1. In 1808, Nathaniel Pope, the Secretary of the Illinois Territory, proposed a bill to Congress that would split the territory into the states of Illinois and Wisconsin. Congress approved the bill two years later, on April 18, 1810.

2. On January 19, 1861, a group of delegates from southern states met in Montgomery, Alabama to form the Confederate States of America. This move was a response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States and the growing tensions between the North and South over the issue of slavery. Illinois was a crucial state in the Union during the Civil War.

3. The first recorded game of basketball in Illinois was played on January 19, 1896, between the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa. The game, which was played at the Bartlett Gymnasium on the University of Chicago campus, ended in a 15-12 victory for the home team.

4. In 1937, Illinois Governor Henry Horner signed into law the state's first unemployment insurance program. The program provided workers who lost their jobs through no fault of their own with partial income replacement until they could find new employment.

5. On January 19, 1982, Ozzy Osbourne performed a concert at the Rosemont Horizon (now known as the Allstate Arena) in Rosemont, Illinois. The concert was part of Osbourne's Diary of a Madman tour, and was notable for an incident in which a fan threw a bat on stage, which Osbourne then bit the head off of thinking it was a rubber bat.