December 6, 1912: Authentic bust of Egypt's Queen Nefertiti discovered after 32 centuriesDecember 19, 1912: The original "Star Spangled Banner" is donated to the SmithsonianDecember 18, 1912: Fake prehistoric "missing link" Eoanthropus dawsoni presented to British scientists
Hiram Bingham completed his first Peruvian expedition, during which he had discovered the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu, and departed Peru with 100 cases of artifacts and 700 photographs.[3][4]
General Uehara Yūsaku resigned as Japan's Minister of War after the rest of the cabinet refused to agree to increasing the army by an additional two divisions. Uyehera's departure preceded the resignation of the entire ministry.[2][6]
Two rail lines opened in South Africa: a line of 31 miles 3 chains (50.0 kilometres) in length between Schoombee to Hofmeyr in Eastern Cape, and a line of 2 miles 50 chains (4.2 kilometres) in length between Ottery to Diep River in Cape Town.[8]
December 3, 1912 (Tuesday)
At Çatalca, the government of Turkey signed an armistice with Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro, but Greece did not participate.[9] The ceasefire took effect at 7:00 pm local time, temporarily halting the fighting.[10] Part of the ceasefire was to hold a peace conference in London, but the discussions failed and hostilities would resume on February 3, 1913.[11]
Italy's Chamber of Deputies approved the peace treaty with Turkey 335-24.[15]
American boxer Jack Johnson shocked much of America by marrying "outside his race" to white American Lucille Cameron. The two would divorce in 1924.[16]
Died:Archibald Gracie, 53, American writer and Titanic survivor, author of The Truth about the Titanic, died from health damage sustained while awaiting rescue in a lifeboat (b. 1858)
Kate Simon (pen name for Kaila Grobsmith), Polish-born American writer, known for her autobiographical writings such as Etchings in an Hourglass and travel writing including Renaissance Tapestry; in Warsaw (d. 1990)
In excavations at Tell al-Amarna in Egypt, the Nefertiti Bust was unearthed, intact, after a burial of 32 centuries. The team, led by a team led by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt, discovered the limestone statue of the head and shoulders of the wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten (who reigned 1353 BC to 1336 BC), while sifting through the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose. Borchardt concluded that the statue had once set upon a wooden shelf, next to a similar bust of Akhenaten, until termite damage caused both objects to topple; and while the pharaoh's statue was shattered, Nefertiti's bust survived because it had happened to land, upside down, on its flat top.[21]
Vladimir, the Metropolitan of Moscow, was appointed President of the Russian Orthodox Synod and Metropolitan of Saint Petersburg as well.[2]
December 7, 1912 (Saturday)
German-American banker Paul Warburg presented the blueprint, for what would become the Federal Reserve, for presentation to U.S. Congress and to U.S. President-elect Woodrow Wilson. The original plan, with twenty reserve banks under control of a central board, would be altered to 12 federal reserve banks after Warburg modified the Federal Reserve Act to accommodate the wishes of Congressman Carter Glass.[23]
Hassan Riaz Pasha, the Turkish Governor of Scutari, refused to accept his nation's armistice and continued fighting the First Balkan War.[2]
Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany convened a "War Council" at Potsdam, with his military leaders (General Helmuth von Moltke, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, and Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller) after receiving the news that the United Kingdom would join with France and Russia in the event of a European war. The outcome was to postpone plans for war with the Russian Empire until the near future, but to prepare the German public for an inevitable "racial war, the war of Slavdom against Germandom" in 1914 or 1915.[24] According to Major General Karl von Wenninger, who was present at the meeting, "Moltke wanted to launch an immediate attack" on France and the United Kingdom because it was the most favorable opportunity for winning, while Tirpitz persuaded a reluctant Kaiser that an attack should wait a year until construction of the U-boat pens at Heligoland and the widening of the Kiel Canal could be completed.[25]
Turkish cavalry and artillery withdrew from Tripoli, which had been ceded to Italy.[2]
The Greek submarine Delfin made the first torpedo attack in modern warfare, after sighting the Turkish cruiser Medjidieh and five escort ships. Lt. Commander Paparrigopoulos ordered the firing of the underwater missile from a distance of 500 meters, but the torpedo "did not run properly and sank".[27]
U.S. Representative Charles Calvin Bowman of Pennsylvania was unseated by a 153-118 vote of his fellow House Congressmen, who concluded that he had used corrupt practices to be elected in 1910. Bowman still had almost three months left in his term, which would expire March 4. Bowman's Democratic opponent, George R. McLean, was also denied a seat by a 181-88 margin, because the majority concluded that he was guilty of the same practices as Bowman.[32]
Off of the coast of Port Arthur, Texas, a sudden storm in the Gulf of Mexico killed all 10 of the crew of Standard Oil's Barge Number 87, and two British freighters, the Impoco and Hainaut, with another 36 people on board.[33]
Luitpold, Prince Regent of Bavaria, passed away at the age of 91. Luitpold had been the de facto ruler of Bavaria since 1886 because of the mental illness of his nephew, King Ludwig II. Luitpold's son, Prince Ludwig of the House of Wittelsbach, succeeded to the regency and would later become King Ludwig III.
