December 21 in History

In late 1620, the Mayflower, an English ship carrying about 100 passengers, anchored off the coast of present-day Massachusetts. Its arrival led to the founding of Plymouth Colony, one of the earliest lasting English settlements in North America. The colony's story later became central to American ideas about religious freedom, self-government, and national origins, though the reality was more complicated than the popular legend.

In 1844, a group of working people in the Lancashire mill town of Rochdale opened a small cooperative store that became the model for the modern cooperative movement. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers was not the first cooperative enterprise in Britain, and earlier experiments had often collapsed within a few years. But its combination of practical rules and democratic principles proved durable and was copied across the world, so it is widely regarded as the founding example of the modern consumer cooperative.

In December 1872, HMS Challenger left Portsmouth on a voyage that would last more than three years and cover roughly 70,000 nautical miles. The Challenger expedition was the first major scientific cruise devoted entirely to studying the deep sea, and its results gave birth to oceanography as a modern discipline. Though the ship sailed around the world, its true aim was to look down rather than out: to find out what lay beneath the surface of the oceans.

In December 1891, James Naismith, a Canadian physical education instructor, introduced a new indoor game at the International Young Men's Christian Association Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. Played with a soccer ball and two peach baskets fixed to the walls of a gymnasium, it became basketball, one of the most widely played team sports in the world.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released by Walt Disney Productions in 1937, is widely regarded as the first full-length cel-animated feature film produced in the United States. Its success showed that animation could sustain a story across a feature-length running time and draw adult as well as child audiences, and it laid the foundation for the modern animation industry. Historians often add a qualification: earlier animated features existed, including Argentine director Quirino Cristiani's El Apóstol from 1917, but that film is now lost, and Snow White was the first to achieve major commercial and lasting cultural impact.