1469 Niccolo Machiavelli - Italian writer, philosopher, statesman and political theorist. In 1532, he wrote The Prince, which stated that all means are acceptable to achieve the maintenance of authority
1844 Richard D'Oyly Carte - British impresario who produced Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Their success enabled him to build the Savoy Theatre
1859 Andy Adams – US cowboy author who was one of the most accurate chroniclers of the authentic Old West (The Log of a Cowboy) While still in his teens, Adams ran away from home, eventually making his way to Texas, where he found work as a cowboy. From 1882 to 1893, Adams witnessed firsthand the golden era of the Texas cattle industry, a time when the cowboys ran cattle on vast open ranges still relatively unrestricted by barbed wire fences. In 1883, he made the first of many cattle drives along the famous cattle trails running north from Texas to the cow towns of Kansas. As farmers began to challenge the ranchers for control of the land, Adams witnessed the gradual fencing-in of the cattle country that would eventually end the short age of the open range. He made his last cattle drive in 1889. In 1893, Adams left Texas for Colorado, attracted by rumours of gold at Cripple Creek. Like most would-be miners, he failed to make a fortune in the business. He eventually settled in Colorado Springs, where he remained for most of his life. While doing a variety of jobs, Adams began to write stories based on his experiences as a Texas cowboy. Adams distinguished himself from the majority of other western authors of the day with his meticulous accuracy and fidelity to the truth. Adams' self-avowed goal was to make his fiction indistinguishable from fact, and as one commentator has noted, "in this he succeeds only too well." While a reader searching for a good story might find Adams' books somewhat dull today, historians and writers looking for an accurate depiction of the cowboy life have found them invaluable
1874 François Coty - Corsican born perfume manufacturer
1886 Marcel Dupré - French organ virtuoso and influential teacher
1896 Dodie Smith - British author (The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Call it a Day)
1898 Golda Meir - The fourth prime minister of the State of Israel. She was born in Russian but educated in the US, and settled in Palestine in 1921, where she worked on a kibbutz. She became prime minister at the age of 70
1906 Mary Astor - US actress (The Maltese Falcon, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, Meet Me In St. Louis)
1913 William Inge - US playwright (Bus Stop, Picnic, Come Back Little Sheba)
1919 Pete Seeger - US songwriter and folk singer with the groups the Almanac Singers and the Weavers (Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, Turn Turn Turn, If I Had a Hammer)
1919 Betty Comden - Broadway librettist and lyricist, with Adolph Green (It's Always Fair Weather, On the Town, Billion Dollar, Singin' in the Rain)
1921 Sugar Ray Robinson - US boxer who was the world champion six times between 1946 and 1960
1921 Joe Ames - Singer with the group The Ames Brothers (Undecided, The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane, Ragmop, Tammy)
1926 Ann B. Davis - Actress (The Bob Cummings Show, The Brady Bunch, Lover Come Back)
1928 Dave Dudley - Country singer with the groups The Dave Dudley Trio, The Country Gentlemen and The Roadrunners (Six Days On the Road, Mad, Truck Drivin' Sun of a Gun, Vietnam Blues)
1933 James Brown - The Godfather of Soul (Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, Please Please Please, I Got You - I Feel Good, It's A Man's Man's Man's World, Living in America)
1937 Frankie Valli - Singer with the group The Four Seasons (Sherry, Big Girls Don't Cry, Rag Doll, Let's Hang On) and solo (Can't Take My Eyes Off You, My Eyes Adored You, Swearin' To God, December '63 - Oh What a Night, Grease)
1938 Rudy Jacobs - Jazz musician
1947 Doug Henning - Canadian magician
1950 Mary Hopkin - Singer (Those Were the Days, Goodbye, Temma Harbour, If You Love Me)
1951 Christopher Cross - Singer and songwriter (Sailing, Ride like the Wind, Say You'll be Mine, Think of Laura)
1972 Kristin Lehman – Canadian actress (Judging Amy, The Killing, Drive, Killer Instinct, Century City, The Chronicles of Riddick)
1975 Dulé Hill – Actor (The West Wing, Psych, The Guardian, Men of Honor, She’s All That, Sugar Hill)
