The Christmas Truce

Although most Christians celebrate December 25 as the birthday of Jesus Christ, few in the first two Christian centuries claimed any knowledge of the exact day or year in which he was born. The oldest existing record of a Christmas celebration is found in a Roman almanac that tells of Christ’s Nativity festival led by […]

On Christmas night 1895, a barroom argument between two men—one named Billy and another named “Stag” Lee—takes place, leading to murder. The killing would inspire an iconic blues song. Murder and mayhem inspired many popular songs over the years, though more often than not, the tales around which such songs revolve tend to be wholly […]

On December 25, 1962, To Kill a Mockingbird, a film based on the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Harper Lee, opens in Los Angeles. The Great Depression-era story of racial injustice and the loss of childhood innocence is told from the perspective of a young Alabama girl named Scout Finch, played […]

Mikhail Gorbachev announces that he is resigning as president of the Soviet Union. In truth, there was not much of a Soviet Union from which to resign—just four days earlier, 11 of the former Soviet republics had established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), effectively dismembering the USSR. The Soviet Union, for all intents and […]