On December 19
No pivotal events are recorded on exactly December 19 in the Human Saga — here is the surrounding week in history.
This week in history (Dec 16 – Dec 22)
On the morning of 17 December 1903, near Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the American brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the first sustained, controlled, powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft.
On 18 December 1978, the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party convened in Beijing and resolved to shift the focus of the Party and state from class struggle to economic construction, launching…
On 18 December 1979 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), an international treaty often described as an international bill of rights for women.
On 17 December 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, set himself on fire after police confiscated his goods and humiliated him. He died on 4 January 2011.
On 21 December 2015, the private American company SpaceX landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket vertically at Cape Canaveral, Florida, after the booster had helped deliver eleven Orbcomm communications satellites to orbit.
In 2025, renewable energy surpassed coal as the largest single source of electricity generation worldwide for the first time, a structural milestone in the global energy transition.