AD 69. Vespasian becomes the fourth Emperor of Rome within a year, in the "Year of Four Emperors," following Galba, Otho, and Vitellius.
Vespasian was the founder of the short-lived though influential Flavian dynasty, being succeeded as emperor by his sons Titus and Domitian. Vespasian's reign is best known for his reforms following the demise of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty, the campaign against Judaea, and for starting the construction of the Colosseum.
Noted for his sense of humor, Vespasian could jest even in his last moments. Sensing the end was near, he whispered,"Alas, I think I'm becoming a god," a reference to the Senate's custom of deifying dead emperors.
Vespasian ultimately did much good for Rome, and ranks somewhere with its greatest emperors -- Augustus, Trajan and Septimus Severus.
1118. Lord Chancellor of England and Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket is born born in Cheapside, London. Becket was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his murder in 1170. He is venerated as a saint and martyr by both the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion. He engaged in conflict with Henry II of England over the rights and privileges of the Church and was murdered by followers of the king in Canterbury Cathedral. Soon after his death, he was canonized by Pope Alexander III.
1140. Conrad III of Germany besieges Weinsberg. The Siege of Weinsberg, within the then-Holy Roman Empire, was a decisive battle between Welfs and Hohenstaufen. Exasperated at the heroic defense of Welfs, Conrad III had resolved to destroy Weinsberg and imprison its defenders. However, he suspended the last assault, ultimately permitting the Weinsberg women to flee, carrying their husbands.
1598. In the Battle of Curalaba, rebel Mapuche, led by Pelentaru, inflict a major defeat on Spanish troops in southern Chile, killing the Spanish governor. News of the governor's death sparks a general uprising..
1761. Revolutionary War hero and faithful Patriot Robert Barnwell is born in Beaufort, South Carolina. Barnwell enthusiastically participated in each stage of his country's revolutionary coming-of-age. At age 16, Barnwell enlisted as a private in the Patriot militia. Wounded 17 times in the Battle of Matthews' Plantation on St. John's Island in June 1779, his supplies were taken and he was left for dead on the battlefield. He rejoined the militia as a lieutenant the following spring, only to be taken prisoner by the British during the siege of Charleston in May 1780. Barnwell spent the next 13 months imprisoned on the ship
Pack Horse. Still undeterred, he joined the militia after his release, reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel by the end of the War of Independence.
Having served the new nation loyally during the war, Barnwell became a successful politician in the political revolution that followed. He was elected first to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1787, then served as a delegate to the Continental Congress from 1788 to 1789. In 1788, he also served as a member of the South Carolina convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution. He sat in the second U.S. Congress as a member of the House of Representatives from 1791 to 1793. He died in his birthplace on October 24, 1814.
1799. William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy move into Dove Cottage in Westmoreland, England, not far from the home of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth and Coleridge had been good friends and colleagues since they met, in 1795. Their collaboration flourished, and in 1798 they published
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, launching the Romantic movement. The book, which included Coleridge's
Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth's
Tintern Abbey, sold out within two years. The book's second edition included a preface by the authors, which became an important manifesto of Romantic poetry.
1861. The Medal of Honor is created when Public Resolution 82, containing a provision for a Navt Medal of honor, is signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. A year later, a similar resolution for the Army is passed. Popularly known as the "The Congressional Medal of Honor," it is the United States' highest military award.
Six Union soldiers who hijacked the General, a Confederate locomotive were the first recipients. Raid leader James J. Andrews, a civilian hanged as a Union spy, did not receive the medal because it was originally awarded only to enlisted men. Army officers first received them in 1891 and Naval officers in 1915.
Many Medals of Honor awarded in the 19th century were associated with saving the flag, not just for patriotic reasons, but because the flag was a primary means of battlefield communication.
During the American Civil War, no other military award was authorized, which explains some of the less notable actions that were recognized by the Medal of Honor. The criteria for award tightened after World War I. Since the start of World War II, only 852 medals have been awarded, 526 of them posthumously. In the post-World War II era, many eligible recipients might instead have been awarded a Silver Star, Navy Cross or similar award. In all, 3461 Medals of Honor have been awarded.
1861. Lord Lyons, the British minister to the United States, meets with Secretary of State William Seward concerning the fate of James Mason and John Slidell, Confederate envoys arrested by the U.S. Navy aboard the
Trent, a British mail steamer. During the meeting, Lyons took a hard line against Seward and forced President Abraham Lincoln's administration to release the Confederates a few days later. "One war at a time," Lincoln said. The
Trent affair was the most serious diplomatic crisis between the two nations during the Civil War.
