The best way to predict the future is to create it.
~ Peter F. Drucker

"Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) American author, poet and philosopher

" If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow "
~~John Dewey

Winter Teaching Theme: http://teachers.teach-nology.com/themes/holidays/winter/
Over 40 worksheets examining this seasons. Includes vocabulary builders, book marks, coloring sheets, and songs.
Billy Bear's Winter Activities: http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/winter/fun.htm
Snowglobe: http://www.kidsdomain.com/craft/snglobe.html
Kids Snow Activity Page: http://www.teelfamily.com
Winter Holiday Lesson Plans: http://www.teachervision.com/lesson-plans/lesson-3401.html
Celebrate Winter: http://familycrafts.about.com/library/weekly/aa010801a.htm
Jack Frost Treasure Hunt: http://www.wb-jackfrost.com/cmp/jackfrost8.html
Literacy Projects With Snow Themes: http://expage.com/page/alphabetacrossamericaletter19S6
Snowman: http://home.att.net/~critterp/craftsnowman.html
Snowman Craft Patterns: http://www.freecraftz.com/snowman.html
A Season of Stories: http://www.whitehouse.gov/holiday/#
People, and Barney the dog(!), at the White House and in the cabinet tell holiday stories.

A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens@Web English Teacher: http://www.webenglishteacher.com/dickens.html
A Christmas Carol Study Guide: http://www.data.unt.edu/Carol_Study_Guide/index.html

December is one of the most eventful months of the year when it comes to holidays. Education World offers information about 10 sites on the Web for teaching kids about celebrations like Kwanzaa, Ramadan, and Hanukkah. http://www.educationworld.com/a_sites/sites067.shtml
Hershey's Kitchen: Holiday Recipes: http://hersheykitchens.hersheys.com/holiday_recipes/
Choose a holiday (Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza) from the vertical menu on the right-hand side. The site also offers a personalized online recipe box to store your favorite Hershey
recipe (free registration required) and a free email newsletter which includes a Kids in the Kitchen section.
Holiday Celebrations: http://www.ncsu.edu/midlink/dec00/holidays.htm
KIDPROJ's Multi-Cultural Calendar: http://www.kidlink.org/KIDPROJ/MCC/
Holidays on the Net: http://www.holidays.net/
Resources for Winter Holidays: http://www.waterborolibrary.org/christm.htm
Waterboro Library's annotated guide to resources for Christmas,
Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and the solstice.

Does December Spell "Dilemma" in Your School?: http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr042.shtml

Ramadan
During Ramadan Muslims abstain from food, drink, smoking and other sensual pleasures from dawn to sunset as a way of learning discipline, self restraint and generosity. Fasting is one of the five main tenets, called pillars, of Islam. Each evening of Ramadon, the daily fast is broken by drinking a beverage adn eating an odd numbe of dates. They then eat a small meal, called iftar, which can include special pastries, such as katayif, or fried pancakes filled with cheese or nuts. Children, the elderly, and pregnant women are among those who are exempt from fasting. It was during Ramadan that Muslims believe the first revelations of the Koran were revealed to Mohammed. The end of Ramadan is marked by one of Islam's major festivals, called Eid al-Fitr.

Chanukah
The eight day Jewish festival of lights commemorates the victory of the Maccabees, Jewish warriors who overthrew their oppressors in about 165 B.C. When they won the battle, the victors also reclaimed their Temple in Jerusalem. But, as the story goes, there was problem -- the Temple lamp only had enough oil to burn for one day. Miraculously, the lap burned for the eight days of celebration and rededication. Each night of Hanukkah, a candle is lit on a special candelabrum, or menorah, with nine candles -- one for each night of the holiday and a servant candle, called the shamash, to light the others. Latkes and other foods cooked in oil are eaten, gifts exchanged, dreidels (tops) are spun, songs are sung and the story is recounted. The Jewish calendar is based on a lunar calendar, which means holidays shift in relation to the Greogoran calendar.
Hannukkah Food Traditions
Hanukkah Donuts: http://food4.epicurious.com/db/recipes/recipesH/3/40003.html
"The young State of Israel has created many of its own customs. One is serving Hanukkah sufganiyot (jelly doughnuts), which are fried in oil to symbolize the miracle of the oil that lasted eight days instead of one." This holiday tradition reflects Israel's melding of East and West. The fritter is of Sephardic origin. But the jelly filling and sugar coating come from European immigrants who ate apricot-filled glazed doughnuts on Hanukkah. This sufganiyot recipe from Epicurious divides the work into adult and child steps.
Latkes,or potato pancakes are also favorites. Cheese also is eaten to commemorate the ancient victory of Judith, who is said to have fed wine and cheese to the Assyrian general Holofernes until he fell down drunk. She cut off his head, the Assrians fled and the Jews were victorious, according to tradition.
Chanukah Concentration: http://www.chanukah99.com/lights/games/concentration/
Chanukah Matching Game: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/chanukah/games/con1.html
Chanukah Puzzle: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/chanukah/games/puz1.html
Dreidel Game: http://www.cyberkids.com/fg/ho/hannukah/dreidel/index.html
Hanukkah House: http://www.zigzagworld.com/draw/
Hanukkah Traditions: http://www2.priscilla.com/priscilla/hanukkah/home1.html
Chanukah Clip Art: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/chanukah/clip.html
Chanukah Crafts: http://www.kidsdomain.com/craft/_chan.html
Chanukah Mazes: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/chanukah/maze.html
Hanukkah Celebrations: http://www.theholidayspot.com/hanukkah/index.htm
Hanukkah Central: http://rats2u.com/calendar_gh/calendar_hanukkah.htm
Hanukkah Music and Songs: http://www.preschooleducation.com/shanukkah.shtml
Menorah Download: http://www.fortunecity.com/millenium/firemansam/16/
Chanukah 2000: http://www.chanukah2000.com/
Dreidel Game: http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/hanukkah/dreidel2.htm
Make a Dreidel: http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/hanukkah/pattern.htm
Dreidel Shape Book: http://abcteach.com/Shape%20books/Holidays/dreidel.htm
Hanukkah Theme: http://www.childfun.com/themes/han.shtml
Black Dog's Chanukah Celebration: http://blackdog.net/holiday/chanukah/
Chanukah: http://www.bonus.com/bonus/card/chanukah.html
Comparing Holidays: http://abcteach.com/MonthtoMonth/Holidays/hancompare.htm
Hanukkah Greetings: http://www.billybear4kids.com/postcard5/hanukkah/card.htm
Hanukah Screensaver: http://www.billybear4kids.com/screen/hanukkah.htm
Hanukkah Wallpaper: http://www.billybear4kids.com/desktop/hanukkah/wallpapr.htm
Star of David Window Ornament: http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/hanukkah/craft/star.htm
Hanukkah section: http://www.lil-fingers.com/jump/hanukkah.shtml
Dreidel spin game, coloring pages, coloring cards links and storybook.

Kwanzaa
This African-American holiday was created in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, a professor at California Sate University Long Beach, as "a cultural message which speaks to the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense." Kwanzaa is a blend of culture, heritage and faith. Lasting for seven days, beginning the day after Christmas, a candle is lit each night to symbolize one of seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith. It's a joyous time, which includes gift-giving and home decorations. The colors of Kwanzaa are black, red and green. There is great feast on December 31 called Kamana. Food includes West African benne cakes, which are sprinkled with sesame seeds for good luck.
Kwanzaa Resources for Teachers: http://www.teacherplanet.com/resource/kwanzaa.php
Kwanzaa section: http://www.lil-fingers.com/jump/kwanzaa.shtml
Matching game, coloring pages, links and storybook
The Official Kwanzaa Website: http://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org/
"All about the holiday, its origins, its symbols, and its significance."

December 1
Worlds AIDS Day
-1589: Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene was registered for publication. The poem tells a long, complex story full of knights, princesses, castles, dragons, and enchanted bowers. Spenser had planned to divide the poem into 12 books, with each book featuring a different knight. Each knight would represent a different virtue, such as holiness or chastity, and King Arthur would appear in each book, representing the complete man. Spenser said the purpose of the poem was "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." But he only finished the first six books. Still, it's one of the longest poems in the English language. Spenser started writing the poem around 1580. About five years later, he took a position in the royal government that sent him to Ireland, where he supervised English colonization. His job was demanding, but he found inspiration in the Irish countryside and worked on The Faerie Queene as often as he could, in his spare time. By 1589, he had finished the first three books. Sir Walter Raleigh visited him in Ireland, read the poem, and liked it so much that he persuaded Spenser to come back to England to get it published. The Faerie Queene was a big hit in England, partly because it was full of praise for Queen Elizabeth and Protestantism. John Milton liked the poem because of its moral lessons. Two hundred years later, English Romantic poets like John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge admired The Faerie Queene for its beautiful, intricate rhyming patterns and its rich story. Today, it's considered one of the greatest poems ever written in English.
-1860: The first installment of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations appeared in the magazine All the Year Round. Dickens had founded All the Year Round the previous year, and whenever he published one of his novels in the magazine it sold very well. But in the fall of 1860, he was serializing a novel called A Day's Ride, by Charles Lever, and sales of the magazine were dropping. Dickens had just gotten the idea for a long story about a young boy who meets an escaped convict and grows up to find out that the convict has been his secret benefactor. He was going to publish it in monthly installments in a different magazine, but he decided to write shorter chapters and publish it in All the Year Round to try to boost sales. Dickens was getting old, and while he wrote Great Expectations he suffered from facial neuralgia, asthma, pain in his side, and insomnia. He had recently separated from his wife and was having an affair with a twenty-year-old actress. But he wrote obsessively, every day, to meet the weekly deadlines and revive the sales of his magazine. His plan worked: a few chapters of Great Expectations were published weekly from December 1, 1860 through August 3, 1861, and about a hundred thousand copies of his magazine were sold each week. It has remained one of Dickens' most popular novels.
-1877: Popular novelist Rex Beach was born in Atwood, Michigan. He was living in Chicago and studying law when he heard about the Gold Rush in Alaska. He quit school and went off to the Klondike to search for gold. He looked for five years, but didn't find any. Back in Chicago, he found a job selling bricks and cement. One day, a friend of his from Alaska told him that he'd just sold a story about the Gold Rush for ten dollars. Beach later recalled, "There was an empty desk where we were standing. I snagged a chair and wrote." His adventure novels were bestsellers in the early 1900s, including The Spoilers (1906) and The Barrier (1908). Beach was one of the first writers to sell the rights of many of his novels to Hollywood and make big profits from the movie adaptations.
-1886: American detective novelist Rex Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana. He wrote over 70 novels, and 46 of them featured Nero Wolfe, an eccentric detective who weighs almost 300 pounds. Wolfe drinks liters of beer each day, grows orchids, and wears yellow silk pajamas. He solves mysteries with the help of his sidekick Archie Goodwin, who does most of the legwork for Wolfe because Wolfe doesn't like to leave his house. Stout wrote articles and stories for magazines for almost thirty years before he wrote his first Nero Wolfe novel at the age of 48. It was called Fer-de-Lance, and it was published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1934. It was a huge success, and Stout went on to write another Wolfe novel almost every year.
-1935: Film director, actor, writer Woody Allen was born Allan Stewart Konigsberg in New York City. He is known for his neurotic persona both on-screen and off. Allen has received many awards for his film work, and been nominated for 20 Academy Awards, winning three. He won nine Golden Globes, one for the critically acclaimed "The Purple Rose of Cairo."

