Today in History

1552 – St Francis Xavier, the Roman Catholic missionary who founded the Jesuits order, dies of fever off the coast of China.

1818 – Illinois is admitted as the 21st state of the United States.

1828 – Andrew Jackson is elected 7th president of the United States.

1854 – More than 20 goldminers at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat, Victoria, are killed by state troopers in an uprising over mining licences. 1863 – NZ Parliament passes a law allowing the confiscation of Māori land, affecting tribes deemed to have rebelled against the Crown. 1894 – Scottish essayist, poet and author

Robert Louis Stevenson dies, aged 44.

1910 – Freda du Faur becomes the first woman to complete an ascent of Mt Cook/ Aoraki.

1926 – Mystery writer Agatha Christie, left, disappears after driving away from her home in Berkshire. She turns up 11 days later at a hotel in Yorkshire. She never explains the disappearance.

1947 – A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, premieres on Broadway. 1960 – The 40-hectare Island Harbour opens at the port of Bluff, having taken eight years to build. 1964 – Police arrest about 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a sit-in.

1967 – Surgeons at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, led by Dr Christiaan Barnard, perform the first human heart transplant. Louis Washkansky lives for 18 days with the new heart.

1975 – Communists take control of Laos and declare an end to its 600-year-old monarchy. 1984 – Up to 16,000 people are estimated to have died and thousands more are injured after a cloud of gas escapes from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India; the Band Aid fundraising single Do They Know It’s Christmas? is released in the UK.

1992 – The first telephone text message is sent by British engineer Neil Papworth, who transmits the greeting ‘‘Merry Christmas’’ from his work computer in Newbury, Berkshire, to Vodafone executive Richard Jarvis’ mobile phone.

2007 – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez loses a constitutional vote that would have let him run for re-election indefinitely.

2018 – Ryan Kaji, 7, is declared the year’s highest-earning YouTube star, with US$22 million, for his channel Ryan ToysReview. 2019 – Kamala Harris ends her campaign to be the Democratic candidate for president.

Birthdays

Joseph Conrad, Polish-British writer (1857-1924); Richard Pearse, NZ aviator (1877-1953); Andy Williams, US singer (1927-2012); Jean-Luc Godard, French director (1930-2022); Kevin Fallon, NZ football coach (1948-); Ozzy Osbourne, UK singer (1948-); Julianne Moore, US actor (1960-); Stephen Donald, All Black (1983-); Amanda Seyfried, US actor (1985-).