TODAY IN HISTORY

 

Batista forced out by Castro-led revolution

On January 1, 1959, facing a popular revolution spearheaded by Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista flees the island nation. Amid celebration and chaos in the Cuban capitol of Havana, the U.S. debated how best to deal with the radical Castro and the ominous rumblings of anti-Americanism in Cuba.

The U.S. government had supported Batista, a former soldier and Cuban dictator from 1933 to 1944, who seized power for a second time in a 1952 coup. After Castro and a group of followers, including the South American revolutionary Che Guevara (1928-1967), landed in Cuba to unseat the dictator in December 1956, the U.S. continued to back Batista. Suspicious of what they believed to be Castro’s leftist ideology and worried that his ultimate goals might include attacks on the U.S.’s significant investments and property in Cuba, American officials were nearly unanimous in opposing his revolutionary movement.

Cuban support for Castro’s revolution, however, grew in the late 1950s, partially due to his charisma and nationalistic rhetoric, but also because of increasingly rampant corruption, greed, brutality and inefficiency within the Batista government. This reality forced the U.S. to slowly withdraw its support from Batista and begin a search in Cuba for an alternative to both the dictator and Castro; these efforts failed.

On January 1, 1959, Batista and a number of his supporters fled Cuba for the Dominican Republic. Tens of thousands of Cubans (and thousands of Cuban Americans in the U.S.) celebrated the end of the dictator’s regime. Castro’s supporters moved quickly to establish their power. Judge Manuel Urrutia was named as provisional president. Castro and his band of guerrilla fighters triumphantly entered Havana on January 7.

The U.S. attitude toward the new revolutionary government soon changed from cautiously suspicious to downright hostile. After Castro nationalized American-owned property, allied himself with the Communist Party and grew friendlier with the Soviet Union, America’s Cold War enemy, the U.S severed diplomatic and economic ties with Cuba and enacted a trade and travel embargo that remains in effect, although some restriction were loosened under the Obama administration. In April 1961, the U.S. launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, an unsuccessful attempt to remove Castro from power. Subsequent covert operations to overthrow Castro, born August 13, 1926, failed and he went on to become one of the world’s longest-ruling heads of state. Fulgencio Batista died in Spain at age 72 on August 6, 1973. In late July 2006, an unwell Fidel Castro temporarily ceded power to his younger brother Raul. Fidel Castro officially stepped down in February 2008; he died on November 25, 2016. 

SPORTS

2008

Sidney Crosby wins first NHL game played outdoors in US

On January 1, 2008, with snowflakes falling around him in Buffalo, Pittsburgh Penguins star Sidney Crosby slips a shot past Ryan Miller to win the NHL’s inaugural Winter Classic—the first regular-season game in league history played outdoors in the United States. 

SPORTS

2006

New England Patriots' Doug Flutie makes NFL’s first drop kick since 1941

On January 1, 2006, following a New England Patriots touchdown against the Miami Dolphins, Doug Flutie enters the game for what initially appears to be a two-point conversion play. After getting his teammates set in a “very strange formation,” Flutie backs up well beyond the normal shotgun position, to the 13-yard line, catches the snap, takes a couple steps forward, drops the ball off the ground and quickly kicks it through the uprights. His teammates immediately mob him after the kick—the first successful drop kick since 1941.

US GOVERNMENT

1994

The North American Free Trade Agreement comes into effect

On January 1, 1994, one of the largest and most significant trade pacts in world history comes into effect. The North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico removed most of the trade barriers between the three countries, but it has been controversial in all three since its inception. Ronald Reagan was the first U.S. president to propose a trilateral free trade agreement between the nations of North America. His successor, George H.W. Bush, opened negotiations with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, which Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney later joined. The goal was to do away with most tariffs and barriers to the movement of people and products across the three countries' borders. The debate over ratification of the treaty was heated in all three countries, with critics warning that it would have adverse affects on the ability of workers to organize and, as a result, depress wages. There were also environmental concerns, which were addressed by a side deal. All three nations ratified NAFTA in the end, and President Bill Clinton signed it into law on December 8, 1993. it took effect on New Year's Day 1994.

HOLIDAYS

45 B.C.

The Julian calendar takes effect for the first time on New Year’s Day

In 45 B.C., New Year’s Day is celebrated on January 1 for the first time in history as the Julian calendar takes effect. Soon after becoming Roman dictator, Julius Caesar decided that the traditional Roman calendar was in dire need of reform. 