December 2
-1981: Britney Spears, pop singer and performer, was born in Kentwood, LA. Spears appeared on Disney's Mickey Mouse Club in the 1993 and 1994 seasons. When her first album was released in January 1999, it went straight to the top of the charts, becoming the first album of the year to debut at No. 1. Spears' second album, released in May 2000, sold 1.3 million copies in its first week. It became the top-selling debut by a solo female artist ever. It earned Spears two more Grammy nominations. Spears is dating fellow Mickey Mouse Club
alumni Justin Timberlake of the boy band 'N Sync.

December 3
-1857: Novelist Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Ukraine, in a region that had once been part of Poland. His father was a poet and translator of English and French literature. Joseph and his father read books written in both Polish and French. By the time he was 12 years old, both of his parents had died of tuberculosis. He went to Switzerland to live with his uncle, but after a few years he decided he wanted to go off and see the world. He joined the French merchant marine, and began a long career as a sailor. He sailed to Australia, Borneo, Malaysia, South America, the South Pacific, and Africa. He joined the British merchant navy, and in 1886 became a citizen of Great Britain. In the fall of 1889, Conrad settled in London for a few months. One morning, after he finished his breakfast, he told his maid to clear away all the dishes immediately. Normally, he would sit by the window and read from a book by Dickens or Hugo or Shakespeare. But on this morning he felt unusually calm and perceptive. He began to write his first novel, Almayer's Folly, which would be published six years later. It's about a man from the Netherlands who trades on the jungle rivers of Borneo. Conrad went on to write many more novels, including Lord Jim (1900), The Secret Agent (1907), and Nostromo (1904). But he's most famous for Heart of Darkness (1902), about a man's journey down a river into the middle of Africa.
-1947: Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire premiered in New York City. Williams spent months writing and revising the play, and he had three different working titles for it: The Moth, Blanche's Chair on the Moon, and The Poker Night. Then he moved to an apartment in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where he could hear two streetcars rattling by, one named Desire and one named Cemeteries. He changed the setting of his play to New Orleans, and he changed the title to A Streetcar Named Desire. The play is about a southern belle named Blanche DuBois who comes to live with her sister Stella and Stella's working class husband Stanley. Stanley thinks Blanche is trying to swindle the couple, and his anger and physical aggression eventually drive her to insanity.
-1965: Katerina Witt, figure skater, was born in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Germany. The East German champion in 1982, she won the first of six successive European titles in 1983, was world champion in 1984-85 and 1987-88, and Olympic champion in 1984 and 1988.

December 4
-1795: Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle was born in the village of Ecclefechan, Scotland. He studied German literature at school, and after graduating he found work teaching and writing articles for magazines. But he was depressed-he suffered from dyspepsia, and worried about finding a wife and about pleasing his parents. He wanted to write something but abandoned all of his projects almost as soon as he started them. He wrote to a friend, "I must do something-or die, whichever I like better." Finally, he came up with the idea for a book that combined autobiography and philosophy, and he began working on what would become his big breakthrough, Sartor Resartus (1833-1834). Carlyle started writing a history of the French Revolution at the beginning of the 1830s, and finished it in 1835. He lent the manuscript to his friend, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, but Mill's housekeeper mistook the pile of paper for waste and threw it in the fire. Mill was furious with his housekeeper and offered Carlyle two hundred pounds in compensation. Carlyle said that he felt like a man who "has nearly killed himself accomplishing zero." But he went right back to work and rewrote the entire book in less than two years. The French Revolution was published in 1837, and it was a great success. Carlyle was interested in the great, towering figures of history, like Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, and Shakespeare. He wrote a book called On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), in which he says, "No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men." Some people in the first half of the twentieth century saw the book as a rejection of democracy, and Carlyle has become less popular than he once was.
-1835: English novelist Samuel Butler was born in Nottinghamshire, England. He came from a family of clerics, and his father assumed Samuel would also become a minister. He went to a parish in London, and it was there that he realized that people who had been baptized were not necessarily morally superior to people who hadn't been baptized. He started questioning Christianity in letters to his father, and eventually lost all faith in religion. He left the parish and sailed off to New Zealand to become a sheep farmer. He made a decent living, and began to read widely. In 1872, he published a satire called Erewhon, which both supported and challenged Darwin's ideas about evolution. Readers loved it, but it was the only book Butler wrote that had any success until his death in 1902. After he died, an incomplete novel that Butler had begun thirty years earlier, The Way of All Flesh, was found in his desk drawer. When it was published in 1903, it sold more copies than any of his works did when he was alive. Critics called it a masterpiece. His notebooks and memoirs were published, and he suddenly became known as a great Victorian writer.
-1861: Actress/singer Lillian Russell was born.
-1892: Spanish dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco was born.
-1893: English writer Herbert Read was born in Yorkshire, England. He wrote over sixty books of poetry, art criticism, and essays. He was especially well known for arguing that art should play a greater role in the public's education, in such books as Education Through Art (1974).
-1921: Actress Deanna Durbin was born.
-1937: Actors Max Baer Jr. was born.
-1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered liquidation of the Works Progress Administration, created during the Depression to provide work for the unemployed.
-1949: Jeff Bridges was born.
-1951: Actresses Patricia Wettig was born.
-1964: Marisa Tomei was born.
-1971: India joined East Pakistan in its war for independence from West Pakistan. East Pakistan became the republic of Bangladesh.
-1973: Model Tyra Banks was born.
-1985: National security adviser Robert McFarlane resigned. President Reagan named Vice Adm. John Poindexter to succeed him.
-1991: Former Lincoln Savings & Loan Association chairman Charles Keating was convicted on 17 counts of securities fraud. American Terry Anderson was freed by his pro-Iranian captors after 6 years. He was the last U.S. hostage held in the Middle East.
-1992: President Bush ordered U.S. troops into Somalia.
-1995: Officials of the United Auto Workers union called an end to a largely unsuccessful 17-month-long strike against Caterpiller in Peoria, Ill.
-1996: Jonathan Schmitz was sentenced in the slaying of Scott Amedure, who had confessed to having a crush on Schmitz during the taping of "The Jenny Jones Show." The segment never aired.
-1997: Top health officials in Europe voted to ban most forms of advertising of tobacco beginning in four to five years.
-1998: The space shuttle Endeavour blasted off, carrying into orbit a U.S. component of the International Space Station.

December 5
-1782: Martin Van Buren, once governor of New York and the eighth president of the United States, was born.
-1830: English poet Christina Rossetti was born in London to Italian parents. She grew up in a family that loved literature. She and her sister and two brothers wrote sonnets together as children, and all four of them grew up to be writers. One brother, the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, helped Christina get her first poems published in a London magazine. Christina was home-schooled and lived with her mother her entire life. She was a deeply devout Protestant. She gave up chess because she was worried that she enjoyed winning too much. She broke off an engagement to the artist James Collison in 1848, after he joined the Catholic Church. Later, she fell in love with a man named Charles Cayley but wouldn't marry him because he wasn't religious enough. She stayed at home and read religious texts, and occasionally, in bursts of inspiration, wrote the poetry for which she is known. She's best known for her poem "Goblin Market" (1862), a dark fairy tale in which a girl is attacked by a pack of goblins after refusing to buy their fruit.
-1892: Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia.
-1901: Walt Disney, animator, producer, creator of Mickey Mouse and Disney theme parks, was born in Chicago, IL. He dropped out of high school at age 17 to serve in World War I. After serving briefly as an ambulance driver, Disney returned in 1919 to Kansas City for an apprenticeship as a commercial illustrator and later for advertising cartoons. By 1922, he had set up his own shop with Ub Iwerks, whose drawing ability and inventiveness were factors in Disney's eventual success. His first success came with the creation of Mickey Mouse in
"Steamboat Willie," the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, featuring Disney's voice as the character called "Mortimer Mouse." Disney's wife, Lillian, suggested that "Mickey" sounded better.
-1933: The 21st Amendment revoking the 18th (Prohibition) Amendment was ratified in the United States.
-1934: American writer Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California. In 1968, Didion's first collection of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, was published, and it was a big success. It includes essays about Joan Baez, Vegas brides, John Wayne, and the hippies in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco. She's gone on to write five novels, including A Book of Common Prayer (1977) and Democracy (1984), as well as several more nonfiction books. Where I Was From (2003) is a history of California that's full of family portraits and personal anecdotes.
-1936: Novelist James Lee Burke was born in Houston, Texas. He's best known for his series of detective novels featuring Dave Robicheaux, an ex-New Orleans policeman, Vietnam veteran, and recovering alcoholic. Burke started writing stories when he was in fourth grade, published his first story when he was 19, and wrote his first novel when he was 23. Half of Paradise (1965) was published just after he finished graduate school, and it got great reviews. Burke wrote a few more novels, but none of them sold well. He fell into depression and alcoholism. He had finished a book called The Lost Get-Back Boogie, but he couldn't find anyone to publish it. He collected ninety-three rejection slips for the book over a period of ten years. He worked as a newspaper reporter, a land surveyor, a social worker, a forest ranger, a teacher, and a truck driver. Finally, in 1985, The Lost Get-Back Boogie was published by Louisiana State University Press. The novel is about a released prisoner who goes to live on a Montana ranch with the family of one of his friends from prison. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Burke's novels have been doing well ever since.
-1939: Writer John Berendt was born in Syracuse, New York. He was an editor at Esquire magazine when he took a trip to Savannah, Georgia on a whim. He fell in love with the place, and decided he wanted to write a book about it. He didn't begin working on it for three years, and then he started doing intense research and interviewing as many people in Savannah as he could. It took him seven years to finish the book. In 1994, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was published, and it became a huge bestseller. It follows the murder case of an antiques dealer, but it's also full of portraits of miscellaneous Savannah residents. It's a nonfiction book that reads like a novel. In 1998 it broke the record for consecutive weeks on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Tourism in Savannah increased by almost 50 percent.
-1955: Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the Montgomery bus boycott to protest racial segregation.

