History for December 24

History for December 24 - On-This-Day.com
Benjamin Rush 1745, Kit Carson 1809, James Joule 1818 


Howard Hughes 1905, Ava Gardner 1922, Ricky Martin 1971 


1814 - The War of 1812 between the U.S. and Britain was ended with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent in Belgium. 


1818 - Franz Gruber of Oberndorf, Germany composed the music for "Silent Night" to words written by Josef Mohr. 


1865 - Several veterans of the Confederate Army formed a private social club in Pulaski, TN, called the Ku Klux Klan. 


1914 - In World War I, the first air raid on Britain was made when a German airplane dropped a bomb on the grounds of a rectory in Dover. 


1943 - U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower supreme commander of Allied forces as part of Operation Overlord. 


1968 - The crew of the U.S. Navy ship, Pueblo, was released by North Korea. The Captain of the Pueblo, Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, and 82 of his crew were held for 11 months after the ship was seized by North Korea because of suspected spying by the Americans. 


1968 - Three astronauts, James A. Lovell, William Anders and Frank Borman, reached the moon. They orbited the moon 10 times before coming back to Earth. Seven months later man first landed on the moon. 


1979 - Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in support of the country's Marxist government. 



1990 - Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were married. 


1997 - Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as "Carlos the Jackal," was sentenced by a French court to life in prison for the 1975 murders of two French investigators and a Lebanese national.