December 3 ...

In 1818 Illinois was admitted as the 21st state. In 1826 Civil War general and presidential candidate George McClellan was born in Philadelphia, PA. In 1828 Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States. In 1857 novelist Joseph Conrad was born in present-day Berdychiv, Ukraine. In 1925 Concerto in F, by George Gershwin, had its world premiere at New York's Carnegie Hall, with Gershwin himself at the piano. In 1947 the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway. In 1953 the musical Kismet opened on Broadway. In 1960 the musical Camelot opened on Broadway. In 1964 police arrested some 800 students at the University of California at Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a massive sit-in. In 1967 surgeons in Cape Town, South Africa, led by Dr. Christian Barnard performed the first human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky, who lived 18 days with the new heart. In 1973 Pioneer 10 sent back the first close-up images of Jupiter. The first outer-planetary probe had been launched from Cape Canaveral, FL, on March 2, 1972. In 1979 11 people were killed in a crush of fans at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum, where the British rock group The Who was performing. In 1984 thousands of people died after a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas escaped from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India. In 1999 NASA lost radio contact with the Mars Polar Lander moments before the spacecraft entered the Martian atmosphere. In 2000 space shuttle Endeavour's astronauts attached the world's largest, most powerful set of solar panels to the international space station; also on this day, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks died in Chicago at age 83. In 2004 the Ukraine Supreme Court ordered a rerun of the head-to-head presidential contest, setting off rejoicing by supporters of Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko, who ended up the winner.