On December 17, 1989, an animated family no one fully trusted to succeed stepped into prime time television and never left. With the broadcast of “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” The Simpsons premiered as a half hour series and quietly altered the future of television comedy: 🧵

On December 16, 1653, England woke to a reality few could have imagined a decade earlier. The monarchy was gone, the House of Lords was abolished, and Oliver Cromwell stood at the center of power as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland: 🧵

Before dawn on December 15, 1890, an attempt to arrest Sitting Bull ended the life of one of the most influential Indigenous leaders in North American history. His death on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation accelerated a chain of events that led to the massacre at Wounded Knee two weeks later: 🧵

Wilma Mankiller walked into the Cherokee Nation headquarters on December 14, 1985 to assume the office of Principal Chief. For the first time, a woman was at the helm of the Cherokee Nation, stepping into leadership during a period of rebuilding and renewed self determination: 🧵

On December 13, 1577, a small fleet slipped out of Plymouth Sound carrying a plan that few beyond the queen and her advisers fully understood. Sir Francis Drake was leaving England on what would become the first English voyage around the world: 🧵

The the Reich Chancellery meeting of December 12 1941, Adolf Hitler stated that the destruction of the Jewish people was not only underway but inevitable, a declaration that revealed how far the regime had already moved toward systematic mass murder.

A tiny Finnish studio put a handful of colourful birds and a simple slingshot in the pockets of millions and changed mobile gaming overnight. When Rovio released Angry Birds internationally for iOS on December 11, 2009, a casual puzzle game proved it could be a global cultural force: 🧵

On December 10, 1906 the Nobel Committee honoured a sitting president of the United States for the first time. Theodore Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping end the Russo Japanese War. Roosevelt became the first American to win the Novel prize in any field: 🧵

On December 9, 1960, Coronation Street arrived with terraced houses, corner shops, cramped rooms, and characters who sounded and behaved like real working class people. It felt familiar in a way British television had rarely attempted, and it became the longest running soap opera in the world: 🧵

History rarely gives us a moment where survival, loyalty, and art collide in one life. Du Fu lived through the collapse of an empire and still walked back into its centre. His return to Chang'an on December 8, 757 reveals the cost of loyalty during one of China’s most violent political upheavals: 🧵

At 7:58 a.m. on December 7, 1941, a wave of Japanese aircraft struck Pearl Harbor and turned a quiet Sunday morning into a pivotal moment in world history: 🧵

For decades Washington avoided taking a side on Jerusalem, yet on December 6, 2017 the United States stunned the world by officially recognizing the city as the capital of Israel and announcing a shift that reshaped modern Middle East diplomacy: 🧵

On December 5, 1945, five US Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers, together known as Flight 19, took off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale for what was meant to be a routine three-hour training flight. It ended in one of the most haunting vanishings in aviation history: 🧵

On December 5, 1872, a small British brig called the Dei Gratia came across an American merchant ship drifting under partial sail some 400 nautical miles east of the Azores. The ship was the Mary Celeste and she was completely deserted: 🧵

Few people noticed it at the time, but on December 3, 1992, a single brief message quietly introduced a new way for the world to communicate. The first text message ever sent contained only two words: Merry Christmas 🧵

On December 2, 1982, surgeons at the University of Utah implanted the Jarvik 7 artificial heart into Barney Clark, a 61 year old retired dentist who had reached the terminal stage of congestive heart failure and was not eligible for a human transplant: 🧵

On December 1, 1952, the New York Daily News ran a front page story under the headline “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,” bringing Christine Jorgensen into the United States spotlight as the first widely reported case of sex reassignment surgery: 🧵

On November 30, 1900, Oscar Wilde died in a cheap room at the Hôtel d’Alsace in Paris. A once famous playwright, he spent his final years in exile after public disgrace and imprisonment. His death closed a chapter that had begun with immense success and ended in near-total ruin: 🧵

On November 29, 1982, Michael Jackson released Thriller, an album that changed pop music and the business around it. What arrived that week was not just a collection of songs. It was a tightly produced, cross genre record built to reach radio, the dance floor, and the new visual world of music: 🧵

On Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1895, a small group of noisy, fragile horseless carriages lined up at Chicago’s Jackson Park for what would become the first organized automobile race in the United States: 🧵

On November 27, 1835, London witnessed the execution of James Pratt and John Smith, marking the final time England carried out the death penalty for sodomy. Their deaths reflected a period of harsh legal enforcement rooted in social, religious, and moral attitudes toward sexuality: 🧵

On November 26, 1917, a group of team owners gathered in Montreal and made a decision that reshaped the future of hockey forever. That meeting created the National Hockey League, a league born out of conflict but destined to define the sport: 🧵

On November 25, 1970, the celebrated author and playwright Yukio Mishima, known for both his literary brilliance and nationalist views, carried out a dramatic act of ritual suicide following a failed attempt to inspire political change in Japan: 🧵

On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin changed how people saw life forever. On the Origin of Species presented a bold, evidence based explanation for how species evolve. It was careful, detailed, and quietly revolutionary, challenging centuries of accepted thinking: 🧵

On November 23, 1991 the world received a brief message that carried enormous weight. Freddie Mercury released a public statement confirming that he was HIV positive and that he had been living with AIDS for years. It was the first and only time he spoke publicly about his illness: 🧵

