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A colorful, crunchy bowl of winter comfort

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On this day in . . .

• 1496, Leonardo da Vinci unsuccessfully tests a flying machine

• 1521, Pope Leo X excommunicates Martin Luther in the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificeme

• 1777, Gen. George Washington defeats British general Charles Cornwallis at the Battle of Princeton

• 1823, Stephen F. Austin receives a grant of land in Texas from the government of Mexico

• 1870, construction of the Brooklyn Bridge begins

• 1888, the refracting telescope at the Lick Observatory, measuring 91 cm in diameter, is used for the first time. It was the largest telescope in the world at the time

• 1911, the first postal savings banks were opened by the U.S. Post Office. (The banks were abolished in 1966.)

• 1924, British explorer Howard Carter discovers the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor, Egypt

• 1925, Benito Mussolini announces he is taking dictatorial powers over Italy

• 1938, the March of Dimes is established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt

• 1947, proceedings of the U.S. Congress are televised for the first time

• 1953, Frances Bolton and her son, Oliver from Ohio, become the first mother and son to serve simultaneously in the U.S. Congress

• 1956, a fire damages the top part of the Eiffel Tower

• 1957, the Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch

• 1959, Alaska is admitted as the 49th U.S. State

• 1961, the United States severs diplomatic relations with Cuba.

• 1962, Pope John XXIII excommunicates Fidel Castro

• 1977, Apple Computer is incorporated

• 1990, former leader of Panama Manuel Noriega surrenders to American forces

• 1993, in Moscow, George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin sign the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). ALSO: Backup quarterback Frank Reich leads the Buffalo Bills to a 41-38 overtime victory over the Houston Oilers in an American Football Conference (AFC) wild card playoff game that will forever be known to football fans as "The Comeback."

• 2000, the last new daily "Peanuts" comic strip by Charles Schulz ran in 2,600 newspapers

• 2001, the 107th U.S. Congress convened for the first time with the Senate equally divided 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans had a 10-member advantage in the House of Representatives

• 2002, a judge in Alabama ruled that former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry was mentally competent to stand trial on murder charges in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls. (Cherry was later convicted, and served a life sentence until his death in Nov. 2004.)

• 2004, NASA's Mars rover, Spirit, touched down on the red planet

• 2007, four Americans and an Austrian abducted in southern Iraq by practitioners of that "religion of peace" spoke briefly and appeared uninjured in a video delivered to The Associated Press. (The men, security contractors for the Crescent Security Group based in Kuwait, were later killed by their captors.)

• 2009, after more than a week of intense airstrikes, Israeli troops crossed the border into Gaza, launching a ground assault against Hamas

• 2010, the U.S. government announced new stricter security screening procedures for airline passengers from certain countries, among them Iran, Pakistan, Yemen and Nigeria, as part of a crackdown following the botched Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound flight and including random patdowns and body scanning

• 2011, Democrat Jerry Brown was sworn in as California's 39th governor, returning to the office he'd left 28 years earlier

• 2012, students attending Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., reconvened at a different building in the town of Monroe about three weeks after the massacre that had claimed the lives of 20 first-graders and six educators. ALSO: The new 113th Congress opened for business, with House Speaker John Boehner re-elected to his post despite a mini-revolt in Republican ranks.

• 2015, the Islamic Boko Haram terrorist group began a series of attacks on the northeastern Nigerian town of Baga lasting five days. Local media said at least 100 people died, though some reports put the death toll closer to 2,000

• 2017, Ford Motor Co. canceled plans to build a new $1.6 billion factory in Mexico, and said it would invest at least some of the savings in new electric and autonomous vehicles. AND: The national president of the NAACP and five others were arrested after staging a sit-in at the Alabama office of Sen. Jeff Sessions, President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for U.S. attorney general. It didn't help

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