Following the death of Edward the Confessor on January 5, 1066, the Witenagemot elected Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, as king, and he was crowned the very next day at Westminster Abbey. His swift coronation, taken partly to preempt rival claimants, provoked William of Normandy to invade later that year, culminating in the Battle of Hastings and the end of Anglo-Saxon rule in England.

Church records and later testimony from the Rehabilitation trial place Joan's birth on Epiphany, January 6, 1412, in the small village of Domrémy in northeastern France. The date carried symbolic weight for later hagiographers, linking her birth to the feast celebrating the arrival of the Magi. She would grow up to lead French forces against the English during the Hundred Years' War before her capture and execution.

At the annual Blessing of the Waters ceremony marking Epiphany on the frozen Neva River in St. Petersburg, a ceremonial artillery salute went wrong when a cannon discharged live shrapnel rather than a blank charge, striking near the imperial party. Tsar Nicholas II escaped injury, but the incident unsettled a court already anxious about revolutionary unrest following the 1905 revolution.

Mexican revolutionary forces loyal to Pancho Villa halted a train near Santa Ysabel, Chihuahua, and pulled 18 American mining employees from the cars, shooting 17 of them dead. The massacre, retaliation for US recognition of Villa's rival Venustiano Carranza, inflamed American public opinion and set the stage for Villa's raid on Columbus, New Mexico, weeks later and the subsequent US Punitive Expedition into Mexico.

Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, reportedly needing cash partly to finance Broadway productions, sold star player Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125,000, then the largest sum ever paid for a baseball player. The transaction transformed the Yankees into baseball's dominant franchise for decades while the Red Sox, who had won five of the sport's first sixteen World Series, would not win another championship until 2004.

NASA finalized the roster for Apollo 14, notable as the flight that would return America's first astronaut, Alan Shepard, to space and to the Moon nearly a decade after his historic 1961 suborbital flight. The mission, launching later that month, targeted the Fra Mauro highlands—originally the destination for the aborted Apollo 13—and would make Shepard, at 47, the oldest person to walk on the lunar surface at that time.

North Korea's state media declared it had conducted its first successful hydrogen bomb test, detected as a 5.1-magnitude tremor near the Punggye-ri test site. The announcement, made with characteristic bombast about self-reliance and deterrence against the United States, drew swift condemnation from the UN Security Council, though experts later disputed whether the device was a true thermonuclear weapon or a boosted fission bomb.

As a joint session of Congress convened to certify Joe Biden's presidential election victory, thousands of supporters of President Donald Trump breached security barriers and stormed the US Capitol building, some engaging in violent clashes with police. Lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence were evacuated, five people died in connection with the events, and Congress ultimately reconvened that night to complete the certification.