December 26


Today's:


1620 - The Pilgrim Fathers landed at New Plymouth, MA, to found Plymouth Colony, with John Carver as Governor.

1776 - The British suffered a major defeat in the Battle of Trenton during the American Revolutionary War.

1865 - The coffee percolator was patented by James H. Mason.

1871 - The "Gods Grown Old" was performed for the first time. It ran for 64 shows.

1898 - Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium.

1908 - Texan boxer "Galveston Jack" Johnson knocked out Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, to become the first black boxer to win the world heavyweight title.

1917 - During World War I, the U.S. government took over operation of the nation's railroads.

1921 - The Catholic Irish Free State became a self-governing dominion of Great Britain.

1927 - The East-West Shrine football game featured numbers on both the front and back of players’ jerseys.

1941 - Winston Churchill became the first British prime minister to address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress.

1941 - U.S. President Roosevelt signed a resolution that set the a fixed-date, the fourth Thursday of November, for the Federal Thanksgiving Day holiday.

1943 - The German battlecruiser Scharnhorst was sunk in the North Sea, during the Battle of North Cape.

1944 - Tennessee Williams' play "The Glass Menagerie" was first performed publicly, at the Civic Theatre in Chicago, IL.

1947 - Heavy snow blanketed the Northeast United States, burying New York City under 25.8 inches of snow in 16 hours. The severe weather was blamed for about 80 deaths.







1953 - "Big Sister" was heard for the last time on CBS Radio. The show ran for 17 years.

1954 - "The Shadow" aired on radio for the last time.

1956 - Fidel Castro attempted a secret landing in Cuba to overthrow the Batista regime. All but 11 of his supporters were killed.

1959 - The first charity walk took place, along Icknield Way, in aid of the World Refugee Fund.

1974 - Comedian Jack Benny died at age 80.

1982 - The Man of the Year in "TIME" magazine was a computer. It was the first time a non-human received the honors.

1986 - Doug Jarvis, age 31, set a National Hockey League (NHL) record as he skated in his 916th consecutive game. Jarvis eventually set the individual record for most consecutive games played with 964.

1986 - "Search for Tomorrow" was seen for the last time on CBS-TV. The show had been on the air for 35-years.

1990 - Garry Kasparov beat Anatoly Karpov to retain the chess championship.

1991 - The Soviet Union's parliament formally voted the country out of existence.

1995 - Israel turned dozens of West Bank villages over to the Palestinian Authority.

1996 - Six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey was found beaten and strangled in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, CO.

1998 - Iraq announced that it would fire on U.S. and British warplanes that patrol the skies over northern and southern Iraq.

1999 - Alfonso Portillo, a populist lawyer, won Guatemala's first peacetime presidential elections in 40 years.

2000 - Michael McDermott, age 42, opened fire at his place of employment killing seven people. McDermott had no criminal history.

2002 - The first cloned human baby was born. The announcement was made the December 27 by Clonaid.

2004 - Under the Indian Ocean, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake sent 500-mph waves across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal. The tsunami killed at least 283,000 people in a dozen countries, including Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Sumatra, Thailand and India.













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