TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2018

On this day in history:

1735 - In London, French surgeon Claudius Amyand performed the first successful appendectomy at St. George’s Hospital. The patient was an 11-year old boy that had swallowed a pin.

1774 - Austria became the first nation to introduce a state education system.

1877 - Thomas Edison demonstrated the first gramophone, with a recording of himself reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb.

1917 - Finland proclaimed independence from Russia.

1921 - The Catholic Irish Free State was created as a self-governing dominion of Britain when an Anglo-Irish treaty was signed.

1926 - In Italy, Benito Mussolini introduced a tax on bachelors.

1982 - 11 soldiers and 6 civilians were killed when a bomb exploded in a pub in Ballykelly, Northern Ireland. The Irish National Liberation Army was responsible for planting the bomb.

1983 - In Jerusalem, a bomb planted on a bus exploded killing six Israelis and wounding 44.

1989 - The worst mass shooting in Canadian history occurred when a man gunned down 14 women at the University of Montreal’s school of engineering. The man then killed himself.

1989 - Egon Krenz resigned as leader of East Germany.

1990 - Iraq announced that it would release all its 2000 foreign hostages.

1992 - Germany’s primary political parties agreed to tighten postwar asylum laws.

1992 - In India, thousands of Hindu extremists destroyed a mosque. The following two months of Hindu-Muslim rioting resulted in at least 2,000 people being killed.

1998 - In Venezuela, former Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chavez was elected president. He had staged a bloody coup attempt against the government six years earlier.

2002 - Officials released the detailed plans for a $4.7 million memorial commemorating Princess Diana. The large oval fountain was planned to be constructed in London’s Hyde Park.