December 13 ...

In 1577 Sir Francis Drake of England set out with five ships on a nearly three-year journey that would take him around the world. In 1642 New Zealand was discovered by Dutch navigator Abel Tasman. In 1769 Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, received its charter. In 1862 Union forces suffered a major defeat to the Confederates at the Battle of Fredericksburg. In 1843 Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol was first published. In 1913 the Federal Reserve System was established; also on this day, authorities in Florence, Italy, announced that the "Mona Lisa" had been recovered. The work was stolen from the Louvre in Paris in 1911. In 1918 President Wilson arrived in France, becoming the first chief executive to visit Europe while in office. In 1928 George Gershwin's musical work An American in Paris had its premiere, at Carnegie Hall in New York. In 1937 Japanese forces captured the Chinese city of Nanking (Nanjing); an estimated 200,000 Chinese were killed over the next six weeks, in what has become known as the "Rape of Nanking." In 1944 the US cruiser Nashville was badly damaged in a Japanese kamikaze attack that claimed more than 130 lives. In 1964 in El Paso, Texas, President Johnson and Mexican President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz set off an explosion that diverted the Rio Grande, reshaping the US-Mexican border and ending a century-old dispute. In 1981 authorities in Poland imposed martial law in a crackdown on the Solidarity labor movement. (Martial law formally ended in 1983.) In 1989 South African President F.W. de Klerk met for the first time with imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, at de Klerk's office in Cape Town. In 2003 Saddam Hussein was captured by US forces while hiding in a hole under a farmhouse in Adwar, Iraq, near his hometown of Tikrit.