The Week in History for Dec. 4-10

Dec. 4

1816: James Monroe of Virginia was elected the fifth president of the United States.

1982: Kathy Smith of Northville was crowned Miss Presentation College.

1991: Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, the longest held of the Western hostages in Lebanon, was released after nearly seven years in captivity.

1992: President George H.W. Bush ordered American troops to lead a mercy mission to Somalia, threatening military action against warlords and gangs who were blocking food for starving millions.

1996: The Mars Pathfinder lifted off from Cape Canaveral and began speeding toward Mars on a 310 million-mile odyssey. (It arrived on Mars in July 1997.)

2007: Defending his credibility, President George W. Bush said Iran was dangerous and needed to be squeezed by international pressure despite a U.S. intelligence finding that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program four years earlier.

Dec. 5

1792: George Washington was re-elected president; John Adams was re-elected vice president.

1932: German physicist Albert Einstein was granted a visa, making it possible for him to travel to the United States.

1933: National Prohibition came to an end as Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, repealing the 18th Amendment.

1962: The United States and the Soviet Union announced a bilateral space agreement on exchanging weather data from satellites, mapping Earth's geomagnetic field and cooperating in the experimental relay of communications.

1978: A recount was underway to determine the winner of South Dakota's First District Congressional seat. Democrat Tom Daschle was declared the winner defeating Republican Leo Thorsness by 14 votes when the 129,000 votes cast in the race were canvassed the first time.

2017: Aberdeen Central graduate Josh Heupel was named head football coach at Central Florida.

Dec. 6

1790: Congress moved to Philadelphia from New York.

1889: Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, died in New Orleans.

1907: The worst mining disaster in U.S. history occurred as 362 men and boys died in a coal mine explosion in Monongah, W.Va.

1947: Everglades National Park in Florida was dedicated by President Harry S. Truman.

1971: The original Auto-Train, which carried rail passengers and their motor vehicles from Lorton, Va., to Sanford, Fla., went into operation. (Although the privately owned line went out of business in 1981, Amtrak revived the service in 1983.)

2011: A suicide bomber slaughtered 56 Shiite worshippers and wounded more than 160 others outside a shrine in Afghanistan's capital.

2017: Molded Fiber Glass announced that it will be closing its plant in Aberdeen in February 2018, affecting 409 jobs. Late that month, MFG received a new order for wind blades, saving it from closure in the short-term.

Dec. 7

1787: Delaware became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

1842: The New York Philharmonic performed its first concert.

1911: China abolished the requirement that men wear their hair in a queue, or ponytail.

1941: Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as part of its plan to conquer Southeast Asian territories; the raid, which claimed some 2,400 American lives, prompted the United States to declare war against Japan the next day.

1972: America's last moon mission to date was launched as Apollo 17 blasted off from Cape Canaveral.

1987: Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev set foot on American soil for the first time, arriving for a Washington summit with President Ronald Reagan.

Dec. 8

1776: During the Revolutionary War, Gen. George Washington's retreating army crossed the Delaware River from New Jersey into Pennsylvania.

1941: The United States entered World War II as Congress declared war against Imperial Japan, a day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

1972: A United Airlines Boeing 737 crashed while attempting to land at Chicago-Midway Airport, killing 43 of the 61 people on board, as well as two people on the ground; among the passengers who died were Dorothy Hunt, wife of Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt, U.S. Rep. George W. Collins, D-Ill., and CBS News correspondent Michele Clark.

1973: Ken's Fairway celebrated its new look with specials throughout the store including 5 pounds delicious apples $.99, 10 boxes of Jell-O $.88, 3-pound can of ButterNut coffee $2.39, Miss Breck Hairspray $.39, and king size box of Tide laundry detergent $1.19.

1982: A man demanding an end to nuclear weapons held the Washington Monument hostage, threatening to blow it up with explosives he claimed were inside a van. After a 10-hour standoff, Norman D. Mayer was shot dead by police; it turned out there were no explosives.

1980: Rock star John Lennon was shot to death outside his New York City apartment building by an apparently deranged fan.

1987: President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed a treaty at the White House calling for destruction of intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

2008: In a startling about-face, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told the Guantanamo war crimes tribunal he would confess to masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks; four other men also abandoned their defenses. Mohammed is still awaiting trial.

2013: : Hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, toppling the statue of former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and blocking key government buildings in an escalating stand-off with the president on the future of the country.

Dec. 9

1912: Longtime House Speaker Thomas ''Tip'' O'Neill was born in Cambridge, Mass.

1947: Former U.S. Sen. Tom Daschle was born in Aberdeen.

1958: The anti-communist John Birch Society was formed in Indianapolis.

1962: The Petrified Forest in Arizona was designated a national park.

1984: The five-day-old hijacking of a Kuwaiti jetliner that claimed the lives of two Americans ended as Iranian security men seized control of the plane, which was parked at Tehran airport.

1992: Britain's Prince Charles and Princess Diana announced their separation. (The couple's divorce became final Aug. 28, 1996.)

2012: Mary Ann Fischer, the Aberdeen woman who in 1963 gave birth to the first set of surviving quintuplets in the United States, died at Avera St. Luke's Hospital. She was 79.

Dec. 10

1906: President Theodore Roosevelt became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for helping mediate an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

1962: ''Lawrence of Arabia,'' David Lean's epic film starring Peter O'Toole as British military officer T.E. Lawrence, had its royal gala premiere in London, with Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, in attendance.

1974: Local voters went to the polls to decide whether to approve a $1.4 million bond to replace Adams Elementary and Lincoln Elementary school buildings with a new building on the site of Lincoln Elementary.

1967: Singer Otis Redding, 26, and six others were killed when their plane crashed into Wisconsin's Lake Monona.

1987: President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev concluded three days of summit talks in Washington.

This article originally appeared on Aberdeen News: The Week in History published Dec. 4, 2021