December 11

Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates, waiting at the posts of my doors. 

– Proverbs 8:34

December is:

National Stress-Free Family Holidays Month - Take time out with your family to do some things that don't involve the hectic frazzel of holiday plans. Sponsor: Parenting Without Pressure.

Born on this Day

• 1475: Pope Leo X
  

• 1781: Scottish physicist and kaleidoscope inventor David Brewster
  

• 1803: French composer Hector Berlioz
  

• 1830: Hawaiian King Kamehameha. The Kamehameha dynasty ended with his death on Dec. 11, 1872.
  

• 1843: German pioneer bacteriologist Robert Koch
  

• 1882: New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia
  

• 1908: The American composer Elliott Carter was born. Only a few hours separated the birth of Olivier Messiaen in France and the arrival of Carter in New York. The two would grow up to have remarkably similar careers each one hailed as an important 20th century composer.
  

• 1918: Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  

• 1930: Actor Jean-Louis Trintignant
  

• 1931: Actress Rita Moreno
  

• 1935: Actor Ron Carey
  

• 1939: California state senator Tom Hayden
  

• 1950: Pop singer David Gates (Bread)
  

• 1943: Actress Donna Mills
  

• 1943: Senator John Kerry (Democrat, Massachusetts)
  

• 1944: Singer Brenda Lee
  

• 1946: Actress Lynda Day George
  

• 1946: Country producer Tony Brown
  

• 1948: Actress Teri Garr
  

• 1952: Movie director Susan Seidelman ("Desperately Seeking Susan")
  

• 1953: Actress Bess Armstrong
  

• 1954: Singer Jermaine Jackson
  

• 1958: Rock musician Nikki Sixx (Motley Crue)
  

• 1964: Rock musician David Schools (Widespread Panic)
  

• 1979: Actor Rider Strong ("Boy Meets World")

Events in History on this day
  

• 0384: Death of St. Damascuc I, Pope
  

• 0493: Death of St. Daniel the Stylite
  

• 1192: Richard the Lion-Hearted captured near Vienna by Leopold of Austria
  

• 1241: Death of Ogudai; Mongols withdraw from Hungary
  

• 1282: Beheading of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, considered last legitimate Prince of Wales
  

• 1521: Death of Wladislaus II, King of Hungary and Bohemia
  

• 1533: Death of Vasily III, Czar of Russia
  

• 1618: An Armistice is signed between Russia and Poland
  

• 1620: 103 "Mayflower" pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock
  

• 1792: France's King Louis the 16th went before the Convention to face charges of treason. (Louis was convicted, and executed the following month.)
  

• 1816: Indiana became the 19th state.
  

• 1844: Dr. Horace Wells, of Hartford, CT, had a tooth extracted. He became the first to receive an anesthetic for this dental procedure.
  

• 1861: A raging fire sweeps the business district of Charleston, South Carolina, adding to an already depressed economic state.
  

• 1872: America's first black governor took office as Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback became acting governor of Louisiana.
  

• 1882: The Bijou Theatre in Boston, MA, became the first theatre to be lighted by electricity.
  

• 1894: The world's first motor show opened in Paris with nine exhibitors.
  

• 1908: WJ Henderson blasted Scriabin's "Poem of Ecstasy" in the New York Sun. "It seemed," he wrote, "like several other things than ecstasy."
  

• 1919:- The kind citizens of Enterprise, Alabama dedicated the first known monument to honor the boll weevil. The weevil had destroyed cotton plants. However, by forcing folks to diversify their crops, the farmers wound up tripling their income.
  

• 1927: Nearly 400 world leaders sign a letter to President Coolidge asking the U.S. to join the World Court.
  

• 1928: Police in Buenos Aires thwarted an attempt on the life of President-elect Herbert Hoover.
  

• 1928: U.S. Senate votes to compromise on the Boulder Dam, leaving California and Arizona short on water demands.
  

• 1930: As the economic crises grows, the Bank of the U.S. closes its doors.
  

• 1936: Britain's King Edward the Eighth abdicated the throne in order to marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson.
  

• 1937: Italy withdrew from the League of Nations.
  

• 1939: Singer Betty Grable and her famous legs were featured on the cover of "LIFE" magazine.
  

• 1939: Marlene Dietrich recorded "Falling In Love Again", on the Decca label.
  

• 1941: Four days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.
  

• 1946: The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) was established.
  

• 1951: Joe DiMaggio announces his retirement from baseball.
  

• 1961: A US aircraft carrier carrying Army helicopters arrived in Saigon -- the first direct American military support for South Vietnam's battle against Communist guerrillas.
  

