Event of Interest
1678 Edmond Halley receives MA from The Queen's College, Oxford
- 1685 Charles II bars Jews from settling in Stockholm, Sweden
- 1689 First recorded successful separation of conjoined twins Elisabet and Catherina Meijerin, completed by Swiss surgeon Johannes Fatio in Basel [1]
- 1694 English parliamentary election set for every 3 years
- 1699 Baron Jacob Hop appointed treasurer-general of the Hague
Event of Interest
1736 Astronomer Anders Celsius takes measurements that confirm Newton's theory that the earth was an ellipsoid rather than the previously accepted sphere
Election of Interest
1828 Andrew Jackson elected 7th US President
Historic Publication
1847 Frederick Douglass publishes first issue of his newspaper "North Star"
Eureka Stockade
1854 Eureka Stockade: In what is claimed by many to be the birth of Australian democracy, more than 20 goldminers at Ballarat, Victoria, are killed by state troopers in an uprising over mining licences
Historic Siege
1863 Confederate General James Longstreet abandons his siege at Knoxville, TN
- 1864 Skirmish at Thomas' Station, Georgia
Appointment of Interest
1868 1st blacks on US trial jury appointed for Jefferson Davis trial
Event of Interest
1881 Henry Morton Stanley founds Leopoldville (now Kinshasa)
Event of Interest
1911 Willis Carrier presents his influential "Rational Psychrometric Formulae" on air conditioning to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers
- 1912 First Balkan War: The Naval Battle of Elli takes place.
- 1912 Gerrit Brinkman becomes 1st Dutch traffic officer
- 1912 Turkey, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece & Bulgaria sign weapons pact
- 1914 Dutch army opens fire on interned Belgian soldiers: 8 killed
- 1915 General Joseph Joffre becomes Commander-in-Chief of the French Armies
- 1917 After nearly 20 years of planning and construction, the Quebec Bridge finally opens to traffic after two prior collapses
- 1917 The Supreme Allied War Council, meeting at Versailles to define war aim, fails to reach an agreement
- 1920 Turkey & Armenia agree to peace treaty
- 1923 First Congressional open session broadcast via radio (Washington, D.C.)
Event of Interest
1926 Detective novelist Agatha Christie mysteriously disappears for 11 days
- 1926 Manchester Guardian (German Reichswehr/Red Army work together)
- 1930 Airborn chemicals combine with fog to kill 60 (Meuse Valley, Belgium)
- 1930 Otto Ender forms Austrian government
- 1931 Alka Seltzer goes on sale
- 1932 Gen Kurt von Schleicher becomes chancellor of Germany
- 1934 Italian colonial Tripoli & Cyrenaica annexed to Libya
- 1934 KYW-AM in Chicago Ill moves to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- 1938 AAUs decides to continue linear measuring system over metric
Event of Interest
1941 Adolf Hitler views Poltava, Ukraine
- 1943 World War II: Battle of Monte Cassino, Italy begins
- 1944 Britain's Home Guard ('Dad's Army') is officially stood down at a special farewell parade in Hyde Park, London.
- 1944 British order to disarm causes general strike in Greece
- 1944 Hungarian death march of Jews ends
- 1944 Mussert puts Seyss-Inquart plan for small Nazi-Europe
- 1944 The Greek Civil War breaks out in a newly-liberated Greece, between communists and royalists
- 1944 US 5th Armoured division occupies Brandenburg Hurtgenwald
Event of Interest
1946 US government asks UN to order dictator Francisco Franco out of Spain
Republican Party
1953 US President Dwight Eisenhower criticizes Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy for saying communists are in the Republican Party
- 1956 Britain and France pull troops out of Egypt
- 1958 Indonesian parliament accepts nationalisation of Dutch businesses
- 1959 State of emergency in Cyprus ends
- 1961 US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site
- 1962 Edith Spurlock Sampson sworn-in as 1st US black female judge
- 1962 Pravda criticizes western art
- 1964 Police arrests 800 sit-in students at University of California at Berkeley
- 1965 USSR launches Luna 8; it crashes on the Moon
- 1966 US performs underground nuclear test at Hattiesburg, Mississippi
Event of Interest
1967 1st human heart transplant performed in South Africa by Dr. Christiaan Barnard on Louis Washkansky
- 1967 Final run of "20th Century Limited" famed NY-Chicago luxury train
- 1970 US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site
- 1971 India invades West Pakistan claiming hundreds of lives and starting the full scale Indo-Pakistani War of 1971
- 1972 Convair 990A charter crashes in Tenerife Canary Island, 155 die
- 1973 Pioneer 10 passes Jupiter (1st fly-by of an outer planet) [Dec 4-GMT]
- 1975 Laos falls to communist forces; Lao People's Democratic Rep proclaimed
- 1976 Patrick J Hillery elected President of Ireland
- 1979 Christies auctions a thimble for a record $18,400
- 1979 Iran accepts constitution
- 1979 Shadow Traffic begins broadcasting in the New York City metropolitan area.
