Welcome to the Lunar New Year of the Earth Ox, and happy Têt, Losar and Tsagaan Sar, too. To find out some of the things that happened during the last year of the Earth Ox, click the “Read More” button.

The last Earth Ox year began on January 29, 1949, and it was a year that saw a whole lot of geo-political settling in the aftermath of various conflicts around the world. The Federal Republic of Germany was established, Newfoundland and Labrador joined Confederation, Ireland left the Commonwealth, Israel was admitted to the United Nations, and the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed while the leadership of the Republic of China evacuated to Taiwan.

Whew. We’ll have to wait and see whether any of this year’s events will have comparably lasting effects on the maps of the world. 

Photo by Phoby, courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s online digital media library.