December 21

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December 21 in history

• 1620, William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims land on what is now known as Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts

• 1844, the Rochdale Pioneers commence business at their cooperative in Rochdale, England, starting the Cooperative movement

• 1861, Public Resolution 82, containing a provision for a Navy Medal of Valor, is signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln

• 1913, Arthur Wynne's "word-cross", the first crossword puzzle, is published in the New York World

• 1937, the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated cartoon in Technicolor, is premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles

• 1945, Gen. George S. Patton died in Heidelberg, Germany, of injuries from a car accident

• 1967, Louis Washkansky, the first man to undergo a heart transplant, dies in Cape Town, South Africa, after living for 18 days

• 1968, Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, is launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At 2h:50m:37s Mission elapsed time (MES), the crew performs the first ever manned Trans Lunar Injection and become the first humans to leave the Earth's gravity field

• 1970, Elvis Presley meets with President Richard Nixon to discuss the war on drugs. ALSO: The F-14 Tomcat flies for the first time

• 1971, the United Nations Security Council chooses Kurt Waldheim to succeed U Thant as Secretary-General

• 1976, the Liberian-registered tanker Argo Merchant broke apart near Nantucket Island almost a week after running aground, spilling 7.5 million gallons of oil into the North Atlantic

• 1988, a bomb explodes on board Pan Am flight 103 by practitioners of that "religion of peace" over Lockerbie, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, killing 270

• 1995, the city of Bethlehem passes from Israeli to Palestinian control; immediately Christians there begin to suffer

• 2002, President Bush received a smallpox vaccination, fulfilling a promise he'd made when he ordered inoculations for about a half-million

• 2007, the Schengen Agreement area increases to include 9 European Union member states; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and Malta on land and sea borders