December 8

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

– Proverbs 8:34

December is:

Made in America Month

Born on this Day

• 0065 BC: Horace, Roman poet
  

• 1545: Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots
  

• 1626: Christina, Queen of Sweden
  

• 1765: Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin
  

• 1861: General Motors founder William Durant
  

• 1865: Jean Sibelius, major Scandinavian composer.
  

• 1894: James Thurber
  

• 1903: Fashion designer Adele Simpson (Smithline)
  

• 1915: Singer-songwriter Floyd Tillman
  

• 1916: Movie director Richard Fleischer ("Tora! Tora! Tora!")
  

• 1925: Entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. (The Candy Man, What Kind of Fool Am I, Faraway Places; member: The Rat Pack)
  

• 1925: Jazz organist Jimmy Smith (Walk on the Wild Side)
  

• 1930: Actor-director Maximilian Schell
  

• 1933: Comedian Flip (Clerow) Wilson
  

• 1936: Actor David Carradine
  

• 1937: Actor James MacArthur
  

• 1939: Flute player James Galway was born in Belfast. Galway was a principal flute player with the Berlin Philharmonic before launching his solo career.
  

• 1939: Singer Jerry Butler
  

• 1942: Pop musician Bobby Elliott (The Hollies)
  

• 1943: Rock musician Jim Morrison
  

• 1946: Actor John Rubenstein
  

• 1947: Rock singer-musician Gregg Allman
  

• 1949: Rock singer-musician Ray Shulman (Gentle Giant)
  

• 1953: Actress Kim Basinger
  

• 1956: Rock musician Warren Cuccurullo (Duran Duran)
  

• 1957: Rock musician Phil Collen (Def Leppard)
  

• 1959: Country singer Marty Raybon (Shenandoah)
  

• 1962: Rock musician Marty Friedman (Megadeth)
  

• 1963: Actor Malcolm Gets ("Caroline in the City")
  

• 1964: Actress Teri Hatcher
  

• 1967: Rapper Bushwick Bill (The Geto Boys)
  

• 1967: Singer Sinead O'Connor
  

• 1967: Actor Matthew Laborteaux
  

• 1972: Rock musician Ryan Newell (Sister Hazel)

Events in History on this day
  

• 0877: Coronation of Louis II, "the Stammerer," as King of France
  

• 1643: John Pym, English Parliamentary statesman, dies
  

• 1644: Christina becomes first Queen Regnant of Sweden
  

• 1776: George Washington's retreating army in the American Revolution crossed the Delaware River from New Jersey to Pennsylvania.
  

• 1813: Beethoven's Seventh Symphony premiered with something of an all-star orchestra. Playing in it were Salieri, Spohr, Romberg, Moscheles, Hummel, and just about any other Viennese musician whose name is still remembered today.
  

• 1854: Pope Pius the Ninth proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
  

• 1861: The American Bible Society announces that it will be distribute 7,000 Bibles a day to Union soldiers.
  

• 1863: President Lincoln announced his plan for the Reconstruction of the South.
  

• 1886: Delegates from 25 unions founded the American Federation of Labor, forerunner of the modern AFL-CIO, in Columbus, Ohio.
  

• 1915: Sibelius's Fifth Symphony premiered, his 50th birthday. He would revise it before publishing, however. The Fifth has turned out to be Sibelius's most popular symphony, with its cold brass chords, its fanfare finale, and those bizarre fortes at the end. president.
  

• 1920: President Wilson declines to send a representative to the League of Nations in Geneva.
  

• 1924: James B. Duke offers $40 million toward the founding of Duke University in Charlotte, North Carolina.
  

• 1941: Ray Eberle and the Modernaires teamed with the Glenn Miller Orchestra to record "Moonlight Cocktail" on Bluebird Records. By April, 1942, the song was a solid hit.
  

• 1941: The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Congress granted President Roosevelt a declaration of war against Japan. The United States had finally entered World War II.
  

• 1949: One of America's classic Broadway plays, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," debuted. It began its long run at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City. Carol Channing starred in the musical and charmed audiences with the show's songs such as her trademark signature, "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend."
  

