December 24 ...

In 1814 the War of 1812 between the US and Britain was ended with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent in Belgium. In 1818 Franz Gruber of Oberndorf, Germany, composed the music for Silent Night to words written by Josef Mohr. In 1851 a fire devastated the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, destroying about 35,000 volumes. In 1865 several veterans of the Confederate Army formed a private social club in Pulaski, TN, called the Ku Klux Klan. In 1906 Reginald A. Fessenden became the first person to broadcast a music program over radio, from Brant Rock, MA. In 1914 in World War I, the first air raid on Britain was made when a German airplane dropped a bomb on the grounds of a rectory in Dover. In 1943 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower supreme commander of Allied forces as part of Operation Overlord. In 1944 a German submarine torpedoed the Belgian transport ship SS Leopoldville with 2,235 soldiers aboard. About 800 American soldiers died. The soldiers were crossing the English Channel to be reinforcements at the Battle of the Bulge. In 1948 the first completely solar-heated house became occupied in Dover, MA. In 1951 Libya achieved independence as the United Kingdom of Libya, under King Idris. In 1968 the crew of the US Navy ship Pueblo was released by North Korea; the Captain of the Pueblo, Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, and 82 of his crew were held for 11 months after the ship was seized by North Korea because of suspected spying by the Americans. Also on this day, American astronauts James A. Lovell, William Anders, and Frank Borman reached the moon, orbiting it 10 times before coming back to Earth; seven months later man first landed on the moon. In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In 1992 President George H. W. Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five others in the Iran-Contra scandal. In 1997 Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as "Carlos the Jackal," was sentenced by a French court to life in prison for the 1975 murders of two French investigators and a Lebanese national. In 2004 the international Cassini spacecraft launched a probe on a three-week free-fall toward Saturn's mysterious moon Titan.