1622 Jean Baptiste Molière - French playwright (The Affected Young Ladies, The School for Wives, Don Juan, The Misanthrope, The Miser, The Learned Ladies)
1870 Pierre S. DuPont - Humanitarian and industrialist who founded the DuPont Company
1885 Mazo de la Roche - Canadian author (Whiteoakes of Jalna, Explorers of the Dawn, Possession, Delight, Ringing the Changes)
1909 Gene Krupa - Drummer, bandleader (Sing Sing Sing, Let Me Off Uptown, Knock Me a Kiss, Chickery Chick, Boogie Blues) His innovative technique allowed him to raise drumming to near-solo status
1913 Lloyd Bridges - Actor (Sea Hunt, Roots, High Noon, Airplane!, The Rainmaker, The Great Wallendas, Joe Versus the Volcano) He was the father of Jeff and Beau Bridges
1921 Frank Thornton – British actor (Are You Being Served?, Last of the Summer Wine, Gosford Park, The Old Curiosity Shop. Grace & Favour, Great Expectations)
1929 Martin Luther King, Jr. - US civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1964. He organised the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was the first major protest of the civil rights movement. The peaceful protests he led throughout the US South were often met with violence, but King and his followers persisted, and the movement gained momentum. In 1963, he led his massive March on Washington, in which he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" address
1937 Margaret O'Brien - Actress (Meet Me in St. Louis, Little Women, The Secret Garden, Amy)
1947 Andrea Martin - Actress, comedienne (The Martin Short Show, Innerspace, Second City TV)
1957 Mario Van Peebles - Mexican born actor (LA Law, Heartbreak Ridge, Hotshot)
1965 James Nesbitt – Irish actor (Murphy’s Law, Jekyll, Match Point, Cold Feet, Waking Ned, Ballykissangel)
1968 Chad Lowe – Actor (Life Goes On, Melrose Place, Take Me Home: The John Denver Story, Unfaithful, 24, Pretty Little Liars) He is the brother of Rob Lowe
1971 Regina King – Actress (Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, Ray, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde, Leap of Faith, Enemy of the State, Jerry Maguire, 24, American Crime, Southland, Flag Day, Watchmen)
Died this Day
1896 Matthew B. Brady, age 73 - US photographic pioneer who became one of the first photographers to use photography to chronicle natural history. He first gained prominence as a portrait photographer, capturing the famous, national leaders and foreign dignitaries. In 1850 Brady published A Gallery of Illustrious Americans, which included a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The portrait was reproduced and circulated during Lincoln's first Presidential campaign, and Lincoln himself was to declare later, "Make no mistake, gentlemen, Brady made me President!" At the peak of his success as a portrait photographer, Brady turned his attention to the Civil War. Although Roger Fenton was the first to document war in photographs, Brady was probably one of the greatest documentary photographers. Friends tried to discourage Brady, citing battlefield dangers and financial risks, but he persisted. Planning to document the war on a grand scale, he organised a corps of as many as twenty photographers to follow the troops in the field. Brady himself did not take many of the photographs which bear his name, but equipped his photographers with darkroom wagons to cover the War, with the ruling that his name, as employer, rather than the names of the photographers themselves, would appear on the photographs. Brady himself was frequently in the field and on several occasions was under fire, but spent much of his time supervising his photographers, preserving their negatives and buying others from private photographers freshly returned from the battlefield. When photographs from his comprehensive collection were published, whether printed by Brady or adapted as engravings in publications, they were credited "Photograph by Brady," although they were actually the work of many people. In 1862, Brady shocked the country by displaying his photographs of battlefield corpses from Antietam, posting a sign on the door of his New York gallery that read, "The Dead of Antietam." This exhibition marked the first time most people witnessed the carnage of war. The New York Times said that Brady had brought "home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war." After the Civil War, Brady found that the war-weary public was no longer interested in purchasing photographs of the recent bloody conflict. Having risked his fortune on his Civil War enterprise, Brady lost the gamble and fell into bankruptcy. His negatives were neglected until 1875, when Congress purchased the entire archive for $25,000. Brady's debts swallowed the entire sum. He died alone, an alcoholic, penniless and unappreciated. In his final years, Brady said, "No one will ever know what I went through to secure those negatives. The world can never appreciate it. It changed the whole course of my life." Despite his financial failure, Mathew Brady had a great and lasting effect on the art of photography. His war scenes demonstrated that photographs could be more than posed portraits, and his efforts represent the first instance of the comprehensive photo-documentation of a war
