Historical Writings

Six Protestants are executed by fire at Canterbury for their religious views - Kempe, Waterer, Prowting, Lowick, Hudson, and Hay.

The citizens of Massachusetts spent a day of fasting and repentance for their roles in the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. Judge Samuel Sewall, who had presided over many of those 20 capital judgments, published a written confession acknowledging his own "blame and shame."

Isaac Watts is called as pastor to Newington where he will set a high standard of preaching and overcome the resistance of the established church to the introduction of new hymns.

The University of Notre Dame was chartered under Roman Catholic auspices in Indiana.

Mt. Sinai Hospital was incorporated by Sampson Simson and eight associates in NY City. It was the first Jewish hospital in the U.S.

Lutheran founder of the Missouri Synod, C.F.W. Walther warned in a letter: 'Inactivity is the beginning of all vice.'

Alice Wood, a Canadian Methodist Holiness missionary, arrives in Argentina where she will become one of the first missionaries to establish a permanent Pentecostal presence in Buenos Aires. By about the middle of the twentieth century, Pentecostals will have converted as many as one tenth of Argentina's people.

Birth of James Edwin Orr in Belfast, Ireland. January 15th will be an important day in his life: on it he will be converted, married, and ordained.

Israeli archaeologists reported uncovering the first evidence supporting the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. by military forces of the ancient Roman Empire.

Muslims in Niger throw Molotov cocktails through the windows of sixty-eight churches, burning them to the ground in an effort to eliminate the Christian presence from the nation. The Christians, however, will regroup, pray for their attackers, and with the help of the Samaritan's Purse organization rebuild fifty of their churches within two years, many of them stronger and in more defensible locations.