Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon, becoming the first to cross the English Channel by air. The two men nearly crashed into the Channel along the way, however, as their balloon was weighed down by extraneous supplies such as anchors, a nonfunctional hand-operated propeller, and silk-covered oars with which they hoped they could row their way through the air. Just before reaching the French coast, the two balloonists were forced to throw nearly everything out of the balloon, and Blanchard even threw his trousers over the side in a desperate, but apparently successful, attempt to lighten the ship.

A massive mine explosion leaves nearly 100 dead in Krebs, Oklahoma, on January 7, 1892. The disaster, the worst mining catastrophe in Oklahoma’s history, was mainly due to the mine owner’s emphasis on profits over safety.

On January 7, 1946, six-year-old Suzanne Degnan is kidnapped from her home in an affluent Chicago neighborhood. Her father found a note on the floor asking for a $20,000 ransom. Although James Degnan went on the radio to plead for his daughter’s safety, the kidnapper never made any contact or further demands. Later, a police search of the neighborhood turned up the girl’s body. She had been strangled to death the night of the kidnapping, then dismembered with a hunting knife. Her remains were left in five different sewers and catch basins.

In his final State of the Union address before Congress, President Harry S. Truman tells the world that that the United States has developed a hydrogen bomb.

Just six days after the fall of the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba, U.S. officials recognize the new provisional government of the island nation. Despite fears that Fidel Castro, whose rebel army helped to overthrow Batista, might have communist leanings, the U.S. government believed that it could work with the new regime and protect American interests in Cuba.

On January 7, 1999, the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, formally charged with lying under oath and obstructing justice, begins in the Senate. As instructed in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist was sworn in to preside, and the senators were sworn in as jurors. Congress had only attempted to remove a president on one other occasion: the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, who incurred the Republican Party’s wrath after he proposed a conservative Reconstruction plan.

Around midday on January 7, 2015, gunmen raid the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people. The attack, a response to the magazine's criticism of Islam and depiction of Muhammad, demonstrated the danger of homegrown terror in Europe as well as the deep conflicts within French society.