Featured Collections: December

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

1986 Dow-Jones index hits record 1,955.57

1989 Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H. W. Bush, declare the Cold War over

1961 Museum of Modern Art hangs Matisse's Le Bateau upside down for 47 days

1941 US aircraft carrier Lexington and 5 heavy cruisers leave Pearl Harbor

2010 Record price for a printed book when a first edition of "The Birds of America" by John James Audubon auctioned at Sotheby's, London, England, for £7,321,250

2015 Beijing issues its 1st ever red alert for pollution

1941 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers "Day of Infamy" speech to US Congress a day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor

2015 German Chancellor Angela Merkel named Time Magazine's Person of the Year, for her handling of debt and refugee crises

2013 Uruguay becomes the first country to legalize the growth, sale, and use of marijuana

2001 The People's Republic of China joins the World Trade Organization.

2015 First women ever elected in Saudi Arabia in municipal council elections

2017 Salma Hayek accuses Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and threatening to kill her

1995 AIDS patient Jeff Getty receives baboon bone marrow transplant

1939 1st commercial manufacture of nylon yarn in Seaford, Delaware

1982 The Federal Reserve announces that the operating capacity of factories has gone down to 67.8%.

1969 USAF closes Project Blue Book, concluding no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships behind thousands of UFO sightings

1997 HTML 4.0 is published by the World Wide Web Consortium

1985 Mary Lund is 1st woman to receive a Jarvik VII artificial heart at Abbott Northwestern Hospital, Minneapolis

2017 Lady Gaga signs Las Vegas residency deal for $75m at MGM Park Theatre

1991 Soviet Union formally dissolves as 11 of 12 republics sign treaty forming Commonwealth of Independent States

1965 Great Britain sets national maximum road speed at 70 miles per hour

1921 Gangster Carlo Gambino enters the United States as an illegal immigrant on the SS Vincenzo Florio

2001 "Time Magazine" names New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani 'Person of the Year', for leadership after 9/11 attacks

274 Roman Emperor Aurelian dedicates a temple to Sol Invictus on the supposed day of the winter solstice and day of rebirth of the Sun.

1941 Winston Churchill becomes first British Prime Minister to address a joint meeting of the US Congress, warning that Axis would "stop at nothing"

1986 "Les Miserables" opens at Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.

1981 1st American test-tube baby, Elizabeth Jordan Carr is born in Norfolk, Virginia

1997 Hong Kong begins slaughtering all its chickens to prevent bird flu

1953 The first ever NTSC color television sets go on sale for about USD at $1,175 each from RCA.

1997 More Swedes died than were born in 1997, 1st time since 1809