Today is Tuesday, January 23, the 23rd day of 2018. There are 342 days left in the year.

1571 The Royal Exchange opens in London.

1656 Blaise Pascal publishes the first of his Lettres provinciales.

1719 The Principality of Liechtenstein is created within the Holy Roman Empire.

1789 Georgetown College, the first Catholic university in the United States, is founded in Georgetown, Maryland ( now a part of Washington, D. C.)

1846 Slavery in Tunisia is abolished.

1849 Elizabeth Blackwell is awarded her M. D. by the Geneva Medical College of Geneva, New York, becoming the United States’ first female doctor.

1899 Emilio Aguinaldo is sworn in as President of the First Philippine Republic.

1909 RMS Republic, a passenger ship of the White Star Line, becomes the first ship to use the CQD distress signal after colliding with another ship, the SS Florida, off the Massachusetts coastline, where six people re killed.

1912 The International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague.

1920 The Netherlands refuses to surrender the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany to the Allies.

1957 American inventor Walter Frederick Morrison sells the rights to his flying disc to the Wham- O toy company, which later renames it the ‘ Frisbee’.

1960 The bathyscaphe USS Trieste breaks a depth record by descending to 10,911 metres in the Pacific Ocean.

1961 The Portuguese luxury cruise ship Santa Maria is hijacked by opponents of the Estado Novo regime with the intention of waging war until dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar is overthrown.

1964 The 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting the use of poll taxes in national elections, is ratified.

1973 US President Richard Nixon announces that a peace accord has been reached in Vietnam.

1986 The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts its first members: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley.

1997 Madeleine Albright becomes the first woman to serve as United States secretary of state.

1998 Netscape announced Mozilla, with the intention to release Communicator code as open source.

2002 U. S. journalist Daniel Pearl is kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan and subsequently murdered.

2003 A very weak signal from Pioneer 10 is detected for the last time, but no usable data can be extracted.