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Explore 21 December

Explore 21 December: Apollo 8 sets off for the Moon, eleven former Soviet republics found the CIS, de Gaulle is elected president and basketball is played for the first time. Meet Benjamin Disraeli, Jane Fonda and Frank Zappa, born on this date.

This day through time →9 verified events across 2 eras

⌛9Full
Timeline ◈4Historic
Moments ♙8Born
Today ✦4Lives
Remembered ◉1Firsts &
Discoveries ☆1Sporting
Moments ♫2Culture
Stories ☉1Observances
The Apollo 8 Saturn V being rolled out to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, 9 October 1968.
The Apollo 8 Saturn V being rolled out to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, 9 October 1968.
Image creditNASA · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1968

Apollo 8 sets off for the Moon

At 7.51 in the morning of 21 December 1968 a Saturn V rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders. It was the first time the giant rocket had carried a crew, and less than three hours later they fired the third stage and became the first people ever to leave Earth’s orbit.

They reached the Moon on Christmas Eve and circled it ten times, the first humans to see its far side with their own eyes. The mission had been brought forward by months, partly out of fear that the Soviet Union would send cosmonauts round the Moon first. They splashed down safely in the Pacific on 27 December.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: NASA: Apollo 8 ↗
Leonid Kravchuk, Nursultan Nazarbayev, Boris Yeltsin and Stanislav Shushkevich at Alma-Ata, 21 December 1991.
Leonid Kravchuk, Nursultan Nazarbayev, Boris Yeltsin and Stanislav Shushkevich at Alma-Ata, 21 December 1991.
Image creditDmitryi Donskoy / Дмитрий Донской · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
1991

Eleven republics bury the Soviet Union

On 21 December 1991 the leaders of eleven of the fifteen Soviet republics met in Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, and signed the documents that founded the Commonwealth of Independent States. They declared that with its formation the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would cease to exist.

Russia, Ukraine and Belarus had agreed to form the Commonwealth near Minsk two weeks earlier; at Alma-Ata the Central Asian republics, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Moldova joined them. The Baltic states and Georgia stayed out. Four days later Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Commonwealth of Independent States ↗
Charles de Gaulle during the Second World War.
Charles de Gaulle during the Second World War.
Image creditOffice of War Information, Overseas Picture Division. [1] The image prefix (LC-USW3) at the Library of Congress image page matches that of pictures from the OWI collection (see prefix list here. · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1958

De Gaulle is elected President of France

On 21 December 1958 an electoral college of some 80,000 members — parliamentarians, councillors and representatives of local councils — elected Charles de Gaulle the first President of the Fifth Republic, by a very large majority. He had been brought back to power in June, in the crisis over the war in Algeria, and the new constitution, approved by referendum in September, had been written around him.

He took office in January 1959. In 1962 he changed the rules again by referendum, so that from 1965 the president would be elected directly by the people. He resigned in 1969.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Élysée: Charles de Gaulle ↗
The memorial garden at Lockerbie.
The memorial garden at Lockerbie.
Image creditSandy Gerrard · CC BY-SA 2.0Resized and cropped for display.
1988

The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103

On the evening of 21 December 1988 Pan Am Flight 103, from London to New York, was destroyed by a bomb over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, less than forty minutes after take-off. All 259 people on board were killed, 190 of them Americans, among them 35 students from Syracuse University, and 11 people died on the ground.

It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in British history. After a long international investigation a Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted in 2001 by Scottish judges sitting in the Netherlands.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation: Pan Am 103 bombing ↗
♙
PEOPLE

Born Today

Benjamin Disraeli
Image creditCornelius Jabez Hughes · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1804

Benjamin Disraeli

Novelist turned Conservative prime minister, Queen Victoria’s favourite, who bought Britain a controlling stake in the Suez Canal.

Hermann Joseph Muller
Image creditAlfred De Bat · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1890

Hermann Joseph Muller

American geneticist who showed that X-rays cause mutations and won the 1946 Nobel Prize for it.

Heinrich Böll
Image creditHoffmann, Harald · CC BY-SA 3.0 deResized and cropped for display.
Born 1917

Heinrich Böll

German novelist of Billiards at Half-past Nine and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum; Nobel Prize in Literature 1972.

Jane Fonda
Image creditColleen Sturtevant · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1937

Jane Fonda

American actress, two-time Oscar winner and lifelong campaigner, whose workout videos sold millions.

Frank Zappa
Image creditHelge Øverås · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1940

Frank Zappa

American composer and guitarist who mixed rock, jazz and orchestral music and fought censorship of records.

Hu Jintao
Image creditDilma Rousseff from Brasil · CC BY-SA 2.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1942

Hu Jintao

Leader of the Chinese Communist Party from 2002 to 2012 and president of China from 2003 to 2013.

