1715 Francois de la Verendrye - The last of the family of great explorers, was born at Sorel, Quebec. He discovered the Saskatchewan River in 1739 and spent more than 10 years on the Prairies. He and his brother Joseph are believed to have been the first white men to see the Rocky Mountains. After the British conquest of Québec he inherited a seignory and lived in Montréal
1839 John Nelvil Maskelyne – British magician who advanced the modern presentation of magic. A trained watchmaker, he used his skills to create his box trick and automata. In 1865 he exposed fraudulent spiritualists which made him a national celebrity
1858 Giacomo Puccini - Italian opera composer (La Boheme, Tosca, Madame Butterfly)
1869 Edwin Arlington Robinson - Pulitzer prize-winning poet (Collected Poems, The Man Who Died Twice, Tristram, Richard Cory, Miniver Cheevy)
1907 Dame Peggy Ashcroft – One of the major British actresses of the 20th century (The Jewel in the Crown, A Passage to India, She’s Been Away, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Murder By the Book, A Perfect Spy, The 39 Steps)
1909 Patricia Hayes – British actress (Edna the Inebriate Woman, The Benny Hill Show, Marjorie and Men, Little Dorrit, A Fish Called Wanda)
1917 Frankie Darro - Actor (Vanishing Legion, Westward the Women, Broadway Bill, Riding High, Black Gold, Irish Luck)
1917 Gene Rayburn - Radio/TV host (Match Game)
1922 Barbara Billingsley - Actress (Leave It to Beaver, Back to the Beach, Airplane!)
1927 Peggy Castle - Actress (The White Orchid, The Finger Man, Lawman) She played Sally Fenner in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Negligent Nymph
1936 Hector Elizondo – Actor (Pretty Woman, Leviathan, Frankie and Johnny, Chicago Hope, Last Man Standing, Monk, The Princess Diaries)
1945 Diane Sawyer - TV journalist (60 Minutes, Prime Time Live)
1948 Lynne Thigpen – Actress (Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, The District, Shaft, LA Law, Tootsie, Godspell)
1948 Maurice & Robin Gibb – British born, Australian raised twins with the musical family group the Bee Gees (score for Saturday Night Fever, How Deep Is Your Love, Stayin' Alive, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, Massachusetts, I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You, Jive Talkin’, Tragedy)
1962 Ralph Fiennes – British actor (Wuthering Heights, The Avengers, The English Patient, Schindler's List, Prime Suspect I, Oscar and Lucinda) He is the brother of Joseph Fiennes
1968 Lauralee Bell - Actress (The Young and the Restless, Carpool Guy, Past Sins)
Died this Day
1440 Giles de Laval - The first bluebeard
1880 George Eliot, age 61 – British author (Silas Marner, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede) Born Mary Ann Evans in Warwickshire, England, she lived with her father in Coventry after her mother's death. There she grew close with her neighbours, the radical intellectual Bray family, and with their encouragement, began writing translations and reviews. After her father's death in 1849, she moved to London to become a freelance writer, boarding with the family of John Chapman, who had published some of her work. Chapman purchased the Westminster Review in 1842, which Eliot edited for three years. About this time, Eliot became involved with married journalist and writer George Henry Lewes. Divorce was extremely difficult in Victorian England, so Lewes and Eliot lived together but never married. Her polite Victorian acquaintances refused to call on her. Fearful that her unconventional relationship would provoke unfair criticism of her work, she began publishing fiction under the pseudonym George Eliot. After Lewes' death in 1878, Eliot married John Cross, her investment manager who was some 20 years her junior. The marriage only lasted seven months, until her death
1940 Nathanael West, age 37 – US author (Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust, A Cool Million, The Dream Life of Balso Snell) He was killed with his wife, Eileen McKenney, in a motor accident in California. West was born in New York to a family of Jewish immigrants. He attended Brown University, then went to Paris to write for a year and a half, where he wrote his first novel. When West returned to New York, he took a job managing a hotel, where he frequently gave free rooms to struggling writer friends, including Dashiell Hammet and Erskine Caldwell. In the 1930s, West moved to Hollywood. Although West was not widely read during his lifetime, his popularity grew after World War II
1943 Beatrix Potter, age 77 – British author and artist (Peter Rabbit books)
1979 Darryl F. Zanuck, age 77 – Producer (The Jazz Singer, The Grapes of Wrath, Forever Amber, The Snake Pit) He was a cofounder of 20th Century Studios
