TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

It is

Boxing Day Independence and Unity Day (Slovenia)

On this day in history:

1620 - The Pilgrim Fathers landed at New Plymouth, MA, to found Plymouth Colony, with John Carver as Governor. 1776 - The British suffered a major defeat in the Battle of Trenton during the American Revolutionary War.

1921 - The Catholic Irish Free State became a self-governing dominion of Great Britain. 1927 - The East-West Shrine football game featured numbers on both the front and back of players’ jerseys. 1941 - Winston Churchill became the first British prime minister to address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress. 1941 - U.S. President Roosevelt signed a resolution that set the a fixed-date, the fourth Thursday of November, for the Federal Thanksgiving Day holiday.

1943 - The German battlecruiser Scharnhorst was sunk in the North Sea, during the Battle of North Cape. 1945 - The first Sydney to Hobart yacht race is held. 1947 - The territory of Heard and McDonald Islands is transferred from Britain to Australia.

1956 - Fidel Castro attempted a secret landing in Cuba to overthrow the Batista regime. All but 11 of his supporters were killed.

1982 - The Man of the Year in TIME magazine was a computer. It was the first time a non-human received the honours.

1990 - Garry Kasparov beat Anatoly Karpov to retain the chess championship.

1991 - The Soviet Union’s parliament formally voted the country out of existence. 1995 - Israel turned dozens of West Bank villages over to the Palestinian Authority.

1999 - Alfonso Portillo, a populist lawyer, won Guatemala’s first peacetime presidential elections in 40 years.

2004 - Under the Indian Ocean, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake sent 500mph waves across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal. The tsunami killed at least 283,000 people in a dozen countries, including Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Sumatra, Thailand and India.