Dec 14, 2017 2 min read

Today is Thursday, Dec. 14, the 348th day of 2017. There are 17 days left in the year.

On Dec. 14, 2012, a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle killed 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., then committed suicide as police arrived; the 20-year-old had also fatally shot his mother at their home before carrying out the attack on the school.

In 1799, the first president of the United States, George Washington, died at his Mount Vernon, Va., home at age 67.

In 1819, Alabama joined the Union as the 22nd state.

In 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team became the first men to reach the South Pole, beating out a British expedition led by Robert F. Scott.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson vetoed an immigration measure aimed at preventing “undesirables” and anyone born in the “Asiatic Barred Zone” from entering the United States (Congress overrode Wilson’s veto in Feb. 1917.)

In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, ruled Congress was within its authority to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against racial discrimination by private businesses (in this case, a motel that refused to cater to blacks).

In 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan concluded their third and final moonwalk and blasted off for their rendezvous with the command module.

In 1986, the experimental aircraft Voyager, piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California on the first nonstop, nonrefueled flight around the world.

In 1996, a freighter lost power on the Mississippi River and barreled into the Riverwalk complex in New Orleans; miraculously, no one was killed.

“No one feels another’s grief, no one understands another’s joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.”

– Franz Schubert, Austrian composer (1797-1828)