January 1 ...

In 404 AD the last gladiator competition was held in Rome. In 1622 the Papal Chancery adopted January 1st as the beginning of the New Year (instead of March 25th). In 1735 Paul Revere was born in Boston, MA. In 1752 Betsy Ross was born in Philadelphia, PA. In 1772 the first traveler's checks were issued in London. In 1785 London's oldest daily paper The Daily Universal Register (later renamed The Times in 1788) was first published. In 1797 Albany became the capital of New York state, replacing New York City. In 1801 Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi became the first person to discover an asteroid; he named it Ceres. In 1804 Haiti gained its independence. In 1808 the US prohibited import of slaves from Africa. In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all slaves in the rebel states were free. In 1879 author E.M. Forster was born in London, England. In 1892 Ellis Island Immigrant Station formally opened in New York; also on this day, Brooklyn and New York merged to form the single city of New York. In 1898 Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island were consolidated into New York City. In 1901 the Commonwealth of Australia was founded. In 1902 the first Tournament of Roses (later the Rose Bowl) collegiate football game was played in Pasadena, CA. In 1909 the first payments of old-age pensions were made in Britain, with people over 70 receiving five shillings a week. In 1919 J.D. Salinger was born in New York City; also on this day, George Halas was named the MVP of the Rose Bowl. In 1926 the Rose Bowl was carried coast to coast on network radio for the first time. In 1937 the First Cotton Bowl football game was played in Dallas, TX, with TCU beating Marquette, 16-6. In 1939 the Hewlett-Packard partnership was formed. In 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued a declaration called the "United Nations"; it was signed by 26 countries that vowed to create an international postwar World War II peacekeeping organization. In 1945 France was admitted to the United Nations. In 1953 country singer Hank Williams, 29, died of a drug and alcohol overdose while en route to a concert date in Canton, OH. In 1956 Sudan gained its independence. In 1959 Fidel Castro overthrew the government of Fulgencio Batista, and seized power in Cuba. In 1975 the magazine Popular Electronics announced the invention of a personal computer called Altair. MITS, using an Intel microprocessor, developed the computer. In 1984 AT&T was broken up into 22 Bell System companies under terms of an antitrust agreement with the Justice Department. In 1987 a pro-democracy rally took place in Beijing's Tiananmen Square (China). In 1993 Czechoslovakia split into two separate states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The peaceful division had been engineered in 1992. In 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. In 1995 the World Trade Organization came into existance. The group of 125 nations monitors global trade. In 1999 the euro became currency for 11 Member States of the European Union. Coins and notes were not available until January 1, 2002. In 2004 Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to the US Congress, died at age 80; also on this day, California Congressman Robert T. Matsui died at age 63.