1987 Ray Bolger - Dancer, actor (The Wizard of Oz, The Colgate Comedy Hour, Look for the Silver Lining, Where's Raymond?, Babes in Toyland, The Partridge Family) He died in Los Angeles, five days after his 83rd birthday
1990 Gordon Jackson, age 66 - Scottish actor (Upstairs Downstairs, Shaka Zulu, A Town Like Alice, The Professionals, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Great Escape) He played Alec MacDonald in the 1984 movie Sherlock Holmes and the Masks of Death
On this Day
1559 Elizabeth Tudor, the twenty-five-year-old Protestant daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, was crowned Queen Elizabeth I in a coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey in London, two months after the death of her Catholic half-sister, Queen Mary I. After Mary's death, Elizabeth survived several Catholic plots against her, but was greeted with approval by most of England's lords, who were largely Protestant and hoped for greater religious tolerance under a Protestant queen. Elizabeth repealed Mary's pro-Catholic legislation and established a permanent Protestant Church of England. In foreign affairs, Elizabeth practised a policy of strengthening England's Protestant allies and dividing her foes. Elizabeth was opposed by the pope, who refused to recognise her legitimacy, and by Spain, a Catholic nation that was at the height of its power. In 1588, English-Spanish rivalry led to an abortive Spanish invasion of England in which the Spanish Armada, the greatest naval force in the world at the time, was destroyed by storms and a persistent English navy. With increasing English domination at sea, Elizabeth encouraged voyages of discovery, such as Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the world and Sir Walter Raleigh's expeditions to the North American coast. The long reign of Elizabeth, who became known as the Virgin Queen for her reluctance to endanger her authority through marriage, coincided with the flowering of the English Renaissance, associated with such renowned authors as William Shakespeare. By her death in 1603, England had become a major world power in every respect, and Queen Elizabeth I passed into history as one of England's greatest monarchs
1759 The British Museum was opened at Montague House, London. Sherlock Holmes had rooms on Montague Street near the museum when he first started his consulting detective practice
1790 Fletcher Christian and eight fellow mutineers from the ship the Bounty, landed on the remote Pitcairn Island, accompanied by six Tahitian men and twelve women
1797 A London haberdasher, John Hetherington, wore the first top hat
1827 To test the resistance of an asbestos suit, a volunteer in Paris walked into a huge oven, holding a raw steak. He emerged a few minutes later in good health and with an overdone steak
1831 Victor Hugo finished writing Notre Dame de Paris, also know as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Distracted by other projects, Hugo had continually postponed his deadlines for delivering the book to his publishers, but once he sat down to write it, he completed the novel in only four months
1844 The University of Notre Dame received its charter from the state of Indiana
1867 An unusually severe frost caused London's Regents Park lake to freeze, attracting crowds on the ice. When it gave way, 40 people died
1870 The first recorded use of a donkey to represent the US Democratic Party appeared in Harper's Weekly. Drawn by influential political illustrator Thomas Nast, the cartoon was entitled A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion. The donkey was tagged Copperhead Papers, referring to the Democrat-dominated newspapers of the South, and the dead lion represented the late Edwin McMasters Stanton, President Abraham Lincoln's secretary of war during the final three and a half years of the Civil War. Four years later, Nash originated the use of an elephant to symbolise the Republican Party in another Harper's Weekly cartoon
1878 Women received degrees for the first time at the London University
1878 The telephone was used for the first time in a public emergency when 21 doctors were summoned to a railway disaster at Tariffville on the Connecticut Western Railway
1880 The first British telephone directory was published by the London Telephone Company. It listed 255 subscribers
1881 The song, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, was first published, without the songwriter being identified
1901 The Northern Pacific Railway obtained a 999-year lease on a railway line in Manitoba
1909 A motorised hearse was used for the first time in a Chicago funeral procession by funeral director HD Ludlow. It was a sharp break with the tradition of stately horse-drawn hearses
1916 The Irish Free State, as southern Ireland was formally called, came into being
1943 Work was completed on the Pentagon, headquarters of the US Defence Department. The Pentagon, located just outside Washington DC in Arlington, Virginia, was built in 16 months at a cost of 83-million dollars
1967 The first Super Bowl ever was played as the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League beat the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League 35 - 10
1973 Golda Meir became the first Israeli head of state to be received by the Pope
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