1600 Charles I - King of England and Scotland. He believed the king ruled by Divine Right, until his action in dissolving Parliament led to the civil war with Cromwell, and Charles I’s eventual execution
1805 Viscomte Ferdinand de Lesseps – French diplomat and engineer who supervised the construction of the Suez Canal from 1859 to 1869
1831 James Garfield – 20th US President. He was the first left-handed president
1875 Hiram Bingham – US senator and archaeologist who discovered the route in the Peruvian Andes to the lost Inca capital of Vilcabamba at Machu Picchu in 1911
1888 José Raùl Capablanca – Cuban chess champion who was instrumental in the development of the modern game
1905 Tommy Dorsey – US trombonist and bandleader who was known as The Sentimental Gentlemen of Swing (I'm Getting Sentimental Over You, Treasure Island, The Music Goes Round and Round, Marie, The Big Apple, Once in a While, All the Things You Are, There are Such Things, In the Blue of the Evening, Without a Song, I'll Never Smile Again, Music Maestro Please, Our Love, Indian Summer, Boogie Woogie) He and his elder brother, Jimmy, played together in the Dorsey Brothers Band, until they split over disagreements on the running of the band
1907 Jack Schaefer - US author (Shane, Monty Walsh, The Silver Whip)
1917 Indira Gandhi – Prime Minister of India from 1966 to 1977, and from 1980 to 1984. She was born in Allahabad
1919 Alan Young - Actor (Mr. Ed, Beverly Hills Cop 3, The Time Machine, The Alan Young Show)
1920 Gene Tierney – Actress (Laura, Leave Her to Heaven, The Pleasure Seekers, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir)
1933 Larry King - TV, radio host, columnist (Larry King Live)
1936 Dick Cavett - TV host (The Dick Cavett Show)
1938 Ted Turner - Cable TV mogul and owner of the Atlanta Braves
1941 Dan Haggerty - Actor and animal trainer (The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, The Adventures of Frontier Freemont)
1942 Calvin Klein - Fashion designer
1943 Fred Lipsius – Musician with Blood Sweat & Tears (You've Made Me So Very Happy, Spinning Wheel)
1954 Kathleen Quinlan - Actress (Family Law, The Promise, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, American Graffiti, Airport '77, Apollo 13, Breakdown)
1956 Glynnis O'Connor - Actress (The Deliberate Stranger, Johnny Dangerously, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Sons and Daughters)
1960 Allison Janney – Actress (The West Wing, Winter Solstice, The Hours, Nurse Betty, American Beauty, Primary Colors, The Guiding Light)
1961 Meg Ryan - Actress (When Harry Met Sally, D.O.A., Sleepless in Seattle, Top Gun, When a Man Loves a Woman, Innerspace, The Presidio, French Kiss)
1962 Jodie Foster – Actress (Silence of the Lambs, The Accused, Taxi Driver, Maverick, Nell, Candleshoe, Freaky Friday, Tom Sawyer, Napoleon and Samantha, Bugsy Malone, Contact) and director (Little Man Tate, Home for the Holidays)
Died this Day
1703 The Man in the Iron Mask – A mysterious prisoner in the Bastille, whose true identity was never revealed, although we was believed to have been Count Anthony Matthioli. He was the subject of a novel by Alexandre Dumas . The infamous mask was in reality made of velvet, and strengthened by bands of whalebone
1828 Franz Schubert, age 31 – Austrian composer who died of typhus
1924 Thomas Ince – Silent film director known as "The Father of the Western" (Custer's Last Fight) He died in his bed in Los Angeles, California. Although Ince died of a heart attack, rumours that he had been shot to death by publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst circulated for years. A stage performer as a teenager, Ince began directing silent films in his 20s. His movies were so successful that he was able to build his own studio on a large tract of coastal land between Santa Monica and Malibu. At the Inceville Studio, he filmed many of Hollywood's earliest Westerns. Ince was at the peak of his film career when he agreed to take a cruise on William Randolph Hearst's yacht on November 16, 1924, with, among others, Hearst, Charlie Chaplin, and actress Marion Davies, Hearst's long-time paramour. While aboard the yacht, Ince suffered a heart attack. He debarked in San Diego and boarded a train to Los Angeles, where he died at home three days later. Partly fuelled by Hearst and Chaplin's inexplicable denial that they were even on the yacht when Ince suffered his heart attack, rumours began to spread that Hearst had shot Ince. There were two main theories surrounding the death: some believed that Hearst caught Ince with Davies, while others speculated that Hearst actually intended to shoot Chaplin. Although investigators confirmed that Ince had died as a result of a heart attack, the rumours continued. The rumours were so persistent that they were often reported as fact by many publications and books, and some even still believe that the Hollywood community covered up Ince's murder. Years after the incident, publications continued to print false reports that Hearst had secretly supplied Ince's widow with a trust fund because he had killed her husband