December 6
-1803: Novelist Susannah Moodie was born Susannah Strickland in Suffolk, England. As a young woman, she married an adventurous man who had traveled around Africa, and the two of them sailed off to live in the backwoods of Canada, which at the time was still wild country. She's best known for her novels about pioneer life, including Roughing it in the Bush (1852) and Life in the Clearings (1853). She's a very important literary figure in Canada, and the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood once wrote a book of poems about her called The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1972).
-1886: Poet (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He was a struggling poet, working as a writer of definitions for the Standard Dictionary, when he got a chance to hike through the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. When he got home, he wrote a poem, trying to express the beauty of what he saw in the forest. He called the poem "Trees." It begins, "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree" and ends with the lines, "Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree."
-1892: English essayist Sir Osbert Sitwell was born in London. He wrote many books of poetry and fiction, but he's best known as the author of autobiographical essays about the years before the collapse of the British Empire. His essays are collected in books such as Left Hand, Right Hand! (1945), Laughter in the Next Room (1948), and Noble Essences (1950).
-1893: Novelist and short story writer Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in Middlesex, England. As a child, Warner loved listening to her mother's stories about growing up in India. She said, "[My mother's memory was] this astonishing storehouse, full of scents and terrors, flowers, tempests, monkeys, beggars winding worms out of their feet." When she became a writer, Warner tried to write fiction that would reproduce the feeling she got from her mother's stories, of something fantastic emerging from something ordinary. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), was about a woman who makes a deal with the Devil and becomes a witch in order to get away from her restrictive family. The novel became the first ever Book of the Month Club Selection, and it was a bestseller in the United States. She went on to write many more books that combined realism and fantasy before it was a popular thing to do. She wrote The Cat's Cradle Book (1940), about a woman who believes that cats crawl into the beds of children at night to tell them fairytales, and The Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), about a magical world where women are the rulers.
-1896: Lyricist Ira Gershwin was born Israel Gershvin on the East Side of New York City. He's considered one of the great lyricists of the twentieth century, best known for writing the lyrics to songs like "I've Got Rhythm" (1930) and "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" (1937). But he always felt overshadowed by the talent of his younger brother, the composer George Gershwin.
-1942: Austrian avant-garde playwright and novelist Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria. He's one of the most influential and controversial writers in the German language. When he first started writing plays, he said, "[I] couldn't stand the pretense of reality [in theater] . . . as if the actors were under a glass bell." He wanted to destroy the illusion. In his first play, Offending the Audience (1966), four actors come on stage to say that there is not going to be a play, and then yell insults at the audience. The play was a surprising success in Germany, but when it traveled abroad, many audiences yelled insults back at the actors. He went on to write other experimental plays like My Foot My Tutor (1969) in which two characters interact for ten scenes without ever speaking. He has also written many novels, including The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972) and Nonsense and Happiness (1976). He wrote the screenplay for the movie Wings of Desire (1987), about an angel who falls in love with a mortal woman. His most recent novel to be translated into English is On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House (2000).

December 7
-1598: Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini was born.
-1761: Waxworks museum founder Marie Tussaud was born.
-1787: Delaware became the first state to ratify the U.S.Constitution.
-1810: German physiologist Theodor Schwann, co-originator of the cell theory and the first to use the term, was born.
-1873: Novelist Willa Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia. Her family moved west when she was a little girl to get away from a tuberculosis epidemic. The disease had killed all of her father's brothers. Congress had recently passed the Homestead Act, and thousands of people were moving west to take advantage of the free government land. She always remembered the journey out to the plains, sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding on to the side to steady herself. Her family settled in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and most of her fictional Nebraska towns are based on it. She fell in love with the Nebraska landscape. She wrote, "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth is the floor of the sky." Cather idolized the immigrant women of Nebraska, who worked alongside men in the fields. As a teenager, she cut her hair short and wore boys' clothes, calling herself William Cather. She traveled around the town with the local doctors, telling everyone she was going to be a surgeon, and she did experiments on frogs in her spare time. But when she went off to college, she got involved in journalism and eventually moved to New York City to edit McClure's magazine. She became an extremely successful magazine editor at a time when men ran almost all magazines and newspapers in New York, but the job kept her from writing anything but short fiction. After living in New York for fifteen years, she quit her job and took a trip back home to Nebraska. Standing on the edge of a wheat field, she watched the first harvest that she had seen since her childhood. When she got back to the East, she began her first great novel, O Pioneers! (1913). Cather went on to write many more novels about the westward expansion of the United States, including My Antonia (1918), The Professor's House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
-1879: Composer Rudolph Friml ("Indian Love Call") was born.
-1888: Novelist and essayist Joyce Cary was born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. He started out wanting to be a painter, and went to art school, but nobody liked his paintings. He moved to Paris and tried to write a novel about the bohemian scene there, but he never finished it. Hoping to find better novel material, he volunteered for the British Red Cross in the Balkan War against Turkey. He nearly died twice and never wrote any fiction about the experience. After that he went to Africa, and almost died a half a dozen more times. In 1918, he was shot in the head, but survived. He said, "A special luck follows me everywhere. . . . I shall not die a violent death. My insurance money will be wasted." In Africa, he started writing several novels, all of which he burned in frustration. Finally, he published a few stories about African colonial life in the Saturday Evening Post, and made enough money to write for a living. He's best known for his novel The Horse's Mouth (1944), which is narrated by a cranky, frustrated old painter named Gulley Jimson.
-1915: Actor Eli Wallach was born.
-1923: Actor Ted Knight was born.
-1928: Linguist Noam Chomsky was born.
-1931: President Hoover refused to see a group of "hunger marchers" at the White House.
-1932: Actress Ellen Burstyn was born.
-1941: Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. The attack came after the United States had frozen Japanese assets and declared an embargo on shipments of petroleum and other war materials to Japan. On the morning of December 7, soldiers at Pearl Harbor were learning how to use a new device called radar, and they detected a large number of planes heading toward them. They telephoned an officer to ask him what to do. The officer said they must be American B-17s on their way to the base, and he told the soldiers not to worry about it. A sailor named James Jones, who would go on to write the novel From Here to Eternity (1951), was in the mess hall that morning. Because it was Sunday, there was a bonus ration of milk to go along with breakfast. Jones said, "It was not till the first low-flying fighter came . . . whammering overhead with his [machine guns] going that we ran outside, still clutching our half-pints of milk to keep them from being stolen." The Japanese planes dropped bombs and torpedoes, and ships started capsizing and sinking. Men jumped and fell from the boats into the water, which was covered with burning oil. Most of the damage occurred in the first thirty minutes. The U.S.S. Oklahoma capsized, and the California, Nevada, and West Virginia sank in shallow water. The U.S.S. Arizona was completely destroyed, killing more than 1,500 soldiers aboard. When nurses arrived for morning duty they found hundreds of injured men all over the base. The nurses ran around, administering morphine, and to prevent overdoses they wrote the letter M on each treated man's forehead. There were ultimately 2,390 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor and 1,178 wounded. Two days after the attack, the Navy passed out postcards to the survivors and told them to write to their families, but not to describe what had happened. A man named George Smith said, "My mother didn't get that postcard until February. . . . When the mailman got [my] card at the post office, he closed down and ran all the way to my house . . . woke up my [parents] and told them, 'Your son's OK.' I would not see my mother for two and a half years." Franklin D. Roosevelt called December 7, "a date which will live in infamy," and he used the event as the grounds for leading the United States into World War II.
The Pearl Harbor Naval Station on the Hawaiian island of Oahu is the hub of United States Pacific naval power. Most of the Navy's major commands have headquarters there. Yet even after sixty-five years, its name is still synonymous with the surprise Japanese attack of "December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy." The United States suffered 3,700 casualties, along with damage to twenty-one ships and 300 planes.
Eyewitness to History: Attack at Pearl Harbor: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/pearl.htm
"The surprise was complete. The attacking planes came in two waves; the first hit its target at 7:53 AM, the second at 8:55. By 9:55 it was all over. By 1:00 PM the carriers that launched the planes from 274 miles off the coast of Oahu were heading back to Japan." This single page description of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor includes quotes from eyewitnesses and some amazing photographs. Links to related pages (The Japanese View and The White House Reacts) are in the right-column, below the ad.
The Legacy of Pearl Harbor: http://click.nationalgeographic.tep1.com/maaaeJQaaQJa8abpgXWb/
Read firsthand accounts of what it was like at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack and consider why Japan might have wanted to expand its territory in the early 1940s.
MSNBC Interactive: Pearl Harbor: http://www.msnbc.com/modules/pearlharbor/experience/
This interactive movie from MSNBC starts as soon as the page loads, so have your speakers turned on. At first glance, this looks like a regular "old-fashioned" video, but there are interactive activities to explore in between each chapter. Start by examining four clues to the impending Japanese air strike that were mostly ignored, and then move through the chapters using the Next button, or the direct navigation menu at the bottom of the player. The site includes first-person narratives.
National Geographic: Remembering Pearl Harbor: http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/
The National Geographic Pearl Harbor site has many excellent features. One of them is "Beyond the Movie" which takes a look behind the scenes of the 2001 "Pearl Harbor" movie from Touchstone, and at characters such as Dorie Miller, the real-life cook played by Cuba Gooding. "The Attack Map" is a multimedia map and time line created with photos, narratives, and footage that "bring the attack on Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawaii, to life – moment by moment, target by target."
Pearl Harbor: http://click.nationalgeographic.tep1.com/maaaeJQaaQJa4abpgXWb/
Firsthand accounts and a groundbreaking multimedia map bring the attack on Pearl Harbor to life--moment by moment, target by target.
-1942: Rock/folksinger Harry Chapin was born.
-1947: Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Bench was born.
-1956: Former basketball player-turned-coach Larry Bird was born.
-1958: "Tonight Show" announcer Edd Hall was born.
-1966: Actor C. Thomas Howell was born.
-1972: Apollo 17 was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on the last manned mission to the moon.
-1986: The speaker of Iran's Parliament said his country would help free more American hostages in Lebanon in exchange for more U.S. arms.
-1987: Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Washington, D.C., the first Soviet leader to officially visit the United States since 1973.
-1988: As many as 60,000 people were killed when a powerful earthquake rocked the Soviet republic of Armenia.
-1991: On the 50th anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, President Bush called for an end to recriminations and sought the healing of old wounds.
-1992: The destruction of a 16th century mosque by militant Hindus touched off five days of violence across India that left more than 1,100 people dead.
-1993: A gunman opened fire on a crowded Long Island, N.Y., commuter train, killing several persons. Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary revealed the United States had conducted 204 underground nuclear tests from 1963 to 1990 without informing the public. Astronauts aboard the shuttle Endeavour fixed the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
-1995: A two-week-old strike by hundreds of thousands of French public-sector workers protesting planned cuts in welfare spending had spread to cities throughout France.
-1997: Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, actress Lauren Bacall and actor Charlton Heston were among those receiving awards from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in
Washington, D.C.

