Kenya declares independence from Britain


Updated:
Original:
Year
1963
Month Day
December 12

On December 12, 1963, Kenya declares its independence from Britain. The East African nation is freed from its colonial oppressors, but its struggle for democracy is far from over.

A decade before, in 1952, a rebellion known the Mau Mau Uprising had shaken the British colony. Not only did the British spend an estimated £55 million suppressing the uprising, they also carried out massacres of civilians, forced several hundred thousand Kenyans into concentration camps, and suspended civil liberties in some cities. The war ended in the imprisonment and execution of many of the rebels, but the British also understood that things had permanently changed. The colonial government introduced reforms making it easier for Kenyans to own land and grow coffee, a major cash crop previously reserved for European settlers. Kenyans were allowed to be elected to the Legislative Council beginning in 1957. With nationalist movements sweeping across the continent and with Britain no longer financially or militarily capable of sustaining its empire, the British government and representatives from the Kenyan independence movement met in 1960 to negotiate independence.

The agreement called for a 66-seat Legislative Council, with 33 seats reserved for black Kenyans and 20 for other ethnic groups. Jomo Kenyatta, a former leader of the Kenya African National Union whom the British had imprisoned on false charges after the Mau Mau Uprising, was sworn in as Kenya’s Prime Minister on June 1, 1963, in preparation for the transition to independence. The new nation’s flag was modeled on that of the Union and featured a Masai shield at its center.

Kenya’s problems did not end with independence. Fighting with ethnic Somali rebels in the north continued from the time of independence until 1969, and Kenyatta instituted one-party rule, leading a corrupt and autocratic government until his death in 1978. Questions about the fairness of its elections continue to plague the country, which instituted a new constitution in 2010. Kenyatta’s son, Uhuru, has been president since 2013.

Source

Da Vinci notebook sells for over $5M


Updated:
Original:
Year
1980
Month Day
December 12

On December 12, 1980, American oil tycoon Armand Hammer pays $5,126,000 at auction for a notebook containing writings by the legendary artist Leonardo da Vinci.

The manuscript, written around 1508, was one of some 30 similar books da Vinci produced during his lifetime on a variety of subjects. It contained 72 loose pages featuring some 300 notes and detailed drawings, all relating to the common theme of water and how it moved. Experts have said that da Vinci drew on it to paint the background of his masterwork, the Mona Lisa. The text, written in brown ink and chalk, read from right to left, an example of da Vinci’s favored mirror-writing technique. The painter Giuseppi Ghezzi discovered the notebook in 1690 in a chest of papers belonging to Guglielmo della Porto, a 16th-century Milanese sculptor who had studied Leonardo’s work. In 1717, Thomas Coke, the first earl of Leicester, bought the manuscript and installed it among his impressive collection of art at his family estate in England.

More than two centuries later, the notebook–by now known as the Leicester Codex–showed up on the auction block at Christie’s in London when the current Lord Coke was forced to sell it to cover inheritance taxes on the estate and art collection. In the days before the sale, art experts and the press speculated that the notebook would go for $7 to $20 million. In fact, the bidding started at $1.4 million and lasted less than two minutes, as Hammer and at least two or three other bidders competed to raise the price $100,000 at a time. The $5.12 million price tag was the highest ever paid for a manuscript at that time; a copy of the legendary Gutenberg Bible had gone for only $2 million in 1978. “I’m very happy with the price. I expected to pay more,” Hammer said later. “There is no work of art in the world I wanted more than this.” Lord Coke, on the other hand, was only “reasonably happy” with the sale; he claimed the proceeds would not be sufficient to cover the taxes he owed.

Hammer, the president of Occidental Petroleum Corporation, renamed his prize the Hammer Codex and added it to his valuable collection of art. When Hammer died in 1990, he left the notebook and other works to the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Several years later, the museum offered the manuscript for sale, claiming it was forced to take this action to cover legal costs incurred when the niece and sole heir of Hammer’s late wife, Frances, sued the estate claiming Hammer had cheated Frances out of her rightful share of his fortune. On November 11, 1994, the Hammer Codex was sold to an anonymous bidder–soon identified as Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft–at a New York auction for a new record high price of $30.8 million. Gates restored the title of Leicester Codex and has since loaned the manuscript to a number of museums for public display.