By executive order, outgoing U.S. President William Howard Taft established National Petroleum Reserve No. 2 (NPR-2), at the Buena Vista Hills in Kern County, California, south of Reserve No. 1.[36]
Antitrust proceedings were filed in the United States against the "candy trust".[2]
LieutenantBelgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis died in Antarctica, after falling into a crevasse whilst on an expedition with explorer Douglas Mawson. Ninnis had been guiding six dogs who were pulling the sledge carrying much of the party's supplies, including most of their food, their tent, and spare clothing, when the ice gave way. Looking into the pit, Mawson and Dr. Xavier Mertz saw a dog about 150 feet below, and an even deeper abyss beyond, but nothing else. Mawson and Mertz were left with a ten-day supply of food and still had 315 miles to cover at the time of the accident.[38]
American aviator Tony Jannus set a mark for "the longest hydro-aeroplane flight on record", landing in New Orleans at 8:30 in the evening hours after he and his passenger had taken off from Omaha, Nebraska, on a journey of 1,500 miles (2,400 km). Jannus fared better than other aviators that day, as the wreckage of Horace Kearny's hydro-aeroplane flyer was found in the Pacific Ocean, 30 hours after he and his newspaper reporter passenger had gone missing during an attempt to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco.[43]
Newspaper readers across the United States were hoaxed by an Associated Press story with the dateline "Keokuk, Ia., Dec. 14" that began "A human hand protruding from tons of cement, the frames of which were removed several days ago, was found today in one of the concrete pillars of the government dam across the Mississippi, and explains the disappearance several weeks ago of one of the laborers. The man's body is imbedded (sic) in the solid concrete and is likely to stay there, as to blast it out would destroy not only the body but a great part of one of the largest blocks of cement composing the dam."[44][45][46] The "news" was a surprise to the residents of Keokuk, Iowa; the paper there would write two days later that the AP "sent out a weird story of horror said to have occurred on the great dam here," and commented "The press association put a Keokuk date line on the thing deliberately and with full knowledge that it did not emanate from Keokuk, Ia." after picking up the fake news from a St. Louis newspaper and changing the details.[47]
The Balkan Peace Conference was opened at St. James's Palace in London by Secretary of Foreign Affairs Edward Grey.[2][49] On the same day, the navies of Greece and Turkey fought a battle at the entrance of the Bosporus strait. The Turkish fleet, with 4 battleships, 9 destroyers and 6 torpedo boats opened fire on a Greek battleship squadron which arrived from the island of Imbros. The Greek fleet retaliated ten minutes later, sending the Turkish ships in retreat, and the battle ended at 10:30 am, forty minutes after it began. The Greeks sustained 8 casualties and no major damage, while the Turks lost 58 killed and wounded.[50]
The Franco-Spanish treaty of Morocco was approved by the Spanish Chamber of Deputies, 216-22.[2]
Kamoun the self-described Sultan of Dar-al-Kuti in what is now the Central African Republic, was defeated by the French Army after nearly two years of defying France and its control of Ouanda Djallé[52]
Born:Edward Short, British politician, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party 1972 to 1976, Secretary of State for Education and Science for the Harold Wilson administration 1968-1970; in Warcop, Cumbria (d. 2012)
Piltdown Man, thought to be the fossilized skull of a hitherto unknown form of early human, was presented to the Geological Society of London. Dr. A.S. Woodard told a reporter, "That this skull, representing a hitherto unknown species, is the missing link, I have no doubt."[54][55] In 1953, the Piltdown Man would be revealed to be a hoax.[56]
The India National Missionary Conference convened in Calcutta, where it established a committee to propose literature reflecting Christian principles that could be shared and accepted in India.[57]
The United States warned rebel leaders in the Republic of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) not to take action against the new government, or it would intervene.[2]
U.S. President William Howard Taft, in his final three months in office, asked Congress to give seats, though not votes, to members of the presidential cabinet. Congress then adjourned without taking up the idea, and Taft departed for a visit to Panama.[58]
Japanese Army Captains Yoshitoshi Tokugawa and Kumazo Hino became the first military pilots in Japan, with Hino flying a German Grade monoplane for 1,200 meters and Tokugawa flying for four minutes in a French Farman biplane.[59]