December 8
Bodhi Day: The buddha is said to have reached enlightenment under a bodhi tree. He sat there for days, and as he did, he came to realize what would later become the founding principles of Buddhism. The anniversary of his attaining Buddhhood is called Bodhi Day and is celebrated by some (though not all) traditions of Buddhism on December 8.
-65 B.C.: The Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace was born in Apulia, Italy. He's best known today for his Odes, poems about ordinary events like drinking wine or saying goodbye to a friend.
-1765: Eli Whitney, the American inventor of the cotton gin, was born.
-1894: American writer James Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio. He's known as the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain. In 1927, Thurber met the writer E.B. White, who introduced him to Harold Ross, the editor of a new magazine called The New Yorker. Ross hired Thurber as an editor, and Thurber went on to write articles and draw cartoons for The New Yorker for years. He wrote almost constantly-at parties, at the dinner table, in bed. Between 1930 and 1961, Thurber published almost thirty books. He's one of the few major American authors who wrote almost exclusively short pieces. His best-known stories are "The Catbird Seat" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," about a man who fantasizes compulsively. Thurber often claimed he didn't care much about politics. He said that when Harding and Cox, who were both from Ohio, ran for president in 1920, he couldn't decide who to vote for. So he flipped a coin, didn't bother to see how it landed, and left without voting. He made fun of leftist intellectuals in the 1930s, but in the '40s and '50s, he became an outspoken critic of McCarthyism, after it began threatening writers' freedom. He said, "The end of American comedy is in sight and the theater's gone to hell. . . . Who can write where everybody's scared? . . . I'm not letting any Congressman scare me to death." He wrote diatribes against the House Un-American Activities Committee and spoke out against it in newspapers and magazines.
-1913: American poet, essayist, and fiction writer Delmore Schwartz was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He went to college at New York University. The summer after his junior year, he moved from his mother's apartment to a shabby apartment in Greenwich Village. He was determined to become a writer, and locked himself in his room for twelve hours a day, writing stories and poems. By the time the summer was over, he had finished his first great work, a short story called "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." It was published in 1937 in the left-wing journal The Partisan Review, and a year later Schwartz came out with a book of short stories with the same name. It was a big success, and people like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Vladimir Nabokov loved it. Schwartz was 25 years old and already a big-name writer. He wrote poetry, essays and stories, and was known as one of the best writers of his generation. He published the poetry collections Shenandoah (1941) and Genesis: Book I (1943), and the short story collection The World is a Wedding (1948). But when he quit his job teaching at Harvard in 1948, he was almost penniless. He married a writer named Elizabeth Pollet, and they went off to live in an old farmhouse in rural New Jersey. He wrote furiously, held several jobs, and got hooked on alcohol and amphetamines. His wife left him and he moved back to New York City, where he continued to drink heavily and write poetry and criticism. He wrote in a letter, "The years pass and the years pass and the years pass, & still I see only as in a glass darkly and vaguely." He died in 1966 at the age of 52.
-1949: American novelist Mary Gordon was born in Far Rockaway, Long Island, New York. She's the author of the novels The Company of Women (1981), The Other Side (1989), and Men and Angels (1985), among others. She grew up in a family that was devoutly Catholic. Her father had converted from Judaism and founded several right-wing Catholic magazines. Mary later said Catholic mass was "an excellent training ground for an aspiring novelist," because it was full of beautiful rituals and evocative language. As a child, she wanted to become a nun. But she fell in love with literature and went to college at Barnard at a time when civil rights activism and Vietnam War protests were at their height. She left the Catholic Church, joined the women's movement, and wrote poetry and fiction. After college, Gordon moved to London, where she researched Virginia Woolf and worked on her first novel. One day, she was feeling lonely and saw the novelist Margaret Drabble on TV. Gordon wrote her a letter describing her day, and Drabble called Gordon up and invited her to dinner. Drabble read the manuscript of Gordon's first novel and introduced her to an agent who helped find a publisher for Final Payments in 1978. It's about a Catholic woman who lives at home until she's 30 years old, taking care of her ailing father. After his death, she goes out into the world on her own for the first time, but she's weighed down by feelings of guilt and self-torment. Final Payments sold over a million copies, and critics compared Gordon to Jane Austen and Flannery O'Connor. Almost overnight, Gordon went from making $11,000 a year teaching community college to being featured in People magazine. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, and says she never wants to leave.
-1980: Rock star John Lennon of the Beatles was shot and killed in New York City.

December 9
-1608: John Milton, poet and controversialist was born in London, England. He married a woman named Mary Powell in 1642, but she quickly grew tired of him and left him almost immediately after their honeymoon. Milton was furious, but it was against the law to get a divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. The next year, he wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), in which he argued that couples should be able to divorce if the marriage turns out to be unhappy. He tried to prove that marriage was created to remedy the loneliness of men, and that if a wife failed to perform this function, her husband should have the right to divorce her. He also said that those who had lived freely in their youth were more likely to find happiness in marriage than those who were chaste and inexperienced. Milton addressed his tract to the British Parliament, but it didn't go over well. He remained married to Powell until her death in 1652. Milton wrote Areopagitica in 1644 to make the case against the government's censorship of books and pamphlets. It's one of the first great arguments in favor of freedom of the press. He argued that no one group should control the number of available opinions from which an individual can choose. After the Civil War ended and Charles II was restored to the throne, Milton devoted himself to the writing of Paradise Lost. The epic poem tells the story of Satan's rebellion against God, his expulsion from Heaven, and his temptation of Adam and Eve.
-1848: Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia. When he was 13 years old, Harris saw an advertisement for a printer's assistant at a newspaper published at a local plantation. He applied, and got the job. While he was working for the newspaper, he met some of the slaves on the plantation. He loved listening to the stories they told about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and other animals in the Briar Patch. When the Civil War began, Chandler left the plantation to work for newspapers in cities all across the South. He was working for the Atlanta Constitution when he began to publish the tales he had heard years earlier, under the title Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1880), the first of many Uncle Remus collections. He wrote the tales in a southern, African-American dialect that he claimed was an exact reproduction of the speech he heard as a young man.
-1905: Screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo was born in Montrose, Colorado. He's best known as a screenwriter, but his 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun won the National Book Award. It's about the thoughts of a soldier who has lost his arms, legs, face, sight, and hearing. The soldier decides to become an educational exhibit about the horrors of war. He thinks people who come to see him "would learn all there was to know about war. That would be a great thing, to concentrate war in one stump of a body and to show it to people so they could see the difference between a war that's in newspaper headlines and liberty loan drives and a war that is fought out lonesomely in the mud somewhere, a war between a man and a high explosive shell." Trumbo joined the Communist party in 1943. He said the meetings were "dull beyond description, about as revolutionary in purpose as Wednesday-evening testimonial services in the Christian Science Church." But he was blacklisted by the film industry and tried by the House Un-American Activities Committee as one of the "Hollywood Ten," a group of writers and actors who refused to speak about their alleged Communist friends and activities. He spent a year in jail and then moved to Mexico, where he continued to write scripts under different pseudonyms. In 1956, he won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for The Brave One, which he wrote under the name Robert Rich. Three years later, his name was removed from the blacklist, and he wrote the screenplay for Exodus (1960).
-1898: Emmett Kelly, clown, was born in Sedan, Kansas. He was over 40 when his sad-faced hobo in oversized rags, "Weary Willie," found a home under the Ringling Brothers big top (1942 to 1955) and made Kelly the most celebrated American clown of his era.
-1992: U.S. troops arrived in Somalia to calm the unrest and provide famine relief.

