Today In History
December 13 in History
Your birthday shares the stage with stories that shaped the world.
National Guard Founded: Massachusetts Organizes Three Militia Regiments
Massachusetts Bay Colony organized three militia regiments to defend against the Pequot Indians, creating the direct lineage of the United States National Guard. This 1637 action established a permanent state-level military force that evolved into the nation's primary reserve component for domestic emergencies and overseas deployments.
Famous Birthdays
Blink-182 Founder Tom DeLonge Is Born
Tom DeLonge co-founded Blink-182 and helped define the pop-punk sound of the late 1990s with albums that sold over 50 million copies worldwide. After departing the band, he pivoted to founding To The Stars Academy, a venture that played a direct role in pressuring the U.S. government to release declassified UFO footage to the public.
Mary Todd Lincoln
Mary Todd Lincoln was born in December 1818 in Lexington, Kentucky, into a wealthy slaveholder family. She married Abraham Lincoln in 1842 against her family's wishes. She buried three of her four sons. She was sitting next to her husband when he was shot. After his death, her surviving son Robert had her briefly committed to a psychiatric institution in 1875 — a betrayal she never forgave. She spent her final years in France, partially blind, largely alone. She died in 1882. Her life was one long argument with catastrophe.
Brian Wilson
The shy kid who stuttered through school assemblies ended up spending 32 years as a Labour MP for Cunninghame North. Brian Wilson didn't follow the usual path — he founded a newspaper, The West Highland Free Press, in 1972 to fight Highland clearances and absentee landlords. It made him enemies. Real ones. When he finally entered Parliament in 1987, he brought that same scrappiness: championed Scottish devolution, pushed renewable energy decades before it was fashionable, served as Minister for Trade and Tourism under Blair. And never lost the newspaper habit. He kept writing columns, kept arguing, kept making the case that politics worked best when you remembered the people getting evicted.
Alvin York
A Tennessee moonshiner and hell-raiser found God at 26 and swore off violence. Seven years later, Alvin York single-handedly captured 132 German soldiers in the Argonne Forest after picking off 25 machine gunners one by one — using the turkey-hunting skills he'd learned as a boy. He did it on October 8, 1918. The U.S. gave him the Medal of Honor. France gave him the Croix de Guerre. York went home, turned down every commercial offer, and spent the rest of his life running a Bible school in the same Tennessee hills where he'd learned to shoot.
B. J. Vorster
Balthazar Johannes Vorster enforced the brutal machinery of apartheid as South Africa’s prime minister, systematically stripping Black citizens of their rights and citizenship. His hardline policies deepened international isolation and fueled the internal resistance that eventually dismantled the regime. He remains a central figure in the institutionalized racial oppression that defined 20th-century South African governance.
Hans-Joachim Marseille
Hans-Joachim Marseille mastered the art of deflection shooting, claiming 158 aerial victories against Allied forces in North Africa. His unorthodox tactics and precision forced the Royal Air Force to overhaul their defensive formations to counter his singular threat. He died in 1942 when his engine failed during a routine flight, ending the career of the Luftwaffe’s most lethal fighter pilot.
George Shultz
A freshman economics major at Princeton who'd never left New Jersey gets seasick on his first Atlantic crossing — that same kid becomes the only person to hold four different Cabinet posts. George Shultz ran Treasury, Labor, and OMB before State, where he'd spend seven years negotiating the end of the Cold War. His secret weapon wasn't diplomacy training. It was his ability to read economic data faster than career diplomats could read cables. Reagan trusted him completely, even when Nancy didn't. He'd later call his State Department years "the most rewarding" — not bad for someone who started out seasick and studying labor unions.
Jeff Baxter
Jeff Baxter redefined the sound of 1970s rock through his fluid, jazz-inflected guitar work with Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers. Beyond his studio success, he transitioned into a career as a defense consultant, applying his analytical approach to music to complex national security and missile defense systems for the U.S. government.
Ted Nugent
Ted Nugent redefined the sonic landscape of 1970s hard rock with his high-voltage guitar pyrotechnics and aggressive stage persona. Beyond his commercial success with The Amboy Dukes and Damn Yankees, he became a polarizing cultural figure whose outspoken advocacy for hunting and Second Amendment rights transformed him into a permanent fixture in American political discourse.
Tom Verlaine
Tom Verlaine redefined the electric guitar’s vocabulary by trading blues-based tropes for the jagged, interlocking melodies that defined the New York punk scene. As the frontman of Television, his intricate, cerebral songwriting on the album Marquee Moon pushed rock music toward the expansive, atmospheric textures of post-punk and indie rock.
Ben Bernanke
He grew up in a small South Carolina town where his father was the town pharmacist and his mother taught elementary school. The kid who learned Hebrew for his bar mitzvah became the man who would helicopter-drop money into a collapsing economy. Bernanke spent the 1980s and '90s studying the Great Depression, writing papers about how the Fed had screwed up in 1929. Then 2008 hit. And he deployed every lesson from those dusty academic journals — slashing rates to zero, buying $3.5 trillion in bonds, basically rewriting central banking. Critics called it reckless. But the economy didn't collapse into another Depression. Sometimes the nerd who studied the last disaster is exactly who you need for the next one.
Thomas Kurzhals
Thomas Kurzhals defined the sound of East German progressive rock through his intricate keyboard arrangements for Stern-Combo Meißen and Karat. His compositions, particularly the hit Über sieben Brücken musst du gehn, became anthems of longing that resonated across the divided nation. He remained a central figure in the GDR music scene until his death in 2014.
Historical Events
Massachusetts Bay Colony organized three militia regiments to defend against the Pequot Indians, creating the direct lineage of the United States National Guard. This 1637 action established a permanent state-level military force that evolved into the nation's primary reserve component for domestic emergencies and overseas deployments.
Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law on December 13, 1981, to crush Solidarity and pro-democracy movements. His regime jailed thousands of activists, rationed basic foods like sugar and meat, and drove nearly 700,000 people from the country. This brutal crackdown ultimately failed to stop the collapse of his government, paving the way for democratic elections in 1989.
Abel Tasman's ships cut through the Pacific to become the first Europeans to sight New Zealand in 1642, sparking a violent clash with Māori warriors that killed four of his crew and forced an immediate retreat. This encounter established the initial European contact with the islands but also cemented a long period of isolation for New Zealanders before further exploration resumed decades later.
The U.S. Mint began stamping the Susan B. Anthony dollar, placing a real woman's face on American currency for the first time. This move forced the public to confront the exclusion of women from national symbols and sparked decades of debate over representation that eventually led to the modern series honoring female figures.
Seven inmates overpowered guards, stole 16 rifles, and walked out of a Texas maximum-security prison on December 13th wearing stolen prison uniforms. They'd planned for months. The guards they left behind were bound with duct tape in an electrical room. For six weeks, the Texas Seven robbed stores across the state — until they hit an Oshman's sporting goods shop on Christmas Eve. Officer Aubrey Hawkins, working security, confronted them. They shot him 11 times, then ran him over. Hawkins was 29, married eight months. Six of the seven were captured within weeks on *America's Most Wanted*. The seventh killed himself during arrest. Four got death sentences.
Gore stood at the podium for four minutes and twelve seconds. Thirty-six days after election night, after Florida recounts and Supreme Court arguments, after leading the popular vote by 543,895 votes, he ended it. "Just moments ago, I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him." The Court had ruled 5-4 to stop the recount with Bush ahead by 537 Florida votes—one vote per precinct. Gore urged unity, quoted his father on bitter defeats, never mentioned the popular vote margin. And that was it. The closest presidential race in 124 years decided by 0.009% in one state. Democracy held. But hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and "Brooks Brothers riot" entered the permanent vocabulary of American elections gone sideways.
Robert Guiscard's forces force Salerno's surrender, shattering Norman control over southern Italy and leaving only the citadel under Duke Gisulf's stubborn defense. This victory secures the Duchy of Apulia and Calabria for the Normans, eliminating the last major Lombard stronghold in the region before Gisulf finally capitulates months later.
An 85-year-old hermit who lived in a cave, ate roots, and hadn't seen Rome in decades became Pope in July 1294. Pietro del Morrone never wanted it. Cardinals chose him precisely because he was holy and unworldly—easy to control. He wasn't. Within weeks he couldn't manage the bureaucracy, spoke no Latin at mass, and appointed 12 new cardinals in a single day because someone asked nicely. By December he'd consulted canon lawyers, found nothing forbidding resignation, and walked away. First pope ever to quit. His successor, Boniface VIII, immediately imprisoned him in a castle—couldn't risk a rival pope wandering around. Pietro died there ten months later, still in chains. The Church made him a saint anyway.
Eleazar Wheelock wanted to convert Native Americans to Christianity. King George III gave him a charter. John Wentworth donated New Hampshire wilderness. Within a decade, only three of Dartmouth's 200 students were Indigenous—the mission had already shifted to educating white colonists' sons. The college Wheelock built to "civilize" Native youth became one of America's elite institutions for exactly the people who'd displace them. By 1770, Wheelock was complaining that Indigenous students were "too attached to their own way of living" to transform. The royal charter outlasted the king who granted it: Dartmouth successfully argued in 1819 that even state legislatures couldn't alter a contract made by the Crown. A missionary school became a precedent for corporate rights.
Confederate forces behind a stone wall at Marye's Heights repulsed fourteen successive Union assault waves at Fredericksburg, inflicting over 12,000 casualties on Ambrose Burnside's Army of the Potomac. The lopsided slaughter demoralized the North and cemented Robert E. Lee's reputation as the war's most formidable defensive commander.
Union troops under General William B. Hazen seize Fort McAllister, cutting off Savannah's last supply line and pushing the city into imminent surrender. This decisive blow clears the path for Sherman to link up with the Union navy, effectively ending Confederate control over Georgia's vital coastal stronghold.
Japanese troops breached Nanjing's walls after General Tang Shengzhi's defending garrison collapsed into a chaotic retreat, abandoning tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians. Over the following six weeks, Japanese soldiers systematically murdered an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 civilians and prisoners of war in what became known as the Nanjing Massacre. The atrocity remains one of the most contested and painful chapters in East Asian history.
Japanese forces overwhelmed Nanjing's Chinese defenders under General Tang Shengzhi after a brief but fierce siege. The fall of the capital triggered the Nanjing Massacre, a six-week campaign of mass murder, rape, and arson that killed an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 civilians and became one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century.
The SS established the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg's Bergedorf district, initially using prisoners to manufacture bricks from local clay. The camp eventually grew into a network of over 85 subcamps across northern Germany, where more than 42,000 prisoners perished from forced labor, starvation, and SS brutality before liberation in 1945.
Three outgunned Royal Navy cruisers engaged the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee in the South Atlantic, suffering heavy damage to HMS Exeter but forcing Captain Langsdorff to seek refuge in Montevideo harbor. The engagement, the first major naval battle of World War II, ended days later when Langsdorff scuttled his ship rather than face the British fleet.
Fun Facts
Zodiac Sign
Sagittarius
Nov 22 -- Dec 21
Fire sign. Optimistic, adventurous, and philosophical.
Birthstone
Tanzanite
Violet blue
Symbolizes transformation, intuition, and spiritual growth.
Next Birthday
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days until December 13
Quote of the Day
“Where words leave off, music begins.”
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