1989 Samuel Beckett, age 83 - Irish born playwright (Waiting for Godot, Endgame, All That Fall, Come and Go, Footfalls) He died in Paris
On this Day
1781 Marquis de Lafayette sailed for France after the success of the US War of Independence
1807 The US Congress, at the urging of President Thomas Jefferson, passed the Embargo Law aimed at cutting off all trade with Europe
1845 The first voice synthesiser, later known as P.T. Barnum's Euphonium, was demonstrated to the public in Philadelphia. The device, developed by German inventor Joseph Faber, used a keyboard connected to a series of reeds, bellows, and chambers that mimicked the human mouth, tongue, teeth, larynx, and lungs. The machine produced sixteen basic syllables and could pronounce any word in any Western language. A mechanical head attached to the machine seemed to emit the strange-sounding but recognisable speech. P.T. Barnum exhibited the invention in London, where it was seen by Alexander Graham Bell's father, who at the time, was developing a system to teach deaf people to speak
1849 Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was led before a firing squad and prepared for execution. He had been convicted and sentenced to death on November 16 for allegedly taking part in antigovernment activities. However, at the last moment he was reprieved and sent into exile to a Siberian labour camp, where he worked for four years. He was released in 1854
1859 The Nor' Wester became the first newspaper published on the Canadian Prairies
1864 Savannah, Georgia fell to General Sherman’s Union troops in the Civil War
1869 Newfoundland voted against joining Canada
1877 Liquid oxygen was formulated by Raoul Pictet of Geneva
1894 The Dreyfus affair began in France, as French officer Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason by a military court-martial and sentenced to life in prison for his alleged crime of passing military secrets to the Germans. The Jewish artillery captain, convicted on flimsy evidence in a highly irregular trial, began his life sentence on the notorious Devil's Island Prison in French Guyana four months later. The Dreyfus case demonstrated the anti-Semitism permeating France's military and, because many praised the ruling, in France in general. Interest in the case lapsed until 1896, when evidence was disclosed that implicated French Major Ferdinand Esterhazy as the guilty party. The army attempted to suppress this information, but a national uproar ensued, and the military had no choice but to put Esterhazy on trial. A court-martial was held in January 1898, and Esterhazy was acquitted within an hour. In response, the French novelist Émile Zola published an open letter entitled "J'Accuse" on the front page of the Aurore, which accused the judges of being under the thumb of the military. By the evening, 200,000 copies had been sold. One month later, Zola was sentenced to jail for libel but managed to escape to England. Meanwhile, out of the scandal a perilous national division was born, in which nationalists and members of the Catholic Church supported the military, while republicans, socialists, and advocates of religious freedom lined up to defend Dreyfus. In 1898, Major Hubert Henry, discoverer of the original letter attributed to Dreyfus, admitted that he had forged much of the evidence against Dreyfus. Henry then committed suicide. Soon afterward, Esterhazy fled the country. The military was forced to order a new court-martial for Dreyfus. In 1899, he was found guilty in another show trial and sentenced to 10 years in prison. However, a new French administration pardoned him, and in 1906 the supreme court of appeals overturned his conviction. The debacle of the Dreyfus affair brought about greater liberalisation in France, a reduction in the power of the military, and a formal separation of church and state
1895 Wilhelm Rontgen made the first radiograph, or x-ray. It was of his wife’s hand
1944 During the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans demanded the surrender of American troops at Bastogne, Belgium. Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe reportedly replied: “Nuts!”
1967 Pierre Trudeau, then the Canadian justice minister told the House of Commons, "There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation"
1969 A woman was ordained a deacon of the Anglican church of Canada for the first time
1973 "Canadian" magazine quoted author Pierre Berton as saying, "A Canadian is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe"
1987 Chinese thieves caused chaos in the streets of Xianyang, in north China, when they stole 2,249 manhole covers to sell back to government departments
1990 Lech Walesa took the oath of office as Poland's first popularly elected president
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