AD 274 Constantine the Great - Roman emperor from 312 to 337, who adopted Christianity
1807 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - US poet (The Song of Hiawatha, Paul Revere's Ride, The Wreck of the Hesperus)
1847 Dame Ellen Terry - British Shakespearean actress. She was the first actress to be made a Dame
1850 Henry Edwards Huntington - US railroad owner (Union Pacific)
1881 Sveinn Bjornsson - The first President of the Republic of Iceland
1891 David Sarnoff - Russian born US broadcasting pioneer, who became CEO of RCA and NBC. Sarnoff moved to New York at age nine. At seventeen, he took a job as a telegraph messenger boy and used his first paycheque to buy a telegraph to teach himself Morse code. Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company hired him as a telegraph operator. In 1912, Sarnoff was the first telegraph operator in the US to pick up the Titanic's distress call. He remained at his post for seventy-two hours, monitoring the call and passing on information
1892 William Demarest – Actor (My Three Sons, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Jazz Singer, The Great McGinty, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, That Darn Cat, Charlie Chan at the Opera)
1899 Charles Herbert Best - Canadian medical researcher, physiologist, and co-discoverer of insulin. In 1921, working alongside Frederick Banting as a medical student at the University of Toronto, Best was the first to extract pancreatic insulin from dogs in a form that controlled diabetes. His work led in 1923 to the award of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine to Banting and Scottish physiologist John James Rickard Macleod, who provided the laboratory space. Banting protested the award to Macleod and shared his part of the prize equally with Best. During World War II Best helped start a Canadian program to provide dried human blood serum. He also discovered the vitamin choline and the enzyme histaminase
1902 John Steinbeck - US author (The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden) He was born and raised in the Salinas Valley in California, where his father was a county official and his mother a former schoolteacher. Steinbeck was a good student and president of his senior class in high school. He had studied writing intermittently at Stanford between 1920 and 1925, but never graduated. He then moved to New York City, where he worked as a manual labourer and a journalist while writing stories and novels. He married and moved to Pacific Grove in 1930, where his father, a government official in Salinas County, gave the couple a house to live in, and a small income while Steinbeck continued to write. His third novel, Tortilla Flat, published in 1935, became a critical and financial success. Steinbeck also took up the serious study of marine biology and published a non-fiction book, The Sea of Cortez, in 1941. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962
1904 Elisabeth Welch - US singer (Stormy Weather, Charleston, Far Away in Shanty Town, Love for Sale) She starred in the 1923 Broadway production, Running Wild, in which she introduced the dance The Charleston to the world
1905 Franchot Tone - Actor (Mutiny on the Bounty, Advise and Consent, In Harm's Way, Ben Casey)
1912 Lawrence Durrell - Indian born poet and writer (The Alexandria Quartet, Prospero's Cell, Bitter Lemons, The Ikons, The Vega and Other Poems)
1913 Irwin Shaw - Author (Rich Man Poor Man, The Young Lions)
1917 John Connally - Former governor of Texas who suffered gunshot wounds during President J.F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963
1920 Jose Melis – Bandleader (The Jack Paar Show) He composed Jack Paar’s theme song I-M-4-U
1930 Joanne Woodward - Actress (The Three Faces of Eve, Sybil, The Long Hot Summer, Philadelphia, Rachel Rachel) She was married to Paul Newman
1932 Elizabeth Taylor - British born actress (Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, National Velvet, Cleopatra, Butterfield 8)
1934 Ralph Nader - Consumer advocate and author (Unsafe at Any Speed, Canada Firsts)
1937 Barbara Babcock - Actress (Hill Street Blues, Space Cowboys, Dallas, The Law and Harry McGraw) She played Martha Robinson in the Perry Mason movie The Case of the Poisoned Pen
1940 Howard Hesseman - Actor (WKRP in Cincinnati, Head of the Class, Amazon Women on the Moon, This Is Spinal Tap)
1943 Mary Frann - Actress (Newhart, King's Crossing, Dance 'Til Dawn, Fatal Charm)
1949 Debra Monk - Actress (NYPD Blue, Bulworth, In & Out)
1957 Timothy Spall – British actor (Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Harry Potter movies, Nicholas Nickleby, Our Mutual Friend, Secrets & Lies, Hamlet, The King’s Speech, The Street, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Auf Wiederehen Pet)
1962 Adam Baldwin - Actor (Chuck, Firefly, Serenity, Full Metal Jacket, Independence Day, Radio Flyer, Predator 2, The Patriot, Ordinary People, My Bodyguard, Wyatt Earp, Angel, DC Cab, Deadbolt) He is no relation to the Baldwin brothers
1966 Donal Logue – Canadian actor (The Patriot, Blade, Ghost Rider, Terriers, Max Payne, Grounded for Life, Reindeer Games, The Runaway Bride, Sneakers, Gotham)
