Daily Calendar for Sunday, January 4, 2026

Daily Calendar

View daily calendar information including holidays, advice, and daily features.

Sir Isaac Newton (physicist) – 1643
Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (folklorist) – 1785
Louis Braille (Educator and creator of a tactile writing system for the visually impaired; was born in Coupvray, France) – 1809
General Tom Thumb (circus performer and little person) – 1838
Thornton W. Burgess (author) – 1874
Sterling Holloway (actor) – 1905
Barbara Rush (actress) – 1929
Don Shula (football coach; born in Grand River, Ohio) – 1930
Don Schula (football coach) – 1930
Floyd Patterson (boxer) – 1935
David Bradley (Control-Alt-Delete computer code author) – 1949
Dave Foley (actor) – 1963

Commodore Vanderbilt (entrepreneur) – 1877
Gary Calkins (scientist) – 1943
T.S. Eliot (author) – 1965
Mae Questel (actress and voice of Betty Boop, Olive Oyl, and Casper the Friendly Ghost) – 1998
Tsutomu Yamaguchi (only person certified by Japan as having survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Second World War atomic bombings) – 2010

Utah admitted to the Union as the 45th state – 1896
Mahatma Gandhi arrested and began a fast unto death to win suffrage for the untouchables – 1932
Seoul captured by Chinese Communists and North Koreans (Korean War) – 1951
The first man-made satellite, Sputnik I, disintegrated on re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere – 1958
Countries outside the Common Market formed the European Free Trade Association – 1960
The Orphan Drug Bill was signed into law. It encouraged pharmaceutical companies to produce drugs for unusual illnesses with limited markets – 1983
Doctors at the University of Miami and the Centers for Disease Control published information on one of the first cases of heterosexual transmission of AIDS in the U.S. – 1984
The worst Amtrak accident in history occured when a freight train collided with a passenger train in Chase, MD – 1987
U.S. Navy F-14s shot down two Libyan MiGs over Mediterranean – 1989
The first female Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, was sworn in – 2007
Minnesota representative Keith Ellison was sworn in as the first Muslim elected to Congress – 2007
A 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Alaska – 2013