IMPORTANT MILESTONES

 More will be added:

The Velvet Revolution dawned in Czechoslovakia when a peaceful student demonstration in Prague was brutally beaten back, sparking the biggest wave of public protests in 20 years and, on December 29, the successful overthrow, without weapons, of the oppressive communist regime (1989)

200 years ago, the women’s suffrage activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was bornin Johnstown, New York, where her lawyer father treated her as he would any son, and encouraged her to enter traditionally male dominated spheres. (1815)

• 25 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee published his formal proposal for the World Wide Web (1990)
• Marriage for same-sex couples in Connecticut commenced after the state’s Supreme Court affirmed their right to wed, rather than accept a 2005 civil union decree (2008)
• Lech Wałęsa, the Polish Solidarity leader, was released from prison after eleven months (1982)

Communist-controlled East Germany opened the gates of the Berlin Wall allowing its citizens to freely travel into West Germany. After 28 years of separation, cheering East Germans surged through at midnight, met by jubilant West Berliners on the other side. Ecstatic crowds clambered up the Wall, danced on the top and hacked off chunks with hand tools. (1989)

in 1933, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt unveiled the Civil Works Administration to create jobs for more than 4 million unemployed workers during the Great Depression. The CWA’s workers laid 12 million feet of sewer pipe and built or improved 255,000 miles of roads, 40,000 schools, 3,700 playgrounds, and nearly 1,000 airports (not to mention building 250,000 outhouses still badly needed in rural America.

• The UN General Assembly passed a resolution condemning South Africa’s racist apartheid policies and calling for UN members to cease military and economic relations (1962)