Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/December 16

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 * 1653 – Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England.
 * 1689 – The Parliament of England enacted the Bill of Rights, setting out basic civil rights and later influencing other documents such as the U.S. Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
 * 1707 – The last recorded eruption of Japan's Mount Fuji released some 800 million m3 (28 billion cu ft) of volcanic ash.
 * 1761 – Seven Years' War: After a four-month siege, Russian forces captured Kolberg, the last major Prussian port on the Baltic Sea.
 * 1811 – The first two in a series of four severe earthquakes struck the Midwestern United States and made the Mississippi River appear to run backward.
 * 1850 – Settlers of the Canterbury Association (poster pictured) aboard Randolph and Charlotte Jane arrived to establish a colony at Christchurch, New Zealand.
 * 1893 – Czech composer Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony (audio featured) premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
 * 1901 – English writer Beatrix Potter privately published 250 copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit (illustration shown) after several publishers' rejections.
 * 1914 – First World War: The Imperial German Navy attacked ports in northern England, resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties.
 * 1918 – Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas declared the formation of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, a puppet state created by Soviet Russia to justify the Lithuanian–Soviet War.
 * 1922 – Gabriel Narutowicz, the first president of Poland, was assassinated only five days after having taken office.
 * 1930 – German-American gangster Herman Lamm killed himself during a botched robbery attempt in Clinton, Indiana, to avoid being captured by police.
 * 1942 – World War II: Americans engaged Imperial Japanese forces at the Battle of Mount Austen, the Galloping Horse, and the Sea Horse in the hills near the Matanikau River area on Guadalcanal during the Guadalcanal campaign.
 * 1971 – The surrender of Pakistani forces in Dacca, East Pakistan, concluded the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Indo-Pakistani War.
 * 1997 – "Dennō Senshi Porygon", an episode of the Japanese television series Pokémon, induced epileptic seizures in 685 children.
 * 2014 – A hostage crisis in a Lindt chocolate café in Sydney, Australia, ended with police storming the building, killing the perpetrator and one of the hostages.
 * Born/died: | Haakon IV of Norway |d|1263| Manuel III of Trebizond |b|1364| Nathaniel Fiennes |d|1669| Maria Rundell |d|1828| Bertha Lamme Feicht |b|1869| Noël Coward |b|1899| Carol Browner |b|1955 | H. D. Kumaraswamy |b|1959| W. Somerset Maugham|d|1965| Deyda Hydara |d|2004|