Around this period, Jayavarman II unified warring Khmer principalities and performed a consecration ceremony proclaiming himself a 'universal monarch,' free from any foreign overlord, atop the sacred mountain of Phnom Kulen. This act is traditionally dated to the year that later Khmer inscriptions used to mark the founding of the Angkorian era, the beginning of an empire that would eventually build Angkor Wat and dominate Southeast Asia for six centuries.
Meeting in York, Pennsylvania after fleeing British-occupied Philadelphia, the Continental Congress proclaimed December 18, 1777 as a day of solemn thanksgiving, prompted largely by General Horatio Gates's decisive victory over British forces at Saratoga. The proclamation, largely drafted with input from Samuel Adams, urged the thirteen states to give thanks for military successes and pray for the Continental Army's ultimate success. It marked the first thanksgiving proclamation issued by a unified American government.
Meeting in Trenton, New Jersey's convention voted unanimously to ratify the newly drafted Constitution, becoming the third state to join the fledgling federal union. The state's merchants and farmers, long resentful of paying duties to New York and Pennsylvania on imported goods, saw a strong central government as a remedy. New Jersey's swift, unanimous vote helped build momentum toward the nine ratifications needed for the Constitution to take effect.
With Georgia's ratification on December 6 providing the necessary three-fourths majority of states, Secretary of State William Seward formally proclaimed the Thirteenth Amendment part of the Constitution on December 18, 1865. The amendment permanently abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime, finishing the work begun by Lincoln's wartime Emancipation Proclamation, which had applied only to Confederate territory. Its ratification came eight months after Lincoln's assassination and Confederate surrender.
Secretary of State William Seward issued a formal proclamation certifying that the requisite number of states had ratified the 13th Amendment, permanently abolishing slavery throughout the United States. Passed by Congress in January 1865 and pushed through in the war's final months, the amendment's ratification came eight months after Confederate surrender, closing the legal chapter on an institution that had defined American economic and political life for over two centuries.
In the months following its completion, the Eiffel Tower continued to draw celebrated visitors eager to see Paris from nearly 1,000 feet above the ground. Gustave Eiffel's iron lattice tower, built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, had already proven its structural daring; each new ascent by a notable figure added to its growing legend as an engineering marvel and tourist sensation that skeptics had once dismissed as a monstrosity.
At a meeting of the Geological Society of London, Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward presented skull fragments and a jawbone found in a gravel pit near Piltdown, England, claiming they belonged to an early human ancestor half a million years old. The find was celebrated across Britain as proof of a native missing link between apes and humans. Not until 1953 was it proven a deliberate forgery, combining a modern human skull with an orangutan jaw, artificially aged and filed down.
After a decade of Security Council vetoes had blocked new admissions amid Cold War rivalries, the UN General Assembly voted to admit sixteen countries simultaneously, including Spain, Portugal, Italy, Finland, Ireland, Jordan, and several Eastern Bloc states like Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The mass admission resulted from a package deal brokered to balance Western and Soviet-aligned candidates. It nearly doubled the pace of the UN's growth and signaled a thaw, however partial, in early Cold War diplomatic gridlock.
Project SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment) launched aboard an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, becoming the first satellite to relay voice communications from space. It broadcast a taped message from President Dwight Eisenhower wishing the world peace and goodwill, played back from orbit and picked up by ground stations, a Cold War demonstration of American space and technological capability just over a year after Sputnik.
On December 18, 1968, Apollo 8's crew remained in lunar orbit, completing pass after pass around the Moon while beaming back detailed observations and photographs of its cratered, gray surface. Launched just three days earlier, the mission marked humanity's first journey beyond low Earth orbit, a bold Cold War gambit by NASA to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon's vicinity and pave the way for a landing the following year.
Following the surrender of Lieutenant General A.A.K. Niazi's forces in Dhaka on December 16, formal ceremonies concluded over the following days as roughly 93,000 Pakistani soldiers became prisoners of war, among the largest surrenders since World War II. The war, marked by widespread atrocities against Bengali civilians, led directly to the creation of Bangladesh as an independent nation. Indian and Bangladeshi forces had fought together as the Mukti Bahini resistance against the Pakistani military.
Commander Gene Cernan and geologist-astronaut Harrison Schmitt landed the lunar module Challenger in the rugged Taurus-Littrow valley, the sixth and final Apollo mission to put humans on the lunar surface. Schmitt, the only professional geologist to walk on the Moon, helped select the landing site for its scientific promise. Over three days, the astronauts drove 22 miles in the lunar rover and collected 243 pounds of rock and soil, the most of any Apollo mission.
The General Assembly adopted this comprehensive treaty aiming to guarantee migrant workers and their families basic human rights regardless of legal status, covering fair wages, healthcare access, and protection from arbitrary expulsion. Though championed by labor-sending countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the convention took 13 years to gather enough ratifications to enter into force, and no major migrant-receiving country in Western Europe or North America has ever ratified it, limiting its practical impact.
With articles of impeachment stemming from Clinton's false testimony about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the House launched into an intense, bitterly partisan floor debate on December 18, 1998, a day before formally voting. Republican leaders pressed the case that Clinton's conduct constituted lying under oath and obstructing justice, while Democrats decried the proceedings as a partisan vendetta, setting the stage for only the second presidential impeachment vote in American history.