1863January 1 – Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation during the third year of the American Civil War, making the abolition of slavery in the Confederate states an official war goal. It proclaims the freedom of 3.1 million of the nation's four million slaves and immediately frees 50,000 of them, with the rest freed as Union armies advance. January 2 – Master Lucius Tar Paint Company (Teerfarbenfabrik Meister Lucius), predecessor of Hoechst, as a worldwide chemical manufacturing brand, founded in a suburb of Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
19691969 (MCMLXIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1969th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 969th year of the 2nd millennium, the 69th year of the 20th century, and the 10th and last year of the 1960s decade. January 1969 January 4 – The Government of Spain hands over Ifni to Morocco. January 5 Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight 701 crashes into a house on its approach to London's Gatwick Airport, killing 50 of the 62 people on board and two of the home's occupants.
2001The year's most prominent event were the September 11 attacks against the United States by Al-Qaeda, which killed 2,977 people and instigated the global war on terror. The United States led a multi-national coalition in an invasion of Afghanistan after the Taliban government did not extradite Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Internal conflicts, political or otherwise, caused shifts in leadership in multiple countries, which included the assassination of Laurent-Désiré Kabila in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Second EDSA Revolution in the Philippines, the massacre of the royal family by the crown prince in Nepal, and civil unrest in Argentina.
19961996 was designated as: International Year for the Eradication of Poverty January 8 – A Zairean cargo plane crashes into a crowded market in the center of the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kinshasa, killing 300 people. January 9–20 – Serious fighting breaks out between Russian soldiers and rebel fighters in Chechnya. January 11 – Ryutaro Hashimoto, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, becomes Prime Minister of Japan. January 13 – Italy's Prime Minister, Lamberto Dini, resigns after the failure of all-party talks to confirm him.
19891989 was a turning point in political history with the "Revolutions of 1989" which ended communism in Eastern Bloc of Europe, starting in Poland and Hungary, with experiments in power-sharing coming to a head with the opening of the Berlin Wall in November, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the overthrow of the communist dictatorship in Romania in December; the movement ended in December 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
20192019 is noted as the year in which the first known human case of COVID-19 was documented, preceding the pandemic which was declared the following year. 2019 was described as the "best year in human history" up to that point by some newspapers and media outlets in the United States, including The New York Times and WNYC. January 1 New Horizons makes a close approach to the Kuiper belt object (KBO) 486958 Arrokoth at 05:33 UTC. Jair Bolsonaro begins his four-year term as President of Brazil. Qatar withdraws from OPEC.
1997January 1 – the Emergency Alert System is introduced in the United States of America January 11 – Turkey threatens Cyprus on account of a deal to buy Russian S-300 missiles, prompting the Cypriot Missile Crisis. January 17 – A Delta II rocket carrying a military GPS payload explodes, shortly after liftoff from Cape Canaveral. January 18 – In northwest Rwanda, Hutu militia members kill 6 Spanish aid workers and three soldiers, and seriously wound another.
19951995 was designated as: United Nations Year for Tolerance World Year of Peoples' Commemoration of the Victims of the Second World War This was the first year that the Internet was entirely privatized, with the United States government no longer providing public funding, marking the beginning of the Information Age. America Online and Prodigy offered access to the World Wide Web system for the first time this year, releasing browsers that made it easily accessible to the general public.
1983The year 1983 saw both the official beginning of the Internet and the first mobile cellular telephone call. January 1 – The migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP is officially completed (this is considered to be the beginning of the true Internet). January 24 – Twenty-five members of the Red Brigades are sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1978 murder of Italian politician Aldo Moro. January 25 High-ranking Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie is arrested in Bolivia.
20002000 was designated as the International Year for the Culture of Peace and the World Mathematical Year. Popular culture holds the year 2000 as the first year of the 21st century and the 3rd millennium, because of a tendency to group the years according to decimal values, as if non-existent year zero were counted. According to the Gregorian calendar, these distinctions fall to the year 2001, because the 1st century was retroactively said to start with the year AD 1.
