| Year | Event
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|---|
| 1804 | Haitians defeated the French army. Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed the independence of Haiti. Revolutionaries either killed white planters or forced them to flee, destroying the plantation economy. Ex-slaves developed peasant production.
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| 1863 | President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. It only freed slaves in the South -- not the North. Dale Carnegie's analysis here.
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| 1901 | The COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA came into being.
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| 1948 | British railroads are nationalized.
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| 1959 | Fidel Castro assumes power in Cuba, the culmination of the six-year revolution that toppled the US supported government of the dictator, General Fulgencio Batista. After over 40 years of harassment by the US with great suffering of the Cuban citizens, he remains in power.
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| 1970 | National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 to require assessment of impacts of federal actions on the environment enacted.
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| 1976 | The EPA orders U.S. Steel to close its Gary, IN, coke plants because its emissions violate the Clear Air standards.
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| 1979 | President Carter (D) dumps Taiwan and establishes diplomatic relations with Beijing. Congress was not happy about it!
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| 1994 | Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela declared "Men of the Year" by Time Magazine. Time quickly cautioned that "Men and Women of the Year are those who have most Influenced history, for good or ill, in the previous 12 months (emphasis added).
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| -- | New Year's Day
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