📜 This Day in History

December 11

• 861The Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil was assassinated by his guards, beginning the Anarchy at Samarra.
• 1886The London-based football club Arsenal, then known as Dial Square, played their first match on the Isle of Dogs.
• 1920Irish War of Independence: Following an Irish Republican Army ambush of an Auxiliary patrol, British forces burned and looted numerous buildings in Cork.
• 1972Apollo 17, the last Apollo mission, landed on the Moon.
• 2006Criticized worldwide as a "meeting of Holocaust deniers", the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust opened in Tehran.
• 2024Urfan Sharif and Beinash Batool were found guilty of the murder of Sara Sharif, and were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Born on this day

• 1803Hector Berlioz, French composer, conductor, and critic (died 1869)
• 1843Robert Koch, German microbiologist and physician, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1910)
• 1911Naguib Mahfouz, Egyptian author, playwright, and screenwriter, Nobel Prize laureate (died 2006)
• 1918Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer, Nobel Prize laureate (died 2008)