On January 2, 1921, in a theater in Hradec Králové, Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. received its world premiere. The initials stood for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” a fictional company that created a line of intelligent workers, and from which the word “robot” was coined. In Czech, robota means forced labour of the kind that serfs were once required to perform on their masters’ lands; it is derived from rab, meaning “slave.”
On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was banned.
This was not a ban on the slave trade as such, of course, sadly.
On December 31, 1695, Englanders received a new tax, a window tax. One of the main responses to this was the bricking up of many British windows.
This last day of the year in 1991 marked the complete cessation of all institutions of the Soviet Union.
New Year’s Eve 1992 saw the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This has been dubbed the “Velvet Divorce.”
On December 30, 1919, Lincoln’s Inn in London, England, admitted its first female bar student.
On December 29, 1911, Mongolia gained independence from the Qing Dynasty.
The first Vice President of the United States to resign his office occurred on December 28, 1832, when the seventh, John C. Calhoun — serving at the job since March 4, 1825, under two presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson — vacated the position to take up his new calling as Senator from South Carolina (December 29, 1832 – March 3, 1843). After an unsuccessful bid for the presidency and a short stint as Secretary of State, Calhoun returned to the Senate on November 26, 1845, dying in office on March 31, 1850.
On the same date three years later, the great leader Osceola led his Seminole warriors into the Second Seminole War against the United States Army. Eleven years after that, Iowa joined the union as the 29th state.