A Look Back in Time

[Guardian Angel]

I was watching the history channel with my husband a few days ago and learned that December 16, 1944, the Battle of the Bulge began.  I thought it might be fun to look back at things that happened along the way.

For instance in 1913 Charlie Chaplin reported to work at Keystone Studios for the first time and in 1773 on this day the Boston Tea Party occured.

In 1972 Kissinger announced that North Vietnamese left negotiations.

Let's see what the rest of you can come up with.

[pesoto74]

1653: Oliver Cromwell becomes 'Lord protector of England'

1773: Boston Tea Party' , when the 'Sons of Liberty' dumped 18,000 worth of tea in the Boston harbor

1864: Union troops led by General George H. Thomas devastated Confederate forces at Nashville, Tennessee. The battle had begun the day before when Thomas initiated an attack after waiting some two weeks for troop reinforcements and favorable weather.

1915: Albert Einstein publishes the General Theory of Relativity

1961: Martin Luther King is arrested in Albany, Georgia while attempting to desegregate public facilities in the city.

1971: Don McLean's 8+ minute version of "American Pie" released

[Guardian Angel]

1843-"A Christmas Carol" is published.

1878- Gold exchange is shut down.

1903- First successful flight lasted 12 seconds, covered 120 feet.

1939- Edgar Bergman debuts on radio with Charlie McCarthy.

1963- Clean Air act passed Congress.

1969- Tiny Tim married on Tonight Show.

1975- "Squeaky" Fromme sentenced to life for her attempt to  assassinate Gerald Ford.

1979- Budwiser Rocket car breaks sound barrier.

1986- Murdered Richard Kuklenskie nabbed.

[pesoto74]

1969: The US Air Force terminates Project Blue Book, which investigated reports of UFO's.

1997: An episode of the animated TV show Pokemon induces seizures in at least 750 Japanese children. The convulsive sequence contains the depiction of a "vaccine bomb," followed by the flashing red eyes of a rat monster. Of those afflicted, 200 remain hospitalized the next day.

[Guardian Angel]

1865-Slavery abolished
1888-Mesa Verde discovered
1898-Official land speed record set
1941- Japan invaded Hong Kong
1946-Steven spielberg born
1984-Cheve Nova introduced

[pesoto74]

Born Today
1779 Joseph Grimaldi, England, pantomimist, "greatest clown in history"
1870 D T Suzuki, Kanazawa Japan, Zen Buddhist scholar
1886 Ty Cobb, batted .367, stole 892 bases, Det Tigers 
1888 Robert Moses, power broker, built Long Island and New York City parks and roads
1911 Helen Vlachos, journalist
1916 Betty Grable, St. Louis, great legs/actress, Gay Divorcee
1947 Steven Spielberg, born in Cincinnati, director, ET, Close Encounters, Jaws

[pesoto74]

1732 Benjamin Franklin under the name Richard Saunders begins publication of "Poor Richard's Almanack"
1776 Thomas Paine published his 1st "American Crisis" essay, in which he wrote, "These are the times that try men's souls"
1777 Washington settles his troops at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania for winter
1843 Charles Dickens publishes "A Christmas Carol," in England
1918 Robert Ripley began his "Believe It or Not" column (New York Globe)
1933 Electric Home and Farm Authority Inc, authorized
1946 War breaks out in Indochina as Ho Chi Minh attacks French in Hanoi
1960 Mercury-Redstone 1A reaches 210 km in test flight 

[pesoto74]

