1964 “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” 1st airs on TV
1240 – Mongols led by Batu Khan occupy and destroy Kyiv after an 8 day siege; out of 50,000 people in the city only 2,000 survive
1273 – Philosopher and Theologian Thomas Aquinas, thought to have had a mystical experience in Naples, refuses to continue his work “I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me”
1424 – Don Alfonso V of Aragon grants Barcelona the right to exclude Jews
1527 – Pope Clement VII escapes imprisonment in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, fleeing to Orvieto disguised as a peddler
1648 – Pride’s Purge: Thomas Pride prevents 96 presbyterians from sitting in English parliament
1735 – In London, French surgeon Claudius Amyand peformed the first successful appendectomy at St. George’s Hospital. The patient was an 11-year old boy that had swallowed a pin.
1745 – Charles Edward Stewart and the Jacobite Army retreated from Derby, England
1774 – Austria became the first nation to introduce a state education system.
1790 – The U.S. Congress moved from New York to Philadelphia.
1825 – President John Adams suggests establishment of a US observatory
1849 – Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery in Maryland for the 2nd and final time
1865 – The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. The amendment abolished slavery in the U.S.
1866 – Chicago water supply tunnel 3,227 m into Lake Michigan completed
1876 – The first crematorium in US begins operation, Washington PA
1877 – Thomas Edison demonstrated the first gramophone, with a recording of himself reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb.
1883 – “Ladies’ Home Journal” was published for the first time.
1884 – The construction of the Washington Monument was completed by Army engineers. The project took 34 years.
1907 – In Monongah, WV, 361 people were killed in America’s worst mine disaster.
1912 – China votes for universal human rights
1916 – Bucharest was captured by the Central Powers
1917 – Finland proclaimed independence from Russia.
1921 – The Catholic Irish Free State was created as a self-governing dominion of Britain when an Anglo-Irish treaty was signed.
1922 – One year to the day after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the Irish Free State comes into existence
1923 – U.S. President Calvin Coolidge became the first president to give a presidential address that was broadcast on radio.
1926 – In Italy, Benito Mussolini introduced a tax on bachelors.
1933 – U.S. federal judge John M. Woolsey rules that the James Joyce novel Ulysses is not obscene.
1940 – Gestapo arrest German resistance fighter/poster artist Helen Ernst
1947 – Everglades National Park in Florida was dedicated by U.S. President Truman.
1952 – Czech government tells Israeli ambassador that he is persona non grata
1955 – The Federal government standardized the size of license plates throughout the U.S. Previously, individual states had designed their own license plates, resulting in wide variations.
1956 – Nelson Mandela and 156 others arrested for political activities in S Africa
1957 – AFL-CIO members voted to expel the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The Teamsters were readmitted in 1987.
1962 – US abandons Skybolt ballistic missile program
1964 “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” 1st airs on TV
1965 – Pakistan’s Islamic Ideology Advisory Committee recommends that Islamic Studies be made a compulsory subject for Muslim students from primary to graduation level.
1969 – Meredith Hunter is killed by Hells Angels during The Rolling Stones’s concert at the Altamont Speedway in California.
1973 – The Twenty-fifth Amendment: The United States House of Representatives votes 387 to 35 to confirm Gerald Ford as Vice President of the United States (on November 27, the Senate confirmed him 92 to 3)
1977 – South Africa grants independence to Bophuthatswana. The Republic of Bophuthatswana was never internationally recognized. In 1994, after a series of coups, it reintegrated with South Africa.
1982 – 11 soldiers and 6 civilians were killed when a bomb exploded in a pub in Ballykelly, Northern Ireland. The Irish National Liberation Army was responsible for planting the bomb.
1983 – In Jerusalem, a bomb planted on a bus exploded killing six Israelis and wounding 44.
1985 – Congressional negotiators reached an agreement on a deficit-cutting proposal that later became the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law.
1989 – The worst mass shooting in Canadian history occurred when a man gunned down 14 women at the University of Montreal’s school of engineering. The man then killed himself.
1990 – Iraq announced that it would release all its 2,000 foreign hostages.
1992 – In India, thousands of Hindu extremists destroyed a mosque. The following two months of Hindu-Muslim rioting resulted in at least 2,000 people being killed.
1993 – Former priest James R. Porter was sentenced to 18 to 20 years in prison. Porter had admitted molesting 28 children in the 1960s.
1994 – Orange County, CA, filed for bankruptcy protection due to investment losses of about $2 billion. The county is one of the richest in the U.S. and became the largest municipality to file for bankruptcy.
1998 – In Venezuela, former Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chavez was elected president. He had staged a bloody coup attempt against the government six years earlier.
2002 – Officials released the detailed plans for a $4.7 million memorial commemorating Princess Diana. The large oval fountain was planned to be constructed in London’s Hyde Park.
2006 – NASA reveals photographs taken by Mars Global Surveyor suggesting the presence of liquid water on Mars
2012 – 7 people are killed and 770 injured during Egyptian protests
2017 – “Supermassive” most distant black hole discovery announced by astronomers in journal “Nature”, 13 billion light-years away, 800 x bigger than the Sun
2018 – Oldest-known plague sample found in 4,900-year-old remains of 20-year old woman in Gökhem, southern Sweden published in “Cell”
2020 – US President Donald Trump orders about 700 troops withdrawn from Somalia
2022 – Argentine Vice-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner found guilty of fraud, sentenced to six years in prison and banned from holding office
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
