1483 Santi Raphael - Artist (Marriage of the Virgin, School of Athens)
1515 St. Teresa of Avila - Spanish founder of the reformed Carmelites who originally came from an aristocratic Castilian family. In 1970 she was declared a Doctor of the Church, the first woman saint to be so honoured
1660 George I - King of England, born in Hanover
1793 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft - US explorer and ethnologist
1890 Paul Whiteman - US bandleader (Washboard Blues, Ol' Man River, Felix the Cat, Heartache, Ain't Misbehavin') He was a violinist with both the Denver and San Francisco symphony orchestras before forming his own large orchestra in 1920 to play "symphonic jazz". Members included many top musicians such as Bix Beiderbecke and Tommy Dorsey. Whiteman commissioned Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which he performed first in February 1924
1899 August Busch - US businessman who built Anheuser-Busch into the world's largest brewery. He also owned the St. Louis Cardinals
1902 Flora Robson - British actress (A Man Called Intrepid, Heidi, Fire Over England, The Shuttered Room)
1912 Frank Lovejoy - Actor (House of Wax, Strategic Air Command, Three Brave Men, Meet McGraw, In a Lonely Place)
1915 Jay Livingston - Composer (To Each His Own, Mona Lisa, Tammy)
1921 Dirk Bogarde - British actor (The Damned, Death in Venice, The Vision, A Bridge Too Far, The Servant, Night Flight from Moscow)
1923 Thad Jones - Musician on the trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn, composer (A Child is Born) He played with Count Basie and Thelonious Monk
1924 Freddie Bartholomew - Irish actor (Anna Karenina, Captains Courageous, David Copperfield, Little Lord Fauntleroy)
1940 Maeve Binchy – Irish author (Circle of Friends, Echoes, Freely Summer, Silver Wedding, Tara Road, Scarlet Feather)
1943 Conchata Ferrell - Actress (LA Law, The Buccaneers, Edward Scissorhands, Mystic Pizza, Two and a Half Men, Erin Brockovich)
1944 Ken Howard - Actor (Crossing Jordan, The White Shadow, The Thorn Birds, Country Girl, Oscar)
1948 Dianne Wiest - Actress (Hannah and Her Sisters, Bullets over Broadway, Radio Days, Edward Scissorhands, Little Man Tate, Footloose, Law & Order, Life in Pieces)
1951 Karen Kain - Canadian Prima Ballerina. Before her retirement, she was a principal dancer with Canada's National Ballet. She has danced most classical roles, and often partnered Rudolph Nureyev
1955 Reba McEntire - Country singer (How Blue, Somebody Should Leave, Who's Ever in New England, What am I Gonna Do about You, For My Broken Heart, The Last One to Know) and actress (Tremors, The Gambler Returns, Buffalo Girls, Reba) She is the winner of every country music award in the industry
1960 Chris Barrie – German-born Irish actor (Red Dwarf, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The Brittas Empire, A Prince Among Men, Spitting Image)
1961 Orla Brady – Irish actress (Noah’s Ark, Fringe, Eternal Law, Jesse Stone: Death in Paradise, Out of the Blue)
1970 Vince Vaughn – Actor (Wedding Crashers, The Break-Up, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Old School, The Lost World: Jurrassic Park)
1972 Nick Frost – British actor (Shaun of the Dead, Wild Child, Hyperdrive, Hot Fuzz, Grindhouse, Spaced)
1981 Julia Stiles – Actress (The Bourne Identity, Dexter, Gospel Hill, Mona Lisa Smile, Carolina, Save the Last Dance)
1986 Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga) – Singer (Poker Face, Born This Way, Edge of Glory, Bad Romance)
Died this Day
1814 Joseph Ignace Guillotin, age 75 - French physician and revolutionary who suggested a decapitating machine which bears his name. He had bestowed the deadly contraption on the French as a "philanthropic gesture" for the systematic criminal-justice reform that was taking place in 1789. The machine was intended to show the intellectual and social progress of the Revolution. It was expensive to build at a time when cost-effectiveness was a serious issue, but it was supposed to have overriding benefits, particularly its efficiency. The guillotine was first used in 1792, and the newspapers reported that the guillotine was not an immediate sensation. The crowds seemed to miss the gallows at first. But the guillotine quickly caught on with the public and many thought it brought dignity back to the executioner. However, the prestige of the guillotine precipitously fell due to its frequent use in the French Terror following the Revolution. It became the focal point of the awful political executions and was so closely identified with the terrible abuses of the time that it was perceived as partially responsible for the excesses itself. Guillotin had what he felt were the purest motives for inventing the guillotine and was deeply distressed at how his reputation had become besmirched in the aftermath. Before he died he said, "How true it is that it is difficult to benefit mankind without some unpleasantness resulting for oneself"
1868 The Earl of Cardigan - He led the Charge of the Light Brigade to disaster during the Crimean War. He is now best remembered for the woollen garments named after him
1941 Virginia Woolf - British novelist and critic (The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, Between the Acts) She filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse, near her home in Sussex
1943 Sergei Rachmaninoff - Russian composer-conductor. He died in Beverly Hills, California, just four days before his 70th birthday
