Scott Allsop's Blog, page 230

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 Company. The act allowed the company to import tea directly to...

15th December 1933: 21st Amendment ends prohibition in the USA

On the 15th December 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution came into effect, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment which had made the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol illegal. Having been proposed on...

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 Europe. Although prone to flooding,...

13th December 1937: The Nanking Massacre begins

On the 13th December 1937, the Nanking Massacre began at the end of the Battle of Nanking – part of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Troops from the Imperial Japanese Army captured the city, which at...

12th December 1963: Kenya gains independence from the United Kingdom

Kenya had been under British rule since the 19th Century, and since becoming a colony in 1920 African demands for a greater role in politics had grown. In the early 1950s a group of Kikuyus,...

11th December 1936: Abdication of King Edward VIII

On the 11th December 1936, King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom announced his abdication in a worldwide radio broadcast. He had signed the Instruments of Abdication on the 10th, but it only became official...

10th December 1768: First edition of the Encyclopaedia @Britannica published (Corrected)

Regular visitors may remember that earlier this week I released a podcast about the release of the the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the 6th December 1768. As with all episodes of HistoryPod, I researched this thoroughly...

10th December 1799: France adopts the metric system for weights and measures

It is estimated that up to a quarter of a million different units of measurement were in use throughout France at eve of the Revolution in 1789, and that these differed not only from trade...

9th December 1965: Charlie Brown Christmas first broadcast

On the 9th December 1965, American television network CBS first broadcast the animated cartoon A Charlie Brown Christmas. Now a staple of American Christmas television, the cartoon was originally financed by the Coca-Cola Company as...

8th December 1660: The first woman appears on a professional stage in England in Othello

Theatre in England had been banned by the Puritan Long Parliament in 1642 but, following the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, the ban was lifted. The king marked the revival of theatre by...