January 17 in History

In January 1912, a British party led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole, only to find that a Norwegian team under Roald Amundsen had arrived more than a month earlier. All five men who made the final push died on the return journey. Their deaths turned a lost race into one of the most enduring stories of the "Heroic Age" of Antarctic exploration, and it shaped how Britain remembered sacrifice, endurance and failure.

The Gulf War of 1990–1991 was a conflict in which a U.S.-led coalition of more than thirty countries expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait, which Iraq had invaded and annexed in August 1990. The ground phase of the war was strikingly brief, and its outcome seemed to confirm American military primacy at the moment the Cold War was ending. President George H. W. Bush spoke of a "new world order," and the United States emerged as the world's sole superpower.

The Great Hanshin earthquake, often called the Kobe earthquake, struck the Kansai region of western Japan in the early morning of 17 January 1995. Measuring magnitude 6.9 on the moment magnitude scale (the Japan Meteorological Agency rated it 7.3 on its own scale), it killed roughly 6,400 people, mostly in the port city of Kobe. It was Japan's deadliest earthquake since the 1923 Great Kanto disaster, and it forced a national rethinking of building standards, emergency response, and volunteer action.