1170 Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, is murdered at the altar by knights acting on behalf of England’s King Henry II.
1851 The YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) opens in Boston, Massachusetts.
1852 Emma Snodgrass is arrested in Boston, US, for wearing pants.
1860 The launch of HMS Warrior, with her screw propeller, iron hull and iron armour, renders all previous warships obsolete.
1890 The US 7th Cavalry massacres over 200 Sioux men, women and children at Wounded Knee Creek, in South Dakota.
1895 Leander Starr Jameson crosses the border into Transvaal, leading 500 hand-picked policemen of the Chartered Company on their way to Johannesburg to support an expected uprising by Uitlanders.
1923 The first private broadcasting station in South Africa is put up by the South African Railways in Johannesburg.
1926 Australia’s Victoria state cricket team scores 1 107 (which includes a triple century, a double century and two centuries) to beat New South Wales by an innings and 656 runs.
1983 Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, the former Officer Commanding of Simonstown naval base, and his wife, Ruth, are sentenced to life imprisonment and 10 years’ in jail respectively for spying for the Soviet Union.
1994 A B737-400 flies into a mountain in east Turkey, killing 54 people.
1998 Leaders of the Khmer Rouge apologise for the 1970s genocide in Cambodia that claimed more than one million lives.
2003 The last known speaker of Akkala Sami dies, rendering the language, spoken in Russia’s remote Kola Peninsula, extinct.
2011 Samoa and Tokelau, in the Pacific, skip straight to December 31, missing out December 30 all together when the International Date Line is moved.
2013 Seven-time world Formula 1 champion Michael Schumacher hits his head on rocks, causing serious injuries, while skiing. Despite two surgeries he remains in a vegetative state.
2018 The record lowest temperature ever recorded, –111ºC, is registered by American satellite at the top of a large storm in the western Pacific. | The Historian