First gorilla born in captivity

On December 22, 1849 writer Fyodor Dostoevsky is led before a firing squad and prepared for execution. He had been convicted and sentenced to death on November 16 for allegedly taking part in antigovernment activities. However, at the last moment he was reprieved and sent into exile. Dostoevsky’s father was a doctor at Moscow’s Hospital […]

A central player in the violent Lincoln County War of 1878-81, the cattleman John Chisum dies at Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Born in Tennessee in 1824, Chisum moved with his family to Paris, Texas, when he was eleven years old. For several years he worked as construction contractor, but in 1854, he decided to go into […]

On December 22, 1894, the Amateur Golf Association of the United States—later renamed the United States Golf Association—is formed in New York to govern the sport. Five charter golf clubs join to form the association—Newport (Rhode Island) Golf Club; St. Andrews Golf Club in Westchester County, New York; Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton, Illinois; Shinnecock […]

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrives in Washington, D.C. for a series of meetings with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on a unified Anglo-American war strategy and a future peace. Now that the United States was directly involved in both the Pacific and European wars, it was incumbent upon both Great Britain and America to create […]

The Soviet Union accuses China of backing U.S. policies in Vietnam, an accusation that illustrates the growing rift between the two communist superpowers. China, which had previously taken a hard line toward negotiations between Hanoi and Washington, softened its position by endorsing a North Vietnamese peace plan for ending the war. Although the peace proposal […]

On the New York City subway, Bernhard Goetz, a 37-year-old white male, shoots four young Black men after they surround him and ask for $5. Goetz later stated that, after wounding three of the unarmed men, he pointed his gun at 18-year-old Darrell Cabey, who was not wounded but cowering terrified in the subway car, […]

The Romanian army defects to the cause of anti-communist demonstrators, and the government of Nicolae Ceausescu is overthrown. The end of 42 years of communist rule came three days after Ceausescu’s security forces opened fire on demonstrators in Timisoara. After the army’s defection, Ceausescu and his wife fled from Bucharest in a helicopter but were […]

On December 22, 2001, three months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Richard Reid, 28, a British citizen and Al Qaeda member, attempts to detonate homemade bombs hidden in his shoes while aboard American Airlines Flight 63 headed to Miami from Paris. During the flight that included 197 passengers and crew members, Reid—who came to be […]