History by month
December
31 days of history. Every date is an entry point to the events, births, and moments that shaped our world.
December 1
1955 Rosa Parks refuses to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery,
December 2
1804 Napoleon Bonaparte snatched the crown from Pope Pius VII's hands to place it on
December 3
1967 Christiaan Barnard injected potassium into Denise Darvall's heart to declare her
December 4
1783 George Washington steps before his weary officers at New York's Fraunces Tavern
December 5
1933 The ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment on December 5, 1933, officially r
December 6
1240 Batu Khan's forces crush Kiev, toppling its defenses and ending the city's statu
December 7
1941 Thirty-five3 Japanese aircraft launched a devastating two-wave strike that sank
December 8
1980 Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon dead at the Dakota entrance just as he retur
December 9
1979 Edward Jenner proved cowpox could shield humans from smallpox in 1796, launching
December 10
1948 The United Nations General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Ri
December 11
1936 King-Emperor Edward VIII demanded to marry divorced American socialite Wallis Si
December 12
1901 Guglielmo Marconi catches a faint "S" in Morse code at Signal Hill, proving wire
December 13
1636 Massachusetts Bay Colony organized three militia regiments to defend against the
December 14
1911 Roald Amundsen's team reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911, beating Rober
December 15
1939 Victor Fleming's epic sweeps audiences into a sweeping romance that redefined Ho
December 16
1773 Sons of Liberty disguised as American Indians boarded ships and dumped East Indi
December 17
1903 Wilbur's sharp pull during their first powered attempt stalled the Flyer in thre
December 18
1271 Kublai Khan declared the new name Yuan, transforming a Mongol conquest into a re
December 19
1776 Thomas Paine launches the first of his "American Crisis" pamphlets to ignite col
December 20
1192 Leopold V of Austria seized Richard I while the English king returned from the T
December 21
1968 Apollo 8's crew executed the first manned trans-lunar injection, breaking free f
December 22
1864 William Tecumseh Sherman marched his Union troops from Atlanta to Savannah, syst
December 23
1947 Bell Labs engineers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley demonstr
December 24
1906 Reginald Fessenden shattered the silence of the airwaves on this day by transmit
December 25
1991 Mikhail Gorbachev steps down as president, triggering the immediate dissolution
December 26
2004 The Indian Plate subducted beneath the Burma Plate, unleashing tsunamis that dro
December 27
1831 Charles Darwin steps onto the HMS Beagle in 1831, launching a five-year voyage t
December 28
1170 Followers of King Henry II slashed Archbishop Thomas Becket to death within Cant
December 29
1890 U.S. cavalrymen opened indiscriminate fire on an unarmed Lakota encampment, slau
December 30
2006 Saddam Hussein was pulled from a hole in the ground near Tikrit in December 2003
December 31
1879 Thomas Edison flipped a switch at his Menlo Park laboratory and flooded the nigh