December 14

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

– Proverbs 8:34

December is:

Universal Human Rights Month - Since 1985, this month promotes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sponsor: International Society of Friendship and Goodwill.

Born on this Day

• 1503: French astrologer and prophet Nostradamus
  

• 1542: Humanist, translator, historian, and poet Jan van Hout
  

• 1546: Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. His work in developing astronomical instruments and in measuring and fixing the positions of stars paved the way for future discoveries.
  

• 1553: Henry IV of France (of Navarre)
  

• 1640: Aphra Behn, 1st professional Englishwoman writer
  

• 1775: U. S. clergyman and educator Philander Chase. He was a bishop in the Protestant Episcopal Church and founder of Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio.
  

• 1829: Black leader and educator John Mercer Langston. He is believed to have been the first black ever elected to public office in the United States.
  

• 1856: Jurist Louis Marshall. He was a lawyer and leader of the American Jewish community who worked to secure religious, political, and cultural freedom for all minority groups.
  

• 1873: Joseph Jongen in Liege, Belgium. Jongen was a fine organist and a fine composer of organ music, but he was almost forgotten until the Telarc label recorded his "Symphonie Concertante" for organ and orchestra.
  

• 1895: George VI
  

• 1896: Aviator James Doolittle He was awarded Congressional Medal of Honor for leading 1st U.S. aerial raid against Japan in WWII.
  

• 1897: Former Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine
  

• 1911: Slapstick band leader Spike (Lindley) Jones (City Slickers: Cocktails for Two, Der Fuhrer’s Face)
  

• 1920: Jazz musician Clark Terry
  

• 1922: "60 Minutes" executive producer Don Hewitt
  

• 1932: Actor-playwright George Furth
  

• 1932: Singer Abbe (Lassman) Lane
  

• 1932: Grammy Award-winning singer Charlie Rich ‘The Silver Fox’(Behind Closed Doors, Lonely Weekends, The Most Beautiful Girl)
  

• 1935: Actress Lee Remick (Bridge to Silence, The Omen, QB VII, No Way to Treat a Lady, The Tempest, Days of Wine and Roses, Anatomy of a Murder, The Long, Hot Summer)
  

• 1938: Actor Hal Williams (Dynasty, The Andros Targets, The Bob Crane Show, On Wings of Eagles, A Question of Love)
  

• 1944: Actor James Sutorius
  

• 1946: Actress Patty (Anna Marie) Duke (The Miracle Worker, Captains and the Kings)
  

• 1946: Pop singer Joyce Vincent-Wilson (Tony Orlando and Dawn)
  

• 1946: Former Walt Disney Company president Michael Ovitz
  

• 1946 - Patty Duke
  

• 1946: Actress Jane Birkin (French Intrigue, La Belle Noiseise, Le Petit Amour, Evil Under the Sun, Death on the Nile, Catherine & Co., Romance of a Horsethief, Blowup)
  

• 1946: Singer Joyce Vincent Wilson
  

• 1948: Actress Dee Wallace Stone (The Frighteners, Temptress, The Road Home, My Family Treasure, I’m Dangerous Tonight, Popcorn, Miracle Down Under, Critters, Wait Till Your Mother Gets Home, Skeezer, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, The Howling, 10, The Hills Have Eyes, Together We Stand, The New Lassie)
  

• 1949: Rock musician Cliff Williams (AC/DC)
  1

• 959: Rock singer-musician Mike Scott (The Waterboys)
  

• 1959: Singer-musician Peter "Spider" Stacy (The Pogues)
  

• 1963: Actress Cynthia Gibb (Gypsy, Death Warrant, Malone, Jack’s Back, Youngblood, Modern Girls, Stardust Memories, Madman of the People, Fame)
  

• 1975: Rhythm-and-blues singer Brian Dalyrimple (Soul For Real)
  

• 1977: Model Bridget Hall   

Events in History on this day
  

• 0867: Election of Adrian II as Pope
  

• 0872: Death of Pope Adrian II
  

• 0872: Election of Pope John III
  

• 1154: Election of Pope Hadrian IV
  

• 1247: Death of Robin Hood
  

• 1515: France makes peace with Pope Leo X
  

• 1542: Death of James V, King of Scotland; 6-day-old Mary, Queen of Scots succedes to the Scottish throne.
  

