Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/December 26

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 * 1606 – The first known performance of King Lear, a tragedy written by William Shakespeare (pictured) and based on the legend of Leir of Britain, took place before King James I.
 * 1709 – The opera Agrippina by George Frideric Handel premiered in Venice.
 * 1776 – American Revolutionary War: George Washington led a Continental Army column across the Delaware River to launch a surprise attack against Hessian forces at the Battle of Trenton (painting shown).
 * 1811 – Seventy-two people died when a theater in Richmond, Virginia, was destroyed by fire, becoming the worst urban disaster in American history at the time.
 * 1825 – Imperial Russian Army officers led about 3,000 soldiers in protest against Nicholas I's assumption of the throne after his elder brother Konstantin removed himself from the line of succession.
 * 1862 – American Civil War: The Battle of Chickasaw Bayou began with Confederate defenders engaging Union forces attempting to capture the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi.
 * 1871 – Thespis, the first comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, premiered at the Gaiety Theatre in London.
 * 1898 – At the French Academy of Sciences, physicists Pierre and Marie Curie announced the discovery of a new element, naming it radium.
 * 1900 – A relief crew arrived at the Flannan Isles Lighthouse in Scotland and discovered that the previous crew had disappeared.
 * 1919 – American baseball player Babe Ruth was sold by the Boston Red Sox to their rivals, the New York Yankees, beginning the 84-year-long "Curse of the Bambino".
 * 1943 – Second World War: The German battleship Scharnhorst was sunk at the Battle of the North Cape during an attempt to attack Arctic convoys.
 * 1946 – American gangster Bugsy Siegel opened The Flamingo Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, the oldest casino still in operation on the Las Vegas Strip.
 * 1996 – Six-year-old American beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey was found beaten and strangled in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, Colorado.
 * Born/died this day: | Masrur al-Balkhi |d|893| Reginald Fitz Jocelin |d|1191| Rose Lok |b|1526| John Fothergill |d|1780| Seth Warner |d|1784|  Bazoline Estelle Usher |b|1885 Mary Jane Richardson Jones |d|1909| Raja Pervaiz Ashraf |b|1950|