On December 13
On December 13, 2 pivotal events are recorded in the Human Saga, including Oman captures Fort Jesus and seizes the Swahili coast (1696).
On this day
After a siege lasting from March 1696 to December 1698, the army of the Yarubid sultan of Oman, Saif ibn Sultan, stormed Fort Jesus at Mombasa on 13 December 1698, ending nearly two centuries of Portuguese dominance over the East African…
On 13 December 2003 US forces captured the deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein during Operation Red Dawn near his hometown of Tikrit.
Also this week in history (Dec 10 – Dec 16)
On 12 December 1901 the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi reported receiving the first wireless signal transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean.
From 12 to 26 December 1936, generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng detained Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek at Xi'an, demanding that he halt the civil war against the Chinese Communists and instead unite the nation against Japanese…
On 10 December 1948 the United Nations General Assembly, meeting at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as Resolution 217 A (III).
On 11 December 1997, at the third Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in Kyoto, Japan, governments adopted the Kyoto Protocol, the first international treaty to set legally binding greenhouse-gas reduction targets.
On 11 December 2001 the People's Republic of China became the 143rd member of the World Trade Organization, completing a 15-year accession process that required extensive commitments to lower tariffs, open markets and reform domestic…
On 12 December 2015, at the COP21 climate conference in Paris, 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement, the first truly universal climate accord binding both developed and developing countries.
On 11 December 2020 the United States Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorisation to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, the first messenger-RNA (mRNA) vaccine ever authorised for use in humans; the United Kingdom…
From 1952 to 1960 the British colony of Kenya was convulsed by the Mau Mau rebellion, an armed insurgency by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, drawn mainly from the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru peoples, against colonial rule and the dispossession…