltaire.

E. T. A. Hoffmann
Image creditE. T. A. Hoffmann · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1776

E. T. A. Hoffmann

German writer of fantastic tales, including The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.

Neil Diamond
Image creditAngela George · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1941

Neil Diamond

American singer-songwriter of Sweet Caroline.

◉
IDEAS THAT CHANGED THINGS

Firsts, Science & Discoveries

Uranus photographed by Voyager 2 in January 1986, a nearly featureless blue-green globe.
Uranus photographed by Voyager 2 in January 1986, a nearly featureless blue-green globe.
Image creditNASA/JPL-Caltech · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1986

Voyager 2 sweeps past Uranus

Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 had already visited Jupiter and Saturn when it reached Uranus, a planet so far away that even the largest telescopes showed only a small blur. Its closest approach came on 24 January 1986, about 81,500 kilometres above the cloud tops.

In a few hours the spacecraft discovered ten new moons and two new rings, found a magnetic field tilted far from the planet’s axis and photographed the strange, scarred surface of the moon Miranda. It is still the only spacecraft ever to visit Uranus; it went on to Neptune in 1989.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: NASA: 35 years ago, Voyager 2 explores Uranus ↗
✦
LIVES REMEMBERED

Remembered Today

Winston Churchill
Image creditYousuf Karsh · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1965

Winston Churchill

British prime minister who led the country through the Second World War.

George Cukor
Image creditMGM · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1983

George Cukor

American film director of The Philadelphia Story and My Fair Lady.

☉
AROUND THE WORLD

Observances & Anniversaries

Pupils listen to a lesson in a classroom in Kabul in 1968, from UNESCO's photo archive.
Pupils listen to a lesson in a classroom in Kabul in 1968, from UNESCO’s photo archive.
Image creditAlexander Shaw · CC BY-SA 3.0 igoResized and cropped for display.
Annual

International Day of Education

In December 2018 the United Nations General Assembly, on a proposal led by Nigeria, proclaimed 24 January the International Day of Education, to celebrate the part that learning plays in peace and development. UNESCO leads the day each year, drawing attention to the hundreds of millions of children and young people who are still out of school.

Source: United Nations: International Day of Education ↗
HISTORY & TIMELINE

Finished the highlights?

Follow 24 January chronologically, from the Middle Ages to the modern day, with 8 verified events and the sources behind them.

This day through time →
Sources & further reading