Monday, December 25, 2017

THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― DECEMBER 25

MERRY CHRISTMAS, TO ALL!

December 25 is the 359th day of the year (360th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are six days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Friday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Wednesday or Thursday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Monday or Saturday (56).

336 – The earliest possible date that Christmas was celebrated on December 25th. 


800 – Pope Leo III crowns French king Charles the Great (Charlemagne), Holy Roman Emperor on the site of what will become St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome.

1066 – Duke William of Normandy (a.k.a., William the Conqueror) is crowned king of England.

1100 – Baldwin of Boulogne is crowned the first King of Jerusalem in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

1643 – Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean is found and named by Captain William Mynors of the English East India Company vessel, the Royal Mary.


1776 – During the American Revolution, General George Washington crosses the Delaware River with 5,400 troops, hoping to surprise a Hessian force celebrating Christmas at their winter quarters in Trenton, New Jersey.

1837 – Second Seminole War: American general (and future president) Zachary Taylor leads 1100 troops against the Seminoles at the Battle of Lake Okeechobee.

1868  Despite bitter opposition, President Andrew Johnson grants unconditional pardon to all persons involved in Southern rebellion (Civil War).

1869 – Angered over a card game dispute, 16-year-old John Wesley Hardin reveals a singular lack of Christmas spirit by shooting James Bradley dead in the street.

1896 – The march "Stars and Stripes Forever" is written by John Philip Sousa.

1914 – Just after midnight on Christmas morning, the majority of German troops engaged in World War I cease firing their guns and artillery and commence to sing Christmas carols.

1938 – Director George Cukor announces Vivien Leigh will play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.


1941 – Admiral Chester W. Nimitz arrives at Pearl Harbor to assume command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet


1862 – On this day in 1862, Lieutenant Elisha Hunt Rhodes of the Second Rhode Island spends Christmas Day in camp, singing with other officers and writing in his diary: "I should like to be home this Christmas night."


1941 – On this day, the British garrison in Hong Kong surrenders to the Japanese.

1959 – Sony brings transistor TV 8-301 to the market.


1966 – Harrison Salisbury, assistant managing editor of the New York Times, files a report from Hanoi chronicling the damage to civilian areas in North Vietnam by the U.S. bombing campaign.

1972 – After a 36-hour respite for Christmas, the U.S. resumes Operation Linebacker II. The extensive bombing campaign was resumed because, according to U.S. officials, Hanoi sent no word that it would return to the peace talks.


1973 – The ARPANET crashes when a programming bug causes all ARPANET traffic to be routed through the server at Harvard University, causing the server to freeze.

1990 – The first successful trial run of the system which would become the World Wide Web.

1991 – Mikhail Gorbachev announces that he is resigning as president of the Soviet Union. In truth, there was not much of a Soviet Union from which to resign—just four days earlier, 11 of the former Soviet republics had established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), effectively dismembering the USSR. The Soviet Union, for all intents and purposes, had already ceased to exist.

2000 – Christmas party at an unlicensed disco is the site of a tragic fire that kills more than 300 people in Luoyang, China, on this day in 2000. It was the deadliest fire in China since a December 1994 fire in a Xinjiang concert hall killed 324 people.


TODAY'S BIRTHS

1642 – Isaac Newton, English physicist and mathematician (d. 1726/7)

1821 – Clara Barton, American nurse and humanitarian, founded the American Red Cross (d. 1912)

1878 – Louis Chevrolet, Swiss-American race car driver and businessman, co-founded Chevrolet (d. 1941)

1878 Noël, Countess of Rothes, philanthropist, social leader and heroine of Titanic disaster (d. 1956)

1889 Lila Bell Wallace, American publisher and philanthropist, co-founded Reader's Digest (d. 1984)

1907 Cab Calloway, American singer-songwriter and bandleader (d. 1994)

1918 Anwar Sadat, Egyptian lieutenant and politician, 3rd President of Egypt, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1981)



From Wikipedia and Google, ex as noted.

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