READ MORE: How Leonardo da Vinci’s Surprising Family Roots May Have Influenced His Work

Source

Stolen “Mona Lisa” recovered in Florence


Updated:
Original:
Year
1913
Month Day
December 12

Two years after it was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece The Mona Lisa is recovered inside Italian waiter Vincenzo Peruggia’s hotel room in Florence. Peruggia had previously worked at the Louvre and had participated in the heist with a group of accomplices dressed as Louvre janitors on the morning of August 21, 1911.

Leonardo da Vinci, one of the great Italian Renaissance painters, completed The Mona Lisa, a portrait of the wife of wealthy Florentine citizen Francesco del Gioconda, in 1504. The painting, also known as La Gioconda, depicts the figure of a woman with an enigmatic facial expression that is both aloof and alluring, seated before a visionary landscape.

After the recovery of The Mona Lisa, Peruggia was convicted in Italy of the robbery and spent just 14 months in jail. The Mona Lisa was eventually returned to the Louvre, where it remains today, exhibited behind bulletproof glass. It is arguably the most famous painting in the world and is seen by millions of visitors every year.

Source

“Tears Of A Clown” gives Smokey Robinson & The Miracles their first #1 pop hit


Updated:
Original:
Year
1970
Month Day
December 12

While Motown Records founder Berry Gordy surely deserves credit for establishing the creative philosophy and business strategy that turned his Detroit-based company into a hit-making machine in the 1960s, the inner workings of that machine during the company’s early years depended almost as much on the talents of a young man named William Robinson, Jr., better known to the world as “Smokey.”  Even if he’d never sung on a single Motown record, Smokey Robinson would still be regarded as one of the label’s most important figures purely on the basis of his production and songwriting work for acts like Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye and The Temptations. But Smokey Robinson did sing, of course, in his trademark falsetto, on some of Motown’s most beloved records: “Shop Around” (1960); “You Really Got A Hold On Me” (1962); “I Second That Emotion” (1967), to name only a few. After more than a decade of hits like these that never quite made it to the top of the charts, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles finally earned their first #1 hit when “Tears Of A Clown” topped the Billboard Hot 100 on December 12, 1970.

Like many of his other songs, “Tears Of A Clown” told a story to which any current or former lovelorn teenager could relate. Mining much the same emotional territory as he did in the song many consider to be his masterpiece, “The Tracks Of My Tears” (1965), Robinson showcased his ability in “Tears Of A Clown” to tell such a story using a catchy melody and clever wordplay—”Don’t let my glad expression/Give you the wrong impression“—without ever lapsing into corniness. It was that ability that led Bob Dylan to refer to Smokey Robinson as America’s “greatest living poet.”

Smokey Robinson’s association with Berry Gordy began even before Motown Records was founded, and it continued long after he stopped scoring hits of his own. Robinson’s “Shop Around” was the company’s first big hit (it was a Billboard #2 hit for The Miracles in 1960), and his “My Guy” (1964) and “My Girl” (1965) were #1 hits for Mary Wells and The Temptations, respectively. In 1967, Smokey Robinson became the vice president of Motown Records Corporation, a position he held for the next two decades until the company was sold to MCA in 1988.

Source

USS Panay sunk by Japanese


Updated:
Original:
Year
1937
Month Day
December 12

During the battle for Nanking in the Sino-Japanese War, the U.S. gunboat Panay is attacked and sunk by Japanese warplanes in Chinese waters. The American vessel, neutral in the Chinese-Japanese conflict, was escorting U.S. evacuees and three Standard Oil barges away from Nanking, the war-torn Chinese capital on the Yangtze River. After the Panay was sunk, the Japanese fighters machine-gunned lifeboats and survivors huddling on the shore of the Yangtze. Two U.S. sailors and a civilian passenger were killed and 11 personnel seriously wounded, setting off a major crisis in U.S.-Japanese relations.

Although the Panay‘s position had been reported to the Japanese as required, the neutral vessel was clearly marked, and the day was sunny and clear, the Japanese maintained that the attack was unintentional, and they agreed to pay $2 million in reparations. Two neutral British vessels were also attacked by the Japanese in the final days of the battle for Nanking.

Source

First radio transmission sent across the Atlantic Ocean


Updated:
Original:
Year
1901
Month Day
December 12

Italian physicist and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in sending the first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, disproving detractors who told him that the curvature of the earth would limit transmission to 200 miles or less. The message–simply the Morse-code signal for the letter “s”–traveled more than 2,000 miles from Poldhu in Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada.

