- 218 BC Battle of the Trebia: Hannibal's Carthaginian army heavily defeats Roman forces on Italian soil during the Second Punic War
- 1603 First fleet of the Dutch East India Company under Admiral Steven van der Haghen departs for the East-Indies
Tasman Reaches NZ
1642 Abel Tasman's expedition is the first European voyage to reach New Zealand sailing into Wharewharangi Bay at the top of the South Island, making the first confirmed contact with Maori
- 1719 Thomas Fleet publishes "Mother Goose's Melodies For Children" in Boston, Massachusetts
The Nutcracker
1892 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet "The Nutcracker" premieres in Saint Petersburg, Russia, now the world's most performed ballet; his final opera "Isolanta" also premieres
- 1916 Battle of Verdun, longest of World War I, officially ends in German defeat after nine months of fighting and almost 1 million total casualties
- 1957 World's first full scale nuclear power plant, for peacetime use only, begins to generate electricity at the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
1966 Dr. Seuss's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" airs for the first time on CBS; the animated special is directed by Chuck Jones and features the voices of Boris Karloff, June Foray, and Thurl Ravenscroft, with songs by Albert Hague
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
1968 Musical-fantasy film "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", co-written by Roald Dahl and director Ken Hughes, starring Dick Van Dyke and Sally Ann Howes, with songs by Sherman and Sherman, premieres in NYC
- 1969 House of Lords votes to abolish the death penalty in England, Wales and Scotland (Northern Ireland 25 July 1973)
- 1997 HTML 4.0 is published by the World Wide Web Consortium
You've Got Mail
1998 Romantic comedy film "You've Got Mail", starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, directed by Nora Ephron, and written by sisters Nora and Delia Ephron, is released
The Two Towers
2002 Second Lord of the Rings film "The Two Towers" is released and earns $62 million in its opening weekend and $938 million worldwide at the box office
- 2012 Canadian police begin arresting 17 people for 'the Great Maple Syrup Heist', for stealing 3,000 tonnes from a storage facility in Quebec
- 2018 Meteor explodes in a huge fireball over the Bering Sea with 10 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, the second largest such event in the last 30 years
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