1620: The Pilgrim Fathers landed at New Plymouth, MA, to found Plymouth Colony, with John Carver as Governor.
1776: The British suffered a major defeat in the Battle of Trenton during the American Revolutionary War.
1865: The coffee percolator was patented by James H. Mason.
1871: The "Gods Grown Old" was performed for the first time. It ran for 64 shows.
1898: Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium.
1908: Texan boxer "Galveston Jack" Johnson knocked out Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, to become the first black boxer to win the world heavyweight title.
1917: During World War I, the U.S. government took over operation of the nation's railroads.
1921: The Catholic Irish Free State became a self-governing dominion of Great Britain.
1927: The East-West Shrine football game featured numbers on both the front and back of players’ jerseys.
1941: Winston Churchill became the first British prime minister to address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress.
1943: The German battlecruiser Scharnhorst was sunk in the North Sea, during the Battle of North Cape.
1944: Tennessee Williams' play "The Glass Menagerie" was first performed publicly, at the Civic Theatre in Chicago, IL.
1947: Heavy snow blanketed the Northeast United States, burying New York City under 25.8 inches of snow in 16 hours. The severe weather was blamed for about 80 deaths.
1953: "Big Sister" was heard for the last time on CBS Radio. The show ran for 17 years.
1954: "The Shadow" aired on radio for the last time.
1956: Fidel Castro attempted a secret landing in Cuba to overthrow the Batista regime. All but 11 of his supporters were killed.
1959: The first charity walk took place, along Icknield Way, in aid of the World Refugee Fund.
1974: Comedian Jack Benny died at age 80.
1982: The Man of the Year in "TIME" magazine was a computer. It was the first time a non-human received the honors.
1986: Doug Jarvis, age 31, set a National Hockey League (NHL) record as he skated in his 916th consecutive game. Jarvis eventually set the individual record for most consecutive games played with 964.
1986: "Search for Tomorrow" was seen for the last time on CBS-TV. The show had been on the air for 35-years.
1990: Garry Kasparov beat Anatoly Karpov to retain the chess championship.
1991: The Soviet Union's parliament formally voted the country out of existence.
1995: Israel turned dozens of West Bank villages over to the Palestinian Authority.
1996: Six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey was found beaten and strangled in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, CO.
1998: Iraq announced that it would fire on U.S. and British warplanes that patrol the skies over northern and southern Iraq.
1999: Alfonso Portillo, a populist lawyer, won Guatemala's first peacetime presidential elections in 40 years.
2000: Michael McDermott, age 42, opened fire at his place of employment killing seven people. McDermott had no criminal history.
2002: The first cloned human baby was born. The announcement was made the December 27 by Clonaid.
2004: Under the Indian Ocean, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake sent 500-mph waves across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal. The tsunami killed at least 283,000 people in a dozen countries, including Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Sumatra, Thailand and India.
