1795 Thomas Carlyle – Scottish historian, essayist and writer (The French Revolution, Chartism)
1800 William Fenwick Williams – Canadian soldier, born at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. He entered the British Army as a young man, and in 1855 led the heroic defence of Kars against Russia during the Crimean War while on loan to the Turkish army. From 1859-65, he was the Commander in Chief in British North America, and prepared defences against possible US invasion during their Civil War
1860 Lillian Russell – US singer, actress and famous burlesque beauty. She starred in light opera and comedies, and was the most photographed woman of her age
1865 Edith Cavell - British nurse. She first entered the nursing profession in 1885, and helped Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium during World War I
1892 General Francisco Franco – Spanish dictator
1912 Gregory H. (Pappy) Boyington – US aviator and author (Baa Baa Black Sheep)
1921 Deanna Durbin – Canadian singer and actress (That Certain Age, Up in Central Park) She was born Edna Mae Durbin at Winnipeg, Manitoba. She was the highest paid female star in the world at age 14, and by age 18 her income was $250,000 a year
1930 Ronnie Corbett – Scottish born comedian (The Two Ronnies, Sorry!, Casino Royale)
1933 Horst Buchholz – German actor (The Magnificent Seven, Raid on Entebbe, Life is Beautiful)
1934 Victor French – Actor (Little House on the Prairie, Highway to Heaven, An Officer and a Gentleman, The Cherokee Trail, Carter Country)
1934 Wink Martindale - TV host (Tic Tac Dough, Can You Top This?)
1937 Max Baer, Jr - Actor (The Beverly Hillbillies, The Birdmen, Macon County Line) and producer (Ode to Billy Joe)
1937 Donnelly Rhodes – Canadian actor (DaVinci’s Inquest, Soap, Danger Bay, The Young and the Restless, TRON: Legacy, Battlestar Galactica, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid)
1942 Gemma Jones – British actress (Longitude, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Jane Eyre, Sense and Sensibility, Paperhouse, Bridget Jone’s Diary, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Bridget Jone’s Diary) She played Anne Staveley in the Inspector Morse episode The Dead of Jericho
1942 Chris Hillman – Singer with the group The Byrds (Turn! Turn! Turn!, Mr. Tambourine Man, Eight Miles High)
1944 Anna McGarrigle – Canadian singer and songwriter who works with her sister, Kate (Kiss and Say Goodbye , Heart Like a Wheel, Kitty Come Home)
1944 Dennis Wilson - Musician with the group The Beach Boys (I Get Around, Good Vibrations, California Girls)
1948 Southside Johnny Lyon – New Jersey rocker (This Time It’s For Real, Hearts of Stone, Fever, Love on the Wrong Side of Town)
1949 Jeff Bridges - Actor (The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Fisher King, The Last Picture Show, Tron, The Big Lebowski) He is the son of Lloyd Bridges and the brother of Beau Bridges
1945 Roberta Lynn Bondar – Canadian neurobiologist who was the first Canadian woman in space, on the space shuttle Discovery
1951 Patricia Wettig – Actress (thirtysomething, Stephen King's The Langoliers, City Slickers, St. Elsewhere) She is married to Ken Olin
1952 Gary Rossington – Guitarist with the group Lynyrd Skynyrd (Sweet Home Alabama, Free Bird)
1954 Tony Todd – Actor (The Rock, Platoon, 24, Chuck, Candyman, Voodoo Dawn, The Night of the Living Dead)
1964 Marisa Tomei - Actress (My Cousin Vinnie, The Paper, Chaplin, The Wrestler, Anger Management, What Women Want)
Died this Day
1131 Omar Khayyam, age 83 - Persian poet, mathematician, and astronomer. He was born at Nishapur, now in Iran, and produced a work on algebra that was used as a textbook in Persia until the 20th century. In geometry, his studies contributed to the theory of parallel lines. Around 1074, he set up an observatory and led work on compiling astronomical tables. He is known to English-speaking readers for his "quatrains" as The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, published in 1859 by Edward Fitzgerald
1642 Cardinal Richelieu – French statesman and chief minister to King Louis XIII
1798 Luigi Galvani – Italian physiologist who discovered galvanic, or animal, electricity
1850 William Sturgeon – British physicist who built the first electromagnet
1973 Alfred Carl Fuller, age 88 – Canadian-born manufacturer, marketer, and founder of the Fuller Brush Company
1993 Frank Zappa - Musician, songwriter, singer with the group Mothers of Invention, and solo (Who are the Brain Police, Plastic People, Valley Girl) He died of cancer, in Los Angeles two weeks before his 53rd birthday
1996 Wilf Carter - Canadian country singer and songwriter (My Swiss Moonlight Lullaby, The Capture of Albert Johnson, My Texas Sweetheart, Golden Lariat, Old Alberta Plains) He was born in Port Hilford, Nova Scotia, the son of a Baptist minister. Carter worked as a logger on the east coast before moving to Alberta in the 1920s. There, he worked as a cowboy, CPR trail rider and a barn dance entertainer before making his radio debut on Calgary's CFCN. He became a US radio star using the stage name Montana Slim. He had a six decade long career, live and on radio and TV. He died 2 weeks before his 92nd birthday
