This day in history

[macliam]

1095: At the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II called for the Crusade against the Muslims who had occupied the Holy Land and were attacking the Byzantine Empire and gave cloth crosses to the knights to be sewn into their armour which gave the Crusades their name......

As an addition to this, it is notable that the greatest victory of the Second Crusade (1145-49) was not actually in the Holy land, but in Portugal.

The country had only asserted it's independence from León in 1128 and it's sovereignty as a Kingdom after defeating the Moors at Ourique in 1139. However, there were still parts of the present country held by Moors beyond that date, notably the Algarve (Al Gharb) and Lisbon.

Crusaders sailing from Dartmouth in 1147 were forced by storms to land at Porto and convinced to help the new king to beseige the important city on the Tagus estuary. After 4 months of siege, the Moors surrendered and an English monk/crusader, Gilbert of Hastings, was made Bishop of Lisbon, but the city did not become capital of Portugal until 1255.

As an aside, In 1249, King Afonso III of Portugal captured Faro, the last Muslim stronghold in Algarve and secured the independence of what is now Portugal, The current border is almost identical to that defined in 1297 by the Treaty of Alcañices. It is 1,214 km (754 mi) long, but is not defined for 18 km (11 mi) between the Caia river and Ribeira de Cuncos, because of the disputed status of Olivenza/Olivença, which Spain has never returned to Portugal after its forced annexation in 1801, despite this action being agreed in the Treaty of Vienna, 1815. Spain continues to administer the enclave, whilst portugues maps show the border there as a dashed line on official maps. It's also notable that Portugal, as a country, is far older than Spain, which was not united until after the expulsion of the Moors in 1492.

[Richard Frost]

1775 Sir James Jay invents invisible ink

1870 Compulsory education proclaimed in England

1897 1st motorcycle race in Surrey, England

1947 Anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo erupt after UN votes to partition Palestine, with cost of 75 lives and the disappearance of medieval manuscript the Aleppo Codex

1947 UN General Assembly vote to allow the partition of Palestine between Arabs & Jews

1949 Nationalist regime of China leaves for Taiwan/Formosa

1962 Great Britain & France decide to jointly build the Concorde supersonic airliner

1972 Co-founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell releases Pong, the 1st commercially successful video game, in Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California

2017 Bosnian war criminal Slobodan Praljak commits suicide by poison in court at The Hague after 20 year prison term read out

2019 Terrorist knife attack at Fishmongers Hall by London Bridge, kills two and injures three, attacker who was previously imprisoned for 2012 terror offence is shot dead

[Richard Frost]

30 November 1872

The first international football match takes place with Scotland drawing 0-0 with England in Glasgow

[macliam]

30 November

1487 - The first German Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot), was promulgated in Munich stating beer should be brewed from only three ingredients – water, malt and hops.

1667 - Birth in Dublin of Jonathan Swift, clergyman, poet, satirist and author of "Gulliver's Travels"clergyman

1864 -Confederate General Patrick Cleburne, from Cork,was killed in command of his division at a battle in Franklin, Tennessee

1876 - Archaeologist Heinrich Schliemanndiscovered the gold Mask of Agamemnon at Mycenae (modern Greece) "the Mona Lisa of prehistory".

1900 - Death of Oscar Wilde in Paris

1934 - The Flying Scotsman Land broke the speed record for railed vehicles, being officially recorded at 100 mph.

1939 - The  Russo-Finnish "Winter War" started when almost a million Soviet troops attacked Finland on several fronts and bombed Helsinki.

1966 - Barbados became independent.

1979 - Pink Floyd's "The Wall"was released. It sold 6 million copies in 2 weeks

1982 - "Thriller" by Michael Jackson was released. It became the best-selling album of all time, Billboard Album of the Year 1983 and Grammy Award Album of the Year 1984.

2005 - John Sentamu became Archbishop of York, the Church of England’s first black archbishop.

[Richard Frost]

1 December

1887 Sherlock Holmes first appears in print in "Study in Scarlet" by Arthur Conan Doyle

1913 Ford Motor Company institutes world's 1st moving assembly line for the Model T Ford

1919 Lady Nancy Astor sworn-in as 1st female member of British Parliament

1925 Peace Treaty of Locarno signed between Germany, France, Belgium, Great Britain, and Italy

1929 Game of Bingo invented by American toy salesman Edwin S. Lowe

1939 SS-Fuhrer Himmler begins deportation of Polish Jews

1941 British cruiser Devonshire sinks German sub Python

1953 Hugh Hefner publishes 1st edition of Playboy magazine, featuring Marilyn Monroe as the magazine's 1st centrefold

1955 Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus and give her seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama

1959 12 nations sign treaty for scientific peaceful use of Antarctica

1972 2 people killed and 127 injured when 2 car bombs explode in the centre of Dublin, Republic of Ireland

1987 Digging begins to link England & France under English Channel

1988 Benazir Bhutto named Prime Minister of Pakistan, the 1st female leader of a Muslim country

1988 First World AIDS day to raise awareness of the AIDS global epidemic

1990 British and French workers meet in the middle of the Channel Tunnel under the English Channel

2003 "The Return of the King", 3rd and final film in the Lord of the Rings series, directed by Peter Jackson and starring Elijah Wood and Ian McKellen premieres in Wellington, New Zealand

2014 "The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies", 3rd and final Hobbit film, directed by Peter Jackson, starring Martin Freeman and Ian McKellen, premieres in London

2018 Violent demonstrations in Paris, France, by yellow-vest movement with 36,000 protesting nationwide

2019 Earliest traceable patient, a 55-year-old man, develops symptoms of a novel coronavirus (Covid-19) in Wuhan, China

[Richard Frost]

2 December

1901 King C. Gillette begins selling safety razor blades

1938 The first 'Kindertransport' carrying Jewish refugee children from Nazi Germany arrives in Britain

1939 British Imperial Airways & British Airways merge to form BOAC

1950 "I Robot" collection of sci-fi short stories by Isaac Asimov published by Gnome Press in the US

1954 Taiwan (ROC) & US sign the Mutual Defense Treaty, preventing Mainland China (PRC) from taking Taiwan between 1955-1979

1971 Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujeira, Sharjah & Umm ak Qiwain form United Arab Emirates
1971 United Arab Emirates (Trucial States) declares independence from UK
1971 Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan is appointed President of the United Arab Emirates

1976 Communist revolutionary Fidel Castro becomes President of Cuba, replacing Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado

1999 The United Kingdom devolves political power in Northern Ireland to the Northern Ireland Executive

2013 "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug", 2nd film in the Hobbit series, directed by Peter Jackson, starring Martin Freeman and Ian McKellen, premieres in Los Angeles

2020 The UK becomes the first western country to authorize a vaccine for COVID-19, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine

[Richard Frost]

On December 3, 1992, the first SMS text message in history is sent: Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old engineer, uses a personal computer to send the text message “Merry Christmas” via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.

Papworth, while working for the now-defunct Anglo-French IT services company Sema Group Telecoms, was part of a team developing a “Short Message Service Centre” (SMSC) for the British telecommunications company Vodafone UK. At the time, Sema Group hoped to use these short messages as a paging service. After Papworth installed the system at a site west of London, he sat at a computer terminal and sent the simple message to the mobile phone of Richard Jarvis, director of Vodafone, who was attending a holiday party.

“It didn't feel momentous at all,” Papworth later said. “For me it was just getting my job done on the day and ensuring that our software that we'd been developing for a good year was working OK."

Shortly after, Papworth received a call from the Christmas party, letting him know that the outgoing message was a success, although cellphones themselves could not actually send messages in return yet.

One year later, Nokia released the first cellphone with an SMS feature, but messages (limited to 160 characters due to bandwidth constraints) could only be sent within the same mobile network—phone networks would finally allow users to SMS across rival companies in 1999. Texting as a means of casual communication blossomed with the introduction of the Tegic (T9) system of predictive texting and pre-paid phone plans, which originally did not charge for texts and appealed to young people. Because of the 160-character constraint, as well as the cumbersome nature of typing with a numeric keypad, an entire “language” of abbreviations and slang emerged through SMS and spread across internet-based messaging.

In the United Kingdom, the birthplace of texting, SMS messaging exploded in popularity—by February 2001, about one billion texts were being sent every month, and users were being charged 10 pence a text, generating about £100 million a month in corporate profits. By 2010, the International Telecommunications Union reported that 200,000 text messages were being sent every minute, but by 2012, texting across the world began to see a steady decline, with messages from instant-messaging apps concurrently spiking.

[Richard Frost]

6 December

1240 Mongols led by Batu Khan occupy and destroy Kyiv after an 8 day siege; out of 50,000 people in the city only 2,000 survive

1877 Thomas Edison records himself reciting "Mary had a little lamb"

1912 China votes for universal human rights

1917 Taking advantage of the temporary relaxation of authority in Russia, Finland declares itself a republic, following the Ukraine on 20 November

1921 The Anglo-Irish Treaty is signed with Ireland receiving dominion status and the partition creating Northern Ireland

1933: “Ulysses” is ruled not obscene.
Federal judge John M. Woolsey ruled that "Ulysses" by James Joyce was not obscene.The book had been banned in both the US and UK when it came out in 1922, published by Sylvia Beach, the owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Co. in Paris. It used coarse language, but the trial court’s decision confirmed that was not pornographic and therefore could be published and admitted into the US.The novel’s radical stream-of-consciousness narrative influenced the development of the modern novel and Woolsey’s verdict has gone down in history as an affirmation of literary free expression.

