Event of Interest
1776 George Washington's retreating army crosses Delaware River from NJ
Event of Interest
1777 Captain James Cook leaves Society Islands
- 1792 1st cremation in US: Henry Laurens
- 1794 1st issue of Herald of Rutland, VT published
- 1852 Gustav Freytag's "Die Journalisten" premieres in Breslau
- 1854 Pope Pius IX proclaims Immaculate Conception, makes Mary, free of Original Sin
- 1863 2,500 reported killed as result of fire at Jesuit Church of La Compana, Santiago, Chile
Event of Interest
1863 Abraham Lincoln issues his Amnesty Proclamation and plan for Reconstruction of the South
Historic Publication
1864 James Clerk Maxwell's paper "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field" is 1st read by the Royal Society in London (published by the Royal Society 1865)
- 1864 Pope Pius IX publishes encyclical Quanta cura ("Syllabus errorum")
Event of Interest
1864 The Clifton Suspension Bridge, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, is finally opened in Bristol, England, 5 years after his death
- 1869 20th Roman Catholic ecumenical council, Vatican I, opens in Rome
- 1869 Timothy Eaton founds T. Eaton Co. Limited in Toronto, Canada.
Event of Interest
1874 Jesse James gang takes train at Muncie Kansas
Election of Interest
1886 American Federation of Labor (AFL) formed by 26 craft unions Samuel Gompers elected AFL president
Battle of Interest
1895 Battle at Amba Alagi: Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II drives Italian General Baratieri out
Event of Interest
1902 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr became Associate Justice on US Supreme Court
Event of Interest
1912 Wilhelm II of Germany calls 'War Council'
Event of Interest
1915 John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Fields" appears anonymously in "Punch" magazine
Anglo-Irish Treaty
1921 Eamon de Valera publicly repudiates Anglo-Irish Treaty
- 1923 German-US friendship treaty signed
- 1923 Labour/Liberals win British parliament
- 1923 Salary & price freeze in Germany
- 1930 Broadway Theater opens at 1681 Broadway NYC
- 1931 Coaxial cable patented
- 1933 French nun Bernadette Soubirous, who saw the vision of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, is canonized by the Catholic Church
- 1934 Friedrich Wolf's "Professor Mamlock" premieres in Zurich
- 1935 The Japanese military police launches a violent suppression of the religious sect Oomoto, beginning with a crackdown on the sect's operational bases of Ayabe and Kameoka in Kyoto Prefecture and the arrest of its leader Onisaburo Deguchi.
- 1936 Anastasio Somoza García elected President of Nicaragua
- 1936 NAACP files suit to equalize salaries of black & white teachers
- 1938 Highest temperature for December in US recorded in La Mesa Calif
- 1941 Chełmno extermination camp opens, 50 kilometres from Łódź, Poland
- 1941 London: Dutch government-in-exile declares war on Japan
- 1941 Russian 16th army recaptures Krijukovo
- 1941 San Francisco 1st blackout, at 6:15 PM
- 1941 US and Britain declare war on Japan, US enters World War II
'Infamy' as Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor
1941 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers "Day of Infamy" speech to US Congress a day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor
Event of Interest
1943 John Van Druten's "Voice of the Turtle" premieres in NYC
- 1946 US Army rocket plane XS-1 makes 1st powered flight
- 1948 Jordan annexs Arabic Palestine
- 1949 Chinese Nationalist government moves from Chinese mainland to Formosa
- 1951 AL alters its restrictions on night games, adopting NL's suspended game rule & lifting its ban on lights for Sunday games
- 1952 1st TV acknowledgement of pregnancy (I Love Lucy)
- 1952 French troops shoot at anti-colonial demonstrators in Casablanca, Morocco, killing 50
- 1952 Isaak Ben-Zwi elected President of Israel
United Nations Speech
1953 Dwight D. Eisenhower gives his "Atoms for Peace" speech at the United Nations in New York
Event of Interest
1954 Maxwell Anderson's "Bad Seed" premieres in NYC
- 1955 Turkish government of Menderes forms
- 1956 1st test firing of Vanguard satellite program, TV-0
- 1959 Dom Mintoff demands independence for Malta
- 1961 Antwerp Belgium diocese forms
- 1961 South Africa v NZ, Durban debuts for Eddie Barlow & Peter Pollock
- 1962 114-day newspaper strike begins in NYC
- 1962 Attempted coup in British-controlled Brunei
Event of Interest
1962 Funeral for Queen Wilhelmina of Holland (New Kerk, Delft)
- 1966 US and USSR sign treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons in outer space
