Today in History.....December 23

On this day in …

* 1620, construction began of the first permanent European settlement in New England, one week after the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth harbor in present day Massachusetts

* 1783, George Washington resigned as commander-in-chief of the Army and retired to his home at Mount Vernon, Virginia

* 1913, the Federal Reserve System was established.

* 1941, during World War Two, American forces on Wake Island surrendered to the Japanese

* 1947, the transistor was invented, leading to a revolution in communications and electronics

* 1948, former Japanese premier Hideki Tojo and six other Japanese war leaders were executed in Tokyo

* 1968, 82 crew members of the U-S intelligence ship Pueblo were released by North Korea, eleven months after they had been captured

* 1986, the experimental airplane Voyager, piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, completed the first non-stop, non-refueled, round-the-world flight as it landed safely at Edwards Air Force Base in California

* 1987, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, serving a life sentence for the attempted assassination of President Ford in 1975, escaped from the Alderson Federal Prison for Women in West Virginia. (She was recaptured two days later.)

* 1997, on the same day that a jury in Denver convicted Terry Nichols of involuntary manslaughter and conspiracy for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing, declining to find him guilty of murder, Woody Allen married Soon-Yi Previn in a small ceremony in Venice, Italy