On the 23rd December 1823, the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, more commonly known as “The Night Before Christmas” was published anonymously in the New York Sentinel.

The origin for the scandal lay in the discovery of a ripped-up letter in a waste basket at the German Embassy in Paris.

On the 21st December 1913, the first modern crossword puzzle was printed in the New York World newspaper.

In November 1923 Hitler was imprisoned after he led a failed coup against the Weimar Government by trying to seize power in the Bavarian city of Munich.

On the 19th December 1843, Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol was published in London by Chapman & Hall.

French aristocrat Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat set the world’s first officially recognised land speed record.

On the 17th December 1903, American brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully made the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight.

The British government had passed the Tea Act seven months earlier on 10 May, partly in an attempt to support the struggling East India Company.

On the 15th December 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution came into effect, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment which had made the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol illegal.

In the medieval period the Netherlands, whose name literally means ‘lower countries’, consisted of large areas of boggy land around the winding estuaries of three of the largest rivers in Europe.

On the 13th December 1937, the Nanking Massacre began at the end of the Battle of Nanking – part of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Kenya had been under British rule since the 19th Century, and since becoming a colony in 1920 African demands for a greater role in politics had grown.

On the 11th December 1936, King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom announced his abdication in a worldwide radio broadcast.

It is estimated that up to a quarter of a million different units of measurement were in use throughout France at eve of the Revolution in 1789, and that these differed not only from trade…