From Wikipedia
217 - The papacy of Pope Zephyrinus ends.
1522 - Suleiman the Magnificent accepts the surrender of the surviving Knights of Rhodes, who are allowed to evacuate. They eventually re-settle on Malta and become known as the Knights of Malta.
1803 - Louisiana Purchase completed.
1860 - South Carolina becomes first state to secede from the United States.
1915 - Last Australian troops evacuated from Gallipoli.
1917 - Cheka, first Soviet secret police, founded.
1952 - United States Air Force C-124 crashes and burns in Moses Lake, Washington killing 87.
1960 - National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam is formed.
1973 - The Spanish Prime Minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, is assassinated by a car bomb attack in Madrid.
1984 - The Summit tunnel fire is the largest underground fire in history, as a freight train carrying over 1 million litres of petrol derails near the town of Todmorden in the Pennines.
1988 - The United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances is signed at Vienna.
1989 - Operation Just Cause: United States sends troops into Panama to overthrow government of Manuel Noriega.
1995 - NATO begins peacekeeping in Bosnia.
1995 - An American Airlines Flight 965 Boeing 757 crashes into a mountain 50 km north of Cali, Colombia killing 160.
1996 - NeXT merges with Apple Computer, starting the path to Mac OS X.
1999 - Vermont's Supreme Court rules that homosexual couples are entitled to same benefits and protections as married heterosexual couples.
1999 - Macau is handed over to the People's Republic of China by Portugal.
2002 - US Senator Trent Lott resigns as majority leader.
2005 - New York City's Transport Workers' Union 100 goes on strike, shutting down all New York City Subway and Bus services.

[andmac]

...and in 1835 the Texian garrison at Goliad signed a declaration declaring Texas independence from Mexico. Texian officals deemed it premature, but in March, Texas went ahead a declared independence.

[pesoto74]

Winter begins! The name "winter" comes from a Germanic term meaning "time of water" and refers to the seasonal precipitation. The winter solstice—the moment when the sun's apparent path is farthest south from the Equator—is used to officially mark winter's beginning. In the Northern Hemisphere, winter begins on the "shortest day" of the year, December 21 or 22, and lasts until March 20 or 22, the beginning of spring, marked by the vernal equinox, when day and night are equal in length. In the United States, this winter's solstice occurs on December 21 at 2:21 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, 7:21 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time. Those of us in the Southern Hemisphere, today celebrate the beginning of the summer season.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/dec21.html

December 21st birthdays
1401: Masaccio, 'Florentine' painter
1804: Benjamin Disraeli, British politician
1879: Joseph Stalin, Russian revolutionary leader
1937: Jane Fonda, American actress

    * 69 - Vespasian becomes the fourth Roman Emperor in the Year of the four emperors.
    * 1620 - The Pilgrims land on what is now known as Plymouth Rock.
    * 1780 - Great Britain declares war on The Netherlands in response to the Dutch joining the League of Armed Neutrality and for assisting French and American forces during the American Revolution.
    * 1861 - The Medal of Honor first authorized.
    * 1861 - Lord Lyons, the British minister to the United States, meets with United States Secretary of State William Seward concerning Confederate envoys arrested by the United States Navy in order to prevent war between the United States and the United Kingdom.
    * 1872 - HMS Challenger sails from Portsmouth on the four-year scientific expedition that would lay the foundation for the science of oceanography.
    * 1880 - Isle of Man becomes first political entity that allows women to vote.
    * 1891 - First basketball game played.
    * 1898 - Marie and Pierre Curie discover radium.
    * 1913 - First crossword puzzle published.
    * 1914 - First feature-length silent film comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance, starring Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand and Charles Chaplin, is released.
    * 1919 - Municipal elections held in Senegal (First round, second round is held December 28). The multi-racial list of the Independent Socialist Republican Party (PRSI) wins in all four municipalities.
    * 1923 - Nepal changes from British protectorate to independent state.
    * 1933 - Newfoundland becomes a crown colony.
    * 1937 - First screening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated movie.
    * 1958 - Charles de Gaulle is elected as the first President of France and establishes the Fifth Republic.
    * 1962 - Rondane National Park, the first national park in Norway, was established.
    * 1968 - Apollo 8 launched.
    * 1979 - The United States government bails out the Chrysler Corporation.
    * 1979 - The Lancaster House Agreement was signed, effectively ending the white rule in Rhodesia under Ian Smith.
    * 1983 - Former U.S. President Gerald Ford guest-stars as himself on the prime-time soap opera Dynasty.
    * 1987 - The passenger ferry Doña Paz sinks after colliding with the oil tanker Vector 1; well over 1,000 die.
    * 1988 - A terrorist bomb explodes and crashes Pan Am flight 103, a Boeing 747, over Lockerbie, Scotland killing 270, including eleven on the ground.
    * 1999 - The Spanish Civil Guard intercepts a van loaded with 950 kg of explosives intended by ETA to blow down Torre Picasso.
    * 2001 - Japanese television performer Masashi Tashiro got No. 1 temporarily in the Internet vote of Time's Person of the Year.
    * 2001 - President Fernando de la Rúa of Argentina was forced out of office in the midst of the December 2001 riots and financial crisis.
    * 2002 - Vancouver, British Columbia city council declares "D.O.A. Day" in observance of the Canadian punk band D.O.A.'s decades of influence and accomplishments.
    * 2012 - The Long Count of the Maya calendar recycles according to the most popular correlation. A minority argues that it does so on December 23, 2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_21