December 10
-1787: Francis Gallaudet, founder of the first free school for the deaf, was born.
-1830: American poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She grew up in a wealthy, religious family, and rarely left Amherst. She went to college at Mount Holyoke and then went back to her parents' house, where she spent the rest of her life. Dickinson dressed completely in white, refused most visitors, and rarely left the house. During the last years of her life, she mourned the deaths of her father, her mother, her nephew, and some of her closest acquaintances. She became known as the "Belle of Amherst," the "New England Mystic," and the "Woman in White." But even though she didn't go out much, she wrote hundreds of letters. Dickinson wrote over 1,700 poems, but only seven of them were published in her lifetime. In 1862, Dickinson wrote 366 poems, or about one per day. She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, but she compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. Her sister found the poems after Emily's death, but they were heavily edited and weren't published until 1890. For a while, Dickinson was considered an interesting minor poet. In 1955, a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the original punctuation intact. She's now considered one of the greatest American poets ever.-1851: Melvil Dewey, librarian and cataloguer, was born in Adams Center, N.Y. He studied at Amherst College (A.B. 1874) and his experience as a student working in the college library led him to propose his decimal-based system of classifying books. He also founded the first professional school of library services in 1887. In 1893 he and his wife, Emily, created the Lake Placid Club, which pioneered recreational winter sports.
-1869: The Territory of Wyoming granted women the right to vote.
-1891: Poet Nelly Sachs was born in Berlin. She accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature on her birthday in 1966. Sachs grew up in a Jewish family in Berlin during the time that Hitler was rising to power. In 1940, she learned that she was going to be put in a forced labor camp. She had been exchanging letters with the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlof for years. She got Lagerlof to intercede with the Swedish royal family in her behalf, and Sachs was able to escape to Sweden with her mother. Other members of her family were killed in concentration camps. Sachs became fluent in Swedish and supported herself and her mother by translating Swedish poetry into German. The first collection of her own poetry wasn't published until 1947, when she was almost fifty years old. Her collected poems were published in 1961 under the title Journey to the Beyond.
-1901: The Nobel prizes were first awarded in Oslo, Norway, and Stockholm, Sweden.
-1911: TV newscaster Chet Huntley was born.
-1914: Actress Dorothy Lamour was born.
-1923: Actor Harold Gould was born.
-1925: Poet Carolyn Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington. She's the author of eight collections of poetry, including Yin: New Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. She's also written essays and criticism, and translated Chinese and Japanese poetry into English.
-1927: The Grand Ole Opry made its first radio broadcast from Nashville.
-1936: Britain's King Edward VIII abdicated to marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson. His brother succeeded to the throne as King George VI.
-1941: Japanese troops landed on northern Luzon in the Philippines in the early days of World War II.
-1950: Ralph J Bunche becomes the first black person awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
-1952: Actress Susan Dey was born.
-1960: Actor Kenneth Branaugh was born.
-1984: The National Science Foundation reported the discovery of the first planet outside our solar system, orbiting a star 21 million light years from Earth.
-1990: The communists won a major victory in the first post-war multi-party elections in the Yugoslavian republics of Serbia and Montenegro.
-1991: TV commentator Patrick Buchanan announced a bid to challenge President Bush for the Republican presidential nomination. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a New York
law that allowed a criminal's profits for selling his story to be seized and given to his victims.
-1997: The Swiss high court ruled that $100 million of the money that had been salted away in banks by former dictator Ferdinand Marcos would be returned to the Philippine govern-
ment.

December 11
-1781: Scottish physicist and kaleidoscope inventor David Brewster was born.
-1803: French composer Hector Berlioz was born.
-1843: German pioneer bacteriologist Robert Koch was born.
-1882: La Guardia, Fiorello (Henry), Mayor, lawyer, U.S. representative, and social activist, was born in New York City. In 1933 he was elected to the first of three terms as mayor of New York. His work for housing and welfare reform, as well as his "common touch,"
demonstrated by his reading of the Sunday comics on the radio during a newspaper strike, earned him the love of millions of New Yorkers, who knew him as "the Little Flower," an apt nickname since he stood only 5'2".
-1913: Italian film producer Carlo Ponti was born.
-1918: Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia. He went to great lengths to write and eventually publish his novels under the Communist regime of the Soviet Union. After fighting in World War II, he was arrested for writing letters that criticized Joseph Stalin. He was sentenced to eight years in Russian labor camps, where he worked as a miner, a bricklayer, and a foundryman. Upon his release, he was exiled to a village in Kazakhstan, where he taught math and physics. He began writing prose in secret, being careful not to show his work to even his closest friends, in case word got out to Soviet authorities. He said he was "convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime." Then, in 1961, the Soviet government adopted slightly looser censorship standards. Solzhenitsyn decided to risk trying to publish his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). He succeeded, but two years later the government took his books out of print and forced him to stop publishing. Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts were smuggled into Europe and America, and they drew the attention of several major writers. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature, even though he still couldn't publish in his home country. It wasn't until the collapse of the Soviet Union that his works became widely available in Russia. Today, he's considered a national hero.-1922: American short story writer Grace Paley was born in New York City. She was raised in the Bronx by Russian immigrants who spoke Yiddish, Russian and English around the house. She started writing poetry at an early age, and took a course from the British poet W.H. Auden when she was 17 years old. As she grew older she felt an urge to write fiction, but she was raising two children and felt that she didn't have the time. One day, she fell ill and arranged for her children to go to an after-school program while she stayed home and rested. Without the children there to take care of, she sat down at a typewriter and started writing what would become her first short story, "Goodbye and Good Luck." She wrote two more stories and began to send them to the editors of magazines, but no one would publish them. Eventually, she showed the stories to the ex-husband of a friend, who worked in publishing. He said the stories were so good that if she could write seven more like the ones he just read he was sure he could get them published. Paley wrote seven more stories, and The Little Disturbances of Man was published in 1959. Her short stories are often about the lives of ordinary people in New York, especially women. Many of her stories don't have much action or plot. Paley often goes long stretches without writing. She starts stories by writing down a few sentences and letting them sit for as long as it takes for her to think of what should come next. Sometimes, she said, it takes months or even years. Her second book of short stories wasn't published until 1974, 15 years after her first collection. She spent the years in between protesting the Vietnam War and participating in the civil rights and feminist movements. She has called herself a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist."-1928: Rafael Cortijo was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and he died of cancer on October 4, 1982 in the caserío Lloréns Torres at the age of 53. He led the revolution of popular bomba and Plena music in the 1950's. He mainstreamed popular Black culture on the island and won immense respect and compensation for musicians from the barrios. He is the only Puerto Rican in the Music Hall of Fame in Paris and he is credited with starting an avant-garde in Puerto Rico's native rhythms in the early 80s.
-1931: Actress Rita Moreno was born.
-1931: American poet Jerome Rothenberg was born in New York City. His first collection of poetry came out in 1959, and since then he's published over 20 more. He's also a well-known translator who has translated poems from French, German, Spanish, Aztec, Navajo, Hebrew, and Seneca.
-1937: Jim Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan. One day, he was out hunting in the woods when he fell off a cliff and hurt his back. Thomas McGuane suggested that Harrison write a novel. He began work on Wolf, and it was published in 1971. Harrison wrote a few books of poetry and another novel, but he was struggling to make just $10,000 per year. Then, in 1979, he came out with a series of novellas entitled Legends of the Fall. It was so successful that Harrison was able to buy a farm near his old home in Michigan, as well as a cabin in the woods of the Upper Peninsula.
-1939: Thomas McGuane was born in Wyandotte, Michigan. He's the author of many novels, including Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), Nothing but Blue Skies (1992), and The Cadence of Grass (2002). He grew up in an Irish family that loved to tell stories, but his parents discouraged him from becoming a writer. When he left for Michigan State University, he devoted himself to reading and writing fiction, hoping to make it big as a writer and show up his parents. He developed a circle of friends that included Jim Harrison, and they exchanged stories and books. Harrison used his connections in the publishing world to help get McGuane's first novel, The Sporting Club (1969), published. McGuane lives on a ranch in Montana, where he raises cattle and takes care of dogs and horses. He's an avid fisherman, and published a book about fishing in 1999 called The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing. For a while, he was a serious rodeo competitor.-1940: Singer David Gates was born.
-1943: Actress Donna Mills was born.
-1944: Singer Brenda Lee was born.
-1949: Actress Teri Garr was born.
-1951: Joe DiMaggio announced his retirement from baseball after 13 seasons with the New York Yankees.
-1953: Actor Ken Wahl (Wiseguy) was born.
-1954: Singer Jermaine Jackson was born.
-1972: Apollo XVII astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt landed on the moon for a three-day exploration.
-1983: 30,000 women tried to rip down fences around a U.S. cruise missile base at Greenham Common, England.
-1984: A nativity scene was displayed near the White House for the first time since courts ordered it removed in 1973.
-1989: Bulgarian leader Peter Mladenov set a May 31 deadline for free elections in the Eastern European country. He also called for a constitution stripping the Communist Party of its
guaranteed dominant role in Bulgaria.
-1991: William Kennedy Smith was acquitted on rape charges by a jury that deliberated less than 77 minutes following a 10-day televised trial.
-1992: The three major TV networks agreed on joint standards to limit entertainment violence by the start of the next fall's season. Women priests were approved by the Church of England.
-1993: Parliamentary elections were held in Russia. Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle of the ruling center-left Coalition of Parties for Democracy won Chile's presidential election.
-1994: Up to 40,000 Russian troops invaded Chechnya, a semi-autonomous republic on Russia's border with Georgia, to put down a secessionist rebellion.
-1995: Two Japanese cult members admitted they had released the toxic sarin gas in Tokyo subway trains the previous March that killed 12 people.
-1996: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's son, Uday, was shot and wounded.
-1997: A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that Microsoft Corp. could not bundle Microsoft Internet Explorer with Windows 95.
-1998: The International Olympic Committee began an internal investigation into rumors that bribes had been offered by cities seeking to be chosen as sites for the Olympic games.