• 1941: The United States entered World War Two as Congress declared war against Japan, a day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
  

• 1944: The U.S. conducts the longest most effective air raid of the Pacific battle at Iwo Jima.
  

• 1949: The Chinese Nationalist government, defeated by the Communists, retreated from the mainland to the island of Taiwan.
  

• 1953: Los Angeles became the third largest city in the U.S.
  

• 1961: "Surfin'" by the Beach Boys - their first record - was released on Candix Records. It became a local hit in Los Angeles but only made it to #75 nationally. The surfin' music craze didn't take hold across America for another year.
  

• 1962: Striking workers of the International Typographical Union closed nine New York City newspapers. The strike lasted 114 days and didn't end until April 1, 1963. A total of 5,700,000 readers were affected by the shutdown.
  

• 1963: Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. He was set free four days later. It was discovered that Sinatra, Jr. cooperated with his abductors in their plot.
  

• 1978: Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, died in Jerusalem at age 80.
  

• 1980: Rock star John Lennon was shot to death outside his New York City apartment building by an apparently deranged fan.
  

• 1985: Amtrak's last transcontinental sleeping car, which carried passengers coast-to-coast without requiring them to board a connecting train, pulled into New York's Pennsylvania Station four days after leaving Los Angeles.
  

• 1986: House Democrats selected majority leader Jim Wright to be the chamber's 48th speaker: succeeding Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill.
  

• 1987: President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed a treaty under which the superpowers agreed to destroy their arsenals of intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
  

• 1987: The "intefadeh" (Arabic for uprising) by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories began.
  

• 1988: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev cut short his US visit in order to return home following a killer earthquake in Armenia.
  

• 1989: Communist leaders in Czechoslovakia offered to surrender their control over the government and accept a minority role in a coalition Cabinet.
  

• 1990: As former American hostages began leaving Iraq and occupying Kuwait, President Bush - wrapping up his South American tour in Caracas, Venezuela - said the evacuation made for "one less worry I've got" in deciding whether to fight Baghdad
  

• 1991: Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine declared the Soviet national government dead, forging a new alliance to be known as the Commonwealth of Independent States.
  

• 1991: AIDS patient Kimberly Bergalis, who had contracted the disease from her dentist, died in Fort Pierce, Florida, at age 23.
  

• 1992: Americans got to see live television coverage of US troops landing on the beaches of Somalia as Operation Restore Hope began (because of the time difference, it was early December ninth in Somalia).
  

• 1993: President Clinton signed into U-S law the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect at the start of 1994.
  

• 1994: Bosnian Serbs released dozens of hostage peacekeepers, but continued to detain about 300 others.
  

• 1994: In Los Angeles, 12 alternate jurors were chosen for the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
  

• 1995: In New York, an arsonist killed seven workers and himself at a Harlem clothing store that had been the target of a racially charged lease dispute.
  

• 1995: Four months after the death of founder Jerry Garcia, "The Grateful Dead" announced it was breaking up after 30 years of making music.
  

• 1996: The Serbian Supreme Court ruled against opposition parties who said Slobodan Milosevic had robbed them of an election victory in Belgrade. director.
  

• 1997: Federal hearings opened in Baltimore into the TWA Flight 800 disaster which had claimed 230 lives. In a $25 billion deal, Swiss Bank and Union Bank of Switzerland announced they would merge, forming Europe's largest and world's second largest bank.
  

• 1998: The Supreme Court ruled that police cannot search people and their cars after merely ticketing them for routine traffic violations.
  

• 1998: San Francisco and several suburbs suffered a power blackout; it was more than seven hours before electricity was fully restored.
  

• 1998: Struggling to stave off impeachment, President Clinton's defenders forcefully pleaded his case before the House Judiciary Committee.
  

• 1999: A Memphis, Tennessee, jury hearing a lawsuit filed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s family found that the civil rights leader had been the victim of a vast murder conspiracy, not a lone assassin. 
  

• 1999: A Russian diplomat was ordered to leave the United States after he was allegedly caught gathering information from the State Department with an eavesdropping device.  
  

Today's History Focus

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