This date in history

[Jimbuna]

1926 2nd part of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf published.

1936 Edward VIII signs Instrument of Abdication, giving up the British throne to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

1936 Britain replaces King Edward VIII stamp series with King George VI

1941 British battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse (Force Z) sunk following Japanese aerial attacks off Malaya. 840 men die.

[Jimbuna]

1620 Mayflower Pilgrims come ashore in Plymouth Bay, traditionally thought to be at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts.

1917 13 black soldiers hanged for participation in Houston riot.

1931 Statute of Westminster gives complete legislative independence to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland (Free State), and Newfoundland (not then part of Canada)

1936 Edward VIII announces in a radio broadcast that he is abdicating the British throne to marry Wallis Simpson.

1941 Japanese attack Wake Island (only failed WW II-landing)

1971 A bomb explodes outside a furniture showroom on the mainly-Protestant and loyalist Shankill Road, Belfast; four civilians (including two babies) were killed and nineteen wounded.

[Red Devil]

1620 Mayflower Pilgrims come ashore in Plymouth Bay, traditionally thought to be at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts.

Any they did not leave from Plymouth but Dartmouth/Kingswear.

[Jimbuna]

1936 Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek declares war on Japan.

1937 Japanese aircraft shell & sink US gunboat Panay on Yangtze River in China. (Japan apologized & eventually paid US $2.2M in reparations)

1945 Special Court of justice convicts Dutch Nazi leader Mussert to death.

1946 UN accepts 6 Manhattan blocks as a gift from John D. Rockefeller Jr.

1948 Malayan Emergency: Batang Kali Massacre - 14 members of the Scots Guards stationed in Malaysia allegedly massacre 24 unarmed civilians and set fire to the village.

1961 Nazi German army officer Adolf Eichmann is found guilty of war crimes in Israel.

[Jimbuna]

1577 Francis Drake sets sail from England on an epic three year circumnavigation of the world aboard the Golden Hind.

1636 The Massachusetts Bay Colony organizes three militia regiments to defend the colony against the Pequot Indians. Recognized today as the founding of the United States National Guard.

1939 Battle of the River Plate - 3 British cruisers vs German pocket battleship Graf Spee.

1944 Japanese kamikaze crashes into US cruiser Nashville, kills 138

1961 Gideon Hausner in Jerusalem demands death penalty for Adolf Eichmann.

2003 Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is captured near his home town of Tikrit, during Operation Red Dawn by US forces.

[Jimbuna]

1812 The French invasion of Russia, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, officially ends with the French having lost as many as 530,000 people.

1918 Sinn Féin candidates win 73 of 105 Irish seats in UK general election, though all will refuse to take seats in Westminster, instead meeting at a Dail Eireann in Dublin.

1941 Premier Winston Churchill travels to US on board HMS Duke of York.

1952 UN Troops kill 82 North Korean POWs during a prison camp riot in Pongam-do, South Korea.

[Jimbuna]

1915 WWI: ANZAC troops complete their withdrawal from Anzac Cove on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

1924 Adolf Hitler freed from jail early, having served only nine months of five-year sentence for "Beer Hall Putsch"

1941 First battle of the American Volunteer Group, better known as the "Flying Tigers" in Kunming, China.

1944 Battle of Bastogne: Nazis surround 101st Airborne (NUTS!)

1951 Walter Zinn's Experimental Breeder Reactor I, the first nuclear reactor to produce electric power, goes live at the Argonne National Laboratory, USA

1957 Elvis Presley receives his draft notice to join the US Army for national service.

1960 Auschwitz commandant Richard Bar arrested in German FR

1963 Berlin Wall opens for 1st time to West Berliners.

2007 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II becomes the oldest ever monarch of the United Kingdom, surpassing Queen Victoria, who lived for 81 years, 7 months and 29 days.

[Aktungbby]

1987: more than 4300 people are killed when Dona Paz, a Phillipine passenger ship, collided with the tanker Vector off Mindoro Island.

[Jimbuna]

1898 Scientists Pierre and Marie Curie discover radium.

1925 "Battleship Potemkin", Soviet silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein, starring Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barksy and Grigori Aleksandrov, premieres in Moscow.

1939 Adolf Hitler names Adolf Eichmann leader of "Referat IV B", responsible for evictions and Jewish immigration.

1941 German submarine U-567 sinks.

1948 State of Eire (formerly Irish Free State) declares its independence.

1962 US & Cuba negotiate accord for Cuba to release "Bay of Pigs" captives in exchange for $23M worth of medicine and baby food.

1988 Lockerbie disaster: A terrorist bomb destroys Pan Am Flight 103 mid-air, over Scotland; kills all 259 passengers and crew on board, and 11 people on the ground.

1989 VP Quayle sends out 30,000 Xmas cards with word beacon spelled beakon.

1991 Soviet Union formally dissolves as 11 of 12 republics sign treaty forming Commonwealth of Independent States.

[Ostfriese]

December 21st, 2012, the day we all thought the world would end (or not), as it was the last year in the mayan calendar (or not).
What a hype was made around this ten years ago, and literally nothing happened.

[Jimbuna]

1942 Adolf Hitler signs the order to develop the V-2 rocket as a weapon.

1963 Cruise ship Lakonia burns 180 miles north of Madeira with the loss of 128 lives.

1965 Great Britain sets national maximum road speed at 70 miles per hour.

1970 Treblinka SS commander Franz Stangl sentenced to life imprisonment.

1974 2nd cease-fire between IRA & British; lasts until approx April 1975

2010 Repeal of the "Don't Ask Don't Tell policy", a 17-year-old policy banning homosexuals serving openly in the US military, signed into law by President Barack Obama.

[Aktungbby]

1944: during the WW II Battle of the Bulge, U.S. Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe, encircled by the Nazi onslaught in Bastogne, rejects a German surrender demand and achieves immortality with his one word official reply: "Nuts!"

[Jimbuna]

1888 Vincent van Gogh cuts off his left ear with a razor, after argument with fellow painter Paul Gauguin, and sends to a prostitute for safe keeping.

1920 Government of Ireland Act / Home Rule Act passed partitioning Ireland.

1941 American forces on Wake Island surrender to Japanese.

1943 General Bernard Montgomery told he is appointed commandant for D-day.

1968 82 members of US intelligence ship Pueblo released by North Korea.

1972 16 plane crash survivors rescued from Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 after 72 days on the Andean Mountains, after only surviving through cannibalism.

[Jimbuna]

1814 Treaty of Ghent signed, ending the War of 1812 between the United States, the United Kingdom and their allies.

1939 World War II: Pope Pius XII makes a Christmas Eve appeal for peace.

1941 First ships of admiral Nagumo's Pearl Harbor fleet return to Japan.

1942 First powered flight of V-1 'buzz bomb', Peenemunde, Germany.

1943 US President FDR appoints General Eisenhower Supreme Commander of the Allied forces.

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

1888 Vincent van Gogh cuts off his left ear with a razor, after argument with fellow painter Paul Gauguin, and sends to a prostitute for safe keeping.

...and $till making money 134 years later:

 

I meant 'Vinny' Van Gogh...not the prostitute!