This day in history
Today is Thursday, Dec. 14, the 348th day of 2023. There are 17 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Singer Abbe Lane is 92. Actor Hal Williams is 89. Entertainment executive Michael Ovitz is 77. Actor Dee Wallace is 75. R&B singer Ronnie McNeir (The Four Tops) is 74. Rock singer-musician Mike Scott of The Waterboys is 65. Singermusician Peter “Spider” Stacy of The Pogues is 65. Actor Sophie Monk is 44. Actor-singer Jackson Rathbone is 39. Actor Vanessa Hudgens is 35. Rock/R&B singer Tori Kelly is 31.
▶ In 1773, thousands of people from Boston and towns across Massachusetts descended on the Old South Meeting House to discuss what to do with unwanted East India Company tea aboard vessels docked in Boston Harbor. Merchants and Sons of Liberty wanted the captains of the vessels to return the tea to London because of taxes on the product and because exclusive rights to sell it bypassed the merchants. The captains feared British warships would attack them if they left the harbor without unloading the tea. Francis Rotch of Nantucket, one of the owners of the ships, was ordered by those at the meeting to receive permission from Colonial Governor Thomas Hutchinson allowing him to leave the harbor without unloading the tea.
▶ In 1799, the first president of the United States, George Washington, died at his Mount Vernon, Va., home at age 67.
▶ In 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team became the first men to reach the South Pole, beating out a British expedition led by Robert F. Scott.
▶ In 1964, the US Supreme Court, in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, ruled that Congress was within its authority to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against racial discrimination by private businesses (in this case, a motel that refused to cater to Blacks).
▶ In 1981, Israel annexed the Golan Heights, which it had seized from Syria in 1967.
▶ In 2006, a British inquiry concluded the deaths of Princess Diana and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, in a 1997 Paris car crash were a “tragic accident” and allegations of a murder conspiracy were unfounded.
▶ In 2012, a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle killed 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., then took his own life; the 20-yearold had also fatally shot his mother at their home.
▶ In 2020, the Electoral College decisively confirmed Joe Biden as the nation’s next president, ratifying his victory in a state-by-state repudiation of President Trump’s refusal to concede he had lost; electors gave Biden 306 votes to Trump’s 232. The largest vaccination campaign in US history began with health workers getting shots on the same day the nation’s COVID-19 death toll hit 300,000.