January 3
day of the year
January 3 is the third day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 362 days remain until the end of the year (363 in leap years).
Events
Pre-1600
69 – The Roman legions on the Rhine refuse to declare their allegiance to Galba, instead proclaiming their legate, Aulus Vitellius, as emperor.
250 – Emperor Decius orders everyone in the Roman Empire (except Jews) to make sacrifices to the Roman gods.
1521 – Pope Leo X excommunicates Martin Luther in the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem.
1601–1900
1653 – By the Coonan Cross Oath, the Eastern Church in India cuts itself off from colonial Portuguese tutelage.
1749 – Benning Wentworth issues the first of the New Hampshire Grants, leading to the establishment of Vermont.
1749 – The first issue of Berlingske, Denmark's oldest continually operating newspaper, is published.
1777 – American Revolutionary War: American forces under General George Washington defeat British forces at the Battle of Princeton, helping boost patriot morale.
1815 – Austria, the United Kingdom, and France form a secret defensive alliance against Prussia and Russia.
1833 – Captain James Onslow, in the Clio, reasserts British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.
The public source identifies “January 3” as day of the year. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around January and year.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2156. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1600, 1521, 1601 and 1900.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “January 3” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.