To­day in his­to­ry:

On Dec. 24, 1914, dur­ing World War I, im­promp­tu Christ­mas truces be­gan to take hold along parts of the West­ern Front be­tween British and Ger­man sol­diers.

Al­so on this date:

In 1814, the Unit­ed States and Britain signed the Treaty of Ghent, which end­ed the War of 1812 fol­low­ing rat­i­fi­ca­tion by both the British Par­lia­ment and the U.S. Sen­ate.

In 1851, fire dev­as­tat­ed the Li­brary of Con­gress in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., de­stroy­ing about 35,000 vol­umes (about two-thirds of the li­brary’s col­lec­tion).

In 1865, sev­er­al vet­er­ans of the Con­fed­er­ate Army formed a pri­vate so­cial club in Pu­las­ki, Ten­nessee, that was the orig­i­nal ver­sion of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1913, 73 peo­ple, most of them chil­dren, died in a crush of pan­ic af­ter a false cry of “Fire!” dur­ing a Christ­mas par­ty for strik­ing min­ers and their fam­i­lies at the Ital­ian Hall in Calumet, Michi­gan.

In 1943, Pres­i­dent Franklin D. Roo­sevelt ap­point­ed Gen. Dwight D. Eisen­how­er supreme com­man­der of Al­lied forces in Eu­rope.

In 1992, Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush par­doned for­mer De­fense Sec­re­tary Cas­par Wein­berg­er and five oth­ers in the Iran-Con­tra scan­dal.

In 2013, Britain’s Queen Eliz­a­beth II grant­ed a posthu­mous par­don to code-break­er Alan Tur­ing, who was crim­i­nal­ly con­vict­ed of ho­mo­sex­u­al be­hav­iour in the 1950s.