“A Streetcar Named Desire” opens on Broadway

Illinois achieves full statehood on this day. Though Illinois presented unique challenges to immigrants unaccustomed to the soil and vegetation of the area, it grew to become a bustling and densely populated state. The prairie lands east of the Mississippi and west of Lake Michigan were inhabited for generations by the Illinois nation, a confederation […]

On December 3, 1967, 53-year-old Louis Washkansky receives the first human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. Washkansky, a South African grocer dying from chronic heart disease, received the transplant from Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old woman who was fatally injured in a car accident. Surgeon Christiaan Barnard, who trained at […]

On December 3, 1979, the last Pacer rolls off the assembly line at the American Motors Corporation (AMC) factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin. When the car first came on the market in 1975, it was a sensation, hailed as the car of the future. “When you buy any other car,” ads said, “all you end up […]

Five-year-old Melissa Brannen disappears without a trace from a Christmas party in Fairfax, Virginia. The intensive forensic investigation that followed led to the arrest of party guest Caleb Hughes and, in the process, demonstrated how technically advanced crime solving had become. After interviewing everyone who had been at the party, investigators determined that Hughes had […]

On December 3, 1992, the first SMS text message in history is sent: Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old engineer, uses a personal computer to send the text message “Merry Christmas” via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague. Papworth, while working for the now-defunct Anglo-French IT services company Sema Group Telecoms, was part of […]