Scott Allsop's Blog, page 126

22nd December 1989: Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu overthrown

Following his overthrow, Ceausescu and his wife were subjected to a show trial on Christmas Day and found guilty of crimes including genocide and illegally gathering wealth before being ...

21st December 1913: First modern crossword puzzle printed

On the 21st December 1913, the first modern crossword puzzle was printed in the New York World ...

20th December 1917: Establishment of the Cheka, the Russian Bolshevik secret police

Established following a decree by Lenin on 19 December, the Cheka’s focus was on defending the revolution by removing internal threats to the communist ...

19th December 1843: Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol published in London by Chapman & Hall

A Christmas Carol has never been out of print since but, despite the first run selling out within 6 days, high production costs due to his very specific requirements meant that the profits were smaller than Dickens had hoped ...

18th December 1898: The world’s first officially recognised land speed record is set

French aristocrat Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat set the world’s first officially recognised land speed ...

17th December 1903: Wright brothers make the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight

Orville piloted the first flight, which lasted for just 12 seconds over a total distance of only 36.5 ...

16th December 1773: The Boston Tea Party throws a shipment of tea into Boston Harbor

The British government had passed the Tea Act seven months earlier on 10 May, partly in an attempt to support the struggling East India ...

15th December 1933: The Twenty-first Amendment to the US Constitution repeals prohibition

The Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth Amendment which had made the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol ...

14th December 1287: St Lucia’s Flood kills over 50,000 people around the North Sea

In the medieval period the Netherlands, whose name literally means ‘lower countries’, consisted of large areas of boggy land around the winding estuaries of three of the largest rivers in ...

13th December 1937: The Nanking Massacre begins during the Second Sino-Japanese War

Although accurate figures are impossible to establish, most scholars estimate that between 40,000 to over 300,000 people died as a result of the massacre in ...