1649 Titus Oates – Anglican priest who invented a ‘Popish Plot’ in 1678, in an effort to create an anti-Catholic backlash. It worked, and fearful Londoners hailed him as a saviour. His false testimony had 35 people executed before his fabrications were exposed. He was pilloried, flogged, and imprisoned
1789 James Fennimore Cooper – US author (The Leatherstocking Tales: The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, The Prairie)
1833 Alexander Dunn – Canadian soldier, who was the first ever Canadian to be awarded the Victoria Cross. He received the honour for his bravery in the Crimean War, as a Lieutenant in the 11th Hussars, during the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854. Dunn was part of an English brigade of 600 men who charged the Russian army at 11 am. Unhorsed, he emptied his revolver at the Russians, then used his sword, which was too long by regulation standards, to save several of his fellow cavalrymen. He later helped organise the 100th Regiment of Foot in Canada, and served as its CO in Gibraltar
1857 William Howard Taft - 27th US President and Yale University law professor. He was the only person to serve as both president and chief justice of the US Supreme Court
1881 Ettore Bugatti - Italian builder of racing and luxury automobiles
1889 Robert Benchley – US humorist, author (From Bed to Worse, Pluck and Luck, The Early Worm, Inside Benchley) and actor (The Bride Wore Boots, National Barn Dance) He was the grandfather of Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws
1890 Dame Agatha Christie – British detective novelist and playwright who wrote numerous books, and created the beloved characters Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple She was born Mary Clarissa Agatha Miller, in Torquay, Devon, England. Raised and educated at Ashfield, her parents’ comfortable home, Agatha and her older sister, Madge, began making up stories as a child. Agatha married Colonel Archibald Christie in 1914, before World War I, and had one daughter. While her husband was off fighting in World War I, she worked as an assistant in a pharmacy, and learned much about poisons. She began to write on a dare from her sister and produced her first mystery novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920, featuring Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. In December, 1926 Christie disappeared for 11 days, eventually turning up at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrowgate. Her disappearance was highly publicised, and an expensive government search ensued. She was later criticised for not coming forward with her whereabouts earlier. Her first marriage ended in divorce, and in 1930 she married archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan and accompanied him on expeditions to the Middle East, which became the setting for many of her novels. She created Miss Marple, one of her most beloved detectives, in 1930. All told, Christie wrote some 80 novels, 30 short story collections, and 15 plays, plus six romances under the pen name Mary Westmacott. She was knighted in 1971 and died in 1976, just a year after she killed off Poirot in the novel Curtain: Hercule Poirot’s Last Case. Poirot received a front-page obituary in the New York Times on August 6, 1975. By the time Christie died, more than 400 million copies of her books had been sold in more than 100 languages
1903 Roy Acuff – Country singer known as The King of Country Music (Wabash Cannonball, Pins and Needles, Night Train to Memphis, The Great Speckled Bird, Freight Train Blues)
1907 Fay Wray – Canadian-born actress (King Kong, Dr. X, Tammy and the Bachelor, The Four Feathers) She appeared in the Perry Mason episodes The Case of the Fatal Fetish, The Case of the Watery Witness, and The Case of the Prodigal Parent
1916 Margaret Lockwood – Karachi-born British actress (The Wicked Lady, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Lady Vanishes)
1921 Richard Gordon (Dr. Gordon Ostlere) – British writer (Doctor in the House) His ‘Doctor’ books lead to a series of popular British comedies
1922 Jackie Cooper - Actor (The Champ, Treasure Island, Peck’s Bad Boy, The Return of Frank James, Superman)
1928 Henry Silva – Actor (Johnny Cool, The Manchurian Candidate, Ocean's Eleven, The Return of Mr Moto, Dick Tracy)
1940 Merlin Olsen - Pro Football Hall of Famer with the LA Rams and actor (Father Murphy, Little House on the Prairie)
1945 Clive Merrison – British actor (The Inspector Lynley Mysteries: The Seed of Cunning, The English Patient, Heavenly Creatures, Anna Lee: Headcase, Miss Marple: A Pocketful of Rye, Reilly: Ace of Spies) He played Bartholomew Sholto in the 1983 version The Sign of Four He also portrays Sherlock Holmes on the BBC Radio 4 dramatisations
1946 Tommy Lee Jones - Actor (The Fugitive, Blue Sky, The Client, Natural Born Killers, JFK, Coalminer's Daughter, Lonesome Dove, The Executioner's Song, Men in Black, Space Cowboys, One Life to Live)
1946 Oliver Stone - Director (Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, Natural Born Killers)
1954 Brad Leland – Actor (Friday Night Lights, The Ringer, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Patriot)
