Also on this day
Lead Story
1936
After ruling for less than one year, Edward VIII becomes the first English monarch to voluntarily abdicate the throne. He chose to abdicate after the British government, public, and the Church of England condemned his decision to marry the American divorcée Wallis Warfield Simpson. On the evening of December 11,...
American Revolution
1777
On this day in 1777, General George Washington begins marching 12,000 soldiers of his Continental Army from Whitemarsh to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for the winter. As Washington’s men began crossing the Schuylkill River, they were surprised by a regiment of several thousand British troops led by General Charles Cornwallis....
Automotive
1962
On December 11, 1962, the New York City Board of Estimate unanimously votes against a plan for a $100 million elevated expressway across the bottom of Manhattan. The road, known as the Lower Manhattan Expressway, had been in the works since 1941. It was supposed to link the Holland Tunnel...
Civil War
1862
On this day in 1862, the Union Army of the Potomac occupies Fredericksburg, Virginia, as General Ambrose Burnside continues to execute his plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia.However, the occupation did not happen until three weeks after Burnside’s army had arrived at Falmouth, Virginia, just across the...
Cold War
1969
On this day, the secretary of the Moscow writer’s union declares that nudity as displayed in the popular play “Oh! Calcutta!” is a sign of decadence in Western culture. More disturbing, he claimed, was the fact that this “bourgeois” thinking was infecting Russian youth.Sergei Mikhailkov, best known for writing...
Crime
2008
On this day in 2008, financier Bernard Madoff is arrested at his New York City apartment and charged with masterminding a long-running Ponzi scheme later estimated to involve around $65 billion, making it one of the biggest investment frauds in Wall Street history.
Madoff, who was born in Queens, New York,...
Disaster
1944
The city of Toronto, Canada, is battered with its worst-ever snowfall on this day in 1944. Twenty-one people died as a result of the record storm, in which nearly 20 inches of snow fell in a single day.
The storm began hundreds of miles to the south near the Gulf of...
General Interest
1946
In the aftermath of World War II, the General Assembly of the United Nations votes to establish the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), an organization to help provide relief and support to children living in countries devastated by the war.After the food and medical crisis of the late...
1994
In the largest Russian military offensive since the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks pour into the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya. Encountering only light resistance, Russian forces had by evening pushed to the outskirts of the Chechen capital of Grozny, where several thousand Chechen...
Hollywood
1944
On this day in 1944, the actress Teri Garr, who will rise to fame in Hollywood in the 1970s with such hit films as Oh, God! and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is born in Lakewood, Ohio.
Garr was born into a show business family: Her father was a vaudeville...
Literary
1918
On this day in 1918, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is born in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia.
Solzhenitsyn’s father, an artillery officer on the German front in World War I, died before Solzhenitsyn was born, and he was raised by his mother, a typist. He began writing as a child but studied mathematics...
Music
1964
On December 11, 1964, in response to a reported shooting, officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were dispatched to the Hacienda Motel, where they found Sam Cooke dead on the office floor, shot three times in the chest by the motel’s manager, Bertha Franklin. The authorities ruled Cooke’s death...
Old West
1872
Already appearing as a well-known figure of the Wild West in popular dime novels, Buffalo Bill Cody makes his first stage appearance on this day, in a Chicago-based production of The Scouts of the Prairie.
Unlike many of his imitators in Wild West shows and movies, William Frederick Cody actually played...
Presidential
1815
On this day in 1815, President James Madison (1809-1817) presents to Congress a trade agreement with Great Britain that would regulate commerce between the two countries. The agreement came just one year after the signing of the treaty that ended the War of 1812. The commerce agreement secured America’s autonomy...
Sports
1981
On this day in 1981, the Jamaican boxer Trevor Berbick beat former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali in a unanimous 10-round decision, before a crowd of 10,000 at the Queen Elizabeth Sports Centre in Nassau, the Bahamas.
At the age of 39, Ali (born Cassius Clay) was attempting his second comeback from...
Vietnam War
1969
Paratroopers from the U.S. Third Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, depart from Vietnam.
The unit was sent to Vietnam in February 1968 as an emergency measure in response to the Communist 1968 Tet Offensive. Landing at Chu Lai, the unit was attached to the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) and given the mission...
World War I
1915
With war raging in Europe, conflict also reigns in the Far East between two traditional enemies, Japan and an internally-divided China. On December 11, 1915, the first president of the new Chinese republic, Yuan Shih-kai, who had come to power in the wake of revolution in 1911 and the...
World War II
1941
On this day, Adolf Hitler declares war on the United States, bringing America, which had been neutral, into the European conflict.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor surprised even Germany. Although Hitler had made an oral agreement with his Axis partner Japan that Germany would join a war against the United States,...
