December 10 ...

In 1817 Mississippi was admitted as the 20th state. In 1830 poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, MA. In 1869 women were granted the right to vote in the Wyoming Territory. In 1898 a treaty was signed in Paris officially ending the Spanish-American War. In 1906 US President Theodore Roosevelt became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for helping mediate an end to the Russo-Japanese War. In 1931 Jane Addams became a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American woman so honored. In 1941 Japan invaded the Philippines; also on this day, the Royal Naval battleships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse were sunk by Japanese aircraft in the Battle of Malaya. In 1948 the UN General Assembly adopted its Universal Declaration on Human Rights. In 1950 Ralph J. Bunche was presented the Nobel Peace Prize, the first black American to receive the award. Bunche was awarded the prize for his efforts in mediation between Israel and neighboring Arab states. In 1953 Hugh Hefner published the first Playboy magazine with an investment of $7,600. In 1958 the first domestic passenger jet flight took place in the US as a National Airlines Boeing 707 flew 111 passengers from New York to Miami in about 2 1/2 hours. In 1964 Martin Luther King Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize during ceremonies in Oslo, Norway. In 1967 singer Otis Redding died in the crash of his private plane in Wisconsin. In 1984 South African Bishop Desmond Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1993 the crew of the space shuttle Endeavor deployed the repaired Hubble Space Telescope into Earth's orbit. In 1994 Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin received the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1998 six astronauts opened the doors to the new international space station 250 miles about the Earth's surface.