December 11 ...

In 1719 the first recorded sighting of the Aurora Borealis was made in New England. In 1816 Indiana was admitted to the Union as the 19th state. In 1844 Dr. Horace Wells became the first person to have a tooth extracted after receiving an anesthetic for the dental procedure. Nitrous Oxide, or laughing gas, was the anesthetic. In 1872 Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback became America's first black governor when he took office as acting governor of Louisiana. In 1882 Boston's Bijou Theater had its first performance, becoming the first American playhouse lit exclusively by electricity. In 1928 in Buenos Aires, police thwarted an attempt on the life of President-elect Herbert Hoover. In 1936 Britain's King Edward VIII abdicated in order to marry American Wallis Warfield Simpson. He became the Duke of Windsor. In 1941 Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The US in turn declared war on the two countries. In 1951 New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio announced his retirement from major league baseball. In 1961 the first direct American military support for South Vietnam occurred when a US aircraft carrier carrying Army helicopters arrived in Saigon. In 1967 the prototype of the supersonic commercial jet the Concorde was shown for the first time in Toulouse, France. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter signed into law legislation creating $1.6 billion environmental "superfund" that would be used to pay for cleaning up chemical spills and toxic waste dumps. In 1985 the US House of Representatives joined the Senate by giving final congressional approval to the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law. In 1991 Salman Rushdie, under an Islamic death sentence for supposed blasphemy, made his first public appearance since 1989 in New York, at a dinner marking the 200th anniversary of the First Amendment (which guarantees freedom of speech). In 1998 scientists announced that they had deciphered the entire genetic blueprint of a tiny worm; also on this day, the House Judiciary Committee voted for three articles of impeachment against President Clinton. In 2001 US Attorney General Ashcroft announced the first federal indictment directly related to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Zacarias Moussaoui, who was charged with six conspiracy charges, was in custody at the time of the attacks.