Shimla, Jan 29
2015
Australian novelist Colleen McCullough, best known for her sweeping romance The Thorn Birds (1977) and for the Masters of Rome series (1990–2007), died at age 77.
2004
Author Janet Frame, who created a unique body of work that presents perhaps the most-recognized voice of New Zealand to those outside her native country, died at age 79.
1966
Brazilian football (soccer) player Romário, who was one of the most prolific goal scorers in the sport’s history, was born in Rio de Janeiro.
1964
The British film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a landmark Cold War farce directed by Stanley Kubrick, was released in theatres.
1936
Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb were among the first players to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
1924
The first machine for rolling ice cream cones was patented by Carl Rutherford Taylor of Cleveland, Ohio.
1919
The Prohibition (Eighteenth) Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified and went into effect the following year.
1900
The American League of Professional Baseball Clubs was organized in Philadelphia.
1886
German mechanical engineer Karl Benz patented the first practical automobile powered by an internal-combustion engine.
1880
American actor and comedian W.C. Fields was born in Philadelphia.
1860
Russian author Anton Chekhov—who was known for his plays and short stories, which often lacked complex plots and neat solutions—was born.
1845
American author Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven was first published, appearing in the New York Mirror; a melancholy evocation of lost love, it became one of the best-known poems in American literature.
1819
British East India Company administrator Sir Stamford Raffles established the port of Singapore.
