1613 Andre Le Notre - French landscape architect who designed the Versailles gardens
1710 Thomas Augustine Arne - British composer who wrote the masque Alfred in 1740, which included the song Rule Britannia
1795 William Lyon Mackenzie – Scottish-born Canadian journalist, printer and political reformer. He was the first mayor of the city of Toronto, Ontario. In 1837 he led an unsuccessful revolt against the government , after which he fled into exile in the U.S. He was the grandfather of Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King
1821 Sir John Joseph Caldwell Abbott - Third Canadian Prime Minister. He was born at St. Andrews, Lower Canada, the first Prime Minster to be born in Canada. Abbott was also the first Prime Minister to lead the country from the Senate
1831 Clement Studebaker - US manufacturer and a leader in the auto industry
1832 Charles Boycott - English-born Irish estate agent. In 1880 he issued eviction notices to a group of tenants who had requested lower rents following crop failure and famine. The Irish statesman Parnell urged tenants not to resort to violence, but to protest by refusing to communicate or deal with him at all. The term "boycott" was born
1858 Adolph Simon Ochs - US publisher who built The New York Times into one of the world's top newspapers
1894 Joseph Meyer - US songwriter (California Here I Come, If You Knew Suzie, Crazy Rhythm)
1908 Max Wall - British entertainer who has been both a zany comedian in music halls, and an acclaimed serious actor (Waiting for Godot)
1912 Irving Layton - Romanian-born Canadian poet (Here and Now, The Bull Calf and Other Poems, The Shattered Plinths)
1912 Paul Weston - Orchestra leader, arranger (Nevertheless I'm in Love with You, Theme from Shane) and songwriter (I Should Care, Shrimp Boats)
1917 Googie (Georgette) Withers - Karachi-born British and Australian actress (Northanger Abbey, Devil on Horseback, Accused, Dead of Night, Miranda)
1918 Frank Overton – Actor (To Kill a Mockingbird, Fail-Safe, 12 O’Clock High, Desire Under the Elms) He was in the Perry Mason episodes The Case of the Bluffing Blast and The Case of the Renegade Refugees
1920 Elaine de Kooning - US painter, teacher and art critic
1921 Gordon MacRae - Actor (Oklahoma!, Carousel, The Desert Song) and singer (I Still Get Jealous, It's Magic, Hair of Gold Eyes of Blue, C'est Magnifique) He had been married to Sheila MacRae, and was the father of Meredith MacRae
1922 Jack Kerouac - US poet and novelist known as the spokesman for the Beat movement (On the Road, The Town and the City, Big Sur, Visions of Cody, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, Lonesome Traveller, Desolation Angels) He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts of French-Canadian parents and learned English as a second language
1923 Walter 'Wally' Shirra, Jr - US astronaut
1928 Edward Albee - Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (A Delicate Balance, Seascape, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
1932 Barbara Feldon - Actress (Get Smart, The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, Smile)
1938 Lew DeWitt - Singer with The Statler Brothers (Flowers on the Wall, Bed of Roses)
1940 Al Jarreau - Singer (Breakin' Away, We're in this Love Together)
1946 Liza Minnelli - Actress (Cabaret, The Sterile Cuckoo, Arthur, Liza with a 'Z'!) She is the daughter of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli
1948 James Taylor - Singer (You've Got a Friend, Handy Man, Fire & Rain, How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You)
1949 Bill Payne - Rock musician with Little Feat (Willin, Easy to Slip, On Your Way Down)
1950 Jon Provost - Actor (Lassie, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Escapade in Japan)
1960 Courtney B. Vance - Actor (Law & Order: Criminal Intent, The Hunt for Red October, Space Cowboys, The Piano Lesson, The Preacher's Wife, FlashForward, Dangerous Minds, Hamburger Hill)
1961 Titus Welliver - Actor (The Good Wife, Sons of Anarchy, Deadwood, NYPD Blue, Mulholland Falls, Falcone, Bosch, Argo)
1968 Aaron Eckhart – Actor (The Dark Knight, Paycheck, Battle Los Angeles, The Black Dahlia, Nurse Betty, Erin Brockovich, Any Given Sunday)
1984 Jaimie Alexander – Actress (Thor, Watch Over Me, The Other Side, Blindspot)
Died this Day
AD604 St. Gregory - The son of a Roman Senator, he became a Pope. He initiated the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and was also involved in church music. The term Gregorian Chant bears his name
1563 John Bull - British composer and organist. Ironically, he composed God Save the King, but had to flee England to escape persecution as a Catholic. He died in Antwerp, Belgium
1820 Sir Alexander Mackenzie - Scottish-born explorer and agent of the North West Company. He was the first explorer of North America to reach the Pacific Ocean over land, during his expedition of July, 1793
1914 George Westinghouse - US inventor of the Westinghouse brake system
1924 Hilaire, Count de Chardonnet - French inventor of rayon
1930 Billy Barker, age 35 - Canadian First World War flying ace, he was killed in a plane crash in Ottawa. Barker shot down 53 enemy planes during the war, and was awarded the Victoria Cross for his single-handed combat against some 60 German aircraft