1975 Christina Hendricks – Actress (Mad Men, Beggars & Choosers, Drive, Life as We Know It, Firefly)
Died this Day
1606 Henry Garnet - British priest, originally a Protestant, who became a Jesuit. He was hanged for treason for his part in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up British Parliament
On this Day
1494 Christopher Columbus was the first European to discover Jamaica, on his second voyage across the Atlantic
1500 The Portuguese explorer, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, claimed Brazil for his nation
1788 The first daily evening newspaper, The Star and Evening Standard, was published in London
1802 Washington, DC, was incorporated as a city, with the mayor appointed by the president and the council elected by property owners
1808 The first duel fought from two hot-air balloons took place above Paris. The two participants used pistols, and their shots were carefully aimed so as not to puncture the air craft. A Monsieur Le Pique was killed
1810 George Gordon, Lord Byron, swam across the Hellespont, a tumultuous strait in Turkey later called the Dardanelles. The 22-year-old Byron was taking an extended tour of the European continent when he decided to take his famous swim. His travels inspired his first widely read poetic work, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. After the publication of the poem's first canto in 1809, Byron became a major British celebrity. The world-weary tone of the poems, describing the travels of a young noble waiting to be knighted, caught the imagination of the public and established the cynical Byronic hero
1887 An explosion in a coal mine at Nanaimo, BC killed 150 people
1915 Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian army medical officer from Guelph, Ontario, wrote the poem In Flanders Fields. He composed his poem in 20 minutes, while overlooking the grave of a fellow officer at Ypres, Belgium. It was first published in the December 1915 issue of Punch magazine. The poem is recited annually at Remembrance Day services across Canada, and the first stanza is printed on the Canadian ten dollar bill
1917 At Acheville, France, Lieutenant Robert Grierson Combe of the 27th Battalion, Manitoba Regiment, took 80 German prisoners with a platoon of only 5 men
1919 Airline passenger service was inaugurated when Robert Hewitt flew two women from New York to Atlantic City, New Jersey
1921 West Virginia imposed the first state sales tax
1922 Women in the province of Prince Edward Island were given the right to vote
1937 Margaret Mitchell won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, Gone With The Wind
1937 The Hindenburg left Frankfurt, Germany, on it's ill-fated three day voyage to the US
1944 In the US, the wartime rationing of most grades of meats ended
1952 The first airplane landed on the North Pole as a ski-modified US Air Force C-47, piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher of Oklahoma and Lieutenant Colonel William P. Benedict of California, touched down. A moment later, Fletcher climbed out of the plane and walked to the exact geographic North Pole, probably the first person in history to do so. In the early 20th century, US explorers Robert Peary and Dr. Frederick Cook, both claiming to have separately reached the North Pole by land, publicly disputed each other's claims. In 1911, Congress formally recognised Peary's claim. In recent years, further studies of the conflicting claims suggest that neither expedition reached the exact North Pole, but that Peary came far closer, falling perhaps 30 miles short. As a result of those findings, Lieutenant Colonel Fletcher was the first person to undisputedly stand on the North Pole. Standing alongside Fletcher on the top of the world was passenger Dr. Albert P. Crary, a scientist who in 1961 travelled to the South Pole by motorised vehicle, becoming the first person in history to have stood on both poles
1979 British Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher was chosen to become Britain's first female prime minister as the Tories ousted the incumbent Labour government in parliamentary elections
1979 The Yukon River submerged Dawson City, Yukon, under more than six feet of water. The downtown was declared a disaster area
1988 The White House acknowledged that first lady Nancy Reagan had relied on an astrologer and used astrological advice to help influence her husband and schedule his activities
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