1638 Louis XIV - King of France. Born in the Palais du Louvre, he became King at age 5, and ruled for 72 years. Under his rule, Canada was considered his personal property, and absolute monarchy based on divine right reached its greatest height in France
1685 John Gay British poet and playwright (The Beggars Opera)
1785 Thomas Barnes British editor of The Times from 1817, who enhanced its quality and viewpoint earning it the nickname The Thunderer
1823 Francis Parkman - Author (The Oregon Trail)
1838 James Jerome Hill Canadian railway promoter and financier. He was born at Rockwood, near Guelph, Ontario. Hill moved as a young man to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he helped set up a shipping business and in 1856, with the quiet backing of the Hudson's Bay Company, a steamboat line down the Red River to Winnipeg. In 1878 he and Donald A. Smith and George Stephen pulled together the Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad running north into Manitoba, then to the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885. In 1890 Hill consolidated all of his railway holdings into the Great Northern Railroad south of the Canadian border to Seattle, which effectively blocked rival lines from tapping into CPR business
1858 Andrew Bonar Law Canadian-born British Prime Minister. He was born at Kingston, New Brunswick. When he was 12, he was sent to live with wealthy relatives in Scotland, and later became a partner in a firm of iron merchants. The only British Prime Minister to come from the Empire, he had to retire after only 209 days as PM because of poor health, and was replaced by Stanley Baldwin
1875 James Cash Penney US merchant who founded J.C. Penney Company
1914 Allen Funt Radio and TV producer and host (Candid Microphone, Candid Camera)
1919 Laurence Johnston Peter Canadian-born educator, psychologist and author (The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong)
1924 Lauren Bacall - Actress (Key Largo, Applause, Woman of the Year, How to Marry a Millionaire, The Big Sleep, Murder on the Orient Express, To Have and Have Not, The Mirror Has Two Faces) She was married to Humphrey Bogart
1925 Charlie Byrd US jazz guitarist (Meditation, Desafinado)
1925 B.B. (Riley B.) King US blues guitarist (The Thrill Is Gone, I Like to Live the Love, Rock Me Baby)
1925 Morgan Woodward Actor (Cool Hand Luke, Dallas, Centennial, How the West Was Won, Westward Ho the Wagons!, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Hill Street Blues) He played Carl Pedersen in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Tarnished Trademark
1926 John Knowles - Author (Backcasts: Memories & Recollections of Seventy Years as a Sportsman)
1927 Peter Falk - Actor (Columbo, Murder by Death, Pocketful of Miracles, The Great Race, The In-Laws, Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, The Princess Bride, The Cheap Detective)
1930 Anne Francis Actress (Honey West, Funny Girl, Riptide, Forbidden Planet, Blackboard Jungle, Summer Holiday)
1934 George Chakiris Actor and dancer (West Side Story, Is Paris Burning, Dallas)
1943 James Alan McPherson US author (Hue and Cry, Elbow Room, Crabcakes)
1949 Ed Begley, Jr. - Actor (St. Elsewhere, Parenthood, She-Devil, The Applegates, The Accidental Tourist, The In-Laws)
1950 David Bellamy Singer with the duo The Bellamy Brothers (Let Your Love Flow, If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me) and songwriter (Spiders and Snakes)
1950 Susan Ruttan - Actress (L.A. Law, Sweet 15, A Perfect Little Murder, Funny About Love, Fire and Rain, Chances Are, Bad Dreams, Bad Manners)
1953 Christopher Rich Actor (Reba, Murphy Brown, The Charmings, Archie: To Riverdale & Back Again, Boston Legal, The Joy Luck Club, Another World)
1956 David Copperfield Magician and illusionist
1956 Mickey Rourke - Actor (Diner, Heavens Gate, Rumble Fish, A Prayer for the Dying, Barfly)
1958 Jennifer Tilly Actress (Bullets Over Broadway, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Key West, Liar Liar) She is the sister of actress, Meg Tilly
1960 Danny John-Jules British actor (Red Dwarf, The Crouches, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, Death in Paradise)
1971 Amy Poehler Actress (Parks and Recreation, Saturday Night Live, Mean Girls, Blades of Glory)
1975 Amy Price-Francis British-born Canadian actress (King, The Cleaner, 24, Rumours, Shades of Black: The Conrad Black Story, Tracker, Little Men)
1985 Madeline Zima - Actress (The Nanny, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Mr. Nanny)
Died this Day
1498 Tomas de Torquemada Dominican monk who was the feared and hated Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition
1736 Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit, age 50 German physicist and instrument maker who developed the alcohol and mercury thermometers. He also devised the measure of temperature known as the Fahrenheit Temperature Scale, and fixed the freezing point at 32 degrees
1845 Phineas Wilcox Accused Christian spy who was stabbed to death by fellow Mormons in Nauvoo, Illinois. Wilcox was one of the first victims of blood atonement, an old Mormon doctrine conceived of by Brigham Young that taught that murder is sometimes necessary in order to save a sinful soul