1964 "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" 1st airs on TV

1975 A Provisional IRA unit takes a couple hostage in Balcombe Street, London, and a 6-day siege begins.

2005 Several villagers are shot dead during protests in Dongzhou, China

[macliam]

6 December

>>>>>>>>>>>>>
1921 The Anglo-Irish Treaty is signed with Ireland receiving dominion status and the partition creating Northern Ireland

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

1975 A Provisional IRA unit takes a couple hostage in Balcombe Street, London, and a 6-day siege begins.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

1921 - Representatives of the Irish government and those negotiating for the Crown sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty, ending the Irish War of Independence and recognizing the partition of Ireland into one entity of 26 counties and another of the 6 counties demanded by the unionists. Michael Collins declares: "I have signed my own death warrant", which proves to be a premonition 20 months later.


1922 - After a close vote in the Daíl, the 26 counties are declared as the Irish Free State, Saorstát Éireann - a dominion within the British Empire. This required Irish TDs or members of parliament to swear allegiance to the British monarch and gave the UK three naval bases on the Irish coast at Cobh, Bearhaven and Lough Swilly. This was inacceptable for a large minority of Republicans and eventually led to the Irish Civil War in June 1922.

1984 - Macliam buys his first flat in London....... and finds it backs onto Balcombe Street!!

Also

1735 - First recorded appendectomy performed by Claudius Amyand at St George's Hospital in London.

1745 - Bonnie Prince Charlie's forces retreat to Scotland.

1865 - 13th Amendment of the US Constitution is ratified, abolishing slavery (except as a punishment).

1877 - Washington Post publishes 1st edition.

1897 - London becomes the world's first city to host licenced taxicabs.

[Richard Frost]

7th December 1941

At 7:55 a.m. Hawaii time, a Japanese dive bomber bearing the red symbol of the Rising Sun of Japan on its wings appears out of the clouds above the island of Oahu. A swarm of 360 Japanese warplanes followed, descending on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbour in a ferocious assault. The surprise attack struck a critical blow against the U.S. Pacific fleet and drew the United States irrevocably into World War II.

With diplomatic negotiations with Japan breaking down, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisers knew that an imminent Japanese attack was probable, but nothing had been done to increase security at the important naval base at Pearl Harbour. It was Sunday morning, and many military personnel had been given passes to attend religious services off base. At 7:02 a.m., two radar operators spotted large groups of aircraft in flight toward the island from the north, but, with a flight of B-17s expected from the United States at the time, they were told to sound no alarm. Thus, the Japanese air assault came as a devastating surprise to the naval base.

Much of the Pacific fleet was rendered useless: Five of eight battleships, three destroyers, and seven other ships were sunk or severely damaged, and more than 200 aircraft were destroyed. A total of 2,400 Americans were killed and 1,200 were wounded, many while valiantly attempting to repulse the attack. Japan’s losses were some 30 planes, five midget submarines, and fewer than 100 men. Fortunately for the United States, all three Pacific fleet carriers were out at sea on training manoeuvres. These giant aircraft carriers would have their revenge against Japan six months later at the Battle of Midway, reversing the tide against the previously invincible Japanese navy in a spectacular victory.

The day after Pearl Harbour was bombed, President Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of Congress and declared, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941–a date which will live in infamy–the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” After a brief and forceful speech, he asked Congress to approve a resolution recognizing the state of war between the United States and Japan. The Senate voted for war against Japan by 82 to 0, and the House of Representatives approved the resolution by a vote of 388 to 1. The sole dissenter was Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, a devout pacifist who had also cast a dissenting vote against the U.S. entrance into World War I. Three days later, Germany and Italy declared war against the United States, and the U.S. government responded in kind.

The American contribution to the successful Allied war effort spanned four long years and cost more than 400,000 American lives.

1703 Great storm of 1703 hits Southern England - thousands killed, Royal Navy losses 13 ships and around 1,500 seamen. The first Eddystone Lighthouse is destroyed in this storm.

1909 Inventor Leo Baekeland patents the first thermo-setting plastic, Bakelite, sparking the birth of the plastics industry

1988 6.9 earthquake in Spitak, Armenia kills 25,000-50,000 people and leaves up to 500,000 homeless

1988 Mikhail Gorbachev cheered by Wall St crowds upon arrival in NYC

2014 The Archbishop of Canterbury claims that he is more shocked by the plight of Britain's hunger-stricken poor than suffering in African refugee camps

2020 Coca-Cola named the world's No. 1 plastic polluter, in Break Free From Plastic's annual brand audit