01010101 This Day In History, January 1

45 BC: The Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar (see The Politics Of Rome and A History Of Jerusalem: Pompey And The Caesars), began to be used for the first time.

42 BC: The Roman Senate posthumously deified Julius Caesar - an irony and/or a hypocrisy, considering that he had been assassinated by Roman Senators in the Senate itself.

69: Roman legions (see Legions Of Men And Angels) in Germania Superior rejected loyalty to Galba and proclaimed Aulus Vitellius Germanicus as emperor (see Pax Romana: The Birth Of The Roman Empire).

193: The accession of Pertinax, the 19th Roman emperor (see New Testament Roman Emperors).

990: Russia adopted Rome's "Julian" Calendar.

1500: Portuguese explorers landed on the coast of South America; they named the place Rio de Janeiro ("River of January").

1502: Portuguese explorers landed on the coast of South America and named it Rio de Janeiro (River of January).

1515: King Louis XII of France (1498-1515) died at age 52. Francis, Duke of Angouleme, succeeded Louis as Francis I.

1583: Rome's Gregorian Calendar was adopted in Belgium (see Pope Gregory's Calendar).

1651: Charles II, son of Charles I, was crowned king of Scotland.

1773: In Olney, England, the hymn "Amazing Grace" was first played, by John Newton.

1785: London's oldest newspaper, The Times, began publishing as the Daily Universal Register.

1801: The Act of Union of England, Scotland and Ireland formed the United Kingdom.

1804: After leading a rebellion against the French colonial forces, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti independent of France.

1833: Britain claimed sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.

1863: Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that formally freed all slaves in the U.S.

1871: While German armies besieged Paris, a new German Reich, with the king of Prussia, Wilhelm, as its inaugural emperor, was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles.

1877: Queen Victoria of England was proclaimed empress of India.

1894: The Manchester Ship Canal in England began operation.

1901: The Commonwealth of Australia began with Edmond Barton as its first Prime Minister.

1912: China became a republic following the Wuchang Uprising.

1915: During the First World War (listen to our Sermon The European World Wars), the German submarine U-24 sank the British battleship Formidable in the English Channel, near Plymouth.

1925: The capital city of Norway, known as Christiana since 1674, resumed its name of Oslo.

1934: Alcatraz became a U.S. Federal prison. The U.S. today (2014) has the highest civilian incarceration rate in the world, with 737 U.S. citizens in every 100,000 behind bars; the U.S. has less than 5% of the world population, but its citizens compose 25% of the world's incarcerated (apart from the many military and political prisons and "interrogation centers" that are operated by the U.S. military and CIA around the world).

1946: Emperor Hirohito of Japan announced that he was not a god.

1947: The Canadian Citizenship Act 1946 came into effect, thereby converting British subjects into Canadian citizens. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King became the first Canadian citizen.

1950: In sovereign defiance to United Nations and Vatican pressure to make Jerusalem an "international city," nearly the entire Israeli government was transferred from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (see Israel In History and Prophecy: Israel Of Judah).

1956: Sudan gained independence from Britain and Egypt.

1958: The 1957 Treaty of Rome took effect, establishing a six-nation European Economic Community among West Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

1959: Cuban communist forces under Fidel Castro overthrew the CIA and Mafia-backed (the Cuba scenes in the Godfather movies are historically correct) regime of Fulgencio Batista and took control of the government of Cuba. The people of Cuba went from being ruled by a fascist dictator to being ruled by a communist dictator.

1973: Britain, Ireland and Denmark entered the European Economic Community, now called the European Union.

1975: During the "Watergate" criminal investigations, John Ehrlichman (Counsel and Assistant to the President), John Mitchell (United States Attorney General) and H.R. Haldeman (White House Chief of Staff) were found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury.

1981: Greece was admitted as the 10th member of the European Economic Community.

1992: Boutros Boutros Ghali of Egypt succeeded Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru as United Nations Secretary General.

1993: Independent Czech and Slovak Republics were established from the former Czechoslovakia.