On This Day

On Dec. 16, 1950, President Harry Truman proclaimed a national state of emergency in order to fight “Communist imperialism,” a reference to Chinese forces fighting against U.S.-led UN forces in the Korean War.

On Dec. 15, 1961, Adolf Eichmann, a former Gestapo lieutenant colonel who oversaw Nazi Germany’s mass deportation and killing of Jews, was sentenced to hang by a Jerusalem court.

On Dec. 14, 1911, Roald Amundsen and four fellow Norwegian explorers became the first men to reach the South Pole, beating the ill-fated team of British Capt. Robert F. Scott by just over a month.

On Dec. 14, 1981, Israel annexed the Golan Heights, which it had seized from Syria following the 1967 Six-Day War.

On Dec. 13, 1577, Francis Drake, with Queen Elizabeth’s blessing, left England on an expedition to the Pacific Ocean. Drake became the second man, after Ferdinand Magellan, to complete a circumnavigation of the globe.

On Dec. 12, 1901, at a site set up in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Guglielmo Marconi revolutionized international communications when he heard three little clicks—the “S” in Morse code—sent by his colleagues from a transmitter in Cornwall, England.

On Dec. 12, 1963, Kenya, which had been under British rule since 1895, officially gained independence.

On Dec. 10, 1948, the UN General Assembly approved a declaration recognizing the “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.”

On Dec. 9, 1990, Lech Walesa, the founder of the Solidarity trade union and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, won Poland's presidential election.

On Dec. 9, 1992, Britain's Prince Charles and Princess Diana revealed that they were separating after 11 years of marriage.

On Dec. 6, 1877, Thomas Alva Edison made the first recording in his tinfoil cylinder phonograph, the invention that made him famous.

On Dec. 6, 1923, President Calvin Coolidge’s State of the Union address became the first presidential address to be broadcast on radio.

On Dec. 1, 1990, British and French construction workers joined the two halves of the Eurotunnel, physically linking Britain and France for the first time since the end of the ice age.

On Dec. 1, 1959, representatives of 12 countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, signed a treaty in Washington setting aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve, free from military activity.

On Nov. 28, 1990, after more than 11 years as the nation’s first female premier, Margaret Thatcher resigned. Although credited with reducing inflation and victory in the Falklands War, she was and remains a profoundly divisive figure in British politics.

On Nov. 28, 1943, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin met in Tehran, Iran, to discuss Allied strategy during World War II as well as post-war matters.

On Nov. 27, 1978, openly gay San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk was murdered, along with Mayor George Moscone, by former Supervisor Dan White.

On Nov. 27, 1910, Pennsylvania Station opened in New York City, with trains entering Manhattan for the first time by way of tunnels under the Hudson River.

On Nov. 26, 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter made a small hole in a sealed doorway and, holding up a candle, shed light onto King Tutankhamen’s tomb in Luxor, Egypt, for the first time in more than 3,000 years.

On Nov. 25, 1947, studio executives released a statement declaring that they would not employ 10 prominent writers and directors who had been held in contempt of Congress for refusing to confirm or deny that they were communists.

On Nov. 24, 1971, a man hijacked a Boeing 727 and, after receiving a $200,000 ransom, parachuted out over Washington state. The identity and the whereabouts of the man, who became known as D.B. Cooper, remain unknown.

On Nov. 23, 1981, President Ronald Reagan provided the Central Intelligence Agency with $19 million in military aid to support guerrilla groups fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government; the decision led to the 1986 Iran-Contra affair.

On Nov. 23, 1943, U.S. forces captured the Tarawa atoll from Japan, its first victory in the island-hopping campaign toward Japan.

On Nov. 22, 1950, a two-train pileup on the Long Island Rail Road killed 79 and injured hundreds more.

On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas.

On Nov. 21, 1953, British scientists revealed that the fragments from the skull of the Piltdown man, discovered in 1912, were taken from human and orangutan skulls and doctored to look like an early human skull.

On Nov. 21, 1964, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connecting Staten Island and Brooklyn opened, surpassing San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge as the world’s largest suspension bridge.

On Nov. 20, 1945, the International Military Tribunal began proceedings against 22 high-ranking Nazis indicted for war crimes; the Nuremberg Trials set a precedent in international human rights law.

On Nov. 20, 1975, Generalisimo Francisco Franco died, ending his 36-year dictatorship in Spain.

On Nov. 18, 1883, railways in the United States and Canada adopted Standard Railway Time, creating four standardized time zones in the U.S. and five in Canada.