1962 Wendie Jo Sperber – Actress (Bosom Buddies, Hearts Afire, Back to the Future Part, Bachelor Party, Corvette Summer)
1971 Josh Charles – Actor (The Good Wife, Dead Poets Society, Four Brothers, Hairspray)
1984 Prince Harry (Henry Charles Albert David) – Younger son of then-Prince Charles, and Diana Princess of Wales
Died this Day
1859 Isambard Kingdom Brunel, age 53 – British engineer who built the Clifton Suspension Bridge, over the River Avon, in Bristol. He also built many ships, including the Great Britain, the first iron ship designed by Brunel, and the first liner fitted with a screw propeller
1864 John Hanning Speke – Discoverer of Lake Victoria, and the source of the Nile
1898 William Burroughs, age 43 - US inventor with little formal education, who invented the first commercially successful adding machine and founded the American Arithmomter Company of St. Louis. The company later became Burroughs Adding Machine Company. His earliest version of the machine, like other adding machines of the time, was accurate but impractical. However, in 1892 he patented a practical adding machine that would become a commercial success
1989 Robert Penn Warren, age 84 - Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and the first poet laureate of the United States (All the King’s Men, I’ll Take My Stand, Night Rider, Remember the Alamo!) He died in Stratton, Vermont
On this Day
1749 Canada’s first domestic grapes were harvested in New France, near Montreal, Quebec
1789 The US Department of Foreign Affairs was renamed the Department of State
1821 Independence was proclaimed for Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador
1830 The world's first passenger railway, from Liverpool to Manchester in England, was opened by the Prime Minister, The Duke of Wellington. William Huskinsson, head of the Board of Trade, became the first person killed by a train when he stepped out onto what appeared to be an empty line, as Stephenson’s Rocket came steaming down
1860 Edward, Prince of Wales began touring British North America and the Colonies. It was the first official royal visit to Canada
1884 Frederick Charles Denison set sail for Egypt with 386 Canadian Voyageurs. They were to help Lord Kitchener ascend the Nile, mount a resistance to Sudan revolutionary leader Mahdi, and rescue General Gordon, who was besieged in Khartoum. The boatmen were organised by Garnet Wolseley, who had commanded the Red River Expedition in 1870. Many of the men were recruited from the ranks of the Hudson's Bay Company, and were Canada's first official participants in an overseas war. Sixteen would die on the mission
1885 At St. Thomas, Ontario, P.T. Barnum's famous circus elephant, Jumbo, charged and was killed by a Grand Trunk train in the St. Thomas railway yard. Jumbo weighed over 3,900 lbs and was probably the largest pachyderm ever in captivity
1916 During the Battle of the Somme, the British launched a major offensive against the Germans, employing tanks for the first time in history. At Flers Courcelette, some of the 40 or so primitive tanks advanced over a mile into enemy lines but were too slow to hold their positions during the German counterattack. The tanks were designed by Sir Earnest Swinton, and revolutionised battle strategy. General Douglas Haig, commander of Allied forces at the Somme, saw the promise of this new instrument of war and ordered the war department to produce hundreds more
1917 Russia was proclaimed a republic by Alexander Kerensky, the head of a provisional government
1940 During the Battle of Britain in World War II, the tide turned as the Luftwaffe sustained heavy losses inflicted by the Royal Air Force in two dogfights lasting less than an hour. The costly raid convinced the German high command that the Luftwaffe could not achieve air supremacy over Britain, and the next day daylight attacks were replaced with night-time sorties as a concession of defeat
1950 During the Korean conflict, United Nations forces landed at Inchon in the south and began their drive toward Seoul
1963 A church bombing in an affluent African-American neighbourhood in Birmingham, Alabama, left four young African-American girls dead. Denise McNair, 11 years old, and Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins, all 14 years old, were killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church, a site of past civil rights rallies. They were attending Sunday services when the dynamite bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan exploded. The tragedy helped to mobilise support for the civil rights movement. The FBI identified four suspects in the bombing, but for an unknown reason blocked prosecution of the case. The prime suspect in the bombing, Robert Chambliss, was finally tried and convicted in 1977 at the instigation of the Alabama state attorney. He died in prison eight years later. In 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted of first-degree murder for his involvement in the bombing. A third suspect, Bobby Frank Cherry, was deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial the same year
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