This day in history
Today is Thursday, Dec. 28, the 362nd day of 2023. There are three days left in the year.
Birthdays: Actor Maggie Smith is 89. Rock singer-guitarist Edgar Winter is 77. Actor Denzel Washington is 69. TV personality Gayle King is 69. Actor Chad McQueen is 63. Political commentator Ana Navarro is 52. Talk show host Seth Meyers is 50. Actor Joe Manganiello is 47. R&B singer John Legend is 45. Actor Sienna Miller is 42. Singer David Archuleta is 33.
ºIn 1612, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei observed the planet Neptune, but mistook it for a star. (Neptune wasn’t officially discovered until 1846 by Johann Gottfried Galle.)
ºIn 1773, Boston’s revolutionary leader Sam Adams, in a letter to James Warren of Plymouth, wrote of the support Boston had received after the event that came to be known as the Boston Tea Party: “It is a great consolation to find, that our friends in the country approve of the conduct of this and the neighboring towns at the late meetings. We are assured of this by the letters we almost daily receive. I think we have put our enemies in the wrong.” Also, a crowd gathered in Charlestown to burn whatever tea could be found in the neighborhood, according to the group Revolution 250.
ºIn 1895, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, held the first public showing of their movies in Paris.
ºIn 1908, a major earthquake followed by a tsunami devastated the Italian city of Messina, killing at least 70,000 people.
ºIn 1912, San Francisco’s Municipal Railway began operations with Mayor James Rolph Jr. at the controls of Streetcar No. 1 in front of 50,000 spectators.
ºIn 1945, Congress officially recognized the Pledge of Allegiance.
ºIn 1972, Kim Il Sung, the premier of North Korea, was named the country’s president under a new constitution.
ºIn 1973, the Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Nixon.
ºIn 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the first American “testtube” baby, was born in Norfolk, Va.
ºIn 1991, nine people died in a crush of people trying to get into a rap celebrity basketball game at City College in New York.
ºIn 2007, Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was laid to rest as the country’s army tried to quell a frenzy of rioting after her assassination.
ºIn 2012, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning Americans from adopting Russian children.
ºIn 2014, the US war in Afghanistan, fought for 13 bloody years and still raging, came to a formal end with a quiet flag lowering ceremony in Kabul that marked the transition of the fighting from US-led combat troops to the country’s security forces.
ºIn 2015, a grand jury in Cleveland declined to indict a white rookie police officer in the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, a Black youth who was shot while playing with what turned out to be a pellet gun.
ºIn 2016, film star Debbie Reynolds, who lit up the screen in “Singin’ in the Rain” and other Hollywood classics, died at age 84, a day after losing her daughter, Carrie Fisher, who was 60.
ºIn 2021, former US Senate majority leader Harry Reid died at his Nevada home of complications from pancreatic cancer; the Democrat was 82. Hall of Fame football coach and broadcaster John Madden died at 85.
ºLast year, New Orleans music legend Walter “Wolfman” Washington, a cornerstone of the city’s musical nightlife for decades, died at age 79.