On Dec. 16, 1773, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded three British ships moored in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea into the water. Now known as the “Boston Tea Party,” the midnight raid was a protest against the Tea Act of 1773, a bill enacted by the British parliament to save the faltering British East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a virtual monopoly on the American tea trade.
On Dec. 15, 1791, Virginia’s ratification made the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the law of the land. Anti-Federalists, such as Patrick Henry, had pushed for the Bill of Rights to protect from encroachment on the rights of the people and the states from a federal government they believed the Constitution made too powerful.
On Dec. 14, 1903, the Wright brothers made their first attempt to fly at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
On Dec. 14, 1825, Russian liberals rise up against Tsar Nicholas I in the Decembrist Revolt in St. Petersburg and are put down.
On Dec. 14, 1799, George Washington, the first president of the United States and the father of his country, passed away at his home at Mount Vernon.
On Dec. 13, 1937, Japanese armed forces entered Nanking, the capital of China, and General Matsui Iwane ordered that the city of Nanking be destroyed. Much of the city was burned, and Japanese troops launched a campaign of atrocities against civilians in what became known as the “Rape of Nanking.” The Japanese butchered an estimated 150,000 male “war prisoners,” massacred an additional 50,000 male civilians, and raped at least 20,000 women and girls of all ages, many of whom were mutilated or killed in the process. After the end of World War II, Matsui was found guilty of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and executed.
On Dec. 12, 1745, John Jay was born. He later became the first Chief Justice of the United States.
On Dec. 12, 1787, Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, five days after Delaware became the first.
On Dec. 11, 1918, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in Stavropol Krai, Russia. His books The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich helped raise global awareness of the Soviet Union’s forced labor camp system. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, but returned to Russia in 1994 after the Soviet system had collapsed.
On Dec. 10, 1869, Wyoming territorial legislators passed a bill to make it the first state or territory to grant women the right to vote. At the time, men outnumbered women by a margin of six-to-one in Wyoming.
On Dec. 10, 1778, John Jay was elected president of the Continental Congress. Jay, who would later contribute to the Federalist Papers and be named the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, had resigned the Congress in 1776, opposing complete independence from Great Britain and refusing to sign the Declaration of Independence.
On Dec. 9, 1775, the Virginia and North Carolina militias defeated 800 slaves and 200 redcoats serving John Murray, earl of Dunmore and governor of Virginia, at Great Bridge outside Norfolk, ending British royal control of Virginia. The Tory survivors retreated first to Norfolk, then to Dunmore’s ship, where the majority died of smallpox.
On Dec. 8, 1941, the day following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt asked for a congressional declaration of war against Japan and Congress passed the declaration that day. (So, that’s how they used to do it.) There was one dissenting vote, that of Jeanette Rankin, the first woman ever elected to Congress. A lifelong pacifist, Rankin had also voted against U.S. entry into the First World War 24 years earlier.
On Dec. 7, 1787, the U.S. Constitution is unanimously ratified by all 30 delegates to the Delaware Constitutional Convention, making Delaware the first state of the modern United States.