On November 22, 1307 the authority of the medieval church reached into every kingdom of Europe with a single document. Pope Clement V issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae and turned the future of the Knights Templar upside down in an instant: 🧵

On November 21, 1905, Albert Einstein published a short paper in Annalen der Physik that quietly introduced an idea the world now knows as E = mc². Few realized that this single insight would reshape modern physics: 🧵

On November 20, 1990, Soviet authorities arrested Andrei Chikatilo, bringing down one of the most notorious serial killers in the history of the USSR: 🧵

On November 19, 1999, a quiet Internal Revenue Service employee stunned the country on live television. John Carpenter walked onto the set of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and left with the first top prize in the show’s history: 🧵

On November 18, 1626, Rome opened the doors of a church that had taken more than a century to build. The new St. Peter’s Basilica was finally ready to be consecrated, and its completion marked one of the most ambitious architectural projects in European history: 🧵

On November 17, 1894, authorities finally arrested H. H. Holmes in Boston, bringing an end to a manhunt that began as a simple fraud investigation and grew into one of the most disturbing criminal cases in American history: 🧵

Imagine watching a man who helped create a Canadian province walk toward the gallows. On November 16, 1885, Louis Riel faced execution, and the country was forced to confront what his life and death truly meant: 🧵

It is not often that a single day captures the scale of a nation’s frustration, but November 15 of 1969 did exactly that: 🧵

On November 14, 2003, two of the biggest rap releases of the early two thousands arrived on the very same day. Jay-Z put out The Black Album and G-Unit released Beg for Mercy. The timing created one of the most memorable hip-hop Fridays of that era: 🧵

On November 13, 1893, Parisian diners at a bustling restaurant on Avenue de l’Opéra witnessed a shocking act. Léon Jules Léauthier, a young shoemaker, stabbed a man in the chest simply because he appeared bourgeois. The victim was Rista Georgevitch, a Serbian diplomat, who survived the attack: 🧵

On November 12, 1912, a search party from the Terra Nova expedition discovered the frozen bodies of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Dr. Edward Wilson, and Lieutenant Henry “Birdie” Bowers, on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, proving that Scott’s expedition to the South Pole had ended in tragedy: 🧵

On November 11, 1831, in Jerusalem, Virginia, Nat Turner was hanged. Turner, an enslaved preacher, had led one of the most significant and violent slave uprisings in American history just a few months earlier: 🧵

On November 10, 1969, American television changed forever. That morning, children across the country met a new group of colorful characters on a show that would redefine educational programming: Sesame Street 🧵

On November 8, 1888, in London’s East End, Mary Jane Kelly entered a moment she could not escape. She spent her final hours in the single room she rented at 13 Miller’s Court off Dorset Street in Spitalfields before becoming widely considered to be the last victim of the infamous Jack the Ripper: 🧵

On November 8, 1520, Stockholm’s streets ran with fear. Christian II of Denmark had promised a general amnesty for his opponents. But within days, that promise was broken in one of the most infamous events in Scandinavian history: the Stockholm Bloodbath: 🧵

On November 7, 1893, the wealthy and powerful of Barcelona gathered at the Gran Teatre del Liceu for an evening of opera. The performance was Guillermo Tell. Businessmen, landowners, and aristocrats dressed in their finest clothes. They had no reason to think the night would end in terror: 🧵

On the early morning of November 6, 1976 in the village of Uttawar, in Haryana, India, when most villagers slept under emergency curfews, loudspeakers summoned every man over the age of fifteen to assemble. The village had become caught in the cross‐hairs of the national sterilization campaign: 🧵

On the early morning of November 5, 1995, a serious security breach occurred at the official residence of Canada’s prime minister. Jean Chrétien and his wife, Aline Chrétien, were in their home at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa when a man broke into the premises and attempted to assassinate the PM: 🧵

On November 4, 1924, voters in Wyoming made history. They elected Nellie Tayloe Ross as the first female governor in the history of the United States. Her victory came less than five years after women gained the right to vote nationwide, and it marked a new moment in American politics: 🧵

On November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2. The mission carried a living passenger: a dog named Laika, who became the first animal to orbit the Earth. Although it was a major step in the space race, it also raised ethical and scientific questions that continue to be discussed: 🧵

On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker from Baltimore, stood outside the Pentagon carrying his one-year-old daughter, Emily. Moments later, he handed her to a bystander, doused himself in kerosene, and set himself on fire: 🧵

On the morning of November 1, 1755, it was All Saints’ Day in Lisbon, one of the most important holidays in Catholic Portugal. Churches were full, and families were gathered for mass. Then, just before 9:40 a.m., the ground began to shake violently. Within minutes, Lisbon was reduced to rubble: 🧵

On the morning of October 31, 1984, India was shaken to its core. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, one of the most powerful and controversial leaders in the nation’s history, was assassinated by two of her own Sikh bodyguards in the garden of her New Delhi residence: 🧵

On the night of October 30, 1995, Canadians watched as one of the most consequential votes in the country’s history came down to a razor-thin margin. Citizens of Quebec narrowly voted to remain part of Canada. The final count was 50.58% to stay and 49.42% to leave: 🧵

On October 29, 1948, near the end of the Arab–Israeli War, Israeli forces captured the Palestinian village of Safsaf in the Galilee. What happened there in the hours that followed became one of the most disturbing episodes of the war, remembered as the Safsaf massacre: 🧵