December 12

1098 – After their success of taking and defending Antioch, forces of the First Crusade besiege the city of Ma’arra in modern Syria.

1787 – Pennsylvania becomes the 2nd state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

1862 – The City-Class ironclad USS Cairo strikes a Confederate naval mine and sinks on the Yazoo River.

1917 – Father Edward J. Flanagan founds Boys Town, Nebraska as a farm village for wayward boys

1937 – Japanese aircraft bomb and sink the U.S. gunboat USS Panay on the Yangtze river in China

1941 – Jesús Villamor and 4 other Filipino pilots, flying Boeing P-26 ‘Peashooters‘ of the 6th Tactical Fighter Squadron of the United States Army Forces in the Far East Air Force, fend off 54 Japanese A6M Zero fighters raiding Batangas Field, Philippines.

1979 – An earthquake of 8.2 magnitude occurs just offshore from the border between Ecuador and Colombia, near the port city of Tumaco, with Columbia’s Nariño Department on its southern Pacific coast border, hardest hit.

1985 – Arrow Air Flight 1285, a McDonnell Douglas DC-8, crashes after takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland, killing all 256 people on board, including 236 members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division returning from a peace keeping deployment in the Sanai.

2000 – In the case of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court ends the legal question of which candidate won the election in Florida, finding for George Bush

2015 – The Paris Agreement relating to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is adopted.