TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS WEDNESDAY, DEC. 7,

the 342nd day of 2016. There are 24 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT IN HISTORY:

On this date in 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched an attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, one of a series of raids in the Pacific. The United States declared war against Japan the next day.

In 43 B.C.,

Roman statesman and scholar Marcus Tullius Cicero was slain at the order of the Second Triumvirate.

In 1787,

Delaware became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

In 1842,

the New York Philharmonic performed its first concert.

In 1909,

chemist Leo H. Baekeland received a U.S. patent for Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic.

In 1965,

Pope Paul VI and Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras I simultaneously lifted the mutual excommunications that had led to the split of their churches in 1054.

In 1972,

America’s last moon mission to date was launched as Apollo 17 blasted off from Cape Canaveral.

In 1985,

retired Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart died in Hanover, N.H., at age 70.

In 1987,

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev set foot on American soil for the first time, arriving for a Washington summit with President Ronald Reagan.

In 1993,

gunman Colin Ferguson opened fire on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train, killing six people and wounding 19. (Ferguson was later sentenced to a minimum of 200 years.)

In 1995,

a 746-pound probe from the Galileo spacecraft hurtled into Jupiter’s atmosphere, sending back data before it was presumably destroyed.