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“If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse. ”
~ Walt Disney
Wikiquote (Walt Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, and animator.)
December 5th, 63 BC
Cicero gave the fourth and final Catiline Orations.
Wikipedia Painting: Cicero Denounces Catiline, fresco by Cesare Maccari, 1882–88 (Detail of Catiline in Maccari's fresco in Palazzo Madama); Cicero discovering the tomb of Archimedes by the Austrian baroque painter Martin Knoller (1725-1804), (painted in 1775, located in a private collection in Mannheim, Germany).
December 5th, 663
Catholic Ecumenical Councils:
663 - Fourth Council of Toledo takes place.
Wikipedia Photo: Toledo, Spain at sunset — The Alcázar on the left and Cathedral on the right dominate the skyline.
December 5th, 771
Charlemagne becomes the sole King of the Franks after the death of his brother Austrasian King Carloman I.
Wikipedia Painting: The coronation of Charlemagne / Carloman I - Charlemagne, Kings of The Franks; Statue équestre de Charlemagne, par Agostino Cornacchini (1725) - Basilique Saint-Pierre du Vatican, Italie..
December 5th, 1408
Emir Edigu of Golden Horde reaches Moscow.
Wikipedia Photo: Cathedral of the Annunciation was built in 1484-1489 by architects from Pskov according a grandiose plan of reconstruction of the royal residence started by Grand Prince of Moscow Ivan III (The Great) at the end of 15th century.
December 5th, 1484
Pope Innocent VIII issues the Summis desiderantes, a papal bull that deputizes Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger as inquisitors to root out alleged witchcraft in Germany and leads to one of the most oppressive witch hunts in European history.
Wikipedia Painting: A 19th-century depiction of Galileo before the Holy Office, by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury; The Tribunal of the Inquisition, by Francisco de Goya.
December 5th, 1492
Christopher Columbus becomes the first European to set foot on the island of Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Wikipedia Paintings: Christopher Columbus' fleet of three ships sets sail from Spain in 1492. credit Kean Collection / Hulton Archive / Getty Images; Christopher Columbus pointing to land in the New World; Romantic Painting of Christopher Columbus arriving to the Americas Primer desembarco de Cristóbal Colón en América, by Dióscoro Puebla 1862.
December 5th, 1496
King Manuel I of Portugal issues a decree of expulsion of "heretics" from the country.
Wikipedia Photo: Lisbon, Portugal, Padrão dos Descobrimentos - credit Aires Dos Santos.
December 5th, 1757
Seven Years' War:
1757 - Battle of Leuthen; Frederick the Great leads Prussian forces to a decisive victory over Austrian forces under Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine.
Wikipedia Painting: The Death of General Wolfe (1771) by Benjamin West, depicting the Battle of the Plains of Abraham; Battle of Hochkirch; Battle of Minorca of May 20, 1756, shortly after the French landing on Minorca; Siege of Kolberg (1761); Leibgarde battalion at Kolin, 1757; Battle of Zorndorf in August 1758 where Russian and Prussian armies suffered heavy casualties and both claimed a victory. Battle of Lagos, by Théodore Gudin.
December 5th, 1766
In London in the James Christie holds his first sale.
Wikipedia Painting: James Christie (1730–1803) was the founder of auction house Christie's, by Thomas Gainsborough.
December 5th, 1775
American Revolutionary War:
1775 - At Fort Ticonderoga, Henry Knox begins his historic transport of artillery to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Wikipedia Paintings: Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emanuel Leutz; Battle of the Chesapeake, French (left) and British (right) lines; Battle of Bunker Hill, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill by John Trumbull; The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 13, 1782, by John Singleton Copley; Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau at Yorktown, 1781; "The surrender at Saratoga" shows General Daniel Morgan in front of a French de Vallière 4-pounder; Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown by (John Trumbull, 1797).
Grand Union - Stars and Stripes Flag
December 5th, 1831
Former United States President John Quincy Adams takes his seat in the House of Representatives.
Wikipedia Painting: John Quincy Adams in a posthumous portrait created in 1858 by G.P.A. Healy.
December 5th, 1847
Jefferson Davis is elected to the United States Senate, his first political post.
Wikipedia Painting: Jefferson Davis is elected to the U.S. senate (his first political post), and one of the Confederate leaders of the American Civil War.
December 5th, 1848
California Gold Rush: In a message before the United States Congress, United States President James K. Polk confirms that large amounts of gold had been discovered in California.
Wikipedia Map of the Gold Regions of California. Showing the Routes via Chagres and Panama, Cape Horn. California.gov
December 5th, 1932
German-born Swiss physicist Albert Einstein flees Nazi Germany and is granted an American visa.
