On December 9
On December 9, the Human Saga records one pivotal event: Battle of Ayacucho ends Spanish rule in South America (1824).
On this day
On 9 December 1824, on the high plateau near Ayacucho in Peru, a patriot army of about 6,000 commanded by Antonio José de Sucre, Bolívar's most capable lieutenant, decisively defeated a larger Spanish royalist force under Viceroy José de…
Also this week in history (Dec 6 – Dec 12)
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…
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 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 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…
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…
A lightning offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and allied factions captured Damascus, toppling President Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Russia.
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…