We usually associate December with the holidays, but other December events in history helped to bring us where we are today, as well. Here is a sampling of December events:
December 2, 1823 - President James Monroe announces the opposition of the United States to interference in affairs of the Western Hemisphere. This is the beginning of the Monroe Doctrine.
December 4, 1154 - Nicholas Breakspear becomes the first and only Englishman to be the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. We know him as Pope Adrian IV.
December 8, 1980 - Beatle John Lennon meets an untimely death.
December 9, 1990 - Lech Walesa is elected President of Poland.
December 11, 1936 - King Edward VIII of Great Britain abdicates the throne to marry an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson.
December 11, 1946 - UNICEF is founded to help children of Europe after World War II. Its mission is expanded in the 1950's.
December 14, 1900 - German physicist, Max Planck, sets forth the tenets of quantum theory. Many consider this to be the birth of modern quantum physics.
December 16, 1773 - American colonists disguised as Native Americans throw cargoes of tea from British ships in protest of the tax on tea. This incident is known as the Boston Tea Party.
December 17, 1903 - Near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright's first flying machine makes it into the sky.
December 20, 1803 - The United States goes on a Christmas shopping spree and gets some real estate. This becomes known as the Louisiana Purchase.
December 21, 1988 - A frightening glimpse of the future occurs when Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over Lockerbie, Scotland; Seton Hill mourns the loss of two outstanding SHU students on the flight, Beth Johnson and Elyse Saraceni.
December 26, 1898 - Pierre and Marie Curie discover a new radioactive element, radium.
December 27, 1932 - Radio City Music Hall kicks open its doors.
December 30, 1924 - American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, announces the existence of other galaxies in addition to our own, Milky Way.