1866. Indians in northern Wyoming lure Lieutenant Colonel William Fetterman and his soldiers into a deadly ambush. On the bitterly cold morning of December 21, about 2,000 Indians concealed themselves along the road just north of Fort Phil Kearney. A small band made a diversionary attack on a party of woodcutters from the fort, and commandant Colonel Henry Carrington quickly ordered Colonel Fetterman to go to their aid with a company of 80 troopers. The party of woodcutters made it safely back to the fort, but Colonel Fetterman and his men chased after the fleeing Crazy Horse and his decoys, just as planned. The soldiers rode straight into the ambush and were wiped out in a massive attack during which some 40,000 arrows rained down on the hapless troopers. None of them survived. With 81 fatalities, the Fetterman Massacre was the army's worst defeat in the West until the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.
1879. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin is born Josef Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia.
1921. Vampira is born, not in Transylvania but in Finland, under the name of Maila Nurmi. She created the well-remembered 1950s character of Vampira. Her portrayal of this character as a television horror host and in films was influential over decades that followed.
She came to the United States with her family when she was two years old and grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, the largest Finnish-American community in Ohio. Arriving in Los Angeles at age 17, she modeled for Alberto Vargas, Bernard of Hollywood and Man Ray, gaining a foothold in the film industry with an uncredited role in Victor Saville's If Winter Comes (1947).
The idea for the Vampira character was born in 1953 when Nurmi attended choreographer Lester Horton's annual Bal Caribe Masquerade in a costume inspired by a character in The New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams. Her appearance with pale white skin and tight black dress caught the attention of television producer Hunt Stromberg, Jr., who wanted to hire her to host horror movies on the Los Angeles television station KABC-TV.
On Friday night, April 30, 1954, KABC-TV aired a preview, Dig Me Later, Vampira, at 11:00pm.
The Vampira Show premiered on the following night, May 1, 1954. As Vampira, Nurmi introduced films while wandering through a hallway of mist and cobwebs. Her horror-related comedy antics included talking to her pet spider Rollo and encouraging viewers to write for epitaphs instead of autographs. When the series was cancelled in 1955, she retained rights to the character of Vampira.
Nominated for an Emmy Award as "Most Outstanding Female Personality" in 1954, she returned to films with
Too Much, Too Soon (1958),
The Big Operator (1959),
The Beat Generation (1959) and Ed Wood's
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). In the following decade, she appeared in
I Passed for White (1960),
Sex Kittens Go to College (1960) and
The Magic Sword (1962).
In the 1980s, when horror hostess Elvira became popular, Nurmi attempted to sue Elvira's producer/manager, Mark Pierson. In 1994, Maila Nurmi was portrayed by actress-model Lisa Marie in Tim Burton's
Ed Wood , and she was the subject of a Finnish documentary,
About Death, Sex and Taxes (1995) by Mika J. Ripatti. Her last film role was in
I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998). Today, Nurmi lives with her pets in a small North Hollywood apartment.
1937. Actress, activist, fitness guru, and born-again Baptist Jane Fonda is born. (See pictures.) Since the 1960s Fonda has appeared in movies, many of which have contained political messages. She has won two Academy Awards and received several other awards and nominations. She initially announced her retirement from acting in 1991, and said for many years that she would never act again, but she returned to film in 2005 with Monster in Law. She also produced and starred in several exercise videos released between 1982 and 1995.
Fonda has served as an activist for various political causes, the most notable -- and notorious -- of which was her opposition to the Vietnam War. Fonda visited Hanoi in July 1972. In Vietnam, Fonda was photographed seated on an anti-aircraft battery used against American aircrews. She also participated in several radio broadcasts on behalf of the Communist regime. In her 2005 autobiography, she states that she was manipulated into sitting on the battery, and claims to have been immediately horrified at the implications of the pictures.
During this visit she also visited American prisoners of war and returned with glowing accounts of their humane treatment. When cases of torture began to emerge among POWs returning to the United States, Fonda called the returning POWs "hypocrites and liars." She added, "These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed." On the subject of torture in general, Fonda told the
New York Times in 1973, "I'm quite sure that there were incidents of torture... but the pilots who were saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that's a lie." American POWs and other eyewitnesses, including former POW and current U.S. Senator John McCain, disagree with this sentiment.
In 2001, Fonda publicly announced that she had become a Christian. She considers herself a Biblical Christian and strongly opposes bigotry, discrimination, and dogma, which she believes are promoted by a small minority of Christians. Her announcement came shortly after her divorce from Ted Turner. Some believe that Fonda's Christianity led to the divorce as Turner had allegedly criticized religion. Fonda currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and has since left the Baptist church because it is anti-feminist.
