December 1

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December 1 is the 335th day (336th on leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 30 days remaining.

Events

1640 - Portugal regains its independence from Spain and John IV of Portugal becomes king.
1821 - Dominican Republic declares its independence from Spain.
1822 - Dom Pedro is crowned as Emperor of Brazil.
1824 - U.S. presidential election, 1824: Since no candidate received a majority of the total electoral college votes in the election, the United States House of Representatives is given the task to decide the winner (as stipulated by the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution).
1884 - American Old West - Near Frisco, New Mexico (now Reserve, New Mexico), deputy sheriff Elfego Baca holds off a gang of 80 Texan cowboys who want to kill him for arresting cowboy Charles McCarthy (the cowboys were terrorizing the area's Hispanos and Baca was working against them).
1913 - Ford Motor Company introduces the first moving assembly line, reducing chassis assembly time from 12 1/2 hours in October to 2 hours, 40 minutes (although Ford was not the first to use an assembly line, his successful adoption of one did spark an era of mass production).
1918 - Iceland becomes a self-governing kingdom, yet remains united with Denmark.
1918 - Transylvania unites with Romania, following the March 27 incorporation of Bessarabia and Bucovina.
1919 - Lady Astor becomes first female member of the British Parliament to take her seat (she had been elected to that position on November 28).
1925 - World War I aftermath: Locarno Treaties - The final Locarno Pact is signed in London, establshing post-war territorial settlements in return for normalizing relations with defeated Germany.
1934 - In the Soviet Union, Politburo member Sergei Kirov is shot dead at the Communist Party headquarters in Leningrad by Leonid Nikolayev (it is widely thought that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered this murder).
1941 - World War II: Former mayor of New York City, Fiorello LaGuardia, and the director of the Office of Civilian Defense, sign an order creating the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) as the civilian auxiliary of the United States Air Force (in April 1943 the CAP was placed under the jurisdiction of the Army Air Forces).
1944 - Edward Stettinius Jr. becomes becomes the last United States Secretary of State of the Roosevelt administration, by filling the seat left by the Cordell Hull.
1952 - The New York Daily News carries a front page story announcing that Christine Jorgensen in Denmark became the recipient of the first successful sex-change operation (in this case a man to a women).
1955 - American Civil Rights Movement: In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city's racial segregation laws (Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr. later led the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott as a result).
1958 - Central African Republic becomes independent from France.
1959 - Cold War: Antarctic Treaty signed - 12 countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, sign a landmark treaty, which sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve and bans military activity on that continent (this was the first arms control agreement established during the Cold War).
1964 - Vietnam War: US President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top-ranking advisers meet to discuss plans to bomb North Vietnam (after some debate, they agreed to enact a two-phase bombing plan).
1969 - Vietnam War: The first draft lottery in the United States is held since World War II (on January 4, 1970, the New York Times ran a long article, "Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random").
1971 - Cambodian Civil War: Khmer Rouge rebels intensify assaults on Cambodian government positions, forcing their retreat from Kompong Thmar and nearby Ba Ray, 10 kilometers northeast of Phnom Penh.
1973 - Papua New Guinea gains self government from Australia.
1974 - A Boeing 727 carrying TWA Flight 514 crashes 25 miles northwest of Dulles International Airport during bad weather, killing all 92 people on-board.
1981 - A Yugoslavian DC-9 crashes into a mountain while approaching Ajaccio Airport in Corsica killing 178.
1987 - NASA announces the names of four companies who were awarded contracts to help build the International Space Station: Boeing Aerospace, General Electric's Astro-Space Division, McDonnell Douglas, and the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell.
1989 - Cold War: East Germany's parliament abolishes the constitutional provision granting the communist party the leading role in the state (Egon Krenz, the Politburo and the Central Committee resigned two days later).
1990 - Channel Tunnel workers from the United Kingdom and France meet 40 meters beneath the English Channel seabed, establishing the first ground connection between the island of Great Britain and the mainland of Europe since the last Ice Age.
1991 - Cold War: Ukrainian voters overwhelmingly approve a referendum for independence from the Soviet Union.
1998 - Exxon announces a US$73.7 billion deal to buy Mobil, thus creating Exxon-Mobil, the largest company on the planet.