Browse Historical Events by Day: What Happened on December 21st?

The Treaty of Verdun is signed, dividing the Carolingian Empire into three parts, marking the beginning of the Carolingian dissolution.

The First Basketball Game is played in Springfield, MA at the YMCA International Training School; which today is Springfield College. The game was created by Dr. James Naismith in response to a request to come up with a new game students could play indoors during the winter that would help keep track and field runners in shape and would be relatively safe to play and would have a small amount of physical contact so that the players would not get injured in this game. More

Charles de Gaulle is elected president of France's Fifth Republic. An insurrection that had broken out in Algiers threatened to bring civil war to France. He was given extraordinary powers to resolve the political crisis and the extraordinarily divisive and bloody War in Algiers. After several tumultuous years de Gaulle resigned on April 28, 1969, following his defeat in a second referendum. More

Apollo 8, the first manned the first manned mission to the moon and the first to launch of the Saturn V rocket lifts off with astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, Jr. and William Anders aboard. It entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 1968 and returned to earth on Dec 27.1968. The Apollo 8 mission proved the performance of the command and service module. On July 20 of the following year, The Apollo 11 spaceflight was the first to land humans on the Moon; Commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin. More

Pan Am Flight 103 is destroyed by a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Boeing 747, took off from London, bound for New York City. As it was climbing on its northerly flight path, it exploded over the town of Lockerbie , Scotland. All 259 passengers and crewmembers were killed plus 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie. More

The Belavezha Accords were joined by Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan. In the city of Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan), the heads of these countries, along with Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, signed the Declaration on the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) on an equal footing. In December 1993 the Accords on the establishment of the CIS were joined by Georgia. Three former Soviet republics, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, did not join the CIS. More