December 12
-1745: John Jay, first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was born.
-1800: Washington, D.C. was founded.
-1805: Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was born.
-1821: French novelist Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen, France (1821). He's best known for the novel Madame Bovary. As a young man, he rebelled against his middle class family, dropped out of school, and studied literature on his own. Eventually, his father convinced him to go to law school, but he was distracted by writing projects that he could never seem to finish. In 1844 he had a nervous attack. He dropped out of law school, his father bought him a house on the River Seine, and Flaubert devoted the rest of his life to writing. After his father died, he moved back in with his mother, where he lived until he was 50 years old. He lived by his own maxim, "Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work." He was a perfectionist, and spent hours at his writing desk every day. It took him about five years to write Madame Bovary, which was published in 1857. Madame Bovary is about the adulterous affair of a provincial housewife. Critics complained about its amoral depiction of sin, and Flaubert had to go to court to allow the book to remain in print. Most of Flaubert's novels were neither critical nor popular successes. A Sentimental Education (1869) sold fewer than 3,000 copies in the first four years after it was published. But he became hugely popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially among European writers like James Joyce, who admired Flaubert's style of realism in which the writer leaves no trace of himself in his work.
-1863: Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was born.
-1870: Joseph Hayne Rainey of South Carolina was sworn in as the first black to serve in the U.S. House.
-1893: Actor Edward G. Robinson was born.
-1901: A radio message was transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.
-1915: Singer Frank Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey. He recorded dozens of hits, including "I Get a Kick out of You," "I've Got You Under My Skin," and "Night and Day." Sinatra grew up in Hoboken, the son of Italian immigrants. He knew early on that he wanted to be a singer, and his mother supported his decision to drop out of high school to sing in nightclubs. In 1935, he formed a group called the Three Flashes with three other young men from Hoboken. After a while, he decided his best chance to make it big was to sing alone, so he quit the group and went back to solo nightclub gigs. In 1939, a trumpet player named Harry James heard Sinatra singing on a local radio station, and James signed him for $75 a week. Sinatra made his first recording the next month.
-1923: TV game show host Bob Barker was born.
-1924: Former New York Mayor Edward Koch was born.
-1929: British playwright John Osborne was born in London. He grew up in a working class family, and his father died when he was young. When he was 16, he quit school and began acting with traveling companies. He started writing plays when he was 19, and his first play was produced when he was 25. Two years later, he came out with his most famous play, Look Back in Anger (1956). It's a bleak play about a 25-year-old man named Jimmy Porter who lives in a tiny apartment with his wife and business partner. Jimmy owns a sweets shop, but he has no real hope for the future, and he becomes involved in a love triangle with his wife's friend. The play was revolutionary in British theater. Before Look Back in Anger, most plays in England were classics, melodramas, or genteel, drawing-room comedies. They usually had a likeable main character for audiences to identify with. Osborne changed all that. The term "angry young man" was coined to label the discontented British youth of the 1950s, and Osborne inspired a generation of writers, artists, and musicians.
-1937: Japanese planes bombed and sank the U.S. gunboat Panay in the Yangtze River north of Nanking, China. Japan later said it was a mistake.
-1938: Singers Connie Francis was born.
-1941: Dionne Warwick was born.
-1951: Talk show host Rush Limbaugh was born.
-1952: Former Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby was born.
-1959: Musician Sheila E was born.
-1962: Former tennis player Tracy Austin was born.
-1975: Actress Mayim Bialik ("Blossom") was born.
-1981: Martial law was imposed in Poland.
-1985: The crash of an Arrow Air DC-8 military charter on takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland, killed all 256 aboard, including 248 U.S. soldiers.
-1989: Five Central American presidents, including Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, called for an end to the rebel offensive against El Salvador's U.S.-backed government.
-1990: 15 people were killed and more than 260 injured in a pileup on a foggy Tennessee highway.
-1991: The Russian parliament ratified a commonwealth treaty linking the three strongest Soviet republics in the nation's most profound change since the 1917 revolution. North and South Korea concluded an historic agreement to reunify peacefully after 46 years of division
and animosity.
-1992: Princess Anne, the only daughter of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, became the first divorced royal in the inner circle to remarry when she wed Cmdr. Timothy Laurence.
-1993: Russian voters approved a new Constitution.
-1996: A French gunman took 35 hostages in a Paris office. The standoff ended without injuries.
-1998: President Clinton began a trip to the Middle East that included a visit to the new Gaza International Airport in Palestinian territory.

December 13
-1577: Sir Francis Drake embarded on a voyage to circumnavigate the globe.
-1642: Dutch navigator Abel Tasman discovered New Zealand.
-1797: German poet Heinrich Heine was born in Dusseldorf, Germany. He's one of the most popular German poets of the nineteenth century. He wrote a series of love poems, each one of which ended with an ironic, witty twist. These poems were collected in The Book of Songs (1827), but they didn't sell well. He spent the next decade struggling to find work, writing for various newspapers, and hoping that he wouldn't get in trouble for his unpopular political views. He wrote many more poems and dramas, but late in his life his early poems were rediscovered, and they made him rich and famous. Many of them were set to music by composers like Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms
-1816: The nation's first savings bank, the Provident Institution for Savings, opened in Boston.
-1835: Clergyman Phillips Brooks, who wrote the Christmas carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem," was born.
-1862: An estimated 11,000 Northern soldiers were killed or wounded in a battle with Confederate troops outside Fredericksburg, Va.
-1887: World War I hero Sergeant Alvin York was born.
-1910: Actor Van Heflin was born.
-1915: Mystery novelist Ross Macdonald was born Kenneth Millar in Los Gatos, California. He's famous for his series of detective novels about the private investigator Lew Archer: Moving Target (1949), The Drowning Pool (1950), and The Way People Die (1951). Most of his novels are about corruption in Southern California.
-1920: Former Secretary of State George Shultz was born.
-1925: Comedian/actor Dick Van Dyke was born.
1927: American poet James Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio. Wright's hometown was located in a heavily industrialized area of the state that Wright called "my back-broken beloved Ohio." There was a coal mine and a steel mill near his house, and he grew up surrounded by blast furnaces and smoke stacks. During the winter, all the snowdrifts in his town turned black from soot. In the summer, he swam with other boys in the Ohio River, which was full of runoff from the factories that lined the banks. He called the Ohio, "[that] beautiful river, that black ditch of horror." He started writing poetry when he was eleven years old. His father worked at the Hazel-Atlas Glass Company, and Wright took a job at the same factory when he got out of high school. After working there for a few months, he decided that he had to get out of his hometown. He served in World War II and used the G.I. Bill to study at Kenyon College. He got a job teaching English at the University of Minnesota, and published two books of poetry, but he suffered from depression and alcoholism, and he lost his teaching job for missing classes. His poetry hadn't attracted any attention, his marriage had broken up, and he wasn't sure what to do next when, one day, he read an issue of Robert Bly's literary magazine The Fifties. It impressed him so much that he wrote Bly a sixteen page single-spaced letter. Bly wrote back and invited him to a farm in western Minnesota, and the two became great friends. Wright had been writing all of his poetry with formal meter and rhyme, but Bly encouraged him to write free verse, and the result was his first important book of poetry, The Branch Will Not Break (1962). It got great reviews and contained many of his most famous poems, including "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," "A Blessing," and "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." He went on to write many more books of poetry, including Two Citizens (1973) and To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977). Throughout his work, he kept coming back to the subject of his hometown.
-1929: Actor Christopher Plummer was born.
-1941: Singer/actor John Davidson was born.
-1948: Rock singer Ted Nugent was born.
-1948: Rock critic Lester Bangs was born in Escondido, California. His father was an alcoholic and an ex-convict who disappeared when Bangs was nine years old. His mother was a Jehovah's Witness, and he grew up going door to door with her, evangelizing, holding signs that said, "What Is Your Destiny?" After he heard The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, he fell in love with rock 'n roll, ran away from home and got involved with the Hell's Angels. He tried to go to college to study journalism but dropped out just before his twentieth birthday. He wanted to join a rock band, but the only instrument he could play was the harmonica. Then, in 1969, he wrote his first music review and sent it to Rolling Stone magazine with a note that said, "Look . . . I'm as good as any writer you've got in there. You'd better print this or give me the reason why!" He was shocked when they actually accepted it. Bangs went on to write for a variety of different magazines, but instead of just writing about the music, he used music as the starting point for long, rambling essays about American life and culture. He wanted to write serious literature, and hated the fact that people considered him a hack journalist. He tried to write a book throughout the 1970s, but he struggled with alcoholism and drug addition, and in 1982 he died of a drug overdose. After his death, much of his work was collected in the book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1987), and he is now considered one of the greatest rock critics of all time.
-1950: Actors Wendy Malick was born.
-1958: Steve Buscemi was born.
-1963: Football player and novelist Tim Green was born near Syracuse, New York. He is possibly the first professional athlete ever to publish a novel while he was still an active player. While in college on a football scholarship, he studied writing with the authors Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. They encouraged him to write about what he knew, and what he knew was football. While playing as a defensive end for the Atlanta Falcons, he published his first novel, Ruffians (1993), a thriller about professional football. He has gone on to write several other novels about the seamy side of the football business, including The Red Zone (1998) and Double Reverse (1999). His most recent novel is The Fourth Perimeter (2003).
-1967: Jamie Foxx was born.
-1982: The Sentry armored car company in New York discovered the overnight theft of $11 million from its headquarters. It was the biggest cash theft in U.S. history.
-1990: The last of the U.S. hostages being held by Iraq, five diplomats in Kuwait, flew to freedom. Troops were rushed to Soviet Georgia and a state of emergency was imposed after inter-ethnic violence killed three people.
-1991: The leaders of the Central American countries held a summit meeting and agreed to pledge $4.5 billion to fight poverty.
-1992: Ricky Ray, 15, one of three hemophiliac brothers barred from attending a Florida school because they had the AIDS virus, died.
-1993: In Canada, Kim Campbell resigned as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party.
-1997: The Getty Center museum complex, built on a hilltop overlooking Los Angeles, was officially opened.
-1998: In a non-binding plebiscite giving Puerto Ricans the opportunity to express a preference as to the future of political status of the island, the "none of the above" option was supported by 50 percent of voters -- indicating that most wished to retain Puerto Rico's current status as a U.S. commonwealth.

December 14
-1919: Novelist and short story writer Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco. She was the daughter of upper class, high society parents, and she never lived up to their expectations. Her mother wanted her to be a socialite, but Shirley was awkward, unattractive, and intellectual. Her mother once told her that she wished Shirley had never been born. She was shunned by her classmates in high school and spent all her time alone, reading and writing. She made a vow to herself that she would write a thousand words every day for the rest of her life, in order to prove herself to everyone who had rejected her. In college, a man named Stanley Edgar Hyman fell in love with her when he read one of her short stories. He was Jewish, and her parents were horrified when she married him. They moved to a small town in Vermont, where her husband taught literature at Bennington College. She was an eccentric woman, and the local townspeople talked about her behind her back. They called her a Communist, a witch, an atheist and a Jew. She felt as though everyone in town were watching her and judging her, and she began to dread leaving the house. One day, she sat down and wrote a story about a small New England town where one resident is ritually chosen by lottery each year to be stoned to death. She finished the story in two hours and sent it off to The New Yorker, where it was published as "The Lottery" in 1948. The story generated more reader response than any story ever published by The New Yorker up to that point. Hundreds of readers wrote to the magazine, demanding to know what the story meant, or asking to cancel their subscriptions because they were so disturbed. "The Lottery" made Shirley Jackson famous, but she still struggled to find time to write while raising four children. She eventually wrote two memoirs about the experience of parenting, Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). Her memoirs were lighthearted and funny, but she also wrote several dark novels, including The Haunting of Hill House (1959), about a group of people who try to spend a night in a house with ghosts, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), about a woman who has poisoned her entire family.
-1945: Stanley Crouch was born in Los Angeles, California. He's an African-American writer who has written several books of essays, including Notes of a Hanging Judge (1990) and The American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race (1995). As a young man, he became disillusioned with the civil rights movement and got involved with the Black Nationalists, who believed in living separately from whites rather than trying to assimilate. He eventually came to feel that Black Nationalism was a form of reverse racism. He has gone on to argue that Black Nationalism killed the Civil Rights movement because it encouraged African Americans to define themselves by their race alone.
-1951: Amy Hempel was born in Chicago, Illinois. She's the author of several books of short stories, including Reasons to Live (1985), At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), and Tumble Home (1997). As a young woman, she had a series of traumatic experiences: her mother committed suicide, she had a motorcycle accident, and then she a car accident. She said, "I went from accident to accident, hospital to hospital; I'd walk out of the house in the morning and half look up to see when the . . . safe was going to fall out of the sky and smash me into the sidewalk." She became so afraid of death that she decided the only way to conquer her fear was to enroll in an anatomy class and dissect cadavers, and it worked. She got a job counseling terminally ill patients, but she wanted to write fiction on the side and wasn't getting anywhere with it. She finally decided to move to New York City, and discovered that it was only after she had left California that she could write about the life she had been living there. She wrote a series of extremely short stories about the strange people she'd known and experiences she'd had, and published them in her first collection, Reasons to Live (1985). It begins, "My heart-I thought it had stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God."

