December 10: What Happened on This Day in History (High_school Level)?

(Page last edited 10/12/2017)

1. 1520 - Martin Luther burns his copy of the papal bull Exsurge Domine outsideWittenberg's Elster Gate.
2. 1684 - Isaac Newton's derivation of Kepler's laws from his theory of gravity, contained in the paper De motu corporum in gyrum, is read to the Royal Society by Edmund Halley.
3. 1799 - France adopts the metre as its official unit of length.
4. 1817 - Mississippi becomes the 20th U.S. state.
5. 1868 - The first traffic lights are installed, outside the Palace of Westminster inLondon. Resembling railway signals, they use semaphore arms and are illuminated at night by red and green gas lamps.
6. 1884 - Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published for the first time.
7. 1901 - The first Nobel Prizes are awarded.
8. 1906 - U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt wins the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first American to win a Nobel Prize.
9. 1911 - The first transcontinental flight across the United States is completed. Calbraith Perry Rodgers began the flight on 17 September 1911, taking off from Sheepshead Bay NY.
10. 1948 - The United Nations General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
11. Famous Birthdays: George Shaw (English botanist and zoologist), Ada Lovelace (English mathematician), Emily Dickinson (American poet), Melvil Dewey (American librarian, created the Dewey Decimal System), Olivier Messiaen (French composer and ornithologist)

For famous birthdays and other daily events in history, visit our Daily Dose Activities.

Click Here for Yesterday in History: December 9

Click Here for Tomorrow in History: December 11

For more history resources on Internet 4 Classrooms, visit our Social Studies and History index. For Pre K-8th Grade Level History and Social Studies Resources, visit our Grade Level Index.