William H. Van Schaick, who had been the captain of the steamboat General Slocum when a fire on the ship killed over 1,000 passengers in 1904, was paroled from New York's Sing Sing prison after serving three and one half years. He would be pardoned on Christmas Day by U.S. President William Howard Taft.[60]
J. H. Logue, a Chicago diamond merchant, was brutally murdered in his office in midday. Logue was gagged, stabbed 17 times, shot in his right shoulder, had his skull crushed, had part of his right thumb severed, and had his mouth burned with acid. The killing was believed to have been revenge for Logue's prosecution of diamond thieves in 1905 and 1906.[65] Five men and four women were arrested the next day in connection with the killing.[66]
A rail line of 10 miles 31 chains (16.7 kilometres) in length opened between Melk to Motkop, Western Cape, South Africa.[8]
A group of 80 actors and actresses in New York City's theaters gathered to form a labor union, the American Federation of Actors, which in 1913 would incorporate as the Actors' Equity Association.[70]
The Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, was wounded in an assassination attempt, when a bomb was thrown at him as he was arriving in Delhi. Hardinge's attendant was killed in the explosion.[71] Hardinge was being brought to the capital on an elephant as part of the arrival ceremony, when a bomb was thrown at him from a housetop. Debris struck his right shoulder. Hardinge's attendant, Jamadar Mahabir Singh was killed, and 20 people were injured.[72] Four people (Amir Ali, Avadh Behari, Bal Mukund, and Basanta Kumar Biswas (who threw the bomb) were later executed for the attack, but the mastermind behind the plot, Rash Behari Bose, escaped to Japan where he would live the rest of his life, dying in 1945.[73]
The completion of heightening of the Aswan Dam was celebrated in a ceremony attended by Lord Kitchener and the Khedive of Egypt.[2][74]
Twenty-two people were killed when two British steamers collided in the Gulf of Mexico.[2]
Ohannes Bey Kouyoumjian, an Armenian Catholic, was appointed as the Turkish Governor of Lebanon.[2]
Sunnyvale, California, was incorporated as a town in Santa Clara County. The future Silicon Valley home of technology companies, including Yahoo!, originally had 1,200 people, and would have over 140,000 a century later.[77]
Fifteen minutes after U.S. President William Howard Taft was driven down a street during his visit to Panama, a dynamite blast wrecked the street in Colón. No group claimed responsibility, but one report noted that "it is generally believed that the act was committed with a view to taking the life of the president and that the plot only failed because of some miscalculation in the arrangements."[79]
The first pro-independence organization in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), the Indische Partij, was founded by Ernest Douwes Dekker, an "Indo" with "a Dutch father and a German-Javanese mother", and Indonesian physicians Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo and Soewardi Soerjaningrat.[80]
Margaret Hatch, 40, a nationally known vaudeville actress, suffered a heart attack on stage while performing at a theater in Stamford, Connecticut, and died minutes later.[81]
The Danish steamer Volmer encountered a gale in the English Channel, where waves killed 13 of the 15 crew after they escaped in lifeboats. The ship's captain and a sailor were the only survivors.[83]
George Washington Donaghey, outgoing Governor of Arkansas, "accomplished through executive action what forty years of protests and duplicitous legislation had failed to do"[88] toward ending the practice of convict leasing in his state. Although Donaghey had not been able to persuade the state legislature to ban the system of the state prisons selling the use of inmates to private companies as unpaid workers, he had lobbied for the early parole of prisoners who had committed minor offenses, and in a single day, pardoned 360 other convicts of their crimes, freeing them prison and from slave labor. The legislature ended the practice the next year.[89]
Future U.S. presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, 12 years old at the time, accidentally shot and killed a family friend, 16-year-old Ruth Merwin, during a party at his home in Bloomington, Illinois.[94]
The town of Carnation, Washington (now a suburb of Seattle) was incorporated as the town of "Tolt, Washington" (for Tolthue, the Snoqualmie Indian name for the area). It would change its name to Carnation, not for the flower, but in honor with of the Carnation Evaporated Milk Company in 1917, then back to Tolt in 1928 but, because the train depot and the post office did not change their names, the town would become "Carnation" again in 1951.[96]
^Jad Adams, Gandhi: The True Man Behind Modern India (Open Road Media, 2011)
^ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzaaabacThe Britannica Year-Book 1913: A Survey of the World's Progress Since the Completion in 1910 of the Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, 1913) pp. xli - xliii
^Helen Delpar, Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850–1975 (University of Alabama Press, 2007) pp. 64-65
^ abcd"Record of Current Events", The American Monthly Review of Reviews (February 1913), pp. 163-167
^"Japanese Cabinet Crisis", New York Times, December 3, 1912
^Hew Strachan, The Outbreak of the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 65
^ abcStatement Showing, in Chronological Order, the Date of Opening and the Mileage of Each Section of Railway, Statement No. 19, p. 187, ref. no. 200954-13
^"Greeks Refuse the Armistice; Others Sign It", New York Times, December 4, 1912
^Edward J. Erickson, Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkans, 1912-1913 (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003) p. 137
^John A. S. Grenville, The Major International Treaties of the Twentieth Century: A History and Guide with Texts, Volume 1 (Taylor & Francis, 2001) pp. 49-50
^Hew Strachan, The Outbreak of the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 65; "Triple Alliance Renewed", New York Times, December 8, 1912
^Janet Khan, Prophet's Daughter: The Life and Legacy of Bahiyyih Khanum, Outstanding Heroine of the Baha'i Faith (Baha'i Publishing Trust, 2005) p. 81; "Abdul Baha Sails Away", New York Times, December 6, 1912
^Joann Fletcher, The Search for Nefertiti: The True Story of an Amazing Discovery (HarperCollins, 2004) p. 60
^"Terauchi Japan's Premier", New York Times, December 7, 1912
^Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (Random House Digital, 2012)
^Roderick R. McLean, Royalty and Diplomacy in Europe, 1890-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2007) p. 66
^John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900–1941 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) p. 910
^"Greece: DELFIN class submarines", in Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1906-1921 (Volume 2), by Randal Gray and Przemyslaw Budzbon (Naval Institute Press, 1985) p. 387
^"Ignore Armistice; Fighting Resumed", Milwaukee Sentinel, December 10, 1912, p. 1
^Spencer Tucker, European Powers in the First World War: An Encyclopedia (Taylor & Francis, 1999) p. 495
^Germain, Georges-Hébert (2007). Un musée dans la ville. Une histoire du musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (in French). p. 55.
^"Austria Mobilizes Army of Kingdom", Milwaukee Sentinel, December 11, 1912, p. 1
^"Bowman Is Ousted from House Seat", Milwaukee Sentinel, December 13, 1912, p. 1
^"Perished in Storm— Oil Barge Tears from Tow and Turns Turtle Off Port Arthur — Gale Sweeps Gulf of Mexico and the Death List May Reach Fifty", Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1912, p. 1
^"Whitelaw Reid Dies in London— American Ambassador to Great Britain Succumbs at His Post After Illness of Less Than a Week", New York Tribune, December 16, 1912, p. 1
^"Whitelaw Reid Has Journeyed into the Beyond", Atlanta Constitution, December 16, 1912, p1
^"Pays Toll to Charon— Whitelaw Reid Joins Honored Dead", Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1912, p1
^"They Tried To Fly and Are Corpses; Tony Janus Flies and Still Lives"; Atlanta Constitution, December 16, 1912, p. 1
^"Imbedded in Concrete— Hand Protruding From Mass Explains Disappearance of Workman on Dam at Keokuk, Ia.", Boston Globe, December 15, 1912, p. 1
^"See Human Hand Protruding From Tons of Cement", Buffalo Sunday News, December 15, 1912, p. 25
^"Man's Body Found Embedded in Dam", Des Moines Register, December 15, 1912, p. 1
^"The Champion Faker", Daily Gate City (Keokuk, Iowa), December 17, 1912, p. 4
^"Actors' Equity", in The Routledge Guide to Broadway, Ken Bloom, ed. (CRC Press, 2006) p. 3; Estelle May Stewart, Handbook of American Trade-Unions (Government Printing Office, 1929) p. 197
^"Assassin Attacks Viceroy of India", Milwaukee Sentinel, December 24, 1912, p. 1
^Bernschneider-Reif, S.; Oxler, F.; Freudenmann, R. W. (2006). "The Origin of MDMA ("Ecstasy") - Separating the Facts From the Myths". Die Pharmazie. 61 (11): 966–972. PMID17152992. S2CID36199565.
^"Marguerite Thompson Zorach". CLARA Database of Women Artists. National Museum of Women in the Arts. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2015-05-19.
^Ben Koning, Images of America: Sunnyvale (Arcadia Publishing, 2011) p. 88
^Thetford, Owen, British Naval Aircraft Since 1912, Sixth Edition, Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1991, ISBN1-55750-076-2, p. 10.
^Christopher DeWolf (30 January 2008). "New Look for the Ritz-Carlton". Spacing Montréal. Spacingmontreal.ca. Archived from the original on 2011-07-05. Retrieved 2011-05-09.
^Biblioteca Nacional de Chile. "Valdivias Deutsche Zeitung". Catálogo de la Biblioteca Nacional de Chile. Retrieved July 30, 2016.
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