1485 Catherine of Aragon – The first of Henry VIII’s wives. She bore him six children, but only one, Mary I, survived. Henry divorced her in pursuit of a male heir, very much against the Pope’s wishes
1770 Ludwig van Beethoven – German composer, who, although by then totally deaf, lead an orchestra in the première performance of his Ninth Symphony
1775 Jane Austen – British author (Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Northhanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Lady Susan, The Watsons) She was the seventh of eight children of a clergyman, and had five years of formal schooling, then studied with her father. Her quiet, happy world was disrupted when her parents suddenly decided to retire to Bath in 1801. Jane hated the resort town and found herself without the time or peace and quiet required to write. Instead, she amused herself by making close observations of ridiculous society manners. After her father's death in 1805, Jane, her mother, and sister lived with one of her brothers until 1808, when another brother provided them a permanent home at Chawton Cottage, in Hampshire. Jane concealed her writing from most of her acquaintances, slipping her writing paper under a blotter when someone entered the room. Though she avoided society, she was charming, intelligent, and funny, and had several admirers. She actually accepted the marriage proposal of a well-off friend of her family's, but the next day withdrew her acceptance, having decided she could only marry for love. She corresponded with the Prince Regent, who suggested she write a historic romance. She replied, saying, "I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life." Her identity as an author was known to only a small circle, and the general reading public only knew that "a lady" had written the books. Although enjoying the appreciation of such leading contemporary authors as Sir Walter Scott, Austen led a quiet, retiring life in the English country until she died at age 42
1857 Edward Emerson Barnard – US astronomer who discovered Barnard’s Star in 1916. It is the second closest star to the sun
1863 George Santayana – Madrid-born US philosopher and author (The Life of Reason, The Realms of Being, The Last Puritan, Persons and Places) He said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
1899 Sir Noël Coward – British actor, playwright and composer (Blithe Spirit, Private Lives, Hay Fever, In Which We Serve)
1901 Dr. Margaret Mead – US anthropologist who specialised in studies of ancient people of the South Pacific, and who helped to popularise anthropology
1906 Leonid Brezhnev - Russian leader of the Communist Party
1917 Sir Arthur C. Clarke – British writer of mainly science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey, Islands in the Sky, Imperial Earth, Childhood’s End) A radar instructor in World War II, Clarke began publishing science fiction stories while in the service. In 1945, at the age of 28, he wrote an article predicting the advent of communications satellites that would broadcast television and radio all over the world, twenty years before the first communications satellites were launched
1938 Liv Ullmann – Tokyo-born Norwegian actress (The Immigrants, Scenes from a Marriage, Persona)
1941 Lesley Stahl - Journalist (CBS News, Face the Nation, 60 Minutes)
1943 Steven Bochco – TV producer (Hill Street Blues, LA Law, Doogie Howser MD, NYPD Blue)
1945 Anthony Hicks - Musician with the group The Hollies (Bus Stop, Carrie-Anne, On A Carousel, The Air that I Breathe)
1946 Bennie Andersson – Pianist and singer with Abba (Fernando, Dancing Queen, Take a Chance on Me, Waterloo)
1947 Ben Cross - Actor (A Bridge Too Far, Chariots of Fire, Paperhouse, The Potato Factory)
1949 Billy Gibbons - Rock musician with ZZ Top (Legs, Sharp Dressed Man, The Grange, Gimme All Your Lovin’)
1955 Xander Berkeley – Actor (Gattica, Air Force One, Taken, North Country, 24, Apollo 13, A Few Good Men, Terminator 2: Judgement Day)
1963 Benjamin Bratt - Actor (Law and Order, A Clear and Present Danger, The River Wild, Demolition Man, Miss Congeniality)
1978 Joe Absolom – British actor (Vincent, Doc Martin, EastEnders, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)
1984 Theo James – British actor (Bedlam, Downton Abbey, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger)
Died this Day
1859 Wilhelm Grimm – German folklorist, who along with his brother Jacob, collected and published classic fairy tales (Grimm’s Fairy Tales)
1897 William Terris – British actor who was stabbed by an embittered small-part actor as he left the Adelphi Theatre in London. It is said that his ghost haunts the theatre
1965 William Somerset Maugham, age 91 – Parisian-born British author and playwright (Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, The Razor’s Edge, Liza of Lambeth, Jack Straw, The Tenth Man)
1980 Colonel Harland Sanders, age 90 - Kentucky Fried Chicken king who was probably the world's best-known human trademark
On this Day
1620 The Mayflower arrived in Plymouth Harbour
1653 Following the execution of King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell became lord protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. As army commander, he gave himself dictatorial powers and turned himself into an uncrowned king for the next four years. Cromwell put down the rebellion, passed anti-Catholic laws and fought a successful war with Spain before dying in 1658
1773 The Boston Tea Party took place in Boston Harbour, as a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded three British tea ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbour. The midnight raid was in protest of the British Parliament's Tea Act of 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a virtual monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the East India Company to undercut even tea smuggled into the colonies by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny. When three tea ships, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, arrived in Boston Harbour, the colonists demanded that the tea be returned to England. After Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused, Patriot leader Samuel Adams organised the "tea party" with about 60 members of the Sons of Liberty, his underground resistance group. The British tea dumped in Boston Harbour was valued at some £18,000. Parliament, outraged by the blatant destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in the colonies, and required colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united resistance to the British
1809 Napoleon Bonaparte was divorced from the Empress Josephine by an act of the French Senate in order to marry Marie Louise, daughter of the Hapsburg Emperor
1811 At the Mississippi River Valley near New Madrid, Missouri, the greatest series of earthquakes in US history began when a quake of an estimated 8.6 magnitude on the Richter scale rocked the region. Although the earthquake greatly changed the topography of the region, it was only sparsely inhabited at the time and there were no known fatalities. The earthquake raised and lowered parts of the Mississippi Valley by as much as fifteen feet, changed the course of the Mississippi River, and actually caused the river to momentarily reverse its direction, giving rise to Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee. A 30,000-square-mile area was affected, although tremors were felt as far away as the East coast of the US, where the shock was recorded to have rung church bells. Additional earthquakes and aftershocks continued throughout the winter and into the spring, with approximately 2,000 more seismic vibrations felt during the period - five of which were estimated to be at an 8.0 or more magnitude. The New Madrid Fault system extends 120 miles southward from the area of Charleston, Missouri, to Marked Tree, Arkansas, and crosses through five states - Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The catastrophic upheavals of the type reported in the winter of 1811 to 1812 occur about every five or six hundred years
1850 The first immigrant ship, the Charlotte Jane, arrived at Lyttleton, New Zealand
1853 Santa Ana became dictator of Mexico
1895 At Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Royal Canadian Sea Cadet Corps organised to interest young men in serving in a planned Canadian Navy
1905 The entertainment trade publication Variety came out with its first weekly issue
1920 One of the deadliest earthquakes in history hit the Gansu province of midwestern China, causing massive landslides and the deaths of an estimated 200,000 people. The earthquake, which measured 8.5 magnitude on the Richter scale, affected an area of some 25,000 square miles, including 10 major population centres. The great devastation caused by the earthquake was due largely to poor soil conditions throughout the Gansu province, and by the fact that for almost 300 years there had been no recorded earthquakes in the region to stabilise gradual changes to the landscape.
1944 The World War II Battle of the Bulge began as German forces launched a surprise counterattack against Allied forces in Belgium
1954 The first synthetic diamond was produced by Professor H.T. Hall at General Electric Research Laboratories in the US
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