- 1969 Greek DC-6B crashes in storm at Athens, 93 killed
- 1969 Police surprise attack on Black-Panthers in LA
- 1970 Head of the Catholic Church in Ireland Cardinal William Conway publishes a pamphlet on the topic of segregation in education in Northern Ireland
- 1972 United Airlines crashes at Chicago's Midway Airport killing 45
- 1974 Greek monarchy rejected by referendum
- 1974 Irish Republican Socialist Party forms
- 1974 Soyuz 16 returns to Earth
- 1975 Radio station 4ZZZ begins transmitting in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia at 105.7 FM; frequency changes to 102.1 FM in 1978
- 1976 Asylum Records releases The Eagles fifth studio album "Hotel California"; it spawns two #1 singles and sells over 30 million copies
Election of Interest
1976 UN General Assembly re-elects Kurt Waldheim Secretary-General
Nobel Prize
1982 Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- 1982 Norman Mayer holds Washington Monument hostage, demanding an end to nuclear weapons. Is killed by police after 10 hrs (he had no explosives)
- 1982 Suriname army leader Desi Bouterse murders 15 opponents
- 1983 9th NASA Space Shuttle Mission: Columbia 6 lands at Edwards AFB
- 1983 Richard Baker, Zen teacher, steps down from abbotship of San Francisco Zen Center
- 1984 Europe & 64 developing countries sign Lome III treaty
- 1985 Ken O'Brien's 96 yard TD pass (NY Jet record) to Wesley Walker
- 1986 House Dems select majority leader Jim Wright as 48th speaker
- 1987 Occupied Palestinians start "intefadeh" (uprising) against Israel
- 1987 Peruvian Navy Fokker F27-400M chartered by Alianza Lima FC crashes into Pacific Ocean 7 miles from Jorge Chávez International Airport near Callao; 43 killed, only pilot survives
Treaty of Interest
1987 US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sign a treaty eliminating medium range nuclear missiles
- 1989 Great Britain performs nuclear test
- 1990 Indians agree to a lease new ballpark in Gateway (Jacobs Field)
- 1990 Spacecraft Galileo flies by Earth at an altitude of 597 miles (960 km) to use the planet's gravity to build speed on its way to Jupiter [1]
- 1991 Russia, Belorussia & Ukraine form Commonwealth of Ind States
- 1991 The Romanian Constitution is adopted in a referendum.
- 1992 Spacecraft Galileo makes its second and closest flyby of Earth at a minimum distance of 305 km for a gravity assist on its way to Jupiter [1]
- 1993 30 killed at religious rebellion in Algeria
- 1993 Dow-Jones hits record 3734.53
- 1993 Storm hits western Europe, 11 killed in England
- 1994 Fire in cinema in Karamay China, 310 killed
- 1998 Tadjena massacre: 81 people are killed by armed groups in Algeria.
- 2002 The Caribbean Community Heads of Government meet with the Government of Cuba and declare the date to be "CARICOM-Cuba Day" - To celebrate diplomatic ties between the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and Cuba.
- 2004 Cuzco Declaration is signed in Cuzco, Peru, establishing the Union of South American Nations
- 2005 Ante Gotovina, Croatian army general accused of war crimes, is captured in the Playa de las Américas, Tenerife by the Spanish police.
- 2008 Kirsty Williams elected as Leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats. The first female leader of a political party in Wales.
- 2009 Bombings in Baghdad, Iraq kill 127 and injure 448.
- 2012 UN climate conference agrees to extend the Kyoto Protocol to 2020
Event of Interest
2018 US President Donald Trump announces John Kelly will be stepping down as White House Chief of Staff at the end of the year
- 2019 Fire in an illegal bag factory in Delhi, India, kills 43
- 2019 Polar explorers Mike Horn and Børge Ousland complete an 1,800 km (1,118 miles) journey on drifting ice in darkness in the Arctic
- 2019 Sanna Marin becomes Finland's youngest-ever Prime Minister at the age of 34
- 2020 Former Israeli space security chief Haim Eshed says Aliens and a Galactic Federation exist and Donald Trump knows about it, in article published in the Jerusalem Post
- 2020 The UK begins vaccinating for COVID-19 using the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine
Event of Interest
2021 Olaf Scholz is sworn as the new Chancellor of Germany, replacing Angela Merkel after 16 years
- 2022 Iran announces first known execution of a protester from recent anti-government unrest, after convicting a man in a revolutionary court of "moharebeh" (enmity against God) [1]
- 2022 UN investigation in DR Congo finds 131 people were massacred in November by M23 rebel group in Kishishe and Bambo villages, in east of the country [1]