What happened on 3 January?

8 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1868 Meiji Restoration Emperor Meiji restored to political authority; abolition of the shogunate; programme of accelerated modernisation begins.
2. 1602 Battle of Kinsale Mountjoy's English army routs Hugh O'Neill and his Spanish allies at Kinsale, breaking the Nine Years' War and Gaelic Ireland's last great resistance; the Flight of the Earls follo
3. 1868 Edo period ends Conventional end of Edo period.
4. 1892 Born: J. R. R. Tolkien Oxford philologist whose Middle-earth defined modern fantasy.
5. 1883 Born: Clement Attlee Labour Prime Minister whose 1945–51 government created the modern welfare state.
6. 1521 Luther excommunicated Leo X's bull Decet Romanum Pontificem casts Luther out after he burned the warning bull in public — the breach that would split Western Christendom for good.
7. 1959 Alaska and Hawaii statehood The US admits its 49th and 50th states, completing the union and adding its only non-contiguous territories.
8. 2019 Chang'e 4 lands on the lunar far side The first landing on the Moon's hidden hemisphere, relayed through a satellite parked beyond it — a first no one else had attempted in sixty years of lunar flight.