December 15
-1791: Bill of Rights Day, which commemorates the passage of the first 10 amendments.
-1932: Irish writer Edna O'Brien was born in County Clare in the west of Ireland. She was raised on a farm, just outside a village of 200 people that O'Brien would later call "enclosed, fervid and bigoted." The town was devoutly Catholic, and O'Brien's parents discouraged her from reading anything other than religious texts. In her Catholic school, she read the Bible, prayer books, and occasionally a passage from Shakespeare. After high school, she packed up a suitcase, bound it in twine, and moved to Dublin. She lived in a poor area of town and studied to become a pharmacist. She had never bought a book before, but one day she purchased a copy of Introducing James Joyce (1942) by T.S. Eliot, which included passages from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). O'Brien later said encountering Joyce "was the most astonishing literary experience of my life." She said she realized for the first time that a writer can draw on his or her own life for material; and she knew that's what she wanted to do for a living. She wrote her first novel, Country Girls (1960), at the age of 26, in only three weeks. It's the first book in a trilogy that follows the lives of two women from their childhood in a convent school in the west of Ireland to their unhappy marriages in London. The books talk openly about poverty and sexuality and religious repression. They were banned in Ireland as soon as they were published. Country Girls was called "a smear on Irish womanhood" and was burned at churches in O'Brien's childhood home. But readers in Britain and America loved her work, and O'Brien has gone on to write many more successful novels about people struggling to find happiness in twentieth-century Ireland.

December 16
-955: 18-year-old Ottaviano, the only son of Duke Alberic II of Spoleto, who ruled Rome, became Pope John XII: when his father ordered his election. John's pontificate lasted nine years, and he is said to have died in the arms of his mistress.
-1485: Catherine of Aragon was born. The first wife of King Henry VIII of England, Catherine was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.
-1770: Ludwig van Beethoven, composer, was born in Bonn, Germany. In 1787 he had lessons from Mozart in Vienna, Beethoven was tolerated by Vienna society despite his physical unattractiveness and arrogance. Just as he was developing a reputation as a composer, he began to go deaf, but stoically accepted the fact. Best known works include "Pathetique" and "Moonlight" sonatas, "Eroica" and "Choral" symphonies.
-1773: Boston Tea Pary Day
-1775: Jane Austen was born in the parish of Steventon in Hampshire, England. Her family was just wealthy enough to be considered part of the gentlemanly class, and her father often struggled to obtain enough money to support her many brothers and sisters. Austen went to school for a time in the city of Southampton, but she came home when she nearly died from typhoid fever. Her real education began when she discovered her father's library. She began to write stories to entertain her family, inventing satires that poked fun at the great 18th-century novelists. Just after she turned 20, she began to write first drafts for many of her novels. One of these was "First Impressions," which later became Pride and Prejudice. Her father sent the manuscript to a publisher, but received no response. Her family moved to the resort city of Bath in 1800, and for many years she appears to have written very little. She fell in love with a man she met at the seashore, but soon afterward he died unexpectedly. Then she traveled with her sister to visit a young, clumsy man named Harris Bigg-Wither, who asked for her hand in marriage. She accepted his proposal, but the following morning she did something unheard of in those days: She told him she had changed her mind. She would remain unmarried her entire life. Austen published her first book, Sense and Sensibility, in 1811. The title page said only that the book was written "by a lady," and nobody outside her family knew she was the author. Then she began to work on a new draft of Pride and Prejudice. She wrote on a table in the drawing room, hiding her notebooks whenever she heard someone come through the door. Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, and it became a sensation with the British public. Austen wrote several more novels, with her identity no longer a secret, but her readers grew less enthusiastic. The critics ignored her next book, Mansfield Park (1814). Then she wrote Emma (1816), which is now believed to be one of her greatest books. Austen died in 1817, when she was 41, probably of Addison's Disease. Her last novel, Persuasion, was published a year later.
-1863: Philosopher and poet George Santayana was born in Madrid. He is famous for saying, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," which became the epitaph for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a book by William L. Shirer (1959). Santayana wrote a great deal about art and the importance of creative thinking. He once said, "Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms, but do not let it deceive you. Enjoy the world, travel over it and learn its ways, but do not let it hold you." As he grew older, he became tired of his teaching position at Harvard and what he called the "thistles of trivial and narrow scholarship," so he left Harvard and spent the rest of his life writing. His books include many philosophical works, as well as collections of poetry. He also spent about 20 years working on a novel, The Last Puritan (1935), about a young man's struggles in Boston high society just before World War I.
-1901: Anthropologist Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia into a family of social scientists. She's famous for her book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). She wrote the book after she visited the South Pacific island and found its people to be more open about sexuality than people in the Western world. Her work has sparked debate and criticism in recent years, but she's still known as one of the forerunners of modern anthropology.
-1917: Arthur C. Clarke was born in Somerset, England. He is a scientist who has also written many science fiction novels. Clarke built his first telescope when he was thirteen. During World War II, he served in the air force and also sold his first stories. Then in 1945 he wrote an article called "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide Radio Coverage?" The article explored the possibilities for a satellite that could broadcast signals while orbiting the earth, an idea that would eventually come to fruition as the communications satellite. Clarke soon began to write many books imagining human contact with extraterrestrial life. In 1968 he wrote the book 2001, and the same year he co-authored a script for the film version with director Stanley Kubrick. The story is set in what is now the present day, but in a world where humans have the power to fly through the solar system. Astronauts head toward Jupiter when they receive a mysterious signal from alien life forms, but their mission is thwarted when the spaceship's computer tries to take control.
-1950: President Truman proclaimed a national state of emergency in order to fight "Communist imperialism."

December 17
-1760: American Revolutionary War soldier Deborah Sampson, who fought as a man under the alias Robert Shurtleff, was born.
-1770: Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized on this day in Bonn. No one knows when he was born. As a young man he was a virtuoso piano player, and he wrote most of his famous compositions after he began to go deaf. Beethoven's music became immensely popular during his lifetime, but he never stopped having troubles with money. Since his father spent much of his time drinking, Beethoven became in charge of the family finances when he was still a teenager, working as a court organist for the Elector of Cologne. He took a trip to Vienna to try to make his way as a musician, but he had to return home before he could gain a foothold. A few years later he went back for good, playing the piano at private parties for the city's aristocrats. Just before he turned forty, a small group of princes and archdukes agreed to give him an annual salary with no conditions attached. The arrangement made Beethoven more independent than almost any composer before him. But he still struggled with all of his expenses. When his brother died, he had to pay for the education of his young nephew. The price was 2,000 florins, which was half of his yearly salary. He also kept servants, enjoyed fine wine and lived in a summer house each year. When his Ninth Symphony premiered in 1824, he tried to raise the ticket prices in order to help pay his debts. But he didn't make nearly as much from the concert as he had hoped. -1790: The Aztec Calendar or Solar Stone was uncovered by workmen repairing Mexico City’s Central Plaza.
-1807: Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was born.
-1894: Arthur Fiedler, conductor, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1930 he took
over the Boston Pops Orchestra and for almost a half century he was the most beloved conductor of light-classical music in the U.S.A. Active in promoting music through various
mediums, he was also made an honorary fire chief because of his practice of chasing every major fire, day or night, and became a familiar figure to Bostonians at the scene of the fires.
-1903: The Wright brothers made the world's first flight in a power-driven, heavier-than-air machine that cost about $1000 to build. With Orville at the controls and Wilbur on the ground, the plane flew 120 feet in twelve seconds in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Although man had dreamt of flying for centuries, it took these two unschooled young men (bicycle shopkeepers by trade) to finally lift us off the ground. They'd spent several weeks camping on the Outer Banks, a narrow, sandy peninsula on the Atlantic. The day began with gray skies and sharp winds, and the brothers huddled in a shed to warm themselves. Orville said years later that he should have realized it was much too dangerous to fly in that weather. But they had already waited several days for the right flying conditions, and they wanted to get home before Christmas. Around mid-morning, they decided to give their machine a try. Orville shook hands with his brother and climbed into the pilot's seat. The machine built up a speed of about 10 miles an hour, rose about ten feet off the ground, and landed almost immediately. The brothers made two more attempts, and still they barely got anywhere. Then Wilbur tried again. He flew straight into the wind for nearly a full minute, covering 852 feet. After he got out of the plane, it promptly rolled over and tumbled straight toward the ocean. The plane would take months to repair, but they had made their first successful flight.
-1903: Novelist Erskine Caldwell was born.
-1925: Army Gen. William "Billy" Mitchell, outspoken advocate of a separate U.S. Air Force, was found guilty of conduct prejudicial to the good of the armed services. He was awarded the Medal of Honor 20 years after his death.
-1929: Journalist William Safire was born in New York City. He was the senior speechwriter for President Nixon, and since 1973 he's been a political columnist for the New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 1978.
-1930: Publisher Bob Guccione was born.
-1936: British singer/actor Tommy Steele was born.
-1939: The Nazi warship Graf Spee was scuttled off the coast of Uruguay as British vessels pursued it.
-1945: Actor Ernie Hudson ("Ghostbusters") was born.
-1946: Comedian Eugene Levy ("Second City TV") was born.
-1954: Actor Bill Pullman ("Independence Day") was born.
-1967: The Clean Air Act was passed by Congress.
-1981: American Brig. Gen. James Dozier was kidnapped in Rome by Italy's Red Brigades. He was freed 42 days later in a raid by Italian anti-terrorist forces.
-1986: A Las Vegas federal jury awarded entertainer Wayne Newton $19.3 million in his defamation suit against NBC. A judge later reduced the award to $5.3 million. A federal jury in Detroit cleared automaker John DeLorean of all 15 charges in his fraud and racketeering trial.
-1990: Secretary of State Baker told NATO that Iraq might withdraw from Kuwait around the Jan. 15 deadline. NATO rejected the partial solution.
-1991: 15 people were killed and 20 wounded in clashes between Soviet troops and guerrillas in a disputed Armenian enclave.
-1992: Israel tried to deport hundreds of Palestinians to Lebanon but Beirut closed the border, trapping them in the Israeli-controlled "security zone." President Bush formally signed the North American Free Trade Treaty simultaneously with the leaders of Mexico and Canada.
-1993: President Clinton acknowledged the $500 million gift of philanthropist Walter Annenberg to public-education reform.
-1994: North Korea said it shot down a U.S. Army helicopter in North Korean airspace, killing one pilot. The second pilot was reportedly uninjured but was held in North Korea.
-1996: The United Nations elected Kofi Annan of Ghana the new secretary-general.
-1997: New Jersey became the first state in the United States to permit homosexual couples to adopt children.
-1998: The U.N. World Meteorological Organization said 1998 was the warmest year ever recorded.