1935 Michael Pupin - Inventor of long-distance telephony. Pupin devised a method to transmit telephone signals over long distances by using coils that amplified the phone signal at intervals along the wire. A penniless immigrant raised by illiterate parents, Pupin rose from humble beginnings to teach electromechanics at Columbia University. The Bell Telephone Company bought his long-distance telephone patent in 1901, and Pupin's autobiography, From Immigrant to Inventor, won the 1924 Pulitzer Prize
1945 Anne Frank, age 16 - German born Jewish girl who kept her famous diary. Her diary related her everyday experiences, her relationship with her family and friends, and observations about the increasingly dangerous world around her. Under threat of deportation to Nazi concentration camps, the Frank family had been forced into hiding in a secret sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse. For two years, under the threat of murder by the Nazi officers patrolling just outside the warehouse, Anne kept a diary that is marked by poignancy, humour, and insight. In August of 1944, the Nazi Gestapo discovered the Frank's "Secret Annex." Along with another Jewish family with whom they had shared the hiding place, and two of the Christians who had helped shelter them, the Franks were sent to the Nazi death camps. She died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp of typhus
1955 Charlie Parker, age 34 - Influential US saxophonist known as "Bird". He was the father of bebop-style jazz.
2001 Robert Ludlum, age 73 – Author (The Bourne Identity, The Chancellor Manuscript, The Holcroft Covenant, The Sigma Protocol, The Prometheus Deception)
2003 Lynne Thigpen, age 54 – Stage and screen actress (The District, Shaft, Bicentennial Man, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, All My Children, Tootsie, An American Daughter, Godspell)
On this Day
1609 Bermuda became a British colony
1664 New Jersey became a British colony as King Charles II granted land in the New World to his brother James, the Duke of York
1755 The first recorded installation of a steam engine in the US took place in North Arlington, New Jersey . It was used to pump water from a mine
1857 In Ontario, the Great Western Railway bridge between Toronto and Hamilton collapsed. Seventy-nine people were killed, and eighteen injured as the train fell 40 feet to the frozen Desjardins Canal below. The builder and financier of the railway, US promoter Samuel Zimmerman, was among those killed
1883 The first steel arrived in Port Moody, BC for construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway
1884 British General Charles Gordon was hemmed in at Khartoum after being sent to evacuate Egyptian garrisons in the Sudan
1912 In Savannah, Georgia, Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Guides, which later became the Girl Scouts of America
1913 The foundation stone was laid for the Australian capital building in Canberra
1923 Dr. Lee DeForest demonstrated Phonofilm, the first film capable of taping sound. Music was recorded on a narrow strip at the edge of the film. The demonstration showed a man and woman dancing, four musicians playing instruments, and an Egyptian dancer, all accompanied by music but no dialogue. Feature films with sound would not debut for several years, as movie studios sought to avoid a standards war
1930 Indian political and spiritual leader Mohandas K. Gandhi began a 300-mile march to the sea in protest against the British tax law securing a monopoly for salt. With hundreds of supporters, he planned to produce a symbolic amount of salt from the sea and provoke his arrest
1933 Eight days after his inauguration, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered the first of his radio ''fireside chats,'' a Sunday night radio address to the entire nation. Journalist Robert Trout later coined the name "fireside chat" for those frequent presidential broadcasts. Roosevelt's down-to-earth radio broadcasts served as a great reassurance to the many who felt isolated from the government during the hard times of the Great Depression
1951 The Dennis the Menace comic strip, created by cartoonist Hank Ketcham, made its syndicated debut in 16 newspapers
1959 The US Senate voted Hawaii in as the 50th state
1969 Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman in London, and on the same day…
1969 George Harrison and his wife Patti were arrested and charged with possession of 120 joints of marijuana at their home
1987 Les Miserables opened on Broadway
1993 North America's east coast was battered by what was dubbed the "Storm of the Century." Snowfalls in excess of three feet deep were common all along the US and Canadian seaboard. Whipped by strong winds, drifts ran as high as thirteen feet. The storm was responsible for more than 110 deaths in the US, Canada, Cuba and the Gulf of Mexico
1994 The Church of England ordained its first women priests
1994 Two experts debunked what was perhaps one of the greatest hoaxes of the century. They concluded a 1934 photo of what appeared to be the mythical Loch Ness monster was in fact a toy submarine. Researcher Alistair Boyd said the last surviving member of the group that perpetrated the hoax had confessed on his deathbed the previous November
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