January 9

 475 – Byzantine Emperor Zeno is forced to flee his capital at Constantinople, and his general, Basiliscus gains control of the empire.

 1150 – Wanyan Liang and other court officials murder Emperor Xizong of Jin. Wanyan Liang succeeds him as emperor.

 1349 – The Jewish population of Basel, believed by the residents to be the cause of the ongoing Black Death, is rounded up and incinerated.

The Basel massacre of Jews took place on 9 January 1349, as part of the Black Death persecutions of 1348-1350. Following the spread of the Black Death through the surrounding countryside of Savoy and subsequently Basel, the Jews were accused of having poisoned the wells, because they suffered a lower mortality rate than the local gentiles from the pestilence.

The City Fathers of Basel attempted to protect their Jews but to no avail: the local guilds demanded their blood and 600 were handed over. They were shackled inside a wooden barn on an island in the Rhine, which was set afire. The few survivors-young orphans-were forcibly converted to Catholicism.

Following the massacre, it was decreed that all Jews were banned from settling in the city of Basel for 200 years, although this was revoked several decades later.

1431 – Judges’ investigations for the trial of Joan of Arc begin in Rouen.

1788 – Connecticut becomes the fifth state to ratify the Constitution.

1793 – Jean-Pierre Blanchard becomes the first person to fly in a balloon in the United States.

1799 – British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger introduces an income tax of two shillings to the pound to raise funds for Great Britain’s war effort in the Napoleonic Wars.

1806 – Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson receives a state funeral and is interred in St Paul’s Cathedral.

1816 – Sir Humphry Davy tests his safety lamp for miners at Hebburn Colliery.

1839 – The French Academy of Sciences announces the Daguerreotypephotography process.

1858 – Anson Jones, the last President of the Republic of Texas, commits suicide.

	Lady Randolph Churchhill

1909 – Ernest Shackleton, leading the Nimrod Expedition to the South Pole, plants the British flag 97 nautical miles (180 km; 112 mi) from the South Pole, the farthest anyone had ever reached at that time.

1960 – President of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser opens construction on the Aswan Dam by detonating ten tons of dynamite to demolish twenty tons of granite on the east bank of the Nile.

2007 – Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduces the original iPhone

2015 – The perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris two days earlier are both killed after a hostage situation; a second hostage situation, related to the Charlie Hebdo shooting, occurs at a Jewish market in Vincennes.

1606 – William Dugard, English printer (d. 1662)

1854 – Lady Randolph Churchill, American-born wife of Lord Randolph Churchill, mother of Sir Winston Churchill (d. 1921)

1870 – Joseph Strauss, American engineer, co-designed the Golden Gate Bridge (d. 1938)

1875 – Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, American sculptor and art collector, founded the Whitney Museum of American Art (d. 1942)

1902 – Rudolf Bing, American impresario and businessman (d. 1997)

Sir Rudolf Bing was an Austrian-born opera impresario who worked in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, most notably being General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City from 1950 to 1972.

1913 – Richard Nixon, American commander, lawyer, and politician, 37th President of the United States (d. 1994)

1941 – Joan Baez, American singer-songwriter, guitarist and activist

1283 – Wen Tianxiang, Chinese general and scholar (b. 1236)

1514 – Anne of Brittany, queen of Charles VIII of France and Louis XII of France (b. 1477)

1848 – Caroline Herschel, German-English astronomer (b. 1750)

1939 – Johann Strauss III, Austrian violinist, composer, and conductor (b. 1866)