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1 - 29 of 29 Interesting & Fun 24th of December Facts: |
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| 640 - John IV becomes Pope. |
| 1294 - Pope Boniface VIII is elected Pope, replacing St. Celestine V, who had abdicated. |
| 1515 - Thomas Wolsey is named the English Lord Chancellor. |
| 1715 - Swedish troops occupy Norway. |
| 1777 - Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island, was discovered by James Cook. |
| 1800 - Assassination attempt on Napoleon Bonaparte's life. |
| 1814 - The Treaty of Ghent was signed which ended the War of 1812. |
| 1818 - "Silent Night" composed by Franz Xaver Gruber. |
| 1865 - Several US Civil War Confederate veterans form the Ku Klux Klan. |
| 1906 - The first radio program, consisting of a poetry reading, a violin solo, and a speech, is broadcast. |
| 1914 - World War I: The "Christmas truce" begins. |
| 1941 - Hong Kong falls to the Japanese Imperial Army. |
| 1941 - Wake Island is conquered by Japanese forces. |
| 1943 - US General Dwight D. Eisenhower becomes the supreme Allied commander. |
| 1946 - France's Fourth Republic founded. |
| 1951 - Libya becomes independent from Italy. Idris I is proclaimed King of Libya. |
| 1953 - Tangiwai disaster: A railway bridge collapse at Tangiwai, New Zealand sends a fully loaded passenger train into the Whangaehu River, killing 153 people. |
| 1953 - NBC's Dragnet becomes the first network-sponsored television program. |
| 1966 - A Canadair CL44 chartered by the United States military crashes into a small village in South Vietnam, killing 129. |
| 1968 - The crew of the USS Pueblo is released by North Korea after being held for 11 months on suspicion of spying. |
| 1968 - The crew of Apollo 8 enter into orbit around the Moon, becoming the first humans to do so. |
| 1969 - Curt Flood writes to Bowie K. Kuhn, the Commissioner of Baseball, asking to be declared a free agent . |
| 1974 - Cyclone Tracy devastates Darwin, Australia. |
| 1979 - The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan to support the country's Marxist government. |
| 1979 - The first European Ariane rocket is launched. |
| 1985 - A black bull blocks the Cross Harbour Tunnel in Hong Kong for three hours. |
| 1997 - The Sid El-Antri massacre (or Sidi Lamri) in Algeria kills 50-100 people. |
| 1997 - The Dominican Republic becomes a member of the Berne Convention copyright treaty. |
| 2004 - The 2004 Christmas Eve Snowstorm delivers an extremely unusual snowfall to the southern United States. |
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