On December 5, 1492, Christopher Columbus's expedition sighted the island later called Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), during his first voyage across the Atlantic. His ships had already explored Cuba, and this new landfall would become the site of the first permanent European settlement in the Americas, La Isabela, founded the following year.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the early hours of December 5, 1791, in his Vienna apartment, felled by an illness that struck suddenly weeks earlier. He was 35. His Requiem Mass in D minor, commissioned anonymously, remained incomplete, finished later by his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr. Rumors of poisoning circulated for decades, though most historians attribute his death to rheumatic fever or a related infection.
On December 5, 1933, Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment, providing the three-quarters majority needed to repeal the 18th Amendment. Prohibition, in effect since January 1920, had failed to curb drinking while fueling organized crime empires built by figures like Al Capone. Legal liquor sales resumed that evening in cities across the country amid widespread celebration.
On December 5, 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, four days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger. Thousands of Black residents walked, carpooled, or took Black-owned taxis instead of riding city buses. That evening, the Montgomery Improvement Association elected a 26-year-old Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr., as its president.
On December 5, 1961, United Nations troops and forces loyal to Katangese secessionist leader Moise Tshombe agreed to a ceasefire in Elisabethville, halting Operation Unokat. The fighting was part of the broader Congo Crisis that followed Belgian decolonization in 1960, a conflict entangled with Cold War rivalries and control over Katanga's vast copper and cobalt deposits.
Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on December 19, 1972, but the mission's outbound journey began December 6-7; on December 5, 1972, final launch preparations at Kennedy Space Center reached their peak as Gene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt readied for humanity's last scheduled Moon landing mission of the 20th century.