1569 – King Philip II forms Inquisition in South America
1613 – Michail Romanov (aged 16) becomes Tsar of Russia
1783 – Great Siege of Gibraltar launched by France and Spain against the British colony during American War of Independence is lifted after 3 years and 7 months
1795 – The 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified.
1817 – Baltimore becomes the 1st American city lit by gas street lamps with the first turned on at Market and Lemon Streets (currently Baltimore and Holliday Streets)
1839 – Henry Clay declares in Senate “I had rather be right than president”
1845 – The Portland Vase, thought to date to the 1st century BC is shattered into more than 80 pieces by a drunken visitor to the British Museum
1882 – The last bareknuckle fight for the heavyweight boxing championship took place in Mississippi City
1893 – Elisha Gray patented a machine called the telautograph. It automatically signed autographs to documents.
1905 – Dominican Republic signs treaty turning over customs collection to US
1936 – The U.S. Vice President’s flag was established by executive order.
1940 – Walt Disney’s second feature length movie, “Pinocchio” premieres (NYC)
1943 – The U.S. government announced that shoe rationing would go into effect in two days.
1945 – General Douglas MacArthur returns to Manila
1950 – Senator Joe McCarthy finds “communists” in US Department of State
1962 – The U.S. government banned all Cuban imports and re-export of U.S. products to Cuba from other countries.
1973 – US Senate creates Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities
1973 – North Ireland’s United Loyalist Council hold a one-day strike, loyalist paramilitaries forcibly try to stop people going to work
1984 – Space shuttle astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart made the first untethered space walk. https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/blog/first-untethered-spacewalk
1984 – David (born without immunity system) touches his mother for 1st time at age 12 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/07/us/the-boy-in-the-bubble-moved-a-world-he-couldnt-touch.html
1986 – Haitian President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier fled his country ending 28 years of family rule.
1990 – USSR Communist party agrees to allow opposition political parties
1991 – The IRA launches a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street during a cabinet meeting.
1992 – The European Union is established as the Maastricht Treaty is signed. The treaty also defined a single European currency: the Euro.
1999 – NASA’s Stardust space probe was launched. The mission was to return comet dust samples from comet Wild 2. The mission was completed on January 15, 2006 when the sample return capsule returned to Earth.
2014 – German treasurer Helmut Linssen resigns amid a scandal involving offshore banking accounts in the Bahamas and Panama
2019 – Measles cases in Europe highest in a decade, tripling in a year to 82,596 according to WHO
2019 – New kangaroo fossil research published from Riversleigh, Australia, show Kangaroos learned to hop 20 million years ago, much earlier than first thought
2019 – Measles outbreak declared in the Philippines with 1,813 cases and 26 deaths
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
