Thomas Paine is arrested in France for treason. Though the charges against him were never detailed, he had been tried in absentia on December 26 and convicted. Before moving to France, Paine was an instrumental figure in the American Revolution as the author of Common Sense, writings used by George Washington to inspire the American troops. Paine moved to Paris to become involved with the French Revolution, but the chaotic political climate turned against him, and he was arrested and jailed for crimes against the country.

Future President Woodrow Wilson is born in Staunton, Virginia on December 28, 1856. He attended private schools and graduated from Princeton University in 1879 before studying law at the University of Virginia and earning his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He was hired by Princeton as a professor of political science in 1899 and went on to serve as the institution’s president from 1902 to 1910. As Princeton’s head administrator, he revolutionized its teaching program and was largely responsible for elevating Princeton to its current prestige. Wilson’s management of Princeton also earned the attention of Democratic Party leaders, who encouraged him to run for political office. Wilson once admitted that if he hadn’t entered politics he would have been happy to live out his life teaching and playing golf, his favorite past time.

At dawn, the most destructive earthquake in recorded European history strikes the Straits of Messina in southern Italy, leveling the cities of Messina in Sicily and Reggio di Calabria on the Italian mainland. The earthquake and tsunami it caused killed an estimated 100,000 people.

On December 28, 1938, the silent-film star Florence Lawrence dies by suicide in Beverly Hills. She was 52 years old. Though she was best known for her roles in nearly 250 films, Lawrence was also an inventor: She designed the first “auto signaling arm,” a mechanical turn signal, along with the first mechanical brake signal. She did not patent these inventions, however, and as a result she received no credit for—or profit from—either one.

On December 28, 1958, the Baltimore Colts defeat the New York Giants, 23-17, in overtime in the NFL Championship Game—a back-and-forth thriller that later is billed as "The Greatest Game Ever Played.” The nationally televised championship—the league's first overtime contest—is watched by 45 million viewers and fuels the NFL's meteroric rise in popularity.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “literary investigation” of the police-state system in the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, is published in the original Russian in Paris. The book was the first of the three-volume work. The brutal and uncompromising description of political repression and terror was quickly translated into many languages and was published in the United States just a few months later.

On December 28, 1973, President Richard Nixon signs the Endangered Species Act into law. The act, which Nixon called for the previous year, is considered one of the most significant and influential environmental laws in American history.

Nine young people die in a crowd stampede in New York City on December 28, 1991. The event was a charity basketball gamed headlined by hip-hop stars Heavy D. and Puff Daddy (now known as P.Diddy).