December 15 in History

Forty-three Indian police officers surrounded Sitting Bull's cabin on the Standing Rock Reservation before dawn, and within minutes the most famous Native American leader in the country was dead. On December 15, 1890, Hunkpapa Lakota chief Sitting Bull was shot and killed during an attempted arrest ordered by federal Indian Agent James McLaughlin, triggering a chain of events that led to the Wounded Knee Massacre two weeks later. Sitting Bull had been the spiritual leader of the Lakota resistance for decades. He had orchestrated the Sun Dance vision that preceded the defeat of George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, making him the most wanted man on the northern plains. After years of exile in Canada, he surrendered in 1881 and was confined to Standing Rock. By late 1890, the Ghost Dance movement was spreading rapidly among the Lakota. The ritual, which promised the return of the buffalo and the disappearance of white settlers, terrified federal authorities. McLaughlin and the military believed Sitting Bull was encouraging the movement and ordered his arrest. Rather than send U.S. Army troops, authorities dispatched Lakota members of the Indian police, hoping to avoid the appearance of military aggression. The arrest went wrong immediately. When police entered Sitting Bull's cabin and told him he was under arrest, supporters gathered outside. As police escorted Sitting Bull from his home, his followers confronted them. A shot was fired, and in the ensuing gunfight, Sitting Bull was hit twice, once by a policeman and once by a follower's stray bullet. Six policemen and eight of Sitting Bull's supporters also died. The killing panicked Ghost Dance followers across the reservations. Hundreds fled toward the Badlands. On December 29, the 7th Cavalry intercepted a band of Miniconjou Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek and massacred between 250 and 300 men, women, and children, effectively ending armed Native resistance on the Great Plains.

French troops surged forward through frozen mud and shattered forests, reclaiming in four days what Germany had spent ten months and 337,000 casualties trying to hold. On December 15, 1916, the French launched their final offensive at Verdun, pushing German forces out of the fortified positions at Louvemont and Bezonvaux on the east bank of the Meuse River. Combined with a similar French advance in October, the attack effectively ended the longest single battle of World War I. German Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn had launched the Verdun offensive in February 1916 with a chilling strategic concept: rather than breaking through French lines, he aimed to "bleed France white" by attacking a position the French could not afford to abandon. Verdun, a fortress city steeped in national symbolism, was exactly that target. The French rallied around the cry "Ils ne passeront pas" and committed division after division to hold the line. The battle consumed both armies. French forces rotated roughly seventy percent of their entire army through Verdun over ten months. German casualties were nearly as severe, demolishing Falkenhayn's theory that France would suffer disproportionately. The fighting centered on a handful of fortified positions like Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux, which changed hands in ferocious close-quarters combat. By autumn, Falkenhayn had been replaced by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who recognized Verdun as a strategic dead end. French commander Robert Nivelle organized counteroffensives in October and December that recaptured most of the ground lost since February. The December 15 attack recovered Louvemont and Bezonvaux, restoring the French line to roughly where it had been ten months earlier. The final toll was staggering: approximately 377,000 French and 337,000 German casualties, nearly a million men killed, wounded, or missing in a battle that moved the front line barely a few miles. Verdun became a synonym for the futility of industrial warfare.

Atlanta shut down for a three-day celebration of a movie about its own destruction. On December 15, 1939, Gone with the Wind premiered at Loew's Grand Theatre to an audience of 2,000 invited guests, launching what would become the highest-grossing film in history when adjusted for inflation. The premiere was the social event of the decade, drawing 300,000 spectators to a city whose population was barely 300,000 itself. Producer David O. Selznick had spent three years and $3.85 million adapting Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel, cycling through three directors and over a dozen screenwriters. The production was plagued by conflicts, delays, and the legendary search for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara, a role that attracted 1,400 auditions before going to British newcomer Vivien Leigh. Clark Gable signed on as Rhett Butler, the role the American public had demanded he play since the book's publication. The premiere itself reflected the racial politics the film both depicted and perpetuated. Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy and would become the first African American to win an Academy Award, was not invited to the Atlanta screening because Georgia's segregation laws prohibited her attendance. The Junior League hosted a costume ball the night before at the Municipal Auditorium, where performers in blackface sang spirituals. Gone with the Wind ran nearly four hours and won eight competitive Academy Awards plus two honorary ones. Audiences flocked to theaters for years, with multiple re-releases extending its commercial dominance across decades. Adjusted for inflation, its worldwide gross exceeds $3.7 billion, a figure no modern blockbuster has approached. The film's romanticized portrayal of slavery and the antebellum South has generated increasing criticism over the decades, prompting HBO Max to temporarily remove it from its platform in 2020 before restoring it with a contextual disclaimer.