LATIN AMERICA

1803

Haitian independence proclaimed

Two months after his defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte’s colonial forces, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaims the independence of Saint-Domingue, renaming it Haiti after its original Arawak name. In 1791, a revolt erupted on the French colony, and Toussaint Louverture, a formerly  enslaved man, took control of the rebels. Gifted with natural military genius, Toussaint organized an effective guerrilla war against the island’s colonial population. He found able generals in two other formerly enslaved men, Dessalines and Henri Christophe, and in 1795 he made peace with revolutionary France following its abolishment of slavery. Toussaint became governor-general of the colony and in 1801 conquered the Spanish portion of island, freeing the enslaved peoples there.

U.S. PRESIDENTS

1863

Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation

On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation. Attempting to stitch together a nation mired in a bloody civil war, Abraham Lincoln made a last-ditch, but carefully calculated, decision regarding the institution of slavery in America. 

WESTWARD EXPANSION

1863

A Nebraska farmer files the first homestead claim

A farmer named Daniel Freeman submits the first claim under the new Homestead Act for a property near Beatrice, Nebraska. Signed into law in 1862 by President Abraham Lincoln, the Homestead Act essentially legalized the long-standing American practice of squatting on the vast federal landholdings in the West, much of it taken from Native American tribes. Ever since the United States became a nation, intrepid pioneers rushed westward well before the government was prepared to oversee an ordered transfer of land into private hands. Ignoring legal niceties like titles or rent payments, the pioneers began farming and ranching wherever they found promising land, and often the government simply looked the other way.

ART, LITERATURE, AND FILM HISTORY

1958

Johnny Cash plays San Quentin State Prison

“Folsom Prison Blues” gave Johnny Cash his first top-10 country hit in 1956, and his live concert performance at Folsom—dramatized memorably in the film Walk The Line—gave his flagging career a critical jump-start in 1968. 

ART, LITERATURE, AND FILM HISTORY

1818

Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" is published

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is published. The book, by 20-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, is frequently called the world’s first science fiction novel. In Shelley’s tale, a scientist animates a creature constructed from dismembered corpses. 

ART, LITERATURE, AND FILM HISTORY

1915

A preview of "The Birth of a Nation" is shown to audiences

On January 1, 1915, audiences file into the Loring Opera House at 3745 7th Street in Riverside, California, for a sneak preview of D.W. Griffith’s first full-length feature film, The Clansman. Later renamed The Birth of a Nation, the controversial Civil War epic would become Hollywood’s first blockbuster hit. After making more than 450 short films for the Biograph movie studio, Griffith left and began secretly working on his own private project, which would become The Clansman. Based on a novel of the same name by Thomas Dixon, Griffith’s career-making film depicted the white supremacist organization the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War era in the South. The later title change reflected Griffith’s view that it was the Civil War—and specifically the victory of the Union over the Confederacy—that bound the collection of disparate American states into a true nation under one central authority.

CRIME

1973

The real-life murder behind "Looking For Mr. Goodbar"

Roseann Quinn, a 27-year-old New Yorker, visits Tweed’s Bar on the Upper West Side and is picked up by her soon-to-be killer. The incident inspires the cautionary novel and subsequent movie Looking For Mr. Goodbar. 

AMERICAN REVOLUTION

1781

Mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line

On January 1, 1781, 1,500 soldiers from the Pennsylvania Line—all 11 regiments under General Anthony Wayne’s command—insist that their three-year enlistments are expired, kill three officers in a drunken rage and abandon the Continental Army’s winter camp at  Morristown, New Jersey. British General Henry Clinton sent emissaries from New York to meet the mutineers and offer them full pardon and the pay owed them by the Continental Army in exchange for joining the Redcoats. Instead, the men turned south towards Princeton, which they captured on January 3, intending to march on Philadelphia and Congress. From Princeton, the mutineers dispatched envoys to meet with General Wayne, who was following behind them. They aired their grievances and handed over Clinton’s men for eventual execution.

WORLD WAR II

1942

United Nations created

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issue a declaration, signed by representatives of 26 countries, called the “United Nations.” The signatories of the declaration vowed to create an international postwar peacekeeping organization. 

WORLD WAR II

1946

Several Japanese soldiers surrender after learning Pacific War has ended

An American soldier accepts the surrender of about 20 Japanese soldiers who only discovered that the war was over by reading it in the newspaper. On the island of Corregidor, located at the mouth of Manila Bay, a lone soldier on detail for the American Graves Registration was busy recording the makeshift graves of American soldiers who had lost their lives fighting the Japanese. He was interrupted when approximately 20 Japanese soldiers approached him waving a white flag. They had been living in an underground tunnel built during the war and learned that their country had already surrendered when one of them ventured out in search of water and found a newspaper announcing Japan’s defeat.