Samuel L. Jackson
Image creditDaltoncitys · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1948

Samuel L. Jackson

American actor of Pulp Fiction and the Marvel films, among the highest-grossing actors of all time.

Emmanuel Macron
Image creditNebojša Tejić · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1977

Emmanuel Macron

French president from 2017, elected at thirty-nine as the youngest head of state since Napoleon.

◉
IDEAS THAT CHANGED THINGS

Firsts, Science & Discoveries

The An-225 Mriya coming in to land at Hostomel after the Independence Day parade in 2021.
The An-225 Mriya coming in to land at Hostomel after the Independence Day parade in 2021.
Image creditZavryk · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
1988

The world’s largest aircraft takes off

The Antonov An-225 Mriya — ‘dream’ in Ukrainian — made its first flight from the Antonov factory airfield at Sviatoshyn in Kyiv on 21 December 1988, with a crew led by Oleksandr Galunenko. It was built to carry the Soviet Buran space shuttle and parts of the Energia rocket on its back.

With six engines and a wingspan of 88 metres it was the heaviest aircraft ever built, and after the Soviet shuttle programme ended it flew outsize cargo around the world. Only one was completed. It was destroyed at Hostomel airfield near Kyiv in the first days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Antonov: the An-225 Mriya ↗
☆
SPORTING HISTORY

Sporting Moments

James Naismith with a ball and a peach basket.
James Naismith with a ball and a peach basket.
Image creditUnknown authorUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1891

The first game of basketball

On 21 December 1891, at the YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, the physical education instructor James Naismith gave a restless class a new indoor game for the winter. He nailed two peach baskets to the balcony at either end of the gym, ten feet above the floor, and divided eighteen men into two teams of nine with a football.

Naismith, a Canadian, wrote thirteen rules. By 1894 the game was being played in France, China and India, and it became an Olympic sport in 1936, when Naismith was there to see it.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Springfield College: the birthplace of basketball ↗
♫
MUSIC • FILM • BOOKS • CULTURE

Culture Stories

Walt Disney in 1946.
Walt Disney in 1946.
Image creditBoy Scouts of America · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1937

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has its premiere

Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated feature made in the United States, had its premiere at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles on 21 December 1937. Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and Marlene Dietrich were in the audience, and some 30,000 people gathered outside.

Hollywood had called the project ‘Disney’s folly’. The audience applauded and wept, and the film became the most successful film of its time, paying for the studio in Burbank that Disney built with the profits.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: The Walt Disney Family Museum: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the opening ↗
A re-creation of Arthur Wynne's 'Word-Cross' puzzle from the New York World, 21 December 1913.
A re-creation of Arthur Wynne’s ‘Word-Cross’ puzzle from the New York World, 21 December 1913.
Image creditArthur Wynne · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1913

The first crossword is published

Arthur Wynne, an English-born editor on the New York World, needed something to fill the Christmas edition of the paper’s Sunday supplement, Fun. On 21 December 1913 he published a diamond-shaped grid of numbered squares with clues and called it a ‘Word-Cross’. It is taken to be the first modern crossword.

Readers took to it at once and complained when it was missing. Within weeks a typesetter’s slip had turned the name into ‘Cross-Word’, and by the mid-1920s crossword books were a national craze.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Library of Congress, Headlines and Heroes: word cross, crosswords and acrostics ↗
✦
LIVES REMEMBERED

Remembered Today

Marguerite de Navarre
Image creditJean Clouet · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1549

Marguerite de Navarre

Queen of Navarre, sister of Francis I of France, protector of reformers and author of the story collection the Heptaméron.

George S. Patton
Image creditRobert F. Cranston / Harry Warnecke · CC0Resized and cropped for display.
Died 1945

George S. Patton

American general of the Third Army’s drive across France, who died after a car accident in occupied Germany.

Nikolaas Tinbergen
Image creditWilly Pragher · CC BY 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
Died 1988

Nikolaas Tinbergen

Dutch-born zoologist, a founder of the study of animal behaviour, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

☉
AROUND THE WORLD

Observances & Anniversaries

Australia's team celebrating their gold medals at the 2006 FIBA World Championship for Women.
Australia’s team celebrating their gold medals at the 2006 FIBA World Championship for Women.
Image creditFIBA · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
UN day

World Basketball Day

In August 2023 the UN General Assembly proclaimed 21 December as World Basketball Day, on the anniversary of the first game in 1891. It was the first team sport to be given its own UN day.

Source: United Nations: World Basketball Day ↗
HISTORY & TIMELINE

Finished the highlights?

Follow 21 December chronologically, from the Middle Ages to the modern day, with 9 verified events and the sources behind them.

This day through time →
Sources & further reading