Constantine VIII finally assumed sole control of the Byzantine Empire at age sixty-five, after spending sixty-three years as a titular co-emperor overshadowed by his brother Basil II. His brief three-year reign was marked by court intrigue and hasty political decisions that squandered the military gains his brother had spent decades securing. Constantine had been nominally co-emperor since 962, when he was crowned alongside his brother as children. Basil II, known as the "Bulgar-Slayer" for his brutal campaigns against the Bulgarian Empire, governed with competence and aggression for nearly fifty years, conquering Bulgaria, extending the empire's frontiers in Syria and Armenia, and filling the imperial treasury. Constantine played no meaningful role in governance during this period, living a life of luxury in the imperial palace and showing no interest in military or administrative affairs. When Basil died on December 15, 1025, Constantine inherited an empire at the peak of its medieval power and immediately proved unequal to the responsibility. He appointed favorites to military commands based on personal loyalty rather than competence, reversed his brother's careful fiscal policies, and alienated the military aristocracy that had been the foundation of Byzantine power. His most consequential decision was arranging the marriage of his daughter Zoe to Romanos III Argyros, who succeeded him as emperor after Constantine's death in 1028. The succession of emperors connected to Constantine's daughters, none of whom proved capable of maintaining Basil II's military gains, began the empire's gradual decline that would culminate in the disaster at Manzikert in 1071, when Seljuk Turks destroyed the Byzantine army and began the conquest of Anatolia.

Wolfgang Pauli died on December 15, 1958, in Zurich, at fifty-eight. His exclusion principle, proposed in 1925 when he was twenty-five, explained why electrons could not occupy the same quantum state. Without it, all electrons in an atom would collapse into the lowest energy level, atoms would be uniform in size and behavior, and the periodic table would not exist. The principle is the reason matter has structure, the reason chemistry works, the reason you can sit in a chair without falling through it. He also predicted the existence of the neutrino in 1930, proposing a nearly massless, chargeless particle to explain the missing energy in beta decay. He called the prediction "a terrible thing" because he believed he had invented a particle that could never be detected. Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan detected it in 1956, two years before Pauli's death. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945 for the exclusion principle, and Einstein nominated him. His intellectual standards were legendarily severe: he dismissed weak physics papers as "not even wrong," a phrase that has entered the scientific vocabulary. He also had a documented tendency to cause laboratory equipment to malfunction in his presence. Other physicists called it the Pauli Effect, and some refused to let him near their experiments. He was reportedly amused by this. He was admitted to room 137 at the Rotkreuz Hospital in Zurich for surgery on pancreatic cancer. The number 137 is the approximate inverse of the fine-structure constant, one of the most important dimensionless numbers in physics and a number that had preoccupied Pauli throughout his career. He remarked on the coincidence to his assistant before he died.

Three-quarters of the states agreed, and Americans gained written protections against the government they had just created. On December 15, 1791, Virginia became the tenth of fourteen states to ratify the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, meeting the threshold required to make the Bill of Rights law. The amendments had been debated, revised, and nearly abandoned in the three years since the Constitution's ratification. The Bill of Rights was born from political compromise. Anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry and George Mason had nearly defeated ratification of the Constitution itself, arguing that the document gave the federal government too much power without explicitly protecting individual liberties. Federalists like James Madison countered that enumerating specific rights was unnecessary and potentially dangerous, since any list would inevitably be incomplete. Madison changed his mind. Running for Congress in 1789 against Anti-Federalist James Monroe, he promised to introduce amendments protecting individual rights. Drawing from Virginia's Declaration of Rights, English common law, and proposals from state ratifying conventions, Madison drafted seventeen amendments and presented them to the First Congress in June 1789. Congress condensed them to twelve and sent them to the states in September. Two of the twelve amendments failed initially. The remaining ten were ratified by December 15, 1791. They guaranteed freedom of speech, religion, and the press; the right to bear arms; protections against unreasonable searches; the right to a jury trial; and prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. The Bill of Rights was largely symbolic for its first century, rarely invoked by courts. Not until the twentieth century did the Supreme Court begin applying these amendments to state governments through the Fourteenth Amendment, transforming ten brief passages into the backbone of American civil liberties.

George Thomas did not hurry, and his patience destroyed an army. On December 15-16, 1864, Union forces under Major General Thomas launched a devastating two-day assault against the Confederate Army of Tennessee under John Bell Hood at Nashville, inflicting one of the most complete tactical victories of the Civil War. Hood's army ceased to exist as an effective fighting force. Hood had marched north into Tennessee to draw Sherman back from his March to the Sea. Sherman refused the bait, sending Thomas to deal with Hood while continuing toward Savannah. Thomas assembled 55,000 troops at Nashville while Hood, with barely 30,000 effectives, entrenched on hills south of the city. Washington grew frantic at Thomas's deliberation. Grant sent orders relieving Thomas of command, then countermanded them, then nearly traveled to Nashville himself. Thomas waited for an ice storm to pass, then struck on December 15. Union forces attacked both flanks simultaneously, with the United States Colored Troops fighting with particular distinction on the left. The first day pushed Hood back two miles. On December 16, Thomas attacked again. A coordinated assault on Hood's left shattered the Confederate line, and the Army of Tennessee broke and ran. Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry fought a desperate rearguard to prevent total annihilation. Hood lost roughly 6,000 men killed, wounded, and captured, plus thousands more who deserted during the retreat. The Army of Tennessee, one of the Confederacy's two principal field armies, never fought again as a coherent force. Thomas, the methodical Virginian who stayed loyal to the Union, delivered the most complete battlefield victory of the war.