On this day in 1984, a gas leak from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, spread over a populated area, resulting ultimately in 15,000 to 20,000 deaths and leaving some half million survivors with chronic medical ailments.
| 2001: | | The U.S. military announced that one of the last 80 Taliban prisoners who had surrendered on December 1 after the November uprising at a prison in Maz─r-e Shar┤f, Afghanistan, was a U.S. citizen, John Walker Lindh. |
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| 1967: | | | Christiaan Barnard of South Africa performed the first human heart transplant, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. |
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| 1895: | | | Anna Freud, a founder of child psychoanalysis and one of its foremost practitioners, was born in Vienna. |
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| 1861: | | In a battle during the American Civil War, Federal troops ousted the Confederates from Salem, Missouri. |
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| 1854: | | After hastily constructing a fortification and barricading themselves inside, miners (“diggers”) working in the Eureka goldfield in Victoria, Australia, opened fire on government forces surrounding the stockade, the culmination of long-standing grievances on the part of the diggers. |
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| 1818: | | | Illinois was admitted as the 21st state of the United States of America. |
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| 1721: | | German composer Johann Sebastian Bach married his second wife, Anna Magdalena Wilcken, daughter of a trumpeter at Weissenfels. |
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| 1552: | | St. Francis Xavier, the leading Roman Catholic missionary of modern times, died of fever off the coast of China. |
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