December 25
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Featured Event
© Fine Art Images/Heritage Images—Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Pope Liberius celebrated the first official Christmas mass in Rome on this day in 352. The birth of Jesus Christ had been celebrated as many as two centuries earlier, but it was this mass that ensured Christmas’s place on December 25 in the Roman Catholic calendar. [Read today’s edition of Today in History >>]
Featured Biography
Featured Biography
dpa picture alliance/Alamy
There is no time to lose. I am ready to go to the ends of the earth if that will save one of my soldiers, one of my officers, from being scratched. I am ready to go to their house, to the Knesset, to discuss peace with the Israeli leaders.
Born this day in 1918, army officer and politician Anwar Sadat, who shared the 1978 Nobel Prize for Peace for his peace negotiations with Israel, served as president of Egypt from 1970 until his assassination in 1981.
Famous Birthdays
More on December 25
NASA
2021
The James Webb Space Telescope—designed and built by U.S., Canadian, and European space agencies as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope—was launched into space. [Compare photos taken by the Webb and Hubble telescopes.]
© Rudi Keuntje—ZUMA/Newscom
2006
American singer and songwriter James Brown, known as “the Godfather of Soul,” died at the age of 73. [Test your knowledge of music.]
Boris Yurchenko/AP Images
1991
Mikhail Gorbachev resigned the presidency of the Soviet Union, which ceased to exist at the end of the year. [Why did the Soviet Union collapse?]
Brown Brothers
1977
Charlie Chaplin, a comedic actor and director who is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in motion-picture history, died in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland.
© 1962 Universal Pictures Company, Inc.; photograph from a private collection
1962
The film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird premiered and became a classic, especially noted for Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch. [Test your knowledge of To Kill a Mockingbird.]
Image: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
1946
As an important step in the U.S.S.R.’s efforts to build a nuclear weapon, the first Soviet chain reaction took place in Moscow using an experimental graphite-moderated natural uranium pile. The Soviets successfully tested their first nuclear device about two and a half years later.
Publicity photo
1941
Bing Crosby debuted Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” on The Kraft Music Hall radio program. Crosby later recorded the song for the film Holiday Inn (1942), and it won an Oscar, becoming one of the most popular songs in American history. [Learn more about the people, places, and events that shaped the 1940s.]
National Archives, Washington, D.C. (111-B-1857)
1821
Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, was born in Oxford, Massachusetts.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of John Stewart Kennedy, 1897 (97.34), www. metmuseum.org
1776
During the American Revolution, General George Washington crossed the Delaware River and surprised the British at Trenton, New Jersey. [Read our timeline of the American Revolution.]
© Photos.com/Getty Images
1066
William I was crowned king of England, formally completing the Norman Conquest. [How much do you know about the kings of England?]
SuperStock
800
Charlemagne, king of the Franks, became the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. [Sort fact from fiction in our Charlemagne quiz.]