ON THIS DAY

The Byzantine church Hagia Sophia in Constantinople is dedicated for the second time after being destroyed by earthquakes. 1476 About 400 Burgundian soldiers freeze to death besieging the French city of Nancy. 1524 Portuguese seafarer Vasco da Gama dies on his final voyage to India.

1651 Three ships, Drommedaris, Reijger and Goede Hoop, carrying Jan van Riebeeck and his party, leave Texel in the Netherlands, for the Cape, to establish a refreshment station. 1737 The Marathas defeat the combined forces of the Mughal Empire, Rajputs of Jaipur, Nizam of Hyderabad, Nawab of Awadh and Nawab of Bengal in the Battle of Bhopal.

1777 Kiritimati, aka Christmas Island, is discovered by James Cook.

1818 The first performance of takes place in Oberndorf, Austria.

1826 Eggnog riots begin at the US Military Academy in West Point, New York. Also known as the Grog Mutiny, these riots began after cadets consumed copious amounts of eggnog made with smuggled whiskey. 1865 Ku Klux Klan founded. The extremist white supremacist organisation was started in Tennessee by Confederate Army veterans. 1893 Henry Ford completes his first useful petrol-fuelled engine.

1901 Drunken British soldiers destroy the

in Burgersdorp, erected to commemorate equal status given to Dutch and English in the Cape Colony.

1913 The Italian Hall disaster in Calumet, Michigan, causes the deaths of 73 Christmas party participants – 59 of them children – who were crushed when someone falsely yelled “fire”.

1914 Christmas Truce begins. A muchstudied event in war and peace studies, it was a brief unofficial ceasefire between British and German troops along the Western Front. During the truce, soldiers from both sides sang carols, shared food, exchanged gifts and played football. Subsequent attempts failed.

1928 At Kommetjie, near Cape Town, 103 whales are washed ashore.

1941 Benghazi is conquered by British forces during World War II.

1951 Libya gains independence from Italy. The North African country had been ruled by Italy since 1912. After independence, it became a constitutional monarchy under King Idris. He was overthrown in a military coup led by Muammar Gaddafi in 1969. 1953 A railway bridge on New Zealand’s North Island is damaged by a lahar from a volcano and collapses beneath a passenger train, killing 151 people.

1955 Norad’s Santa tracking service begins. The event is now a Christmas tradition where the North American Aerospace Defence Command tracks Santa Claus as he travels across the world delivering presents to children. The event began after a printing error in a Sears catalogue asking children to call Santa Claus. The number that was printed was the number of Colorado Springs’ Continental Air Defence Command Centre. 1991 A female coelacanth, with 26 nearterm embryos, is caught off Pebane, Mozambique.

2008 The Lord’s Resistance Army begins a series of attacks on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, massacring more than 400 people. |