Born in Bologna, Italy, in 1874 to an Italian father and an Irish mother, Marconi studied physics and became interested in the transmission of radio waves after learning of the experiments of the German physicist Heinrich Hertz. He began his own experiments in Bologna beginning in 1894 and soon succeeded in sending a radio signal over a distance of 1.5 miles. Receiving little encouragement for his experiments in Italy, he went to England in 1896. He formed a wireless telegraph company and soon was sending transmissions from distances farther than 10 miles. In 1899, he succeeded in sending a transmission across the English Channel. That year, he also equipped two U.S. ships to report to New York newspapers on the progress of the America’s Cup yacht race. That successful endeavor aroused widespread interest in Marconi and his wireless company.

Marconi’s greatest achievement came on December 12, 1901, when he received a message sent from England at St. John’s, Newfoundland. The transatlantic transmission won him worldwide fame. Ironically, detractors of the project were correct when they declared that radio waves would not follow the curvature of the earth, as Marconi believed. In fact, Marconi’s transatlantic radio signal had been headed into space when it was reflected off the ionosphere and bounced back down toward Canada. Much remained to be learned about the laws of the radio wave and the role of the atmosphere in radio transmissions, and Marconi would continue to play a leading role in radio discoveries and innovations during the next three decades.

In 1909, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics with the German radio innovator Ferdinand Braun. After successfully sending radio transmissions from points as far away as England and Australia, Marconi turned his energy to experimenting with shorter, more powerful radio waves. He died in 1937, and on the day of his funeral all British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) stations were silent for two minutes in tribute to his contributions to the development of radio.

Source

NFL rookie Gale Sayers ties single-game TD record


Updated:
Original:
Year
1965
Month Day
December 12

On December 12, 1965, the rookie running back Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears scores six touchdowns during a single game against the San Francisco 49ers at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, tying the National Football League (NFL) record for most touchdowns in a single game.

Born in 1943, Sayers was a two-time All-American at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. In 1965, he was drafted by both the Bears of the NFL and the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League (AFL). Though Kansas City offered him more money, Sayers chose to play for the Bears. He scored his first pro touchdown in the second game of the season, a losing effort against the Los Angeles Rams, and never looked back, amassing a total of 2,272 combined rushing, receiving and kick-return yards and 22 touchdowns, a record for a rookie. In the December 12 game against the 49ers, Sayers triumphed over muddy conditions to score his historic six touchdowns–four rushing, one receiving and one return–tying an NFL record held by Ernie Nevers of the Chicago Cardinals (1929) and Dub Jones of the Cleveland Browns (1951). Sayers was voted the NFL Rookie of the Year for 1965.

Due to serious knee injuries sustained in 1968 and 1970, Sayers’ NFL career lasted only six seasons, during which he twice led the league in rushing, in 1966 and 1969, and garnered the best-ever career kickoff-return average in the NFL (30.65 yards). After briefly attempting to play again after his second injury, he retired for good in 1972.

Sayers is also well-known for his close friendship with his fellow Bears halfback Brian Piccolo, who motivated Sayers through rehabilitation after his first knee injury and who died in 1970 after a struggle with cancer. The 1971 TV movie Brian’s Song, a sentimental favorite for many, was adapted from Sayers’ memoir, I Am Third. In 1977, the 34-year-old Sayers became the youngest player ever to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Source

JFK memorial album sets record for sales


Updated:
Original:
Year
1963
Month Day
December 12

On December 12, 1963, a vinyl long-playing record (“LP”) called John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Memorial Album sets a record for album sales. A total of 4 million copies sold in the first six days of its release.

The album, released on the Premier label, included recordings of some of Kennedy’s most memorable speeches, as well as memorial tributes to the president broadcast in the aftermath of his assassination on November 22, 1963. The recordings included excerpts from his inaugural address and his campaign debates with Richard Nixon as well as highlights from speeches on a variety of topics from civil rights to space to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Some of Kennedy’s most enduring quotes were captured on the album including “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” (from his inaugural) and “ich bin ein Berliner” (translated as “I too, am a Berliner”) from a speech he delivered at the Berlin Wall during the height of the Cold War.

Each copy of the album cost 99 cents and the proceeds went to the Joseph Kennedy, Jr., Foundation for Mental Retardation. Although Kennedy remains one of the most beloved and documented presidents in American history, the album itself has not yet garnered much value as a collector’s item. In 2006, a mint copy of the album fetched a mere $15.00 on several internet auction sites. This may be because most of Kennedy’s speeches are now accessible on the internet.

