December 1, 1955 – Rosa Parks is arrested in Montgomery, Alabama after she refuses to go to the back of a municipal bus in the era of segregation ushering in the modern civil rights movement.
December 1, 1990 – England was connected to mainland Europe for the first time since the Ice Age as workers digging the railway tunnel under the English Channel broke through the last layer of rock.
December 2, 1942 – Physicists led by Enrico Fermi carried out the first successful nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago.
December 3. 1967 – The first successful heart transplant is performed by Dr. Christiaan Barnard at Cape Town, South Africa.