On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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LEAD: Dubbed a ''hot book'' not long after it was started nearly two years ago, 7 Days, the weekly magazine, now faces the difficult task of proving that Manhattan's trend-setters actually read it and are willing to pay for it.
LEAD: AS the season to be jolly moves into its frenetically jolliest of weekends today, New York City will be singing, shopping, sparkling, touring, dancing and otherwise celebrating. The long Christmas weekend, which coincides with the beginning of Hanukkah this year (related article, page C34), may chiefly be a time for indoor family festivities.
LEAD: An appeals court yesterday upheld the indictment of the New York State Senate minority leader, Manfred Ohrenstein. But the ruling dismissed many counts that were at the heart of the prosecution's case.
LEAD: UNADORNED homes are rare commodities around Christmastime in Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst and Canarsie. With thousands of plastic Santas and snowmen, armies of toy soldiers and multicolored megawatts of lights decorating block upon block of houses and apartment buildings, no one could accuse these Brooklyn neighborhoods of a lack of holiday cheer.
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of December 20, 1989, covering December 22, 1989.
Milli Vanilli
Billy Joel
Janet Jackson
Phil Collins
Paula Abdul
1989Jordin Sparks, American singer-songwriter and actress[†]
Jordin Sparks is an American singer and actress. She rose to fame in 2007 after winning the sixth season of American Idol at age 17, becoming the youngest winner in the series' history. Her 2007 self-titled debut studio album was met with critical and commercial success; it peaked at number ten on the Billboard 200, received platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and sold over two million copies worldwide. The album was supported by the Billboard Hot 100-top ten singles "Tattoo" and "No Air" —the latter received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals and remains the third highest-selling song by an American Idol contestant—with three million digital copies sold in the United States.
1989Jacob Stallings, American baseball player[†]
Jacob Daniel Stallings is an American professional baseball catcher who is a free agent. He has previously played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Miami Marlins, and Colorado Rockies. Stallings made his MLB debut in 2016. In 2021, he won the Gold Glove Award and Fielding Bible Award.
1989Samuel Beckett, Irish author, poet, and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1906)[†]
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic episodes of life, often coupled with black comedy and literary nonsense. A major figure of Irish literature and one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, he is credited with transforming the genre of the modern theatre. Best remembered for his tragicomedy play Waiting for Godot (1953), he is considered to be one of the last modernist writers, and a key figure in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd." For his lasting literary contributions, Beckett received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."
1989Romanian Revolution: Communist President of Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu is overthrown by Ion Iliescu after days of bloody confrontations. The deposed dictator and his wife Elena flee Bucharest in a helicopter as protesters erupt in cheers.[†]
The Romanian revolution was a period of violent civil unrest in Romania during December 1989 as a part of the revolutions of 1989 that occurred in several countries around the world, primarily within the Eastern Bloc. The Romanian revolution started in the city of Timișoara and soon spread throughout the country, ultimately culminating in the drumhead trial and execution of longtime Romanian Communist Party (PCR) General Secretary Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, and the end of 42 years of Communist rule in Romania. It was also the last removal of a Marxist–Leninist government in a Warsaw Pact country during the events of 1989, and the only one that violently overthrew a country's leadership and executed its leader; according to estimates, over one thousand people died and thousands more were injured.
1989German reunification: Berlin's Brandenburg Gate re-opens after nearly 30 years, effectively ending the division of East and West Germany.[†]
German reunification was the process of re-establishing Germany as a single sovereign state, which began on 9 November 1989 and culminated on 3 October 1990 with the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic and the integration of its re-established constituent federated states into the Federal Republic of Germany to form present-day Germany. This date was chosen as the customary German Unity Day, and has thereafter been celebrated each year as a national holiday. On the same date, East and West Berlin were also reunified into a single city, which eventually became the capital of Germany.
In 1989, the world population was approximately 5,234,431,732 people[†]