To launch 2024, The duty offers an overview of the 24 anniversaries that will mark this new year, from the creation of Dungeons and Dragons to the move of the Expos, through Watergate and the landing in Normandy. First part.
January
January 1974: American shoemaker Gary Gygax markets role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, which he developed two years earlier in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, with a history student, Dave Arneson. The first edition of the game allows you to play as a warrior, a magician or a priest in a fantastic medieval universe inspired by Conan the Barbarian and Lord of the Rings. The thousand copies of the first printing were sold in less than a year. However, it was not until the turn of the 1980s that Dungeons and Dragons takes flight. The game today brings together millions of fans who gather in bungalow basements to face orcs, trolls and goblins with “D20”.
January 21, 1924: The father of the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his nickname Lenin, died after a long illness at the age of 53. The former chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR had seized power seven years earlier in the turmoil of the First World War. Lenin’s embalmed body is placed in a glass coffin which is then installed between the granite walls of a pyramidal mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow. The mummy of the goateed revolutionary, who became one of the main tourist attractions in the Russian capital, survived the disintegration of the USSR in 1991.
January 23, 2014: One cold night, a fire broke out in a residence for semi-autonomous elderly people in L’Isle-Verte in Bas-Saint-Laurent. The blaze fueled by strong winds left 32 victims, whose bodies were found in the middle of the icy ruins of the building. A public commission of inquiry chaired by Cyrille Delagence was set up to determine the cause of the tragedy. His report highlights the ineffectiveness of the local fire safety brigade, the lack of staff within the residence and the non-compliance of the building. Quebec makes the installation of automatic sprinklers mandatory in private residences for the elderly from the beginning of 2015. A third of buildings still do not have one in 2023, as revealed by a TVA survey.
FEBRUARY
February 4, 2004: Mark Zuckerberg launches The Facebook, a networking platform for students at Harvard University in Boston. The authorship of the project was quickly contested by the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss who obtained compensation of 65 million dollars in 2008. The website inspired by the yearbooks was opened to other American universities then to the general public in 2006. It has today nearly three billion subscribers, whose walls are covered with “sponsored” publications. The multinational renamed Meta in 2021 blocked access to Canadian journalistic content in the summer of 2023 in response to the Federal Online News Act, which aimed to compensate media for lost advertising revenue for the benefit of GAFAM.
February 29, 2004: The Oscar for best foreign language film is awarded to Denys Arcand for Barbarian invasions, which presents an intimate story of the end of life of a retired history professor, played by Rémy Girard. The Quebec filmmaker thus leaves with the golden statuette which had escaped him twice, in 1986 and in 1989, during the nomination of the Decline of the American Empire and of Jesus of Montreal. The continuation of Barbarian invasions, Dark Ageswill not have the same critical and commercial success as its predecessor when it was released in theaters in 2007.
March
March 18, 2014: The Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine is officially annexed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Russian president ordered the invasion of this territory washed by the Black Sea in the wake of pro-European demonstrations which led to the dismissal of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, close to Moscow. In the following weeks, Russian soldiers also crossed the Donbass border to support the Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Luhansk which had seceded from Ukraine. kyiv’s forces are retreating to a fortified line along which the Russian-Ukrainian conflict will resume in February 2022.
April
1er April 2004: The couple formed by Michael Hendricks, 62, and René Leboeuf, 48, got married at the Montreal courthouse at the end of a long five-year crusade and a ceremony completed in about fifteen minutes. Quebec thus joins British Columbia and Ontario, which have authorized marriage between same-sex spouses since 2003. “It’s a public ceremony where we choose each other forever and for life,” explains the eldest of the couple, Michael Hendricks, during a press briefing. In the event of divorce or death, I want everything to be settled financially. »
April 5, 1994: Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain commits suicide at his home in Seattle on the west coast. The death of the icon of the grunge generation puts an end to the meteoric rise of the group he formed with bassist Krist Novoselic, drummer Dave Grohl and guitarist Pat Smear. Cobain suffered from severe depression and stomach ailments which he treated with heroin. The suicide of the 27-year-old musician is confirmed by the autopsy, which will not prevent conspiracy theorists from constructing incredible theses about his alleged assassination. One of them will go all the way to the Washington State Court of Appeal to try to obtain the release of the 55 photos from the scene of the tragedy.
April 6, 1994: The assassination of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana in Kigali triggers the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus. The massacres carried out using grenades and machetes left 800,000 dead in almost three months in a country which then had only seven million inhabitants. They also led to the exodus of a million Rwandans who gathered in unsanitary camps in Zaire where a cholera epidemic broke out. The drama unfolds before the eyes of a handful of UN peacekeepers under the orders of General Roméo Dallaire. The Quebec soldier will vigorously denounce the inaction of the international community.
April 27, 1994: Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa four years after serving a 27-year prison sentence for sedition. The Nobel Peace Prize advocates reconciliation in a country deeply marked by racial segregation. He thus supported the national rugby team composed of a majority of white players during the 1995 World Cup played on South African soil. The politician recognizable by his batik shirts did not seek a second term in 1999. Mandela died in 2013 from a lung infection probably resulting from tuberculosis which he had contracted at the maximum security prison on Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town. .
May
May 8, 1984: Corporal Denis Lortie of the Canadian armed forces kills three people and injures thirteen others in the grounds of the Quebec Parliament building. The 25-year-old soldier is quietly heading towards the Blue Room to eliminate members of René Lévesque’s PQ government which, he says, has harmed French-speakers outside Quebec. However, he arrives early for the question period scheduled for that day. “I missed my shot, but one day, I will come back,” he announces under the eye of the automated camera of the National Assembly before throwing his dentures in the air. Sergeant-at-arms René Jalbert convinces the corporal in fatigues to surrender at the end of an interview interspersed with bursts of machine guns aimed at government desks.
June
June 2, 1924: Adoption of the Indian Citizenship Act, which extends citizenship to all Native people in the United States. The legislation promulgated by President Calvin Coolidge aims in particular to reward the involvement of indigenous people in the American army during the First World War. However, it was not until 1948 that the first peoples of the United States could exercise their right to vote in certain states.