Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/December 11

This is a list of selected December 11 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 10	December 12 →

Staging area

Images

Use only ONE image at a time

• 
  Insignia for Apollo 17
• 
  Lunar Roving Vehicle, driven by Eugene Cernan
• 
  The Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 
  The Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal fire, seen from a vantage point between the Northgate and 3Com buildings
• 
  Felipe Calderón
• 
  Bernard Madoff
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  Workers clearing rubble in Cork following the fires
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  Parliament House on fire

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
Republic Day in Burkina Faso (1958)	refimprove section
220 – Emperor Xian abdicated the throne and the Han dynasty broke apart, beginning the Three Kingdoms period in China.	refimprove section
630 – Muslims led by Muhammad conquered Mecca from the Quraysh.	multiple issues
1282 – Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last independent Prince of Wales to rule in Wales, was killed in an ambush.	refimprove
1868 – Revolutionary Vasil Levski began his first tour around Ottoman Bulgaria, laying the foundations for a national uprising against the Ottoman occupation.	appears on February 18
1906 – The battleship HMS Dreadnought, representing such a marked advance in naval technology that her name came to be associated with an entire generation of battleships, was commissioned into the Royal Navy.	appears on February 10
1931 – The British Parliament enacted the Statute of Westminster, giving the option of complete legislative independence to the Irish Free State, Newfoundland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.	refimprove section
1946 – The United Nations General Assembly created UNICEF, originally to help provide emergency food and health care to children in countries that had been devastated by World War II.	needs cleanup, outdated
1962 – Convicted murderers Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas became the last two persons to be executed in Canada.	lots of CN tags (14)
1971 – The Libertarian Party of the United States was founded, currently one of the largest of America's alternative political parties.	refimprove sections
1981 – Salvadoran Civil War: Over 800 civilians were killed by Salvadoran armed forces in an anti-guerrilla campaign.	Dates unclear
1980 – The United States Congress enacted the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act to protect people, families, communities and others from heavily contaminated toxic waste sites that have been abandoned.	refimprove/unreferenced section
1990 – The Party of Labour of Albania allowed other political parties to form, the first step in the nation's fall of communism.	refimprove
1994 – The First Chechen War began as Russian forces entered into the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya to control the secessionist movement.	refimprove section, ISBNs missing
2005 – A series of explosions, described as the biggest of its kind in peacetime Europe, rocked the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England.	needs update
Subramania Bharati |b|1882	refimprove

Eligible

• 861 – The Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil was assassinated by his guards, beginning the Anarchy at Samarra.
• 1640 – A crowd of 1,500 people presented the Root and Branch petition to the Long Parliament, calling for abolishing the episcopacy of the Church of England.
• 1899 – Second Boer War: In the Battle of Magersfontein, Boers defeated British forces trying to relieve the Siege of Kimberley.
• 1907 – The original Parliament House in Wellington, New Zealand, was destroyed by fire (pictured).
• 1925 – Pope Pius XI promulgated the encyclical Quas primas, establishing the Feast of Christ the King.
• 1972 – Apollo 17, the last Apollo mission, landed on the Moon.
• 1998 – With its pilot believed to have been suffering from spatial disorientation, Thai Airways Flight 261 crashed in a swamp on approach to Surat Thani Airport, resulting in 101 deaths.
• 2005 – Demonstrations in Cronulla, a suburb of Sydney, against recent violence towards locals turned into a series of race riots.
• 2006 – The first action in the Mexican drug war began as President Felipe Calderón ordered Mexican soldiers and Federal Police units into the state of Michoacán.
• 2008 – American stockbroker Bernie Madoff was arrested and charged with securities fraud in a $64.8 billion Ponzi scheme, the largest in history.
• Born/died: | Al-Fath ibn Khaqan |d|861| Pieter Nuyts |d|1655| George Mason |b|1725| Colley Cibber |d|1757| Hector Berlioz |b|1803| Webster Paulson |b|1837| Max Born |b|1882| Max-Hellmuth Ostermann |b|1917 |Emmanuelle Charpentier |b|1968 | Anne Rice |d|2021

Notes

• The Blue Marble appears on December 7, so Apollo 17 should not appear in the same year
• Newcastle United F.C. appears on December 9, so Arsenal should not appear in the same year

December 11

Old Well at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• 1789 – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (structure pictured), one of the oldest public universities in the United States and the only one to award degrees in the 18th century, was chartered.
• 1886 – The London-based football club Arsenal, then known as Dial Square, played their first match on the Isle of Dogs.
• 1920 – Irish War of Independence: Following an Irish Republican Army ambush of an Auxiliary patrol, British forces burned and looted numerous buildings in Cork.
• 2006 – Criticized worldwide as a "meeting of Holocaust deniers", the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust opened in Tehran.

• Averroes (d. 1198)
• Kamehameha V (b. 1830; d. 1872)
• Carl von In der Maur (d. 1913)
• Big Mama Thornton (b. 1926)

More anniversaries:

• December 10
• December 11
• December 12