Indiana admitted to Union – Chicago Tribune

Today is Thursday, Dec. 11, the 345th day of 2025. There are 20 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Dec. 11, 1816, Indiana was admitted to the Union as the 19th U.S. state.

Also on this date:

In 1936, Britain’s King Edward VIII abdicated the throne so he could marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson; his brother, Prince Albert, became King George VI.

In 1946, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) was established.

In 1972, Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan guided lander Challenger to a touchdown on the moon, where he and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt would become the last two Apollo astronauts to walk on the lunar surface. They returned to Earth three days later with astronaut Ronald Evans, who remained aloft in the command module.

In 1978, nearly $6 million in cash and jewelry were stolen from the Lufthansa cargo terminal at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport; the ‘Lufthansa Heist,’ the largest cash robbery in history at the time, was immortalized in the film “Goodfellas.”

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating a $1.6 billion environmental “Superfund” to pay for cleaning up hazardous chemical spills and toxic waste dumps.

In 1997, more than 150 countries agreed at a global warming conference in Kyoto, Japan, to control the Earth’s greenhouse gases.

In 1998, majority Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee pushed through three articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, over Democratic objections.

In 2008, former Nasdaq chairman Bernie Madoff was arrested, accused of running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that wiped out the life savings of thousands of people and wrecked charities. (Madoff died in April 2021 while serving a 150-year federal prison sentence.)