On This Day in History - December 1st - Almanac

This is Tuesday, Dec. 1, the 336th day of 2020 with 30 to follow.

The moon is waning. Morning stars are Mars, Mercury, Neptune, Uranus and Venus. Evening stars are Jupiter, Mars, Saturn and Uranus.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Sagittarius. They include French wax-figure sculptor Marie Tussaud in 1761; baseball Hall of Fame member Walter Alston in 1911; singer/actor Mary Martin in 1913; singer Lou Rawls in 1933; comedian/filmmaker Woody Allen in 1935 (age 85); golf Hall of Fame member Lee Trevino in 1939 (age 81); comedian Richard Pryor in 1940; Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member John Densmore in 1944 (age 76); singer/actor Bette Midler in 1945 (age 75); actor Treat Williams in 1951 (age 69); actor Deep Roy in 1957 (age 63); model Carol Alt in 1960 (age 60); actor Golden Brooks in 1970 (age 50); comedian Sarah Silverman in 1970 (age 50); Matthew Shepard, University of Wyoming student killed because he was gay, in 1976; actor Dean O'Gorman in 1976 (age 44); actor Riz Ahmed in 1982 (age 38); rapper Yolandi Visser in 1984 (age 36); singer/actor Janelle Monae in 1985 (age 35); rock singer Tyler Joseph in 1988 (age 32); actor Zoe Kravitz in 1988 (age 32); TV personality/animal conservationist Robert Irwin in 2003 (age 17).

On this date in history:

In 1891, the game of basketball was invented when James Naismith, a physical education teacher at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., put peach baskets at the opposite ends of a gym and gave students soccer balls to toss into them.

In 1903, the world's first drive-in gasoline station opened for business in Pittsburgh.

In 1943, ending a "Big Three" meeting in Tehran, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Russian Premier Josef Stalin pledged a concerted effort to defeat Nazi Germany.

In 1950, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, in a cable to United Press, said that his U.N. forces were fighting in Korea against "military odds without precedent in history," and warned that failure to meet the issue there will leave it to "be fought, and possibly lost, on the battlefields of Europe."

In 1953, the first Playboy magazine was published. Marilyn Monroe was on the cover. The magazine temporarily ended the practice of including nudity in its pages in 2016, but reintroduced it one year later.

In 1955, Rosa Parks, a black woman, was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus, signaling, along with its resulting bus boycott and related events, the birth of the modern civil rights movement.

In 1959, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a treaty banning military activity on Antarctica, reserving the continent for scientific research.

In 1990, workers broke through in the tunnel under the English Channel for the first time. The Chunnel connecting Britain and France opened four years later.

In 2005, same-sex marriage became legal in South Africa when the country's Constitutional Court ruled that laws banning it were unconstitutional.

In 2011, Iceland became the first Western European country to recognize a Palestinian sovereign state.

In 2016, Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn was formally proclaimed King Maha X of Thailand, the country's first new monarch in seven decades.

In 2017, Michael Flynn, former national security adviser in the Trump administration, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russia's alleged election meddling.

In 2018, the animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse had its world premiere in Los Angeles. The move went on to win Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards.

A thought for the day: "True champions aren't always the ones that win, but those with the most guts." -- Mia Hamm