This Day in History......

[moreluck]

Dec. 2, 1804
In Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte is crowned Napoleon I, the first Frenchman to hold the title of emperor in a thousand years. Pope Pius VII handed Napoleon the crown that the 35-year-old conqueror of Europe placed on his own head.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 3, 1947

On this day in 1947, Marlon Brando's famous cry of "STELLA!" first booms across a Broadway stage, electrifying the audience at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre during the first-ever performance of Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 4, 1867
Former Minnesota farmer Oliver Hudson Kelley founds the Grange, which became a powerful political force among western farmers.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 5, 1945
At 2:10 p.m., five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers comprising Flight 19 take off from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a routine three-hour training mission. Flight 19 was scheduled to take them due east for 120 miles, north for 73 miles, and then back over a final 120-mile leg that would return them to the naval base. They never returned.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 6, 1884
On this day in 1884, in Washington, D.C., workers place a nine-inch aluminum pyramid atop a tower of white marble, completing the construction of an impressive monument to the city's namesake and the nation's first president, George Washington. As early as 1783, the infant U.S. Congress decided that a statue of George Washington, the great Revolutionary War general, should be placed near the site of the new Congressional building, wherever it might be. After then-President Washington asked him to lay out a new federal capital on the Potomac River in 1791, architect Pierre L'Enfant left a place for the statue at the western end of the sweeping National Mall (near the monument's present location).

 

[soberups]

December 6, 1969--the Altamont Speedway in northern California is the site of a free rock concert featuring the likes of Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills Nash& Young, and the Rolling Stones. Instead of hiring professional security, concert organizers arrange for the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels to keep fans off of the stage in exchange for free admission and $500 worth of beer. A fan winds up being killed by a knife-wielding Angel as the Rolling Stones play "Sympathy for the Devil." 300,000 stoned and acid tripping teenagers; no parking; no portable toilets; no police; and "security" provided by drunken Hells Angels. What could possibly go wrong with that?

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 7, 1941
At 7:55 a.m. Hawaii time, a Japanese dive bomber bearing the red symbol of the Rising Sun of Japan on its wings appears out of the clouds above the island of Oahu. A swarm of 360 Japanese warplanes followed, descending on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in a ferocious assault. The surprise attack struck a critical blow against the U.S. Pacific fleet and drew the United States irrevocably into World War II.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 8, 1980
John Lennon, a former member of the Beatles, the rock group that transformed popular music in the 1960s, is shot and killed by an obsessed fan in New York City. The 40-year-old artist was entering his luxury Manhattan apartment building when Mark David Chapman shot him four times at close range with a .38-caliber revolver. Lennon, bleeding profusely, was rushed to the hospital but died en route. Chapman had received an autograph from Lennon earlier in the day and voluntarily remained at the scene of the shooting until he was arrested by police. For a week, hundreds of bereaved fans kept a vigil outside the Dakota--Lennon's apartment building--and demonstrations of mourning were held around the world.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 9, 1972
Nothing in her professional credentials suggested the Australian pop singer Helen Reddy as a feminist icon prior to 1972. She'd made her way to the United States from her native Australia on her own to pursue stardom, and she'd paid her dues working on the periphery of the music business for a number of years before making a breakthrough. Yet when that breakthrough came, it was in the form of a 1971 cover version of "I Don't Know How To Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar—hardly a song about women's liberation. But a feminist icon is exactly what Helen Reddy would become the very next year, when the anthem-to-be "I Am Woman" charged up the pop charts, reaching the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 on this day in 1972.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 10, 1901

The first Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. The ceremony came on the fifth anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and other high explosives. In his will, Nobel directed that the bulk of his vast fortune be placed in a fund in which the interest would be "annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." Although Nobel offered no public reason for his creation of the prizes, it is widely believed that he did so out of moral regret over the increasingly lethal uses of his inventions in war.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 11, 1936

After ruling for less than one year, Edward VIII becomes the first English monarch to voluntarily abdicate the throne. He chose to abdicate after the British government, public, and the Church of England condemned his decision to marry the American divorcée Wallis Warfield Simpson. On the evening of December 11, he gave a radio address in which he explained, "I have found it impossible to carry on the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge the duties of king, as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love." On December 12, his younger brother, the duke of York, was proclaimed King George VI.

 

[oldngray]

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 13, 2000
Vice President Al Gore reluctantly concedes defeat to Texas Governor George W. Bush in his bid for the presidency, following weeks of legal battles over the recounting of votes in Florida, on this day in 2000.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 14, 1911
Norwegian Roald Amundsen becomes the first explorer to reach the South Pole, beating his British rival, Robert Falcon Scott.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 15, 1993

On this day in 1993, Schindler’s List, starring Liam Neeson in the true story of a German businessman who saves the lives of more than a thousand Polish Jews during the Holocaust, opens in theaters. The film was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and took home seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. It was the first Best Director win for Spielberg, who had been nominated in the category for three of his earlier films: 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and 1982’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Schindler’s List was adapted from Thomas Keneally’s 1982 book Schindler’s Ark, about the Catholic businessman Oskar Schindler, who saved a large number of Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in a factory that made supplies for the German army. The film co-starred Ben Kingsley as Schindler’s Jewish accountant and Ralph Fiennes as an evil Nazi officer.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 16,1773
In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 17, 1903
Near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright make the first successful flight in history of a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft. Orville piloted the gasoline-powered, propeller-driven biplane, which stayed aloft for 12 seconds and covered 120 feet on its inaugural flight.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 18, 1620
On December 18, 1620, the British ship Mayflower docked at modern-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, and its passengers prepared to begin their new settlement, Plymouth Colony.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 19, 1998
After nearly 14 hours of debate, the House of Representatives approves two articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, charging him with lying under oath to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice. Clinton, the second president in American history to be impeached, vowed to finish his term.

 

[moreluck]

Dec. 20, 1957
On this day in 1957, while spending the Christmas holidays at Graceland, his newly purchased Tennessee mansion, rock-and-roll star Elvis Presley receives his draft notice for the United States Army.