On December 5
No pivotal events are recorded on exactly December 5 in the Human Saga — here is the surrounding week in history.
This week in history (Dec 2 – Dec 8)
On the morning of 7 December 1941, Japanese carrier-based aircraft launched a surprise attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, sinking or damaging numerous battleships and other vessels and killing about 2,400…
On the night of 2-3 December 1984, approximately 45 tons of the highly toxic gas methyl isocyanate (MIC) leaked from the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, after water entered storage tank E610…
On 2 December 1804, in the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris and in the presence of Pope Pius VII, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of the French, inaugurating the First French Empire and the Bonaparte dynasty.
On 2 December 1805, near Austerlitz in Moravia, Napoleon won what is often regarded as his greatest tactical victory.
In his seventh annual message to Congress on 2 December 1823, President James Monroe set out the principles that became known as the Monroe Doctrine.
Ratified on 6 December 1865 and proclaimed on 18 December, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime, throughout the country and its territories.
On 3 December 1967 surgeon Christiaan Barnard and a large team at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, performed the first human-to-human heart transplant, placing the heart of accident victim Denise Darvall into Louis…
On 6 December 1998 Hugo Chávez, a former army officer who had led a failed 1992 coup, was elected president of Venezuela with about 56 percent of the vote, promising to write a new constitution, fight corruption and redistribute the…
South Korea was plunged into its gravest constitutional crisis in decades when President Yoon Suk Yeol abruptly declared martial law on the night of 3 December 2024, sending troops toward the National Assembly.
A lightning offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and allied factions captured Damascus, toppling President Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Russia.