This is a list of selected December 7 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.
Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article or picture of the day.
To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.
| ← December 6 | December 8 → |
|---|
Images
Use only ONE image at a time
-
Japanese naval aircraft prepare to take off from the aircraft carrier Shōkaku. -
West Virginia, Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941 -
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor -
Jesse James -
Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, Taipei -
"The Blue Marble" -
HMS Spiteful -
Bust of Cicero
Ineligible
| Blurb | Reason |
|---|---|
| Day of the Little Candles in Colombia; | unreferenced section |
| Armed Forces Flag Day in India; | lots of citations needed |
| 1724 – In Toruń, Royal Prussia, Polish authorities executed the city's mayor and nine other Lutheran officials following tensions between Protestants and Catholics. | lots of CN tags (5) for length |
| 1787 – Delaware became the first U.S. state to ratify the United States Constitution. | refimprove section |
| 1815 – Michel Ney, Marshal of France, was executed by a firing squad near Paris' Jardin du Luxembourg for supporting Napoleon. | lots of CN tags (10) |
| 1904 – Comparative trials began between HMS Spiteful, the first warship powered solely by fuel oil, and a similar Royal Navy ship burning coal. | date not in article |
| 1941 – World War II: The Imperial Japanese Navy made a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, intending to neutralize the United States Pacific Fleet from influencing the war Japan was planning to wage in Southeast Asia. | lots of CN tags (12) |
| 1946 – The deadliest hotel fire in U.S. history happened at the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. | refimprove section |
| 1949 – Chinese Civil War: The government of the Republic of China relocated from Mainland China to Taipei on the island of Taiwan. | cleanup list |
| 1965 – East–West Schism: Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople and Pope Paul VI issued a declaration, simultaneously lifted mutual excommunications that had been in place since 1054. | summarize section, refimprove section |
| 1972 – The crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft took the photograph "The Blue Marble", the first clear image of an illuminated face of Earth, on their way to the Moon. | refimprove section |
| 1987 – A former airline employee on Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 shot his former boss and the pilots and deliberately crashed the plane near Cayucos, California, leaving no survivors. | refimprove section |
Eligible
- 43 BC – Cicero, widely considered one of ancient Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists, was killed after having been proscribed as an enemy of the state.
- 1837 – British troops swiftly defeated rebels led by William Lyon Mackenzie and Anthony Van Egmond at the Battle of Montgomery's Tavern, the only major confrontation of the Upper Canada Rebellion.
- 1869 – American outlaw Jesse James committed his first confirmed bank robbery in Gallatin, Missouri.
- 1942 – Second World War: A small unit of Royal Marines launched Operation Frankton, in which they damaged six ships in the port of Bordeaux in German-occupied France.
- 1972 – Construction workers found the remains of Martin Bormann and Ludwig Stumpfegger near Lehrter Station in Berlin, ending a decades-long search after Bormann's conviction in absentia at the Nuremberg trials.
- 1988 – A 6.8 Ms earthquake struck the Spitak region of Armenia, killing at least 25,000 people.
- 1993 – A passenger murdered six people and injured nineteen others on the Long Island Rail Road in Garden City, New York.
- 2005 – Spanish authorities captured Croatian Army general Ante Gotovina, who was wanted for war crimes committed during the Croatian War of Independence; he was eventually cleared of all charges.
- 2007 – A crane barge that had broken free from a tugboat crashed into an oil tanker near Daesan, South Korea, causing the country's worst-ever oil spill.
- 2015 – The JAXA space probe Akatsuki entered into orbit around Venus to study the planet's atmosphere, five years after its first attempt failed.
- Born/died this day: | Charles Garnier |d|1649| Richard Bellingham |d|1672| Charles Saunders |d|1775| Theodor Schwann |b|1810| Joseph Cook |b|1860| Hamilton Fish III |b|1888| Noam Chomsky |b|1928| Martha Layne Collins |b|1936| Barbara Howard |d|2002| Jeane Kirkpatrick |d|2006
December 7: Feast day of Saint Ambrose (Christianity); National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day in the United States (1941)
- 574 – Suffering from mental illness, Eastern Roman emperor Justin II had his general Tiberius proclaimed Caesar, adopting him as his own son.
- 1862 – American Civil War: The Battle of Prairie Grove ended a Confederate attempt to regain control of northwestern Arkansas.
- 1936 – Australian cricketer Jack Fingleton became the first player to score centuries in four consecutive Test innings.
- 1975 – The Indonesian military invaded East Timor under the pretext of anti-colonialism, beginning an occupation.
- 1995 – The Galileo spacecraft (illustration shown) arrived at Jupiter, a little more than six years after it was launched by Space Shuttle Atlantis during Mission STS-34.
- Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (b. 903)
- Willa Cather (b. 1873)
- Nicholas Hoult (b. 1989)