1988 Christina Onassis, age 37 – US born daughter of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. She was the embodiment of the “poor little rich girl”
1998 Alan Pakula, age 70 – Director (To Kill a Mockingbird, Sophie’s Choice) He died in a car accident on Long Island, NY
On this Day
1794 The US and Britain signed the Jay Treaty concerning trade boundaries and commerce. John Jay negotiated the Jay Treaty “to promote friendship and good neighbourhood” between the US and British North America, now Canada
1850 Alfred, Lord Tennyson became the Poet Laureate of Britain
1858 The colony of British Columbia was formally proclaimed
1863 President Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address at the close of a dedication ceremony for a cemetery for Union army dead at the site of the Civil War battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Gettysburg Address is commonly considered one of the finest speeches ever uttered by a US politician. Asked to make "a few appropriate remarks," the usually long-winded Lincoln articulated, in less than three hundred words, an eloquent memorial to the thousands of Union soldiers who fell on the battlefields of Gettysburg, explained the historical relevance of their sacrifice, and called for the living to resolve that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." The hard-won Union victory at the bloody three-day battle of Gettysburg ended the northern invasion of Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee, but resulted in over 20,000 Union casualties. The Lincoln Memorial, which opened in Washington, DC, in 1922, features the words of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address carved into its interior marble walls
1867 The British government rejected a request to allow British Columbia to join Confederation immediately
1869 In London, England, the Hudson's Bay Company owners approved the deed of surrender of their Rupert's Land territory to Canada. The terms were £300,000 cash, land around HBC posts and 1/20th of the Prairie fertile belt, which would come into effect December 1st. This move prompted the first of two north-west rebellions of the Métis under Louis Riel. The Métis were alarmed at the possibility of mass immigration by Canadians when the Hudson's Bay Company handed over jurisdiction for their area to the government of Canada. The uprisings led to the formation of the province of Manitoba, and to Riel’s hanging for treason
1874 The Women's Christian Temperance Union was founded at Cleveland, Ohio
1893 The first colour supplement was published in the Sunday New York World
1906 Niagara Falls began to provide hydro-electric power to Toronto
1954 The first automatic toll collection machine was placed in service at the Union Toll Plaza on New Jersey's Garden State Parkway. In order to pass through the toll area, motorists dropped 25¢ into a wire mesh hopper and then a green light would flash permitting passage through the toll. The automatic toll collection machine was an important innovation for the US’s modern toll highway, which first appeared in 1940 with the opening of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The earliest known toll road appeared in the US in 1795, when people travelling through the Blue Ridge Mountains along the Little River Turnpike found their way blocked by toll gates at Snicker's Gap, where they were asked to pay a fee for passage
1954 Sammy Davis Jr. was seriously injured in a car crash while en route to a Los Angeles recording session from Las Vegas. Davis's left eye was removed but he was back performing within several weeks. During his hospital stay, he converted to Judaism
1960 The first vertical take-off aircraft (VTOL) made by the British Hawker Siddeley Company was flown for the first time
1969 As part of Apollo 12, the second manned mission to the surface of the moon, US astronauts Charles Conrad, Jr., and Alan L. Bean became the third and fourth humans to walk on the surface of the moon after their landing module, Intrepid, touched down on the lunar plain of the Ocean of Storms. Over the next fifteen-and-a-half hours, the two astronauts made two lunar walks, where they collected samples and investigated the Surveyor 3 spacecraft, an unmanned US probe that soft-landed on the moon in 1967
1990 The pop duo Milli Vanilli were stripped of their Grammy Award because other singers had lent their voices to the Girl You Know It's True album
1990 NATO and the Warsaw Pact formally ended the Cold War by signing a treaty on conventional armed forces in Europe. They also signed a non-aggression declaration
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