Wikipedia Picture: Albert Einstein Nobel Prize in Physics; Einstein at the age of three in 1882; The mathematician, physicist 1947; Einstein's theory of special relativity; Albert and Elsa Einstein in 1933; Conrad Habicht, Olympia Academy founders, Maurice Solovine and Einstein.
December 5th, 1933
Prohibition in the United States ends: Utah becomes the 36th U.S. state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75% of states needed to enact the amendment (this overturned the 18th Amendment which had made the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol illegal in the United States).
Wikipedia Photo: Volstead Act paves the way for Prohibition the following January, and ends on December 5th 1933 with the retification of the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution.
December 5th, 1934
Events preceding World War II in Europe:
1934 - Abyssinia Crisis; Italian troops attack Wal Wal in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), taking four days to capture the city.
1936 - The Soviet Union adopts a new constitution and the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic is established as a full Union Republic of the USSR.
World War II:
1941 - Battle of Moscow; Georgy Zhukov launches a massive Soviet counter-attack against the German army, with the biggest offensive launched against Army Group Centre.
1941 - Great Britain declares war on Finland, Hungary and Romania.
1943 - Operation Crossbow; U.S. Army Air Force begins attacking German's secret weapons bases.
Wikipedia Photo: Bombing of Dresden in World War II; August Schreitmüller's sculpture 'Goodness' surveys Dresden after a firestorm started by Allied bombers in 1945.
USS Bunker Hill was hit by kamikazes piloted by Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa and another airman on 11 May 1945. 389 personnel were killed or missing from a crew of 2,600; Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa, who flew his aircraft into the USS Bunker Hill during a Kamikaze mission on 11 May 1945; Kamikaze Missions - Lt Yoshinori Yamaguchi's Yokosuka D4Y3 (Type 33 Suisei) "Judy" in a suicide dive against USS Essex. The dive brakes are extended and the non-self-sealing port wing tank is trailing fuel vapor and/or smoke 25 November 1944.
Wikipedia Photo: Germans race towards Stalingrad. August 1942; Soviet children during a German air raid in the first days of the war, June 1941, by RIA Novosti archive; Soviet sniper Roza Shanina in 1944. About 400,000 Soviet women served in front-line duty units Caucasus Mountains, winter 1942/43; Finnish ski patrol: the invisible enemy of the Soviet Army with an unlimited supply of skis; Men of the German Engineers Corps cross a river which is swollen after the first autumn rains, to strengthen bridges linking the German positions on the central front in Russia. by Keystone / Getty Images. October 1942; Russian snipers fighting on the Leningrad front during a blizzard. Photo by Hulton Archive / Getty Images, 1943; German soldiers surrendering to the Russians in Stalingrad, the soldier holding the white flag of surrender is dressed in white so that there could be no doubt of his intentions, a Russian soldier is on the right of the photograph. by Keystone / Getty Images, January 1943.
December 5th, 1945
Flight 19 is lost in the Bermuda Triangle (Devil's Triangle).
Wikipedia Image: Flight 19; Artist's depiction of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers that disappeared on December 5, 1945 during a United States Navy overwater navigation training flight from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, Florida. credit © Lee Krystek.
December 5th, 1955
American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merge and form the Congress of Industrial Organizations merge and form the AFL-CIO.
Wikipedia Image: AFL-CIO Logo.
December 5th, 1955
E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Wikipedia Photo: Montgomery Bus Boycott; Rosa Parks in 1955, with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the background; Rosa Parks' arrest.
December 5th, 1964
Vietnam War:
1964 - For his heroism in battle earlier in the year, Captain Roger Donlon is awarded the first Medal of Honor of the war.
Wikipedia Photo: Vietnam War: Hovering U.S. Army helicopters pour machine gun fire into a tree line to cover the advance of South Vietnamese ground troops in an attack on a Viet Cong camp 18 miles north of Tay Ninh, northwest of Saigon near the Cambodian border, in Vietnam on March 1965. (AP Photo / Horst Faas) / Boston Globe
December 5th, 1969
The last of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) Nodes closed.
Wikipedia Photo: Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the world's first operational packet switching network and the progenitor of what was to become the global Internet.
December 5th, 2007
Westroads Mall shooting: A gunman opens fire with a semi-automatic rifle at an Omaha, Nebraska mall, killing eight people before taking his own life.
Wikipedia Photo: Westroads Mall massacre; Omaha, Nebraska, memorial placed in fron of the Von Maur Mall.