December 1973
month of 1973
The following events occurred in December 1973:
December 1, 1973 (Saturday)
Papua New Guinea was granted self-government by Australia in advance of eventual independence. No ceremonies were held because of the danger of violence from anti-independence groups, and at 10:00 a.m. at Port Moresby, Australian administrator Les Johnson administered the oath of office to Chief Minister Michael Somare.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, president of Bangladesh, announced an amnesty for 36,400 prisoners who had been accused, during the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Bangladesh genocide, of collaboration with the Pakistan.
Bob Foster of the United States became the first black boxer to defeat a white challenger in a bout in South Africa, which had strict racial segregation under its apartheid policies at the time. Foster, the world light heavyweight champion, outpointed South Africa's Pierre Fourie in a 15-round bout at Rand Stadium in Johannesburg.
In West Germany's Baden-Württemberg state, the villages of Conweiler, Schwann, and Pfinzweiler-Feldrennach were merged to create the small town of Straubenhardt. A fourth village, Ottenhausen, was added one month later and Langenalb would follow on January 1, 1975.
Commercial diver Timothy House was lost at sea while conducting a surface-orientated dive in the North Sea from the semi-submersible drill rig Blue Water III. House, who was performing routine maintenance, was assumed to have cut through his umbilical due to hypothermia.
Born:
Bahareh Rahnama, Iranian film actress; in Arak
Rajesh Sharma, Indian film actor; in Kollam, Kerala state
Died: David Ben-Gurion, 87, Polish-born Zionist leader and first Prime Minister of Israel, died 13 days after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage.
“December 1973” enters the record as month of 1973. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what December and month can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“December 1973” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, December and month provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5248949. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “December 1973” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.