1977 Maria Callas, age 53 US-born soprano famed for her lyric soprano and fiery temperament, died of a heart attack in Paris. When she was 13, she went to Athens to study voice. The diva divorced her husband of many years after becoming involved with Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis
1977 Marc Bolan British singer and founder of the group T. Rex (Bang a Gong) He died when his car crashed on Barnes Bridge, London, two weeks before his 29th birthday
On this Day
1620 The Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England, bound for the New World with 102 passengers. The ship was headed for Virginia, where the colonists, made up of religious dissenters and entrepreneurs, had been authorised to settle by the British crown. However, stormy weather and navigational errors forced the Mayflower off course, and the Pilgrims reached Massachusetts, where they founded the first permanent European settlement in New England. Thirty-five of the Pilgrims were members of the radical English Separatist Church, who travelled to North America to escape the jurisdiction of the Church of England, which they found corrupt. The Separatists won financial backing from a group of investors called the London Adventurers, who were promised a sizeable share of the colony's profits. In a difficult Atlantic crossing, the 90-foot Mayflower encountered rough seas and storms and was blown more than 500 miles off course. Along the way, the settlers formulated and signed the Mayflower Compact, an agreement that bound the signatories into a "civil body politic." Because it established constitutional law and the rule of the majority, the compact is regarded as an important precursor to US democracy. After a 66-day voyage, the ship landed on November 21 on the tip of Cape Cod at what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts. In the first year of settlement, half the colonists died of disease. In 1621, the health and economic condition of the colonists improved, and that autumn Governor William Bradford invited neighbouring Indians to Plymouth to celebrate the bounty of that year's harvest season. Plymouth soon secured treaties with most local Indian tribes, and the economy steadily grew, and more colonists were attracted to the settlement. By the mid 1640s, Plymouth's population numbered 3,000 people, but by then the settlement had been overshadowed by the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north, settled by Puritans in 1629
1773 The ship, Hector, arrived at Brown's Point near Pictou, Nova Scotia with 182 Scottish Highlanders aboard, mostly tenant farmers fleeing high rents in Loch Broom in Sutherland. They started a wave of immigration which, following the expulsion of thousands of Acadians, made the Scots the predominant ethnic group in Nova Scotia
1791 In London, England, King George III demanded that all French coats of arms be removed from Quebec
1810 The Mexican War of Independence began when Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a Catholic priest, issued his Grito de Dolores, or Cry of Dolores, the revolutionary tract, so-named because it was publicly read by Hidalgo in the town of Dolores. It called for the end of 300 years of Spanish rule in Mexico, redistribution of land, and racial equality. Thousands of Indians and mestizos flocked to Hidalgo's banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and soon the peasant army was on the march to Mexico City
1847 The United Shakespeare Company bought the house in which Shakespeare was born at Stratford-upon-Avon for £3,000. It was the first building in Britain to be bought for preservation
1857 The song Jingle Bells, under the title, One Horse Open Sleigh, was copyrighted by Jane Pierpont of Boston. It was written originally for a Sunday school entertainment
1861 The Post Office Savings Banks opened in Britain
1893 Hundreds of thousands of settlers swarmed onto a section of land in Oklahoma known as the Cherokee Strip, to claim valuable land that had once belonged to Native Americans. The giant Cherokee Strip rush was the largest of a series of massive "land runs" that began in the 1890s, with thousands of immigrants stampeding into Oklahoma Territory
1893 Calgary was incorporated as Alberta's first city. Its population had grown to almost 4,000 people in the decade following the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and it was the only community between Winnipeg and the Pacific with a water works and sewer system
1908 The Buick and Oldsmobile car manufacturers merged to become General Motors
1914 Sir Sam Hughes set up the first Canadian military air service, the Canadian Aviation Corps. It was the forerunner of the Royal Canadian Air Force
1916 Prohibition went into effect in Ontario after a night when liquor stores and saloons sold out their stocks
1940 The Burke-Wadsworth Act was passed by Congress, imposing the first peacetime draft in the history of the US, Selective Service
1953 Cinemascope was demonstrated by 20th Century-Fox in New York City, with a screening of the movie The Robe
1966 The Metropolitan Opera opened its new opera house at New York's Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts
1974 President Ford announced a conditional amnesty program for Vietnam War deserters and draft evaders
1974 At Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada's first female RCMP recruits were sworn into the force as constables
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