01011207 This Day In History, December 7

43 BC: Marcus Tullius, known as Cicero, statesman and writer, remembered as Rome's greatest thinker and writer, had his head and right hand chopped off by Mark Antony's soldiers. Mark Antony and Cleopatra (see The Cleopatra Connection) were later defeated by Octavian, who, later known as Caesar Augustus, declared the census that caused the fulfillment of the prophecy that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem (see A History Of Jerusalem: Pompey And The Caesars and Does Rome Have Christ's Birth Certificate?).

983: German King Otto III ascended to the throne of the "Holy Roman Empire" (see The Holy Roman Empire Of The German Nation). Considering himself to be a Roman emperor, Otto crowned his cousin Bruno as Pope Gregory V (see Emperors and Popes).

1729: 3,000,000 acres of land in Ontario was surrendered by native Americans of the Mississauga tribe (the city of Mississauga, adjacent to Toronto, is named after the Mississauga people).

1815: Michel Ney, one of Napoleon's marshals, was executed by firing squad for alleged treason.

1817: British naval officer William Bligh died in London at age 63. He is best known as captain of the Bounty when its famous mutiny occurred in 1789.

1916: Herbert Asquith resigned as British Prime Minister and was replaced by David Lloyd George, the war secretary, with a commitment to wage all-out war on Germany (listen to our Sermon The European World Wars).

1931: Adolf Hitler's Nazis announced that they would ensure "Nordic dominance" in Germany by sterilizing "mongrel" races (see Presidential Quotes On War, Terrorism, Religion).

1941: Japanese forces made a surprise attack on the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 2,334 U.S. servicemen were killed, 4 battleships and 188 planes were destroyed. The attack on Pearl Harbor was one of many near-simultaneous attacks carried out by the Japanese navy on British, Dutch, Australian and U.S. bases and colonies all across the Pacific.

1941: Canada declared war on Japan. The Canadian action came only hours after the Japanese attack on U.S. and British bases and colonies in the Pacific. The declaration made Canada the first of the western allies to officially enter a state of war with Japan (Canada was already at war with Germany, having entered the Second World War with Britain at the start of the conflict in September 1939). The U.S., Britain and the other allied countries declared war the next day.

1945: The Microwave oven was patented.

1953: David Ben Gurion, who had been Prime Minister of Israel (see Israel In History and Prophecy: Israel Of Judah) since its foundation in 1948, resigned to retire.

1965: Pope Paul VI and Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras I simultaneously lifted the excommunications on each other that caused the division of the Eastern and Western churches of Rome in 1054.

1970: West Germany and Poland signed a pact renouncing the use of force to settle disputes, recognizing the Oder-Neisse River as Poland's western frontier, and acknowledging the transfer to Poland of 40,000 square miles of former German territory.

1988: In Armenia, an earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale killed more than 25,000 people.

1993: The U.S. government said that it had concealed 204 nuclear blasts at its Nevada test site, more than one-fifth of total tests, to keep the Soviet Union in the dark about the U.S. arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

2003: The Conservative Party of Canada came into existence after the merger of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.