This week in history
December 1, 1854: Eureka Stockade
Tens of thousands of miners in the Ballarat gold fields, burdened by high mining licence fees and a corrupt and brutal administration, and incensed at the jailing of unlicensed diggers, rallied and built the famous Eureka Stockade to protect themselves from an imminent military onslaught.
The stockade was overwhelmed in a sneak military attack, killing four and wounding 12.
In the aftermath, mass sympathy for the diggers and their demands caused the mining licence to be scrapped, replaced by a small annual fee. The mining administration was replaced by a smaller number of officials, and police numbers were dramatically reduced.
December 2, 1956: Cuban revolutionaries sail to Cuba in the Granma
Fidel Castro and 82 other revolutionaries boarded the Granma in Mexico and began their fight to liberate Cuba from brutal US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
Concentrating its forces in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, the July 26th Movement attacked and demoralised the dictator's military forces while winning the political support of workers, students and peasants. Political ferment spread to factories and universities, culminating in a general strike. On January 1, 1959, Batista fled and the revolutionary forces entered Havana.
December 5, 1955: Montgomery bus boycott begins
In early December 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested, jailed and fined $14. Her "crime" was to remain seated on a bus and not to offer her seat to a white man.
Montgomery, Alabama, bus segregation required African-American passengers to pay their fares at the front, then leave the bus to board and sit at the rear. Whites sat at the front, and if one white was standing, a whole row of blacks would be told to give up their seats.
Parks' arrest was the spark for a mass boycott campaign that lasted over a year. Martin Luther King, then an unknown preacher, was one of a handful people who began to agitate against the injustice.
Support snowballed, hundreds of thousands of people showing solidarity. By February 1956, the boycott was thought to have cost Montgomery merchants $1 million and the bus company 65% of its income. Legal segregation of Montgomery buses was finally overturned on December 20, 1956. The campaign and its victory gained international coverage and were a spur to building an ongoing civil rights movement.