1 of 3 | On December 10, 2013, Mary Barra became CEO of General Motors, the first woman to head a major automotive company. File Photo by Olivier Douliery/UPI | License Photo
Dec. 10 (UPI) — On this date in history:
In 1768, Encyclopedia Britannica was first published.
In 1817, Mississippi joined the United States as the 20th state.
In 1869, the Territory of Wyoming granted women the right to vote.
In 1898, Spain signed a treaty officially ending the Spanish-American War. It gave Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States.
In 1901, the Nobel Prizes were first awarded in Oslo, Norway, and Stockholm, Sweden.
In 1906, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt became the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Photo courtesy the Museum of Photography at the University of California
In 1936, Britain’s King Edward VIII abdicated to marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson. His brother succeeded to the throne as King George VI.
In 1941, Japanese troops landed on northern Luzon in the Philippines in the early days of World War II.
In 1984, the National Science Foundation reported the discovery of the first planet outside the solar system — 21 million light-years from Earth.
In 1990, communists won a major victory in the first postwar multiparty elections in the Yugoslavian republics of Serbia and Montenegro.
In 2006, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the former president of Chile who seized power in a bloody 1973 coup and ruled the nation for 17 years, died at the age of 91.
File Photo by Cristobal Arjona/UPI
In 2009, President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, urging attendees to reach for the world “as it ought to be.”
In 2010, Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, represented by a portrait and an empty chair, was honored during the Nobel presentations in Oslo, Norway. Liu was in a northeastern China prison serving an 11-year sentence for subversion and his family was forbidden from attending the ceremony.
In 2013, Mary Barra became CEO of General Motors, the first woman to head a major automotive company.
In 2021, an outbreak of 71 tornadoes struck portions of Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee and Kentucky on this day and Dec. 11, 2021. The destructive storms killed at least 89 people and caused nearly $4 billion in damage.
In 2022, Grant Wahl, a sports journalist and soccer analyst, died while covering the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.