1756 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Austrian composer (Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, Requiem, A Little Night Music) He wrote over 600 compositions, but died in poverty at age 35
1832 Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) - British author, logician, photographer and mathematician (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, The Hunting of the Snark)
1885 Jerome Kern - Composer who is known as the Father of the American Musical (Show Boat, Ol' Man River, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Lovely to Look At, The Last Time I Saw Paris)
1900 Hyman Rickover - Admiral in the US Navy who was dubbed the Father of the Nuclear Navy. He directed development of the Nautilus, the first nuclear reactor-powered submarine
1908 William Randolph Hearst Jr. - US newspaper publisher and media magnate
1918 Skitch Henderson - Bandleader who was the musical director of NBC-TV's The Tonight Show with Steve Allen
1921 Donna Reed - Actress (From Here to Eternity, It's a Wonderful Life, The Benny Goodman Story, The Donna Reed Show)
1931 Mordecai Richler - Canadian author (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Joshua Then and Now, Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, Son of a Smaller Hero)
1936 Troy Donahue - Actor (Hawaiian Eye, Parrish, A Summer Place, Legion, The Godfather II)
1940 James Cromwell - Actor (The Green Mile, Space Cowboys, Babe, Star Trek: First Contact)
1944 Nick Mason - Rock musician with the group Pink Floyd (The Wall, Dark Side of the Moon)
1964 Bridget Fonda - Actress (Point of No Return, Single White Female, The Road to Wellville) She is the daughter of actor Peter Fonda and granddaughter of Henry Fonda
1965 Alan Cumming – Scottish actor (The Good Wife, Zero Effect, X-Men 2: X-Men United, Nicholas Nickleby, Spy Kids, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, Emma, GoldenEye, Bernard and the Genie) He’s the host of PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery
Died this Day
1851 John James Audubon, age 65 - Naturalist and artist famous for his drawings and paintings of North American birds. Audubon was born in Les Cayes, Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. He was the illegitimate son of French sea captain Jean Audubon and a servant, Jeanne Rabine. Audubon's mother died shortly after his birth and while still a young child, he and his half-sister went to live at their father's home in Le Port Launay de Couëron, France. During a happy childhood, Audubon studied geography, fencing, and mathematics, but was most enthusiastic about exploring the out-of-doors and collecting and drawing birds' nests, eggs, and other curiosities. Encouraged by his father's wife, Audubon pursued his interest in drawing birds native to the wetlands near his childhood home on the Loire River estuary. In 1803 he was sent to the US to operate Mill Grove, a farm near Philadelphia that his father had purchased in 1789. Through mismanagement and neglect Audubon lost the farm, thus beginning a long series of early commercial failures for the young man, who preferred to devote his time to shooting and sketching specimens rather than to overseeing his business interests. At Mill Grove, Audubon met Lucy Bakewell, whom he married in 1808. They moved to Louisville, Kentucky, then to Henderson, Kentucky, and in later years to New Orleans. Because he was often absent on collecting excursions, his wife worked as a governess and schoolteacher to support the family. Encouraged by his wife Lucy, he continued drawing birds. Fascination with birds inspired journeys as far South as the Florida Keys and as far North as Labrador, Canada. From 1810 to 1819, the family lived in Henderson, a town located along the Mississippi flyway, an important migratory route for birds. After 1820, Audubon and his wife supported themselves with a succession of jobs while he worked on his drawings. In 1826 Audubon turned to England to gain support for his venture. He found a warm and encouraging reception in Liverpool, where he showed his drawings and paintings at the Royal Institution. Gradually he gathered a group of subscribers and found an accomplished London engraving firm, Robert Havell & Son, thus enabling him to begin his project of creating large illustrations of North American birds. The four-volume The Birds of America, consisting of 435 hand-coloured plates, was published by Havell between 1827-38. His reputation as an illustrator secure, Audubon settled in the city of New York in 1839. Audubon's last nine years were spent at Minnie's Land, thirty-five acres of property that he purchased on what is now upper Manhattan, facing the Hudson River. In 1886, George Bird Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream, founded the Audubon Society, forerunner of the National Audubon Society
1901 Guiseppe Verdi, age 87 - Italian composer (Rigoletto, La Traviata, Aida)
1967 Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White II and Roger B. Chaffee - Astronauts who died in a flash fire during a routine test aboard their Apollo 1 spacecraft at Cape Kennedy, Florida. An investigation indicated that a faulty electrical wire inside the Apollo 1 command module, which ignited pure oxygen, was the probable cause of the launch pad fire. The astronauts, the first Americans to die in a spacecraft, had been participating in a simulation of the Apollo 1 launch scheduled for the next month
1972 Mahalia Jackson - US gospel and jazz singer (Bless This House, Move On Up)
1989 Sir Thomas Sopwith - British air pioneer and WW I aircraft designer who designed the Sopwith Camel airplane. He died 9 days after his 101st birthday
On this Day
1302 Poet and politician Dante Alighieri was exiled from Florence, where he served as one of six priors governing the city. Dante's political activities, including the banishing of several rivals, led to his own banishment, and he wrote his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, as a virtual wanderer, seeking protection for his family in town after town. Around 1293, Dante published a book of prose and poetry called The New Life, followed a few years later by another collection, The Banquet. It wasn't until his banishment that he began work on his Divine Comedy. In the poem's first book, the poet takes a tour through Hell with the poet Virgil as a guide. Virgil also guides the poet through Purgatory in the second book. The poet's guide in Paradise, however, is named Beatrice. The work was written and published in sections between 1308 and 1321. Although Dante called the work simply Comedy, the work became enormously popular, and a deluxe version published in 1555 in Venice bore the title The Divine Comedy
1858 Ottawa became the Canadian capital. Formerly Bytown, Ottawa was selected by Queen Victoria. Four other cities, Quebec, Montréal, Kingston and Toronto, had been in the running, but the Queen chose Ottawa because its location away from the US border made it safe from possible enemy attack
1880 Thomas Edison received a US patent for his electric incandescent lamp
1888 The National Geographic Society was founded
1913 US athlete Jim Thorpe was stripped of his Olympic decathlon and pentathlon gold medals when it was ruled that he was a professional, having been paid to play baseball
1945 Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland. The notorious Auschwitz was freed by Field Marshall Ivan Konev and the troops of his 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front. Although few details of the liberation of Auschwitz were given in the press at the time, it had gained a reputation as the worst of the German concentration camps. That May, a State commission compiled by the Soviets revealed the full horror of conditions at the camp. It found evidence of experiments carried out on humans "of a revolting character". They also found seven tons of women's hair, human teeth, from which gold fillings had been extracted and tens of thousands of children's outfits. The final death toll at Auschwitz was estimated between 1 and 1.5 million, including 800,000 Jews
1951 An era of atomic testing in the Nevada desert began as an Air Force plane dropped a one-kiloton bomb on Frenchman Flats, forcefully marking the continued importance of the West in the development of nuclear weaponry. Although much of the West had long lagged behind the rest of the nation in technological and industrial development, the massive World War II project to build the first atomic bomb single-handedly pushed the region into the 20th century. Code named the Manhattan Project, this ambitious research and development program pumped millions of dollars of federal funds into new western research centres like the bomb building lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico and the fissionable material production centre at Hanford, Washington. Ironically, the very conditions that had once impeded western technological development became benefits: lots of wide-open unpopulated federal land where dangerous experiments could be conducted in secret
1965 Queen Elizabeth signed a Royal Proclamation permitting Canada's new Maple Leaf flag to be flown
1973 The Vietnam peace accords were signed in Paris
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