TODAY IN HISTORY
1777: During the American Revolutionary War, Gen. George Washington led his army of about 11,000 men to Valley Forge, Pa., to camp for the winter. 1843: “A Christmas Carol,” by Charles Dickens, was first published in England.
1915: Legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf was born in Paris. German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer, who discovered the pathological condition of dementia, died in Breslau (now Wroclaw), Poland, at age 51.
1946: War broke out in Indochina as troops under Ho Chi Minh launched widespread attacks against the French.
1960: Fire broke out on the hangar deck of the nearly completed aircraft carrier USS Constellation at the New York Naval Shipyard; 50 civilian workers were killed.
1972: Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific, winding up the Apollo program of manned lunar landings. 1974: Nelson A. Rockefeller was sworn in as the 41st vice president of the United States in the U.S. Senate chamber by Chief Justice Warren Burger with President Gerald R. Ford looking on. 1975: John Paul Stevens was sworn in as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
1998: President Bill Clinton was impeached by the Republican-controlled House for perjury and obstruction of justice (he was subsequently acquitted by the Senate).
2001: The fires that had burned beneath the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York City for the previous three months were declared extinguished except for a few scattered hot spots. 2002: Secretary of State Colin Powell declared Iraq in “material breach” of a U.N. disarmament resolution.
2003: Design plans were unveiled for the signature skyscraper — a 1,776-foot glass tower — at the site of the World Trade Center in New York City. 2008: Citing imminent danger to the national economy, President George W. Bush ordered an emergency bailout of the U.S. auto industry.
2019: Congress headed home for the holidays without a plan or timeline in place for President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate; Republicans resisted Democratic demands for new witness testimony. The House gave Trump an overwhelming bipartisan victory on trade, approving a bill putting in place the terms of the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.