What happened onJanuary 31, 1987Saturday Week 5

Today is September13, 2026 Sunday.

January 31 is a Saturday again in 1998.

About January 31

January 31 Events On this day through the years

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January 31FamousBirthdays

In loving memoryFamous DeathsJanuary 31

The World in 1987 the year Wall Street lost a fifth in a day

On Black Monday the Dow Jones fell 22.6% in one trading day. If a family had $1,000 in shares that morning, about $226 of it was gone by dinner.

Life back then

Friday night meant a walk to the video shop, where the good tapes were already gone and bringing one back late cost you a fine. Half of American homes had a VCR, so people recorded shows and swapped the cassettes at school. A fax machine was the fastest way to get a page across the world, and a phone in a car meant someone had money. U2's The Joshua Tree played from every stereo that spring, and in Japan a small team shipped the first Final Fantasy just before Christmas.

The year in 8 events

• 🕯️Mar 6 The ferry Herald of Free Enterprise capsizes soon after leaving Zeebrugge, Belgium. 193 people die.
• 📺Apr 19 The Simpsons appear as short cartoons on The Tracey Ullman Show.
• ✈️May 28 Mathias Rust, a teenage pilot from West Germany, flies through Soviet air defenses and lands a small plane next to Red Square.
• 🧱Jun 12 Standing at the Berlin Wall, President Reagan calls on Gorbachev to tear it down.
• 🌍Sep 16 Countries sign the Montreal Protocol and agree to phase out the chemicals eating the ozone layer.
• 📉Oct 19 Black Monday. Stock markets crash around the world and the Dow loses 22.6% in a single day.
• 🕊️Dec 8 Reagan and Gorbachev sign the INF Treaty in Washington, scrapping a whole class of nuclear missiles.
• 🕯️Dec 20 The ferry Doña Paz sinks after hitting a tanker off the Philippines. More than 4,000 people die.

Who Was in Charge?

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