1945. American General George S. Patton dies in Germany of injuries suffered in a car accident.
1946. An undersea earthquake sets off a powerful tsunami that devastates Honshu, Japan. About 2,000 people perished and half a million were left homeless. When the tsunami hit Honshu, 20-foot waves obliterated buildings from shorelines and about 2,000 ships were capsized as they were thrown around by the mass of water. In all, 60,000 square miles were flooded by the waves and 40,000 homes were completely destroyed.
1968. Apollo 8 is launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Aboard are Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders who become the first humans to orbit around the Moon. The crew took three days to travel to the Moon, which they orbited for 20 hours. While in lunar orbit they made a Christmas Eve television broadcast in which the crew read from the book of Genesis. It was the most watched broadcast to date.
1969. French/American actress Julie Delpy is born. A Renaissance woman, Delpy is also a musician and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. (See pictures.)
Delpy became an international celebrity after starring in the 1991 film Europa Europa. In the film, she plays a pro-Nazi girl, Leni, who falls in love with the hero, Solomon Perel, not knowing that he is Jewish. Delpy was subsequently offered to appear in several Hollywood and European films. In 1993, she was cast by director Krzysztof Kieślowski to play the female lead in Three Colors: White, the second film of Kieślowski's Three Colors Trilogy; Delpy also appeared in the other films in the series, albeit in smaller roles.
Delpy, who has had an interest in a career as a film director since her childhood, enrolled in a summer directing course at New York University; she made her directorial debut in 1995, with a short film entitled Looking for Jimmy, which she also wrote and produced.
Delpy may be best known in the United States for her co-starring role with Ethan Hawke in director Richard Linklater's 1995 film, Before Sunrise. The film received glowing reviews and was considered one of the most interesting films of the independent film movement of the 1990s. Its success led to the casting of Delpy in the 1997 American film, An American Werewolf in Paris, which was generally considered a disappointment by critics.
Delpy is also an accomplished musical artist. She released a self-titled CD in 2003. Three tracks from the album, "A Waltz For A Night", "An Ocean Apart" and "Je t'aime tant" were featured in Before Sunset.
Delpy currently resides in Los Angeles and has been a naturalized United States citizen since 2001, although she also retains her French citizenship.
1975. In Vienna, Austria, Carlos the Jackal leads a raid on a meeting of oil ministers from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). German and Arab terrorists stormed in with machine guns, killed three people, and took 63 people hostage, including 11 OPEC ministers. Calling his group the "Arm of the Arab Revolution," Carlos demanded that an anti-Israeli political statement be broadcast over radio, and that a bus and jet be provided for the terrorists and their hostages. Austrian authorities complied, and all the hostages were released in Algeria unharmed. OPEC did not hold another summit for 25 years.
1980. Wealthy socialite Martha "Sunny" Crawford von Bulow is found in a coma -- the result of what appeared to be an insulin overdose -- on the marble bathroom floor of her Newport, Rhode Island, mansion. Following a long investigation, Sunny's husband, Claus von Bulow, was charged with two counts of attempted murder and was convicted in a sensational trial in 1982. But the conviction was later overturned, and Claus was acquitted at a second trial in 1985.
1988. A bomb explodes on board Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, killing 270.
Known as the Lockerbie bombing and the Lockerbie air disaster in the UK, it became the subject of Britain's largest criminal inquiry, led by its smallest police force, Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary. It was widely regarded as an assault on a symbol of the United States, and with 189 of the victims being Americans, it stood as the deadliest attack on American civilians until the September 11, 2001 attacks.
1999. The Spanish Civil Guard intercepts a van loaded with 950 kg of explosives which the Basque separatist ETA intended to use to blow up Torre Picasso in Madrid.
2010. The total lunar eclipse of December 21st falls on the same date as the northern winter solstice, a rare coincidence according to Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory, who inspected a list of eclipses going back 2000 years. "Since Year 1, I can only find one previous instance of an eclipse matching the same calendar date as the solstice, and that is December 21, 1638," says Chester. "Fortunately we won't have to wait 372 years for the next one...that will be on Dec. 21, 2094."
The total eclipse lasted more than an hour from 02:41 am to 03:53 am EST on Tuesday morning, Dec. 21st. The eclipse was visible throughout North America (weather permitting).
2011. Syria's opposition urges the United Nations and Arab League to hold emergency meetings after an alleged massacre took place in the northwest of the country, before Arab League monitors enter the country.
Elsewhere, the death toll from flooding in the Philippines caused by Tropical Storm Washi reaches 1,002 and is set to rise further.
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