The Week in History for Dec. 11-17

Dec. 11

1928: Police in Buenos Aires announced they had thwarted an attempt on the life of President-elect Herbert Hoover.

1946: The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) was established.

1994: The two-room school in Glenham was planned to close at the end of the school year. There were only 19 students in grades K-5. Glenham was part of the Selby/Java/Glenham school district.

1997: More than 150 countries agreed at a global warming conference in Kyoto, Japan, to control the Earth's greenhouse gases.

2008: Bernie Madoff was arrested, accused of running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. (Madoff is serving a 150-year federal prison sentence.)

Dec. 12

1787: Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

1897: ''The Katzenjammer Kids,'' the pioneering comic strip created by Rudolph Dirks, made its debut in the New York Journal.

1917: Father Edward Flanagan founded Boys Town outside Omaha, Neb.

1925: The first motel — the Motel Inn — opened in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

1967: South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks re-opened pheasant season for a six-day holiday hunt to begin Dec. 26. Bag limit was three birds and hunting hours were noon to sunset. The special season would give students and servicemen home for the holidays a chance to hunt the state bird.

1972: Irwin Allen's all-star disaster movie ''The Poseidon Adventure'' was released.

2000: George W. Bush was transformed into the president-elect as a divided U.S. Supreme Court reversed a state court decision for recounts in Florida's contested election.

Dec. 13

1918: President Woodrow Wilson arrived in France, becoming the first chief executive to visit Europe while in office.

1937: The Chinese city of Nanjing fell to Japanese forces; what followed was a massacre of war prisoners, soldiers and citizens.

1962: The United States launched Relay 1, a communications satellite which retransmitted television, telephone and digital signals.

1978: The Philadelphia Mint began stamping the Susan B. Anthony dollar, which went into circulation in July 1979.

1981: Authorities in Poland imposed martial law in a crackdown on the Solidarity labor movement. (Martial law formally ended in 1983.)

2000: Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore conceded to Republican George W. Bush, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court shut down further recounts in Florida.

2003: Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces while hiding in a hole under a farmhouse in Adwar, Iraq, near his hometown of Tikrit.

Dec. 14

1861: Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, died at Windsor Castle at age 42.

1936: The comedy ''You Can't Take It With You'' by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart opened on Broadway.

1961: A school bus was hit by a passenger train at a crossing near Greeley, Colo., killing 20 students.

1986: The experimental aircraft Voyager, piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California on the first non-stop, non-refueled flight around the world.

2002: The Associated Press reported that FBI Director Robert Mueller said in an interview that nearly 100 terrorist attacks had been thwarted since 9/11.

2011: President Barack Obama, visiting Fort Bragg in North Carolina, saluted troops returning from Iraq, asserting that the nearly nine-year conflict was ending honorably.

Dec. 15

1806: Napoleon Bonaparte entered Warsaw, Poland.

1890: Sioux Indian Chief Sitting Bull and 11 other tribe members were killed in Grand River, South Dakota, during a confrontation with Indian police.

1939: The motion picture “Gone With the Wind” premieres in Atlanta.

1989: Manuel Noriega is named head of government and declares Panama in "a state of war" with the United States; a popular uprising begins, resulting in the downfall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

1992: Chess genius Bobby Fischer is indicted in the United States on charges of violating economic sanctions against Yugoslavia by playing a highly publicized match with Boris Spassky.

1998: Temperatures in Aberdeen are unseasonably warm. Today they are in the upper 40s. Yesterday, they were a record-setting 54! The previously recorded high temp for this date was 52 set in 1921.

1998: John Hilpert was installed as Northern State University’s 14th president.

2000: The long-troubled Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine was closed for good.

2001: With a crash and a large dust cloud, a 50-foot tall section of steel — the last standing piece of the World Trade Center's façade — was brought down in New York.

2017: Former state Division of Criminal Investigation agent Laura Zylstra Kaiser was awarded $1.2 million in damages by a jury in a civil lawsuit in which she claimed discrimination and retaliation. In 2015, she sued DCI Director Bryan Gortmaker and former DCI agent Mark Black, alleging violations of the federal Civil Rights Act and the South Dakota Human Relations Act.

Dec. 16

1773: The Boston Tea Party took place as American colonists boarded a British ship and dumped more than 300 chests of tea into Boston Harbor to protest tea taxes.

1944: The World War II Battle of the Bulge began as German forces launched a surprise attack against Allied forces in Belgium (the Allies were eventually able to beat the Germans back).

1976: The government halted its swine flu vaccination program following reports of paralysis apparently linked to the vaccine.

1987: The romantic comedy-drama ''Moonstruck,'' starring Cher and Nicolas Cage, was released in New York City, the film's setting.

1989: A representative from the GE factory was at Aberdeen TV and Appliance to give a microwave cooking demonstration.

Dec. 17

1903: Wilbur and Orville Wright of Dayton, Ohio, conducted the first successful manned powered-airplane flights near Kitty Hawk, N.C., using their experimental craft, the Wright Flyer.

1972: The boys' basketball teams from Conde and Bristol were undefeated at that point in the season.

1975: Lynette Fromme was sentenced in Sacramento, Calif., to life in prison for her attempt on the life of President Gerald R. Ford. (She was paroled in August 2009.)

1989: Feinstein's women's store held its annual holiday “for men only” fashion show.

1992: President George H.W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in separate ceremonies. (After approval by the legislative bodies of the leaders' respective countries, the treaty came into force on Jan. 1, 1994.)

This article originally appeared on Aberdeen News: The Week in History for Dec. 11-17