1972 Richard Coyle – British actor (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Tiime, The Whistleblowers, Strange, Coupling, Lorna Doone, Wives and Daughters, Human Traffic, The Libertine)
Died this Day
1706 John Evelyn, age 86 - British author and diarist who kept a diary for the last 65 years of his life. In 1661 he published "Fumifugium, or the Inconvenience of the Air and Smoke of London Dissipated" which proposed practical remedies for metropolitan air pollution
1735 John Arbuthnot - British physician, poet and author (Know Thyself, The History of John Bull, An Essay Concerning the Nature of Ailments)
1795 Francis Marion - US revolutionary commander who was known as "The Swamp Fox"
1936 Ivan Pavlov, age 86 - Russian physiologist and psychologist who specialised in behaviour and developed Pavlov's Theory (Pavlov's dogs…)
1993 Lillian Gish, age 97 - Actress who was known as The First Lady of the Silent Screen (The Whales of August, The Birth of a Nation, The Scarlet Letter, Arsenic and Old Lace) She was the sister of Dorothy Gish
2002 Terence Alan (Spike) Milligan, age 83 - Irish comedian, actor (Gormenghast, Yellowbeard, History of the World: Part I, The Life of Brian, The Last Remake of Beau Geste) and author (Depression and How to Survive It, Adolph Hitler: My Part In His Downfall, Monty: My Part In His Victory, Peace Work, Where Have All the Bullets Gone?, Goodbye Soldier, Puckoon: a Novel, A Book of Bits) He has been called "the godfather of alternative comedy", and is credited with transforming modern British comedy. He was a founding father of BBC radio's Goon Show, with Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine and Harry Secombe. Milligan also played a policemen in 1978 comedy version of The Hound of the Baskervilles He celebrated his 80th birthday with a special edition of his book, The Hound of the Baskervilles According To Spike Milligan He was born in India, to Irish parents. The family returned to Britain upon his father's retirement from the British Army in 1933. Milligan, an Irish national, received an honorary Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1992, and an honorary knighthood in the 2000/2001 New Year Honours List. He died at his home in Sussex, surrounded by his family
2003 Fred McFeely Rogers - Protestant minister, composer and TV host (Mr. Rogers Neighbourhood, Butternut Square, Mister Rogers, The Children's Corner) He died of cancer at his home in Pittsburgh, less than a month before his 75th birthday
On this Day
1526 In Germany, the rulers of Saxony and Hesse formed the League of Gotha, an alliance of Protestant princes
1801 The District of Columbia was placed under the jurisdiction of Congress
1827 The first New Orleans Mardi Gras celebration took place
1844 The Dominican Republic gained its independence from Haiti
1879 It was announced that saccharin had been discovered at John Hopkins University, Baltimore
1883 Oscar Hammerstein, grandfather of the musical composer, patented the first cigar-rolling machine in the US
1897 Paris saw the first couple to leave their wedding in a decorated motor car
1915 The Sherlock Holmes story, The Valley of Fear, was published in novel form
1917 Women in Ontario won the right to vote in provincial elections
1922 The US Supreme Court unanimously upheld the 19th Amendment to the Constitution that guaranteed the right of women to vote
1939 The US Supreme Court outlawed sit-down strikes
1939 Britain's most haunted house, Borley Rectory, was mysteriously destroyed by fire
1948 The Federal Trade Commission issued a restraining order, preventing the Willys-Overland Company from representing that it had developed the Jeep. Willys-Overland did, in fact, end up producing the Army vehicle that would come to be known as the Jeep, but it was the Bantam Motor Company that first presented the innovative design to the Army
1973 Members of the American Indian Movement occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux men, women and children. The occupation lasted until May
1974 Time-Life published the first issue of People magazine with an initial run of one million copies
1977 In Toronto, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones rock group was arrested by the RCMP and charged with possession of heroin with intent to traffic and possession of cocaine. Police seized 22 grams of heroin, 5 grams of cocaine and narcotics paraphernalia. Richards was released on $25,000 bail and later found guilty, but released on condition the Stones play two benefit concerts for the blind
1986 The US Senate approved telecasts of its debates on a trial basis
1991 President Bush declared that "Kuwait is liberated, Iraq's army is defeated," and announced that the allies would suspend Gulf War combat operations at midnight
1997 Divorce became legal in Ireland
1998 With the approval of Queen Elizabeth II, Britain's House of Lords agreed to end 1,000 years of male preference by giving a monarch's first-born daughter the same claim to the throne as any first-born son
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