January 15 1919: Rosa Luxemburg, founder of the Spartacus League, is murdered by the Germany Social Democratic government. "The madness will cease and the bloody daemons of hell will vanish only when workers in Germany and France, England and Russia finally awake from their stupor, extend to each other a brotherly hand and drown out the bestial chorus of imperialist war-mongers" 

 January 13, 1898: Émile Zola publishes his infamous letter, "J'accuse...!" accusing the French government of framing Jewish general Alfred Dreyfus for sabotage. 

 January 12, 1904: Herero soldiers rebel against German colonial rule in present-day Namibia. It is estimated that the Herero population was reduced from 80,000 to 15,000 in the following three years through systemic violence and deportation.
 

 January 11, 1912: Workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, walk out of over a race-based pay cut in what would become known as the "bread and roses" strike. Soon an Industrial Workers of the World-organized strike shuts down every textile mill in the city. 

 January 9, 1959: Rigoberta Menchú Tum, indigenous revolutionary and Nobel Peace Prize winner, is born in Chimel, Guatemala. "[My cause] wasn't born out of something good, it was born out of wretchedness and bitterness. It has been radicalized by the poverty in which my people live." 

 January 7, 1957: Djamila Bouhired, the "Arab Joan of Arc" and member of the National Liberation Front, sets off a bomb in an Algiers café, precipitating the Battle of Algiers, a pivotal episode in the Algerian struggle for independence against the French. "It was the most beautiful day of my life because I was confident that I was going to be dying for the sake of the most wonderful story in the world." 

 January 6, 1977: Charter 77, a document criticizing the Czech government for its human rights record, is published; it is violently suppressed. 

 January 5, 1971: Angela Davis - black feminist, philosopher, and prison abolitionist - declares her innocence in a California court over the kidnapping and murder of a judge. "Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practices of disappearing vast number of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business." 

 January 3, 1961: Angolan peasants employed by the Portuguese-Belgium cotton plantation company Cotonang begin protests over poor working conditions, setting off the Angolan struggle for independence from Portugal. "Tomorrow we will sing songs of freedom wen when we commemorate the day this slavery ends." 

 January 1, 1994: Zapatista forces overtake towns in Chiapas, beginning an ongoing revolution against the Mexican state. "The dispossessed, we are millions, and we thereby call upon our brothers and sisters to join n this struggle as the only path."