1944 Stephen Leacock, age 74 - British born Canadian pioneer political economist, historian of early Canada and the British Empire, author and humorist (Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy, Further Foolishness, Humour: Its Theory and Technique, Literary Lapses, Nonsense Novels, Frenzied Fiction)
1957 Christopher Morley, age 66 - US columnist (New York Evening Post, Saturday Review) and novelist (Kitty Foyle, Thunder on the Left, Parnassus on Wheels, The Haunted Bookshop) In 1930, he was commissioned by Doubleday Publishers to write a preface to their book, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, and in 1934 he founded the Baker Street Irregulars
1969 Dwight D. Eisenhower, age 78 - 34th president of the US, died in Washington. He was one of the most highly regarded US generals of World War II
1979 Emmett Kelly, age 80 – Clown with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus whose characters included the Hobo and Weary Willie
1985 Marc Chagall - French painter
1987 Maria von Trapp, age 82 - Her life inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music. She died in Morrisville, Vermont
2004 Sir Peter Ustinov - British actor (Spartacus, Topkapi, Quo Vadis, Beau Brummel, Logan's Run, The Last Remake of Beau Geste, Death on the Nile, Appointment with Death, Evil Under the Sun) He died 3 weeks before his 83rd birthday
On this Day
1380 Gunpowder was first used in Europe in a battle between the Genoese and the Venetians
1776 The future site of San Francisco was founded as Juan Bautista de Anza, one of the great western pathfinders of the 18th century, arrived there with 247 colonists. Anza established a presidio, or military fort, on the tip of the San Francisco peninsula. Born and raised in Mexico, Anza joined the army when he was 17 and became a captain seven years later. He excelled as a military leader, displaying tactical genius in numerous battles with the Apache Indians. In 1772, Anza made his first major exploratory mission, leading an arduous but successful expedition northwest to the Pacific Coast. Anza's expedition established the first successful overland connections between the Mexican State of Sonora and northern California. Impressed by this accomplishment, the Mexican viceroy commissioned Anza to return to California and establish a permanent settlement along the Pacific Coast at San Francisco Bay. Six months after Anza arrived, a Spanish Franciscan priest founded a mission near the presidio that he named in honour of St. Francis of Assisi, which in Spanish was San Francisco de Asiacutes. The most northerly outpost of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, San Francisco remained an isolated and quiet settlement for more than half a century after Anza founded the first settlement. It was not until the 1830s that an expansionist US began to realise the commercial potential of the magnificent natural harbour. In the wake of the Mexican War, the US took possession of California in 1848, though San Francisco was still only a small town of 900 at that time. With the discovery of gold that year at Sutter's Fort, however, San Francisco boomed. By 1852, San Francisco was home to more than 36,000 people
1797 Nathaniel Briggs of New Hampshire patented a washing machine
1834 The US Senate voted to censure President Jackson for the removal of federal deposits from the Bank of the United States
1854 During the Crimean War, Britain and France declared war on Russia
1896 The opera, Andrea Chenier, by Umberto Giordano, premiered in Milan, Italy
1898 The Supreme Court ruled that a child born in the US to Chinese immigrants was a US citizen, and therefore could not be deported under the Chinese Exclusion Act
1900 The British Royal family received its first motor car, a Daimler Mail Phaeton
1910 The first seaplane, designed by Henri Fabre, took off near Marseilles, France
1917 Britain's first women's service unit, the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, was formed
1918 Conscription riots broke out in Quebec in protest over forced participation in the First World War. In Quebec, the war was viewed as largely a British concern, supported almost entirely by the English speaking Canadians. This created much tension with the French Canadians, one of the reasons being that they felt no obligation towards the Empire, and so didn't approve of forced participation
1920 The King and Queen of Hollywood, Douglas Fairbanks Sr and Mary Pickford, were married
1928 Ottawa's first automatic street light system began operation
1930 The names of the Turkish cities of Constantinople and Angora were changed to Istanbul and Ankara
1935 The Canadian Radio Commission prohibited "sales talks or spot advertising" on Sundays
1939 The Spanish Civil War ended as Madrid fell to the forces of Francisco Franco
1944 New York radio station WQXR banned singing commercials
1959 China ordered the dissolution of the Dalai Lama's local government of Tibet
1979 The worst accident in the history of the US nuclear power industry began at 4 a.m., when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island, near Middletown, Pennsylvania, failed to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat. During the incident, equipment failures and human mistakes led to a loss of coolant and partial core meltdown, and at one point, the reactor had come within less than an hour of a complete meltdown. The accident forced the evacuation of thousands of people. The unharmed Unit-1 reactor at Three Mile Island, which was shut down during the crisis, did not resume operation until 1985. Cleanup continued on Unit-2 until 1990, but it was too damaged to be rendered usable again
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