December 1960 in History

Events in History

Dec 1 Patrice Lumumba caught in the Congo

Dec 2 Paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey discovers 1.4 million year old Homo erectus (Olduvai Hominid 9) in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania

Dec 5 Ghana drops diplomatic relations with Belgium
Dec 7 Ivory Coast claims independence from France
Dec 10 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine awarded to Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Peter Medawar for work on tissue grafting

Dec 10 Willard Libby wins the Nobel prize in Chemistry for his work developing carbon-14 dating (radiocarbon dating).

Dec 11 Black Sunday - Riot in Algiers; pro-independence demonstrations turn violent, 114 die
Dec 11 Cleveland Brown's Bernie Parrish sets club record for longest interception return with a 92 yard run
Dec 13 Laos General Fumi Nosavang occupies Vientiane
Dec 14 Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) forms
Dec 16 TWA 266 & United 826 collide over Staten Island, kills 134
Dec 18 General Meeting of UN condemns apartheid
Dec 19 Fire aboard USS Constellation, under construction at Brooklyn (50 die)
Dec 19 Mercury-Redstone 1A reaches 210 km in test flight
Dec 20 Auschwitz commandant Richard Bar arrested in German FR
Dec 20 The National Liberation Front, better known as the Viet Cong, is officially formed in South Vietnam
Dec 23 Jan De Quay's Dutch government falls
Dec 23 King Saud of Saudi Arabia takes power
Dec 24 Dutch bishops question papacy values
Dec 27 France performs nuclear test

Dec 2 Deb Haaland, American politician (1st Native American to head a cabinet agency as Secretary of the Interior 2021-), born in Winslow, Arizona
Dec 8 Lim Guan Eng, Secretary-General of the Malaysian Democratic Action Party (DAP), born in Johor Bahru, Malaysia
Dec 9 Dobroslav Paraga, Croatian politician and editor, born in Zagreb, FPR Yugoslavia
Dec 14 Catherine Coleman, American USAF officer and astronaut (STS 73), born in Charleston, South Carolina
Dec 14 Ebrahim Raisi, Iranian jurist and politician (President of Iran 2021-), born in Mashhad, Iran

Dec 14 American lawyer and former FBI director, born in Yonkers, New York

Dec 18 South Korean prosecutor and President of South Korea (2022-), born in Seoul, South Korea

Dec 19 Michelangelo Signorile, American writer
Dec 20 Carolyn Seaward, Miss United Kingdom (1979), born in Devonshire, England
Dec 20 Nalo Hopkinson, Jamaican-Canadian writer (Brown Girl in the Ring; The Salt Roads), born in Kingston, Jamaica
Dec 21 Sherry Rehman, Pakistani politician and diplomat (Federal Minister of Climate Change), born in Karachi, Pakistan
Dec 22 Jean-Michel Basquiat, American artist (Gray, SAMO), born in Brooklyn, NYC, New York (d. 1988)
Dec 22 Patrick Fitzgerald, American lawyer, born in NYC, New York
Dec 23 [Zindziswa] Zindzi Mandela, South African politician, born in Johannesburg, South Africa (d. 2020)
Dec 26 Jim Toomey, American syndicated cartoonist, born in Alexandria, Virginia
Dec 29 Thomas Lubanga, Congolese war criminal, born in Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Dec 1 Ernst Rowohlt, German publisher (Rowohlt-Verlag), dies at 73
Dec 12 Christopher Hornsrud, Prime Minister of Norway (3 weeks), dies at 101
Dec 26 Eduard Ludwig, German architect (Hansa quarter, Berlin), dies at 54
Dec 26 Watsuji Tetsuro, Japanese philosopher (b. 1889)
Dec 29 Eden Phillpotts, English novelist, poet and playwright (Red Madymaynes), dies at 98
Dec 29 Philippe Panneton, Canadian physician, diplomat and writer (Trente arpents), dies at 65