• 1967: The Concorde, a joint British-French venture and the world’s first supersonic airliner, is unveiled in Toulouse, France.
  

• 1973: West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and Czech Prime Minister Lubomir Strougal formally signed a treaty nullifying the 1938 Munich pact sanctioning Hitler's seizure of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland.
  

• 1980: President Jimmy Carter signed into law legislation creating $1.6 billion environmental "superfund" to pay for cleaning up chemical spills and toxic waste dumps.
  

• 1981: The U.N. Security Council chose Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru to be the fifth secretary-general of the world body.
  

• 1982: In his weekly radio address, President Ronald Reagan urged the Senate to vote for production funds for the M-X missile, and worry later about the "basing-mode" for the weapon.
  

• 1983: Pope John Paul II paid a historic visit to a Lutheran church in Rome, the first visit by a Roman Catholic pontiff to a Protestant church in his own diocese.
  

• 1984: Two days after the end of the hijacking of a Kuwaiti jetliner, the United States accused Iran of encouraging "extreme behavior" by the hijackers, who killed two Americans during the five-day siege.
  

• 1985: The U.S. House of Representatives joined the Senate in giving final congressional approval to the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law.
  

• 1985: The most expensive non-oil acquisition in U.S. history took place as General Electric Company agreed to buy RCA Corporation for $6.3 billion. The deal also included NBC Radio and Television.
  

• 1986: The government of South Africa drastically expanded its 6-month-old media restrictions by imposing prior censorship and banning coverage of a wide range of peaceful anti-apartheid protests.
  

• 1987: NATO allies urged the U.S. Senate to ratify the intermediate -range missile treaty quickly, and underscored their support by pledging to let the Soviet Union inspect missile bases in 5 European nations.
  

• 1988: A Soviet military transport plane crashed, killing nearly 80 people involved in Armenian earthquake relief efforts.
  

• 1988: Sixty-two people were killed when tons of illegal fireworks exploded in a Mexico City marketplace.
  

• 1989: President Bush, facing criticism at home for sending two U.S. officials to China, defended the diplomatic overture despite the Beijing government's crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators the previous June.
  

• 1990: Hundreds of foreigners flew out of Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, ending four months of captivity following Iraq's invasion of its oil-rich neighbor.
  

• 1990: Ivana Trump was divorced from real estate mogul Donald Trump after 12 years of marriage.
  

• 1991: European Community leaders meeting in the Dutch city of Maastricht hammered out a compromise for a loose federation of their countries.
  

• 1992: President-elect Clinton tapped Robert Reich to be labor secretary and Donna Shalala to be secretary of Health and Human Services.
  

• 1993: President Clinton, in his weekly radio address, said the nation must fight "violence with values," and praised radio stations that refused to play songs advocating violent crime or showing contempt for women.
  

• 1994: Thousands of Russian troops backed by armored columns and jets rolled into breakaway republic of Chechnya in a bid to restore Moscow's control over the region.
  

• 1994; Leaders of 34 Western Hemisphere nations signed a free-trade declaration in Miami which would be known as "The Miami Process." It was a hemispheric agreement to create the world's largest free trade zone.
  

• 1995: Utah Congresswoman Enid Greene Waldholtz held an emotional news conference in which she publicly addressed the scandal surrounding her personal and campaign finances and blamed her estranged husband, Joe.
  

• 1997: More than 150 countries agreed at a global warming conference in Kyoto, Japan, to control the Earth's greenhouse gases.
  

• 1997: Henry Cisneros, President Clinton's first housing secretary, was indicted on charges of conspiracy, obstructing justice and making false statements about payments to his former mistress.
  

• 1997: Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams became the first political ally of the IRA to meet a British leader in 76 years as he conferred with Prime Minister Tony Blair in London.
  

• 1998: The Mars Climate Orbiter blasted off on a nine-month journey to the red planet (however, the probe disappeared last September, apparently destroyed because scientists had failed to convert English measures to metric values).
  

• 1998: Majority Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee pushed through three articles of impeachment against President Clinton, over Democratic objections.
  

• 1999: President Clinton told CBS Radio his 1993 "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military wasn't working, and he pledged to work with the Pentagon to find a way to fix it. 
  

• 1999:Ron Dayne, Wisconsin's record-setting tailback, was a landslide winner in the Heisman Trophy balloting. 

Today's History Focus

Send Mail to pbower@neo.rr.com

Looking for more quotations?
Past quotes from the Daily Miscellany can be found here!