The Premier record was not the only one released in honor of Kennedy in 1963. An LP documentary called The Presidential Years1960 – 1963 sold a respectable 1 million copies in its first six days, also at 99 cents per copy.

Source

“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” opens in theaters


Updated:
Original:
Year
1967
Month Day
December 12

On December 12, 1967, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a groundbreaking movie about an interracial romantic relationship starring Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton, opens in theaters.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner followed the story of a young white woman (Houghton) who brings her fiance (Poitier), an African-American doctor, home to meet her parents, played by Hepburn and Tracy in their last film together. (Off-screen, the couple had a long romance, although Tracy was married to another woman. He died on June 10, 1967, a short time after the movie wrapped.) Directed by Stanley Kramer, who was known for his “message” films–including Inherit the Wind (about the Scopes “monkey” trial) and Judgment at Nuremberg (about Nazi crimes during World War II)–Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner examines the reactions of the young couple’s various family members and friends to their relationship. Until the landmark 1967 civil-rights case Loving vs. Virginia, which was decided just five months before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released, marriage between blacks and whites was still illegal in parts of America, and Kramer’s film was notable for its willingness to tackle this taboo topic. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and collected two Oscars, including Best Actress for Hepburn, the second of her career.

Hepburn (1907-2003) won four Academy Awards (out of 12 total nominations) over the course of her long career, more than any other actress. She collected her first Best Actress Oscar for 1933’s Morning Glory, with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and went on to earn Best Actress Oscar nominations for Alice Adams (1935), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), which marked her first movie with Spencer Tracy, The African Queen (1951), Summertime (1955), The Rainmaker (1956), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962). The legendary screen star followed her Oscar win for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner with Best Actress golden statues for The Lion in Winter (1968) and On Golden Pond (1981). Her final feature film was 1994’s Love Affair, with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.

Sidney Poitier, born on February 27, 1927, earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for 1958’s The Defiant Ones, directed by Stanley Kramer and co-starring Tony Curtis and Theodore Bikel. For his performance as a handyman who builds a chapel for a group of German nuns in 1963’s Lilies of the Field, he became the first black man ever to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. Among Poitier’s other well-known films are To Sir, With Love (1967) and In the Heat of the Night (1967).

Spencer Tracy (1900-1967) took home his first Best Actor Oscar for 1937’s Captains Courageous, having been previously nominated in the category for 1936’s San Francisco. He won again for 1938’s Boys Town and went on to earn nominations for Father of the Bride (1950), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Old Man and the Sea (1958), Inherit the Wind (1960) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Tracy received his ninth and final Best Actor Oscar nomination for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Source

Real estate mogul Leona Helmsley sentenced to prison


Updated:
Original:
Year
1989
Month Day
December 12

Leona Helmsley, nicknamed the “Queen of Mean” by the press, receives a four-year prison sentence, 750 hours of community service, and a $7.1 million tax fraud fine in New York. For many, Helmsley became the object of loathing and disgust when she quipped that “only the little people pay taxes.”

Leona’s husband, Harry, was one of the world’s wealthiest real estate moguls, with an estimated $5 billion to $10 billion in property holdings. The couple lived in a dazzling penthouse overlooking Central Park and also maintained an impressive mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Leona, who operated the Helmsley Palace on Madison Avenue, was severely disliked by her employees.

Though they lavishly furnished their homes and hotel, the Helmsleys were curiously diligent about evading the required payments and taxes for their purchases. Much of their personal furniture was written off as a business expense, and there were claims that the Helmsleys extorted free furnishings from their suppliers. Contractors were hardly ever paid on time-if at all-and many filed lawsuits to recover even just a portion of what they were owed. Leona reportedly also purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars of jewelry in New York City but insisted that empty boxes be sent to Connecticut so that she could avoid the sales tax.

Given her offensive personality, many were quite pleased by Leona’s legal troubles. Even celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz could not win her immunity from the law. Following her conviction, Federal Judge John Walker publicly reprimanded her, saying, “Your conduct was the product of naked greed [and] the arrogant belief that you were above the law.” Leona Helmsley was sent to jail in 1992 and was released in 1994. In 2002, Helmsley, whose husband Harry died in 1997, again found herself in court after being sued by Charles Bell, a former employee who accused Leona of firing him soley because he was homosexual. A jury ordered Helmsley to pay him more than $11 million in damages.

Helmsley died in August 2007 at age 87. She famously left $12 million to her dog, Trouble.

Source