TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY IS SATURDAY, DEC. 3, the 338th day of 2016. There are 28 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT IN HISTORY: On this date in 1926, English novelist Agatha Christie, 36, drove away from her home in Sunningdale, Berkshire, and disappeared. (Christie turned up 11 days later at a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, under an assumed name, for reasons never quite explained.)
In 1818, Illinois was admitted as the 21st state.
In 1833, Oberlin College in Ohio — the first truly coeducational school of higher learning in the United States — began holding classes.
In 1925, George Gershwin’s “Concerto in F” had its world premiere at New York’s Carnegie Hall, with Gershwin at the piano.
In 1947, the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire” opened on Broadway.
In 1960, the Lerner and Loewe musical “Camelot” opened on Broadway.
In 1965, The Beatles’ sixth studio album, “Rubber Soul,” was released in the United Kingdom; it was released in the U.S. three days later).
In 1967, surgeons in Cape Town, South Africa, led by Dr. Christiaan Barnard, performed the first human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky, who lived 18 days with the donor heart, which came from Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old bank clerk who’d died in a traffic accident.
In 1979, 11 people were killed in a crush of fans at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum, where the British rock group The Who was performing.
In 1984, thousands of people died after a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas escaped from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India.
In 1991, radicals in Lebanon released American hostage Alann Steen, who’d been held captive nearly five years.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS: Movie director Jean-Luc Godard is 86. Singer Jaye P. Morgan is 85. Actor Nicolas Coster is 83. Actress Mary Alice is 75. Rock singer Ozzy Osbourne is 68. Actress Heather Menzies Urich and rock singer Mickey Thomas are 67. Actor Steven Culp is 61. Actresses Daryl Hannah and Julianne Moore are 56. Olympic gold medal figure skater Katarina Witt is 51. Actor Brendan Fraser and singer Montell Jordan are 48. Pop-rock singer Daniel Bedingfield is 37. Actress Anna Chlumsky is 36. Actor Brian Bonsall is 35. Pop/rock singer-songwriter Andy Grammer is 33. Actress Amanda Seyfried is 31.