1980 – Annie Leibovitz has a photo-shoot with John Lennon, the last person to professionally photograph him before he is assassinated in New York by Mark David Chapman later in the day
1541 – Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham are executed for having affairs with Catherine Howard, Queen of England and wife of Henry VIII.
1609 – Biblioteca Ambrosiana opens its reading room, the second public library of Europe
1710 – Battle of Brihuega in the War of the Spanish Succession: British General James Stanhope captured by French & Spanish forces
1776 – George Washington’s retreating army in the American Revolution crossed the Delaware River from New Jersey to Pennsylvania.
1854 – Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The theory holds that Mary, mother of Jesus, was free of original sin from the moment she was conceived.
1863 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln announced his plan for the Reconstruction of the South.
1881 – Vienna’s Ring Theater destroyed by fire, kills between 640-850
1886 – At a convention of union leaders in Columbus, OH, the American Federation of Labor was founded.
1902 – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr became Associate Justice on Supreme Court
1907 – King Gustaf V of Sweden accedes to the Swedish throne.
1914 – Boers rebelling against the British in South Africa suffer several defeats, with one of their leaders, General Beyers, accidentally drowning
1923 – Salary & price freeze in Germany
1933 – Secretary of the Navy establishes Fleet Marine Force, integrating a ready-to-deploy Marine force with own aircraft into Fleet organization
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.
1940 – The Chicago Bears defeat the Washington Redskins 73-0, in the NFL Championship Game. This is the most lopsided game in NFL history
1941 – The United States entered World War II when it declared war against Japan. The act came one day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Britain and Canada also declared war on Japan.
1942 – Holocaust: in Ternopil, Ukraine, German SS organise the last deportation of Ternopil Jews to death camp in Belzec, when 1,400 Jews were sent there. The chief of the Gestapo, SS-Sturmbannfhrer Hermann Mller, bore overall responsibility for the mass murder of the Jews of Ternopil and Berezhany county
1948 – Jordan annexs Arabic Palestine
1949 – The Chinese Nationalist government moved from the Chinese mainland to Formosa due to Communists pressure.
1953 – Dwight D. Eisenhower gives his “Atoms for Peace” speech at the United Nations in New York
1962 – Workers of the International Typographical Union began striking and closed nine New York City newspapers. The strike lasted 114 days and ended April 1, 1963.
1963 – Frank Sinatra, Jr. was kidnapped in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. He was set free four days later.
1966 – US and USSR sign treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons in outer space
1970 – Head of the Catholic Church in Ireland Cardinal William Conway publishes a pamphlet on the topic of segregation in education in Northern Ireland
1980 – Annie Leibovitz has a photo-shoot with John Lennon, the last person to professionally photograph him before he is assassinated in New York by Mark David Chapman later in the day https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/john-lennon-shot
1982 – Norman D. Mayer demanding an end to nuclear weapons held the Washington Monument hostage. He threatened to blow it up with explosives he claimed were inside a van. 10 hours later he was shot to death by police.
1984 – In Roanoke, Virginia, a jury found Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt innocent of libeling Reverend Jerry Falwell with a parody advertisement. However Falwell was awarded $200,000 for emotional distress.
1987 – U.S. President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed a treaty agreeing to destroy their nations’ arsenals of intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
1987 – The Queen Street Massacre: Frank Vitkovic shoots and kills 8 people at the offices of Australia Post in Melbourne, Australia before being killed himself.
1989 – Communist leaders in Czechoslovakia offered to surrender their control over the government and accept a minority role in a coalition Cabinet.
1991 – Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine declared the Soviet national government to be dead. They forged a new alliance to be known as the Commonwealth of Independent States. The act was denounced by Russian President Gorbachev as unconstitutional.
1992 – Americans got to see live television coverage of U.S. troops landing on the beaches of Somalia during Operation Restore Hope. (Due to the time difference, it was December 9 in Somalia.)
1993 – U.S. President Clinton signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA is a trade pact between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, eliminates virtually all tariffs and trade restrictions between the three nations.
1994 – Bosnian Serbs released dozens of hostage peacekeepers, but continued to detain about 300 others.
1995 – 8 people including the gunman, Roland Smith, are killed on 125th Street in an arson/murder at Freddie’s Fashion Mart.
1997 – The second largest bank was created with the announcement that Union Bank Switzerland and the Swiss Bank Corporation would merge. The combined assets were more than $590 billion.
1998 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police could not search a person or their cars after ticketing for a routine traffic violation.
1999 – In Memphis, TN, a jury found that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been the victim of a vast murder conspiracy, not a lone assassin.
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.
2009 – Bombings in Baghdad, Iraq kill 127 and injure 448.
2018 – US President Donald Trump announces John Kelly will be stepping down as White House Chief of Staff at the end of the year
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
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)
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
