December 26 in History

Maulana Karenga gathered a small group of Black families in Los Angeles on December 26, 1966, for the first observance of Kwanzaa, a seven-day cultural celebration he had created to provide African Americans with a holiday rooted in African traditions rather than European or commercial ones. Karenga, born Ronald McKinley Everett, was the chair of Black Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and the founder of the Black nationalist organization US, which competed with the Black Panther Party for influence in the Southern California activist community. Karenga drew on harvest festival traditions from across the African continent, particularly the Zulu first fruits celebration, to construct a holiday built around seven principles known as the Nguzo Saba: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. Each principle corresponds to one day of the celebration, from December 26 through January 1. The observance centers on a kinara, a candle holder with seven candles in black, red, and green, the colors of the Pan-African flag. The timing was deliberate. Karenga created Kwanzaa in the immediate aftermath of the Watts riots of 1965, which had devastated Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles and exposed the depth of racial inequality in urban America. He intended Kwanzaa as a tool for community building and cultural reclamation, explicitly rejecting the hyper-commercialism of Christmas. Karenga emphasized it was not a religious holiday but a cultural practice compatible with any faith. Kwanzaa spread through Black community organizations, churches, and schools through the 1970s and 1980s. At its peak in the late 1990s, an estimated 12 to 18 million Americans observed the holiday. Observance has declined in the twenty-first century, but Kwanzaa remains an enduring expression of African American cultural identity and Pan-African solidarity.

The seafloor off the coast of Sumatra ruptured along a 900-mile fault line at 7:58 AM local time on December 26, 2004, unleashing a magnitude 9.1 earthquake that released the energy equivalent of 23,000 Hiroshima bombs and triggered a series of tsunamis that killed approximately 230,000 people across fourteen countries. The disaster struck without warning because the Indian Ocean, unlike the Pacific, had no tsunami detection system in place. The earthquake occurred where the Indian tectonic plate subducts beneath the Burma plate, at a depth of roughly 19 miles below the ocean floor. The rupture propagated northward at 1.7 miles per second over a period of ten minutes, displacing massive volumes of water across the entire width of the Indian Ocean. Waves traveled outward at speeds up to 500 miles per hour, the speed of a jet airliner, arriving at the coast of Sumatra within thirty minutes, at Sri Lanka and eastern India within two hours, and at the coast of East Africa seven hours later. Indonesia suffered the greatest devastation. The city of Banda Aceh, nearest the epicenter, was virtually obliterated, with waves reaching heights of 100 feet in some coastal areas. Sri Lanka lost over 30,000 people, India nearly 18,000, and Thailand over 8,000, including thousands of foreign tourists on beach holidays. Entire fishing communities were erased from coastlines across the region. The total economic damage exceeded $15 billion. The international humanitarian response was unprecedented in scale, with over $14 billion in aid pledged by governments, organizations, and individuals worldwide. The disaster directly led to the creation of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System, operational since 2006, which uses a network of seismographic stations, ocean floor pressure sensors, and coastal tide gauges to provide alerts within minutes of a seismic event. The Boxing Day tsunami remains the deadliest natural disaster of the twenty-first century.

Marie and Pierre Curie announced the discovery of radium to the French Academy of Sciences on December 26, 1898, identifying a new element that was two million times more radioactive than uranium and that would reshape physics, medicine, and the twentieth century understanding of matter itself. The discovery culminated months of backbreaking labor in a converted shed at the Ecole de Physique et de Chimie in Paris, where the couple worked without proper ventilation, protective equipment, or institutional support. Marie Curie had chosen uranium rays as her doctoral subject partly because no one else wanted it. She quickly discovered that pitchblende emitted far more radiation than its uranium content could explain, leading her to hypothesize an unknown element was responsible. Pierre abandoned his own research to join her in isolating the source. The Curies processed tons of pitchblende residue obtained from Joachimsthal mines in Bohemia, using a tedious method of chemical fractionation to concentrate the radioactive component. They had already announced the discovery of polonium, named for Marie native Poland, in July 1898. Radium proved far more difficult to isolate. The December announcement was based on spectroscopic evidence; it took Marie four more years of processing eight tons of pitchblende to obtain one-tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride. The discovery earned the Curies a shared Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, alongside Henri Becquerel. Marie received a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for her work isolating pure radium, becoming the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Radium transformed cancer treatment through radiation therapy and advanced the understanding of atomic structure that led to nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Marie Curie died in 1934 from aplastic anemia caused by decades of radiation exposure; her laboratory notebooks remain so contaminated that they are stored in lead-lined boxes.

Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees on December 26, 1919, for $100,000 in cash and a $300,000 loan secured by a mortgage on Fenway Park, completing the most consequential transaction in American sports history. Ruth was 24 years old, had just set the single-season home run record with 29, and was about to transform baseball from a low-scoring strategic contest into a spectacle built around power and personality. Frazee needed money. He had purchased the Red Sox in 1916 largely with borrowed funds and was simultaneously producing Broadway shows, several of which were failing. Ruth, who had led the Red Sox to three World Series titles, was demanding a salary increase to $20,000, a figure Frazee considered ruinous. The Yankees owner, Colonel Jacob Ruppert, and general manager Ed Barrow saw an opportunity to acquire the most talented player in the game and moved quickly. The deal was announced on January 5, 1920, and Boston newspapers denounced it immediately. Ruth rewarded the Yankees beyond anyone expectations. In his first season in New York, he hit 54 home runs, nearly doubling his own record. He drew such enormous crowds that the Yankees built Yankee Stadium, opened in 1923 and immediately nicknamed "The House That Ruth Built." Over the next fifteen seasons, Ruth hit 659 of his 714 career home runs in a Yankees uniform, led the team to seven American League pennants and four World Series championships, and became the most famous athlete on Earth. The Red Sox, meanwhile, did not win another World Series for 86 years. The drought, which became known as the Curse of the Bambino, ended only in 2004 when Boston completed a historic comeback from a 3-0 deficit against the Yankees in the American League Championship Series before sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals for the title. Frazee Broadway career produced one success, "No, No, Nanette" in 1925, a show Red Sox fans have bitterly cited as the real reason Ruth was sold.

Harry Truman died on December 26, 1972, at 88, at Research Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. He had left the presidency in January 1953 with an approval rating around 32 percent, one of the lowest for any departing president. Historians have spent the intervening decades reconsidering. Born in Lamar, Missouri on May 8, 1884, Truman grew up in Independence and worked as a farmer, a zinc miner, a bank clerk, and a haberdasher before entering politics. His haberdashery business failed. He was 38 when he won his first political office, a county judgeship, through the patronage of the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City. He was honest within a corrupt system, a distinction that mattered to him. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1934 and served two terms. Franklin Roosevelt chose him as vice president in 1944 largely because he was inoffensive. Roosevelt never briefed him on the atomic bomb or the state of the war. When FDR died on April 12, 1945, Truman told reporters: "I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me." He authorized the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, a decision he said he never lost sleep over. He desegregated the U.S. military by executive order in July 1948, bypassing a Congress that would not have passed the legislation. He launched the Marshall Plan, which spent $13 billion rebuilding Western Europe and is widely credited with preventing the spread of communism westward. He created NATO. He fought the Korean War to a stalemate. He won the 1948 election against Thomas Dewey in the most famous upset in American political history. The Chicago Daily Tribune printed "Dewey Defeats Truman" on its front page. Truman held up the newspaper the next morning, grinning. He refused to enrich himself from the presidency. He left office and returned to Independence without a government pension (Congress later passed the Former Presidents Act partly because of his financial situation). He walked to the local bank, bought his own stamps, and answered his own mail.

Gerald Ford never wanted to be president. Never ran for it either. He became vice president because Spiro Agnew resigned in a bribery scandal, and then president because Richard Nixon resigned in Watergate, making Ford the only person in American history to hold both offices without being elected to either. Born Leslie Lynch King Jr. in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1913, he was renamed after his stepfather and grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He played center and linebacker at the University of Michigan, turning down offers from the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions to attend Yale Law School. He served in the Navy during World War II, won a Congressional seat in 1948, and spent twenty-five years as a steady, well-liked Republican member of the House, eventually becoming Minority Leader. Nixon nominated him for vice president in October 1973 after Agnew's resignation, and Ford was confirmed by Congress under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. He became president on August 9, 1974, telling the nation: "Our long national nightmare is over." His first major act was pardoning Nixon on September 8, a decision that dropped his approval rating from seventy-one percent to forty-nine percent overnight and likely cost him the 1976 election against Jimmy Carter. Ford believed the pardon was the only way to move the country past Watergate's paralysis, and he accepted the political cost knowingly. He died on December 26, 2006, at ninety-three, the longest-lived American president until Jimmy Carter surpassed his record. He left behind something rarer than a presidential library: a model of putting country over career.