MOMENTS IN TIME - Dec. 23, 2010

The History Channel

* On Jan. 1, 45 B.C., New Year’s Day is celebrated on January 1 for the first time as the Julian calendar takes effect. In designing his new calendar, Roman ruler Julius Caesar enlisted the aid of Sosigenes, an Alexandrian astronomer, who calculated a year to be 365 and 1/4 days.

* On Dec. 29, 1890, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. The cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers and demanded they surrender their weapons. A brutal massacre followed, with nearly half those killed being women and children.

* On Dec. 30, 1936, in one of the first sit-down strikes in the United States, autoworkers occupy the General Motors Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Mich. The strike lasted 44 days. GM’s output went from a robust 50,000 cars in December to just 125 in February.

* On Dec. 27, 1941, the federal Office of Price Administration first begins to ration automobile tires. Only those who demonstrated need were allowed to purchase cars, metal typewriters, bicycles, stoves and rubber shoes. Butter, coffee, sugar, cooking fat, gasoline and non-rubber shoes also were rationed.

* On Jan. 2, 1962, The Weavers, who sparked the folk music revival of the 1950s and ‘60s, are banned from appearing on NBC when they refuse to sign an oath of political loyalty. The group saw their careers nearly destroyed during the Red Scare of the early 1950s, and they lost their recording contract over their leftist politics.

* On Dec. 28, 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “literary investigation” of the police-state system in the Soviet Union, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956”, is published in the original Russian in Paris. On Feb. 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his citizenship and deported.

* On Dec. 31, 1984, Bernhard Goetz, a white man dubbed the “subway vigilante” after he shot four young black men on a New York City subway train, turns himself in at a police station. Goetz was viewed by some people as a hero, fighting back against his attackers. In 1987, a Manhattan jury acquitted Goetz of criminal assault and attempted murder.

(c) 2010 King Features Synd., Inc.