• 1575: Stephen Bathory elected King of Poland
  

• 1591: Death of Juan de Yepes, called "St. John of the Cross"
  

• 1655: Jews readmitted into England by Cromwell
  

• 1656: Artificial pearls 1st manufactured, by M. Jacquin in Paris; made of gypsum pellets covered with fish scales.
  

• 1798: David Wilkinson of Rhode Island patented the nut and bolt machine.
  

• 1799: The first president of the United States, George Washington, died at his Mount Vernon home at age 67.
  

• 1819: Alabama joined the Union as the 22nd state.(making 11 slave states and 11 free states)
  

• 1861: Prince Albert of England, one of the Union’s strongest advocates, dies.
  

• 1863: Longstreet attacks Union troops at Bean’s Station, Tennessee.
  

• 1863: The widow of Confederate General B.H. Helm is given amnesty by President Lincoln after she swears allegiance to the Union. Mrs. Helm is the half-sister of Mary Todd Lincoln.
  

• 1900: Max Planck presents the quantum theory at the Physics Society in Berlin.
  

• 1902: The ship, "Silverton", set sail from the Bay Area. It was headed out to lay the first telephone cable between San Francisco and Honolulu. The project was completed by January 1, 1903.
  

• 1911: Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first man to reach the South Pole, beating out an expedition led by Robert F. Scott.
  

• 1928: America’s original Funny Girl, Fanny Brice, recorded "If You Want the Rainbow", a song from the play, "My Man" -- on Victor Records.
  

• 1934: The first steam-driven locomotive, nicknamed the "Commodore Vanderbilt", was introduced by the New York Central Railroad. The locomotive was quite impressive: 228 tons and 4,075 horsepower.
  

• 1936: The play, "You Can’t Take It with You", opened at the Booth Theatre in New York City.
  

• 1939: The Soviet Union was dropped from the League of Nations.
  

• 1944: Major-league baseball representatives, who were meeting in New York City, decided to allow ball clubs to play night games any day except Sundays and holidays, providing the visiting team agreed. They also agreed to prohibit the scheduling of any football games before the home team’s baseball season ended.
  

• 1946: The United Nations General Assembly voted to establish UN headquarters in New York.
  

• 1953: Fred Allen returned from semiretirement to narrate Prokofiev’s classic, "Peter and the Wolf", on the "Bell Telephone Hour" on NBC radio.
  

• 1953: Sandy Koufax, age 19, was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers. The kid reportedly had played no more than 20 games of baseball in his entire life. In the next 12 seasons, Koufax posted 167 wins, 87 losses and 2,396 strikeouts.
  

• 1962: The US space probe "Mariner Two" approached Venus, transmitting back information about the planet.
  

• 1963: Singer Dinah Washington died in Detroit. She popularized many, many great songs, including "What a Diff’rence a Day Makes", "Unforgettable", and several hits with Brook Benton, including "Baby (You’ve Got What it Takes)" and "A Rockin’ Good Way.
  

• 1970: George Harrison received a gold record for his single, "MySweet Lord".
  

• 1973: Jerry Quarry defeated Ernie Shavers in 2 minutes, 21 seconds of the first round of their heavyweight boxing match in New York. Quarry broke his hand in the short fight and failed miserably at a later comeback attempt.
  

• 1980: After four days of meetings, members of NATO warn the Soviets to stay out of the internal affairs of Poland, saying that intervention would effectively destroy the detente between East and West.
  

• 1981: Israel annexed the Golan Heights, which it had seized from Syria in 1967.
  