- 1980 NY Federal jury finds Reps Thompson D-NJ & Murphy, D-NY, guilty
- 1981 US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site
- 1982 35.7 cm rainfall at Big Fork, Arkansas (state record)
- 1982 77°F highest December temperature ever recorded in Cleveland, Ohio
- 1983 France performs nuclear test at Mururoa atoll
- 1984 Bhopal disaster: Union Carbide pesticide plant leak 45 tons of methyl isocyanate and other toxic compounds in Bhopal, India, kills 2,259 (official figure) - other estimates as high as 16,000 (including later deaths) and over half a million injured
- 1985 23rd Shuttle Mission (61-B)-Atlantis 2-lands at Edwards AFB
- 1988 NY Lotto pays $45 million to twelve winner (#s are 1-8-13-18-28-48)
Event of Interest
1989 Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H. W. Bush, declare the Cold War over
- 1991 Muslim Shi'ites in Beirut, Lebanon release US political hostage Alann Steen [1]
- 1991 White House Chief of Staff John Sununu resigns
- 1992 The Greek oil tanker Aegean Sea, carrying 80,000 tonnes of crude oil, runs aground in a storm while approaching La Coruña, Spain, and spills much of its cargo
- 1992 UN Security Council passes Resolution 794 authorizing US led allied forces to intervene in war-torn Somalia to restore order and allow humanitarian aid to be delivered
- 1995 Naeem Akhtar takes 10-28 for Rawalpindi B against Peshawar
- 1995 Northwestern South Carolina begins using new area code 864
- 1999 NASA loses radio contact with the Mars Polar Lander moments before the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere
- 1999 Worcester cold storage and warehouse fire in Worcester, Massachusetts claims lives of 6 firefighters
- 2005 XCOR Aerospace makes first manned rocket aircraft delivery of US Mail in Mojave, California.
- 2007 Devastating winter storms cause Chehalis River to flood many cities in Lewis County, Washington, closing 20-mile portion of Interstate 5 for several days, resulting in at least eight deaths and billions of dollars of damage
- 2014 Protests erupt in cities across the US after a grand jury decides not to charge the New York City police officer who killed Eric Garner with a choke-hold
- 2015 US Defense Secretary Ash Carter announces all combat roles in US armed forced will be opened to women
- 2016 US army decides it will not allow an oil pipeline to be built in North Dakota, after months of protests by The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe
- 2017 First pizza party in space held by astronauts of the International Space Station
- 2018 Dutch court in Arnhem rejects man's request to legally be recognised 20 years younger
Event of Interest
2019 70th anniversary of NATO marked by gathering in London of world leaders and reception by Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace
Event of Interest
2019 Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announce they are stepping down from roles at parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai to become head of both
Event of Interest
2019 Kamala Harris ends her campaign to be the Democratic candidate for president
Event of Interest
2019 World leaders discussing US President Donald Trump in unflattering terms at NATO reception caught on camera and goes viral
- 2020 AT&T Inc’s Warner Bros studio announces all its 2021 movies will stream online the same day they appear in theatres because of the pandemic
- 2020 “I actually believe they’re going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation,” warns Dr. Robert Redfield, head of US CDC about the months ahead with COVID-19
- 2022 FBI investigate a targeted attack on two electricity substations in North Carolina which closes schools and leaves around 40,000 without power for days [1]
- 2022 Former US President Donald Trump call for "termination" of all rules including US Constitution in a Truth Social post, so to overturn the 2020 election, which he again falsely claims that he won [1]