AP Highlight in History: On Dec. 3, 1984, more than 4,000 people died after a cloud of gas escaped from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India.
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On this date in:
1818
Illinois was admitted to the union as the 21st state.
1828
Andrew Jackson was elected the seventh president of the United States.
1857
Novelist Joseph Conrad was born in Berdychiv, Poland.
1947
"A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams opened on Broadway.
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1948
The House Un-American Activities Committee announced that former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers had produced microfilm of secret documents hidden inside a pumpkin on his Maryland farm.
1964
Police arrested some 800 students at the University of California at Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a massive sit-in.
1965
The album "Rubber Soul" by the Beatles was released.
1967
Surgeons in Cape Town, South Africa, led by Dr. Christiaan Barnard, performed the first human heart transplant. Louis Washkansky lived 18 days with the new heart.
1967
The 20th Century Limited, the famed luxury train, completed its final run from New York City to Chicago.
1979
Eleven people were killed in a crush of fans at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum before a rock concert by The Who.
1989
East German Communist leader Egon Krenz, the ruling Politburo and the party's Central Committee resigned.
1994
Elizabeth Glaser, who became an AIDS activist after she and her two children were infected with HIV via a blood transfusion, died at age 47.
1997
South Korea struck a deal with the International Monetary Fund for a $55 billion bailout of its foundering economy.
1999
Scientists failed to make contact with the Mars Polar Lander after it began its fiery descent toward the red planet; the spacecraft was presumed destroyed.
