TODAY IN HISTORY
ON DEC13...
In 1577 Sir Francis Drake of England set out with five ships on a nearly three-year journey that would take him around the world.
In 1642 Dutch navigator Abel Tasman arrived in present-day New Zealand.
In 1769 Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, received its charter.
In 1862 Union forces suffered a major defeat to the Confederates at the Battle of Fredericksburg.
In 1887 Alvin York, American military hero of World War I, was born in Pall Mall, Tenn.
In 1913 Archie Moore, the professional boxer who would become the world light-heavyweight champion through most of the 1950s, was born Archibald Lee Wright in Benoit, Miss.
In 1918 President Woodrow Wilson arrived in France, becoming the first chief executive to visit Europe while in office.
In 1928 George Gershwin’s musical work “An American in Paris” had its premiere, at Carnegie Hall in New York.
In 1944 during World War II, the U.S. cruiser Nashville was badly damaged in a Japanese kamikaze attack that claimed more than 130 lives.
In 1964 in El Paso, Texas, President Lyndon Johnson and Mexican President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz set off an explosion that diverted the Rio Grande, reshaping the U.S.-Mexican border and ending a century-old dispute.
In 1977 the University of Evansville basketball team was wiped out when its DC-3 crashed after takeoff from the southern Indiana city; the death toll of 21 included some coaches, faculty members, parents and alumni.
In 1978 the Philadelphia Mint began stamping the Susan B. Anthony dollar, which went into circulation the following July.
In 1981 authorities in Poland imposed martial law in a crackdown on the Solidarity labor movement. (Martial law formally ended in 1983.)
In 1988 PLO chairman Yasser Arafat addressed the U.N. General Assembly in Geneva, where it had reconvened after the United States refused to grant Arafat a visa to visit New York.
In 1989 South African President F.W. de Klerk met for the first time with imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, at de Klerk’s office in Cape Town.
In 1993 the space shuttle Endeavour returned from its mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Also in 1993 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that people were entitled to a hearing before real property linked to illegal drug sales could be seized.
In 1994 an American Eagle commuter plane carrying 20 people crashed short of RaleighDurham International Airport in North Carolina, killing 15.
In 1995 China’s most influential democracy activist, Wei Jingsheng, who already had spent 16 years in prison, was sentenced to 14 more years. (However, Wei was later granted medical parole by Beijing, and allowed to travel to the U.S.)
In 1996 the U.N. Security Council chose Kofi Annan of Ghana to be the world body’s seventh secretary general. Also in 1996 President Bill Clinton nominated William Daley, brother of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, to be commerce secretary.
In 2000 Republican George W. Bush claimed the presidency 36 days after Election Day; Democrat Al Gore conceded defeat.
In 2001 the Pentagon released a captured videotape of Osama bin Laden in which the al-Qaida leader said the deaths and destruction achieved by the Sept. 11 attacks exceeded his “most optimistic” expectations. Also in 2001 President George W. Bush served formal notice that the United States was pulling out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia.
In 2002 Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as Boston archbishop because of the priest sex abuse scandal.
In 2003 Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces while hiding in a hole under a farmhouse in Ad Dawr, Iraq, near his hometown of Tikrit. Also in 2003 former Sen. William Roth Jr., R-Del., creator of Roth IRA accounts, died in Washington; he was 82.
In 2004 a jury in Redwood City, Calif., recommended the death penalty for Scott Peterson for the murders of his wife and unborn child.
Also in 2004 NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe resigned. Also in 2004 a Chilean judge indicted former dictator General Augusto Pinochet on charges of kidnapping nine political dissidents and killing one of them during his 17-year military regime.
In 2005 Crips gang co-founder Stanley “Tookie” Williams, whose supporters argued he had redeemed himself inside prison, was executed in California for killing four people in robberies.