• 1984: Bank robbers killed four customers and wounded three others in Geronimo, Oklahoma, to grab $17,000. Two suspects were arrested in San Francisco three days later.
  

• 1985: Wilma Mankiller became the first woman to lead a major American Indian tribe as she took office as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
  

• 1986: Nicaragua announced the arrest of American Sam Hall as a spy. Hall, a former Ohio state lawmaker, was freed less than seven weeks later.
  

• 1986: The experimental aircraft "Voyager," piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California on the first non-stop, non-refueled flight around the world. (The trip took nine days.)
  

• 1987: Supreme Court nominee Anthony M. Kennedy told his confirmation hearing he had no hidden agenda for abortion and privacy cases.
  

• 1987: Chrysler pleaded no contest to federal charges of selling several thousand vehicles as new even though they'd been driven by employees with the odometer disconnected.
  

• 1988: In a dramatic policy shift, President Reagan authorized the US to enter into a "substantive dialogue" with the Palestine Liberation Organization, after chairman Yasser Arafat said he was renouncing "all forms of terrorism."
  

• 1989: Nobel Peace laureate Andrei D. Sakharov died in Moscow at age 68.
  

• 1990: President Bush prodded Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to agree to talks on the Persian Gulf crisis by January 3. 
  

• 1990: President Bush said he would nominate Lynn Martin to succeed Elizabeth H. Dole as labor secretary. 
  

• 1992: President-elect Clinton opened a two-day conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, on the nation's economic problems.
  

• 1992: Russian President Boris Yeltsin lost a battle with hard-liners as he was forced to abandon his reformist prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, in favor of Communist-era technocrat Viktor Chernomyrdin.
  

• 1993: The Juilliard String Quartet played four Haydn quartets at New York's Lincoln Center. The opus numbers show the gamut of the foursome 17, 50, 77 and 103. The last one is unfinished.
  

• 1993: A Colorado judge struck down the state's voter-approved Amendment Two prohibiting gay rights laws, calling it unconstitutional.
  

• 1993: United Mine Workers approved a five-year contract, ending a strike that had reached seven states and involved some of the nation's biggest coal operators.
  

• 1993: Actress Myrna Loy died in New York at age 88.
  

• 1994: Former Arkansas Governor Orval E. Faubus, whose refusal to let nine black students into Little Rock's Central High School in 1957 forced President Eisenhower to send in federal troops, died at age 84.
  

• 1994: A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking almost all of Proposition 187's bans affecting illegal immigrants in California.
  

• 1995: Presidents Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia signed the Bosnian peace treaty in Paris. AIDS patient Jeff Getty received the first-ever bone-marrow transplant from a baboon. The experimental procedure at a San Francisco hospital was criticized by animal rights activists. 
  

• 1996: A freighter lost power on the Mississippi River and barreled into the Riverwalk complex in New Orleans (miraculously, no one was killed).
  

• 1996: Teamsters President Ron Carey won election to a second term (however, the results were later overturned and Carey barred from a rerun vote by a court-appointed monitor who ruled that Carey had used union money for his campaign).
  

• 1997: Iran's new president (Mohammad Khatami) called for a dialogue with the people of the United States - a nation reviled by his predecessors as "The Great Satan."
  

• 1997: Cuban President Fidel Castro declared Christmas 1997 an official holiday to ensure the success of Pope John Paul the Second's upcoming visit to the communist country.
  

• 1998: President Clinton stood witness as hundreds of Palestinian leaders renounced a call for the destruction of Israel.

• 1999: Charles M. Schulz announced he was retiring the "Peanuts" comic strip. 
  

• 1999: Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian national, was arrested after authorities allegedly found nitroglycerin in the trunk of his car as he arrived from Canada by ferry at Port Angeles, Washington. 
  

• 1999: U.S. and German negotiators agreed to establish a $5.2 billion fund for Nazi-era slave and forced laborers.  

Today's History Focus

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