On Dec. 31, 1879, Thomas Alva Edison lit up a street in Menlo Park, New Jersey, the first public demonstration of his incandescent lightbulb. Although the first incandescent lamp had been produced 40 years earlier, no inventor had been able to come up with a practical design until Edison embraced the challenge in the late 1870s.
On Dec. 30, 1853, American Ambassador to Mexico James Gadsden signed what came to be known as the Gadsden Purchase, a treaty whereby the U.S. bought a 29,670-square-mile region of present-day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico from Mexico. The purchase was the last major territorial addition to the contiguous United States. Purchasing property is the proper way for a free country to acquire it.
On Dec. 29, 1940, London suffered its most devastating air raid when the German Luftwaffe firebombed the city. The next day, a newspaper photo of St. Paul’s Cathedral standing undamaged amid the smoke and flames seemed to symbolize the capital’s unconquerable spirit during the Battle of Britain.
On Dec. 29, 1890, the U.S. Army massacred hundreds of Sioux at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
On Dec. 29, 1170, Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered by followers of King Henry II in Canterbury Cathedral, after engaging in conflict with the king over the rights and privileges of the Church. Becket is venerated as a saint and martyr by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.
On Dec. 28, 1793, Thomas Paine was arrested in France for treason. The American patriot and author of the revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense, had traveled to Paris to assist in the French Revolution. Originally, Paine was welcomed and given honorary citizenship. His book against royalty, The Rights of Man, was popular with the leaders of the revolution. However, Paine was a strong opponent of the death penalty and was vocal against the revolutionaries’ use of the guillotine. Paine was released in November 1794.
On Dec. 28, 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris. The book about the police-state system in the Soviet Union from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution to 1956 was an instant success in the West, but Soviet officials were livid and on February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his citizenship, and deported.
On Dec. 27, 1657, thirty non-Quakers signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition to Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of the New Netherland colony requesting an exemption to his ban on Quaker worship. In 1663, the Dutch West India Company informed Stuyvesant to end religious persecution in the colony, which was the northeast Atlantic coast, including what is now New York City. The petition is considered a precursor to the First Amendment’s provision guaranteeing freedom of religion.
On Dec. 25, 1776, just before midnight, General George Washington crossed the icy Delaware River with 5,400 troops, surprising a Hessian mercenary force early the next morning, Dec. 26. Washington’s men captured close to 1,000 Hessians still groggy from Christmas festivities, and the military triumph provided a much needed boost to morale after months of military defeats.
On Dec. 24, 1745, Benjamin Rush was born. Rush founded Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and signed the Declaration of Independence. A physician, writer, educator, and humanitarian, he was also an early opponent of slavery and capital punishment. Dr. Rush may be most famous today for reconciling the friendship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams by encouraging the two former Presidents to resume writing to each other.
On Dec. 23, 1783, General George Washington resigned his commission as commander in chief of the Continental Army, following the signing of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, and retired to his home at Mount Vernon, Virginia. Many people at the time wanted Washington to become the new king. His quick resignation of his military post helped fortify the republican foundations of the new nation.
On Dec. 22, 1990, Polish labor leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa was sworn in as the first non-communist president of Poland since the end of World War II, a decade after he took over the leadership of a 1980 strike of shipyard workers in Gdansk.
A year earlier, on Dec. 22, 1989, the government of Romania’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown after the army defected to the cause of anti-communist demonstrators, ending 42 years of communist rule.
On Dec. 21, 1603, Roger Williams was born in London. Williams became an early proponent of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. In 1636, he began the colony of Providence Plantation (Rhode Island), which provided a refuge for religious minorities. Williams started the first Baptist church in America. He was also a student of Native American languages and an advocate for fair dealings with Native Americans.