[pesoto74]

1847 - December 22, Lincoln presents resolutions questioning President Polk about U.S. hostilities with Mexico.

Lincoln’s first turn on the national political stage, a two-year term in the U.S. Congress, was largely occupied with the Mexican War. Lincoln gained notice for his “Spot” Resolution, a protest against President James K. Polk’s aggressive pursuit of the war. Polk claimed that Mexico instigated the war by “shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil” (a reference to a border skirmish of which there were only shadowy reports). Lincoln’s resolution mockingly called on the president to identify the very spot upon which American blood had been spilled on American soil.

[andmac]

I am going to cover the "spot" resolution and Illinois' role in the Mexican War in my "Illinois in the Mexican War" community education class at Parkland in Febraury.

[pesoto74]

I think Lincoln and the Mexican War is interesting.  He was one of the few people who opposed what was a very popular war.  I remember reading that both Lincoln and Grant thought that the Civil War was God's punishment for the Mexican War.

[pesoto74]

#  becomes Pope
# 1493 - Georg Alt's German translation of Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle is published.
# 1783 - George Washington resigns as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army at the Maryland State House in Annapolis, Maryland.
# 1823 - The poem A Visit From St. Nicholas (AKA The Night Before Christmas) is published in the Sentinel.
# 1888 - Vincent Van Gogh cuts off the lower part of his left ear, takes it to a brothel, and gives it to a prostitute named Rachel.
# 1913 - The Federal Reserve Act is signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, creating the Federal Reserve.
# 1916 - World War I: Battle of Magdhaba - Allied forces deafeat Turkish forces in Egypt's Sinai peninsula.
# 1936 - Colombia becomes a signatory to the Buenos Aires copyright treaty.
# 1947 - The transistor is first demonstrated at Bell Laboratories
# 1954 - The first human kidney transplant is performed by Dr. Joseph E. Murray at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.
# 1972 - The Nicaraguan capital of Managua is struck by a 6.5 magnitude earthquake, killing more than 10,000.
# 1972 - Immaculate Reception: Franco Harris scores a contentious touchdown from a pass thrown by Terry Bradshaw in an AFC semi-final between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Oakland Raiders at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
# 1972 - Andes flight disaster: The remaining survivors of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash are rescued from the Andes after 73 days, during which they have had to resort to cannibalism.
# 1979 - Soviet war in Afghanistan: Soviet forces occupy Kabul, the Afghan capital.
# 1982 - The Environmental Protection Agency announces it has identified dangerous levels of dioxin in the soil of Times Beach, Missouri.
# 1986 - The Scaled Composites Voyager aircraft completes the first non-stop flight around the world without refueling.
# 1990 - Republic of Slovenia votes to secede from Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
# 2004 - An earthquake measured 8.1 on the Richter scale hits Macquarie Island in the Southern Ocean, one day before the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_23

[pesoto74]

1818 - "Silent Night" composed by Franz Xaver Gruber.
1906 - The first radio program, consisting of a poetry reading, a violin solo, and a speech, is broadcast.
1968 - The crew of the USS Pueblo is released by North Korea after being held for 11 months on suspicion of spying.
1968 - The crew of Apollo 8 enter into orbit around the Moon, becoming the first humans to do so.
1969 - Curt Flood writes to Bowie K. Kuhn, the Commissioner of Baseball, asking to be declared a free agent .

Births
1166 - King John of England (d. 1216)
1491 - Ignatius of Loyola, Spanish founder of the Jesuit order (d. 1556)
1809 - Kit Carson, American frontiersman (d. 1868)
1905 - Howard Hughes, American film producer and inventor (d. 1976)