Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On Dec. 20, 1803, the Louisiana Purchase was completed as ownership of the territory was formally transferred from France to the United States.
On this date:
1860: South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union as all 169 delegates to a special convention in Charleston voted in favor of separation.
1924: Adolf Hitler was released from prison after serving nine months for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch.
1961: Playwright-director Moss Hart, 57, died in Palm Springs, California.
1963: The Berlin Wall was opened for the first time to West Berliners, who were allowed one-day visits to relatives in the Eastern sector for the holidays.
1968: Author John Steinbeck died in New York at age 66.
1978: Former White
House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman was released from prison after serving
18 months for his role in the Watergate cover-up.
1987: More than 4,300 people were killed when the Dona Paz, a Philippine passenger ship, collided with the tanker Vector off Mindoro island.
1989: The United States launched Operation Just Cause, sending troops into Panama to topple the government of Gen. Manuel Noriega.
1995: An American Airlines Boeing 757 en route to Cali, Colombia, slammed into a mountain, killing all but four of the 163 people aboard. In Bosnia-herzegovina, NATO began its peacekeeping mission, taking over from the United Nations.
1999: The Vermont Supreme Court ruled that homosexual couples were entitled to the same benefits and protections as wedded heterosexual couples.
2002: Trent Lott resigned as Senate Republican leader two weeks after igniting a political firestorm with racially charged remarks. The nation’s ten biggest brokerages agreed to pay $1.44 billion and fundamentally change the way they did business to settle allegations they’d misled investors by hyping certain companies’ stocks.
2005: A federal judge ruled that “intelligent design” could not be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, delivering a stinging attack on the Dover Area School Board.
Ten years ago: Actress Brittany Murphy, who’d starred in “Clueless” and “8 Mile,” died at age 32.
Five years ago: A gunman who’d announced online that he was planning to shoot two “pigs” in retaliation for the police chokehold death of Eric Garner ambushed two New York City officers in a patrol car; Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot
Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu to death before running to a subway station and killing himself.
One year ago: President Donald Trump declared that he would not sign a bill to keep funding the government because it failed to provide billions of dollars for his border wall with Mexico.