December 5 in History

Students from the College of William and Mary gathered in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern to establish Phi Beta Kappa, creating the nation's first scholastic fraternity. This bold move immediately shifted campus culture by prioritizing academic excellence over social clubs, setting a lasting standard for scholarly societies across the United States.

President James K. Polk confirmed to Congress that vast quantities of gold lay beneath California's soil, instantly transforming a remote frontier into a global magnet for fortune seekers. This official validation triggered a mass migration of nearly 300,000 people within four years, fundamentally altering the nation's demographics and accelerating California's admission as a state.

The ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment on December 5, 1933, officially repealed Prohibition and ended the nationwide ban on alcohol. This repeal restored state control over liquor regulation and generated critical tax revenue just as the Great Depression deepened, while simultaneously dismantling the lucrative black markets that had fueled organized crime for over a decade.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died on December 5, 1791, in Vienna, at 35. The cause has never been definitively established — rheumatic fever, kidney disease, and trichinosis have all been proposed. He was buried in a common grave, in accordance with Viennese custom for his social class, not from poverty as the legend suggests. The Requiem he was writing when he died was completed by his student Franz Xüssmayr from sketches; nobody is certain exactly which parts Mozart finished. He'd composed 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos, 23 string quartets, 18 masses, 22 operas. He was paid well for his work and died with almost nothing, because he spent extravagantly. His wife Constanze survived him by 50 years and spent them correcting the record about his life.

At 68, penniless and partially paralyzed from a stroke, Dumas died in his son's house — the same son he'd once refused to acknowledge. The man who'd earned millions from *The Three Musketeers* and *The Count of Monte Cristo* spent it all: a château with a monkey theater, a private newspaper, mistresses across Europe, and 500 meals a week for anyone who showed up. He'd written 300 books, some dictated to ghostwriters he called his "factory." But he left behind something stranger than swashbuckling heroes: his father was a French general born to a slave in Haiti, making Dumas's adventure stories a quiet revolution — Europe's most popular novelist had Black ancestry nobody talked about.

He spent 27 years in prison. On Robben Island, he cracked limestone in a quarry and was permitted one letter every six months. When he walked free in 1990, the world expected rage. What came out instead was a man who invited his former jailer to his inauguration. Mandela became South Africa's first Black president in 1994, inheriting a country that could have burned. It didn't. He died in December 2013, ninety-five years old. The question his whole life answered: what does it take to forgive something like that?

Henry Knox launched an audacious mission to haul sixty tons of captured British artillery 300 miles from Fort Ticonderoga to Cambridge through frozen wilderness. The cannons arrived in January, giving Washington the firepower to fortify Dorchester Heights and force the British evacuation of Boston without firing a shot.

Heinrich Kramer had just been kicked out of Innsbruck for railroading witch trials. The bishop called him senile. So Kramer went straight to Rome and got Pope Innocent VIII to issue Summis desiderantes—a papal bull backing him and James Sprenger to hunt witches across Germany. The bull gave them full authority to ignore local clergy who thought the whole thing was absurd. Kramer published it as the preface to his Malleus Maleficarum two years later, the manual that would fuel witch hunts for two centuries. Over 50,000 executions followed across Europe. One bishop's "no" became 50,000 deaths because Kramer knew where to shop for a better answer.

Columbus stepped onto Hispaniola's beach and called it "La Isla Española" — the Spanish Island. The Taíno people who met him numbered around 400,000. They wore gold jewelry, which Columbus noted immediately in his log. Within 56 years, Spanish colonization and disease reduced the Taíno population to fewer than 500. The island became Europe's first foothold in the Americas, launching three centuries of colonial rule that split it into two nations speaking different languages. That beach landing didn't discover a new world. It ended one.

Frederick II of Prussia employed his oblique order tactic to crush an Austrian army twice his size at Leuthen, inflicting 22,000 casualties while losing only 6,000 of his own men. Napoleon later called it a masterpiece of maneuver, and the victory preserved Prussian control of Silesia throughout the Seven Years' War.