December 18
-1708: Playwright Christopher Fry was born in Bristol, England. He wrote plays in blank verse at a time when most British plays were realistic social comedies. He's best known for The Lady's Not for Burning (1948), a play set in the Middle Ages about an ex-soldier who wants to die and a young woman who is accused of being a witch.
-1708: Hymn writer Charles Wesley was born in Epworth, England. He went to Oxford University, where he formed a small religious study group that included his brother John and a few other friends. They were nicknamed "the holy club" and later "the Methodists" because of their methodical worship and strict discipline. The group eventually broke up, but a few years later John and Charles Wesley founded the first official Methodist Society, laying the foundations for modern-day Methodism. After graduating from Oxford, Charles grew frustrated with Christianity and began to question his beliefs. He went on a mission to the new American colony of Georgia in 1735. He worked as a secretary of the governor, but he found it hard to adapt the rough lifestyle in America. Wesley wrote over 6,500 hymns, including "Hark! the herald angels sing," and "Oh for a thousand tongues to sing."-1786: German composer Carl Maria von Weber was born.
-1778: Joseph Grimaldi, known as the "greatest clown in history," was born.
-1856: English physicist Joseph Thompson, discoverer of the electron, was born.
-1865: Slavery abolished by 13th Amendment in the United States.
-1870: British short story writer Saki was born Hector Hugh Munro in Akyab, Burma. He wrote short, whimsical stories about the British upper class, stories that were full of witty sayings and surprise twists. Munro was raised in rural England by two aunts. When he was 23 years old and still hadn't decided on an occupation, his father found him a job with the military police in Burma. He soon caught malaria and returned to London. While he was recovering, he decided he was going to be a writer. When he was well enough to leave his family's home, he moved to London and spent his days reading and writing at the British Museum. His first book was a history of medieval Russia called The Rise of the Russian Empire (1900). His next book was a satire of the British government, The Westminster Alice (1902), which he wrote under the pen name Saki. It was hugely popular, and he began to write short stories under the same name. He loved animals, and often wrote about them in his stories. His first story, "Dogged," is about a vicious fox terrier who lives with a stuffy bachelor. In Saki's story "Tobermory," a cat living in a country house learns to talk, and starts repeating what guests say about each other in secret.-1879: Swiss modernist painter Paul Klee was born.
-1886: Baseball pitcher Tyrus "Ty" Cobb was born.
-1904: Film director George Stevens ("Giant") was born.
-1913: West German statesman Willy Brandt was born.
-1915: President Wilson, a widower for one year, married the widow Edith Bolling Galt.
-1916: Actress Betty Grable was born.
-1917: Actor Ossie Davis was born.
-1943: Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards was born.
-1946: Steven Spielberg, academy award winning film director, was born in Cincinnati, OH. Even as a child, he knew he wanted to make movies. When he was 13 years old, he won a contest with a 40-minute film called Escape to Nowhere. When he was 16, he produced a movie called Firelight that made a $100 profit at the local movie theater. He wanted to study film at the University of Southern California, but the film school rejected him, so he went to California State University in Long Beach and majored in English. One day, he was taking a tour of Universal Studios when he slipped by security, found an abandoned janitors' closet, cleaned it up, and turned it into an office. He discovered that if he wore a suit and tie he could walk right past the security guards at the front gate, and he began coming in to his makeshift office every day. While he was there, he started making a short silent movie called Amblin'. It caught the attention of some Universal executives, and he began to make TV movies. His first real breakthrough was Duel (1971), a suspenseful thriller about a man in a small car being terrorized by a man in a large truck for no apparent reason. It came out on TV in the U.S. and in theaters in Europe. Four years later, he directed Jaws (1975), one of the most successful movies ever made. Spielberg's parents divorced when he was a child, after years of intense arguing. Many of his movies deal with the relationships between parents and children, especially fathers and sons. In Close Encounter of the Third Kind (1977), children and parents are abducted from their homes. In E.T. (1982), Elliott befriends an alien, in part to make up for the loss of his father. And in the more recent film Catch Me if you Can (2002), the main character runs away from home and becomes a con man after his parents announce their plans to divorce. Spielberg has seven children: one with his first wife Amy Irving, and the rest with wife, Kate Capshaw.
-1950: Movie critic Leonard Maltin was born.
-1955: Actors Ray Liotta was born.
-1964: Brad Pitt was born.
-1966: Kiefer Sutherland was born.
-1969: Singer Tiny Tim, 44, married 17-year-old Miss Vicky Budinger on Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show."
-1972: The United States resumed heavy bombing and mining operations against North Vietnam after the communists refused to agree to end the war.
-1978: Katie Holmes ("Dawson's Creek") was born.
-1980: Singer Christina Aguilera was born.
-1985: Congress approved the biggest overhaul of farm legislation since the Depression, trimming price supports.
-1989: A pipe bomb killed Savannah, Ga., City Councilman Robert Robinson, hours after a pipe bomb is discovered at the Atlanta federal courthouse. A racial motive was cited in a rash of bomb incidents. The Romanian government sealed the borders amid reports of a deadly crackdown on dissidents. The United States launched Operation Just Cause, sending troops into Panama to topple the government of General Manuel Noriega.
-1990: Moldavia became the sixth Soviet republic to refuse to participate in a 10-day meeting in a mounting affront to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
-1991: General Motors announced it would close 21 plants and eliminate 74,000 jobs in the next four years to offset record losses.
-1993: Vice President Gore wrapped up a tour of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia -- during which he signed a series of agreements.
-1996: New rating codes were announced for American television programs.
-1997: South Koreans elected longtime leftist opposition leader Kim Dae Jong president, marking the first time in the nation's history that a member of the opposition had defeated a candidate of the New Korea Party and its predecessors. The six-mile-long Tokyo Bay tunnel connecting the cities of Kawasaki and Kisarazu opened. The project took 8 1/2 years to complete and cost $17 billion.

December 19
-1777: Gen. George Washington and the Continental Army began a winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pa.
-1820: Women's suffrage leader Mary Livermore was born.
-1843: Charles Dickens published Christmas Carol, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, whom Dickens described as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner. Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire." In the book, Scrooge learns the Christmas spirit of generosity from three ghosts who show him his past, his present, and his future. Dickens wrote the novel after his first commercial failure. His previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit (1842) had flopped, and he was suddenly strapped for cash. Martin Chuzzlewit had been satirical and pessimistic, and Dickens thought he might be more successful if he wrote a heartwarming tale with a holiday theme. He got the idea for the book in late October of 1843 and struggled to finish it in time for Christmas. It finally came out, and it was a huge bestseller.
-1861: Italo Svevo was born Aron Hector Schmitz in Trieste. His novel The Confessions of Zeno (1923) is considered one of the greatest Italian novels of the 20th century. Svevo was a bank clerk who hated his job and wanted to be a writer, but his first two self-published novels were completely ignored. His wife's father got him a more prosperous job at a paint company, and he gave up on literature, settling down to live a comfortable life. Then, ten years after he had stopped writing, he decided to take some English classes for business reasons. The tutor he found was a young, aspiring writer named James Joyce. The two men got to talking about writing, and Svevo suddenly confessed that he had written two novels. He gave copies to Joyce, and Joyce loved them and told Svevo he was a neglected genius. It took Svevo more than ten years to complete his next novel, a fictional memoir of a patient undergoing psychoanalysis. The Confessions of Zeno was published in 1923, and it was also ignored, but Schmitz sent a copy to Joyce, and Joyce sent it to all his literary friends. They declared it a comic masterpiece, and Schmitz became a literary celebrity in Europe. He only lived for two more years, but they were the best two years of his life. A new translation of his last novel, now called Zeno's Conscience, came out in 2001.
-1861: Constance Garnett was born Constance Black in Brighton, England. She's best known for providing the first widely available English translations of the important Russian novels of the 19th century. After marrying the literary critic Edward Garnett, she became friends with some Russian exiles and decided to learn the language. She loved it so much that she traveled to St. Petersburg in 1893 and became friends with many writers and revolutionaries.When she returned home, she decided to begin translating as much Russian literature as she could. Her eyesight grew worse and worse, so she had a Russian friend read the novels aloud to her one sentence at a time, and she dictated her translations. She somehow managed to translate about 5000 words a day. She finished Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in six months, and went on to translate Dostoyevsky's complete works, about two and a half million words long. In many cases, her translations of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and others were the first versions read by English and American writers in the early 20th century.
-1868: Novelist Eleanor Porter ("Pollyanna") was born.
-1875: The father of Black history, Carter G Woodson was born.
-1902: Actor Ralph Richardson was born.
-1906: Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev was born.
-1910: French dramatist Jean Genet, a pioneer in the theater of the absurd, was born.
-1933: Actors Cicely Tyson was born.
-1944: Tim Reid was born.
-1946: Robert Urich was born.
-1958: The U.S. satellite Atlas transmitted the first radio voice broadcast from space, a 58-word recorded Christmas greeting from President Eisenhower.
-1963: Jennifer Beals was born.
-1972: Alyssa Milano was born. The splashdown of Apollo XVII ended America's
manned moon exploration program.
-1984: The United States formally withdrew from UNESCO in a effort to force reform of the U.N. cultural organization's budget and alleged Third World bias. The prime ministers of Britain and China signed an accord,