On this Day
1674 Explorer Jacques Marquette reached the Chicago River and wintered on the site of present-day Chicago, a name that the local Indians gave to a variety of wild onion
1791 The Observer, Britain’s oldest Sunday newspaper was first published
1872 The Dei Gratia, a small British brig under Captain David Morehouse, spotted the Mary Celeste, a US vessel, sailing erratically but at full sail in the Atlantic Ocean, midway between the Azores and Cape Roca on the Portuguese coast. The ship was seaworthy, its stores and supplies were untouched, but not a soul was onboard. In November, the brigantine Mary Celeste sailed from New York harbour for Genoa, Italy, carrying Captain Briggs, his wife and two-year-old daughter and a crew of eight. She carried a cargo of 1,701 barrels of American Alcohol, shipped by Meissner, Ackermann & Co., the purpose of which was to fortify wine. After the Dei Gratia sighted the vessel, Captain Morehouse and his men boarded the ship to find it abandoned, with its sails slightly damaged, and several feet of water in the hold. The lifeboat and navigational instruments, the chronometer and sextant, were missing. However, the ship was in good order, the cargo intact, and reserves of food and water remained on board. The last entry on the ships slate showed she had made the island of St Mary in the Azores on November 25th. Apparently, the Mary Celeste had been drifting toward Genoa on her intended course for 11 days with no one at the helm to guide her. Captain Briggs, his family, and the crew of the vessel were never found, and the reason for the abandonment of the Mary Celeste has never been determined. A British Board of Inquiry in Gibraltar gathered evidence and testimony from the boarding party that had discovered Mary Celeste as a drifting derelict. Lack of evidence of violence ruled out piracy or foul play, but no conclusions as to the fate of the mortals aboard was forthcoming. The Mary Celeste was first launched in Nova Scotia in 1861, under the name Amazon. She was 103 ft overall displacing 282 tons and listed as a half-brig. An aura of doom had clung to the ship since the beginning, when her captain died early on her maiden voyage. The ship was wrecked off Cape Breton Island just six years later, forcing its owners to sell the vessel. Over the next few years she was involved in several accidents at sea and passed through a number of owners. Eventually she turned up at a New York salvage auction where she was purchased for $3,000. After extensive repairs she was put under US registry and renamed Mary Celeste. After the incident in 1872, the Mary Celeste sailed for 12 years on voyages marred by collisions and fires. She was sold 17 times before being bought for a final time in 1884. Like its beginnings, the ship's end, many said, was proof the Mary Celeste was cursed. In 1885, the ship was wrecked on a coral reef near Haiti. Soon after, allegations surfaced that the brigantine's owners and captain had heavily insured the ship's nearly worthless cargo and then crashed it, in hope of making the sizeable insurance claim. A jury failed to convict the captain and his first mate of barratry, but both men died shortly after the trial. All but one of the ship's owners confessed to barratry. The remaining man shot himself. The Mary Celeste, meanwhile, sank to the ocean floor. In 1884 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writing under a pseudonym, published a story about the 1872 abandonment of the ship, titled the "Marie Celeste." In 2001 a team of divers and marine archeologists brought pieces of wood and spikes recovered from the wreck of the Mary Celeste on a reef near Haiti back to Nova Scotia where the ship was built
1875 William M. Tweed, the Boss of New York City's Tammany Hall political organisation, escaped from jail and fled the country
1909 The first Grey Cup championship football game was held. The University of Toronto defeated Toronto Parkdale 26-6 in front of 3,807 fans. The trophy was donated that year by Governor-General Earl Grey for the rugby football championship of Canada
1918 President Wilson set sail for France to attend the Versailles Peace Conference. It was the first European trip by a US president
1921 US silent film comedian Fatty Arbuckle was found not guilty of rape and manslaughter. He was retried twice and cleared both times, but his career was ruined
1937 The Dandy comic featuring Desperate Dan was first published
1948 George Orwell finished the final draft of Nineteen Eighty-four, which was published the following June
1991 Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, the longest held of the US hostages in Lebanon, was released after nearly seven years in captivity
1998 The space shuttle Endeavour and a crew of six blasted off on the first mission to begin assembling the international space station
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