December 26 1820:

Hoping to recover from bankruptcy with a bold scheme of colonization,
Moses Austin meets with Spanish authorities in San Antonio to ask permission for 300 Anglo-American families to settle in Texas.

A native of Durham, Connecticut, Austin had been a successful merchant in Philadelphia and Virginia.
After hearing reports of rich lead mines in the Spanish-controlled regions to the west,
Austin obtained permission in 1798 from the Spanish to mine land in an area that lies in what is now the state of Missouri.
Austin quickly built a lead mine, smelter, and town on his property, and his mine turned a steady profit for more than a decade.
Unfortunately, the economic collapse following the War of 1812 destroyed the lead market and left him bankrupt.

Determined to rebuild his fortune,
Austin decided to draw on his experience with the Spanish and try to establish an American colony in Texas.
In 1820, he traveled to San Antonio to request a land grant from the Spanish governor, who initially turned him down.
Austin persisted and was finally granted permission to settle 300 Anglo families on 200,000 acres of Texas land.

Overjoyed, Austin immediately set out for the United States to begin recruiting colonists,
but he became ill and died on the long journey back.
The task of completing the arrangements for Austin's Texas colony fell to his son, Stephen Fuller Austin.
The younger Austin selected the lower reaches of Colorado River and Brazos River as the site for the colony,
and the first colonists began arriving in December 1821.
Over the next decade, Stephen Austin and other colonizers brought nearly 25,000 people into Texas, most of them Anglo-Americans.
Always more loyal to the United States than to Mexico,
the settlers eventually broke from Mexico to form the independent Republic of Texas in 1836.
Nine years later, they led the successful movement to make Texas an American state.

1939 : The Glen Miller Show debuts

~ http://www.history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&id=3883

December 28, 1895

First commercial movie screened

On this day in 1895, the world's first commercial movie screening takes place at the Grand Cafe in Paris. The film was made by Louis and Auguste Lumiere, two French brothers who developed a camera-projector called the Cinematographe. The Lumiere brothers unveiled their invention to the public in March 1895 with a brief film showing workers leaving the Lumiere factory. On December 28, the entrepreneurial siblings screened a series of short scenes from everyday French life and charged admission for the first time.

Movie technology has its roots in the early 1830s, when Joseph Plateau of Belgium and Simon Stampfer of Austria simultaneously developed a device called the phenakistoscope, which incorporated a spinning disc with slots through which a series of drawings could be viewed, creating the effect of a single moving image. The phenakistoscope, considered the precursor of modern motion pictures, was followed by decades of advances and in 1890, Thomas Edison and his assistant William Dickson developed the first motion-picture camera, called the Kinetograph. The next year, 1891, Edison invented the Kinetoscope, a machine with a peephole viewer that allowed one person to watch a strip of film as it moved past a light.

In 1894, Antoine Lumiere, the father of Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948), saw a demonstration of Edison's Kinetoscope. The elder Lumiere was impressed, but reportedly told his sons, who ran a successful photographic plate factory in Lyon, France, that they could come up with something better. Louis Lumiere's Cinematographe, which was patented in 1895, was a combination movie camera and projector that could display moving images on a screen for an audience. The Cinematographe was also smaller, lighter and used less film than Edison's technology.

The Lumieres opened theatres (known as cinemas) in 1896 to show their work and sent crews of cameramen around the world to screen films and shoot new material. In America, the film industry quickly took off. In 1896, Vitascope Hall, believed to be the first theater in the U.S. devoted to showing movies, opened in New Orleans. In 1909, The New York Times published its first film review (of D.W. Griffith's "Pippa Passes"), in 1911 the first Hollywood film studio opened and in 1914, Charlie Chaplin made his big-screen debut.

In addition to the Cinematographe, the Lumieres also developed the first practical color photography process, the Autochrome plate, which debuted in 1907.

1940 : Worst air raid on London
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1916 : Rasputin murdered

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