December 7
1776 –At age 19, Gilbert du Motier Marquis de Lafayette, enters service in the American Continental Army at the rank of Major General, the next to highest officer rank at the time.
1787 – Delaware becomes the first state to ratify the United States Constitution.
1842 – The New York Philharmonic Orchestra performs its first concert, opening on lower Broadway, with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 conducted by Ureli Corelli Hill.
1917 – Duri9ng World War I, the U.S. declares war on Austria-Hungary.
1932 – German born Swiss physicist Albert Einstein is granted an American visa.
1941 – The Imperial Japanese Navy, launching 414 attack and fighter aircraft from the fleet carriers, Hiryu, Soryu, Shokaku, Zuikaku, Akagi and Kaga, carry out what appears to be a surprise attack on the United States Pacific Fleet, Army and Marine air and ground forces at Pearl Harbor, and elsewhere on Oahu island, Hawaii.
1946 – A fire at the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia kills 119 people, the deadliest hotel fire in U.S. history.
1965 – Roman Catholic Pope Paul VI and Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras I simultaneously revoke mutual excommunications that had been in place since ‘The Great Schism’ of 1054 A.D.
1972 – Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, with astronauts
Eugene A. Cernan, Ronald E. Evans and Harrison H. Schmitt aboard the Command Module America launches from Complex LC-39 at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral to explore the Taurus–Littrow valley of the Mare Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity. While about 18,000 miles on the way out, a series of full circumference pictures of Earth are taken, one released as “The Blue Marble”.
1982 – In Texas, Charles Brooks, Jr., becomes the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the United States.
1987 – Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771, a British Aerospace 146-200A, crashes near Paso Robles, California, killing all 43 passengers and crew on board, after a disgruntled passenger shoots his ex boss traveling on the flight, then shoots both pilots and steers the plane into the ground.
1993 – Passenger Colin Ferguson murders 6 people and injures 19 others on the Lon Island rail Road, in Nassau County, New York, before being tackled by other passengers.
1995 – Launched 6 years earlier from Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-34, the Galileo space probe arrives at Jupiter.
2005 – Rigoberto Alpizar, a passenger on American Airlines Flight 924 who allegedly claimed to have a bomb, is shot and killed by U.S. Air Marshals at Miami International Airport.
2020 – Retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Chuck Yeager dies, age 97, in a Los Angeles hospital.