1451 Isabella I - Spanish Queen who sponsored the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World. She was born in Madrigal, Spain
1707 Henry Fielding - British novelist and playwright (The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, Tom Thumb: A Tragedy, Amelia)
1724 Immanuel Kant - German Enlightenment philosopher (The Critique of Pure Reason)
1873 Ellen Glasgow - Pulitzer Prize winning US novelist (The Descendants, Barren Ground, Veins of Iron, In This Our Life)
1904 J. Robert Oppenheimer - US physicist who headed the Manhattan Project and directed research at Los Alamos, leading to the production of first atomic bomb
1906 Eddie Albert - Actor (Green Acres, Teahouse of the August Moon, Roman Holiday, Oklahoma!, The Sun Also Rises, The Longest Day, Switch) He was the father of actor Edward Albert. During WWII, he served in the US Navy and was an active participant in the battle of Tarawa in November 1943, one of the bloodiest battles in US Marines Corps history. He has spoken about it in television documentaries
1916 Yehudi Menuhin - US violin virtuoso who was a child prodigy. He played solo with the San Francisco Orchestra at the age of seven, and played with the New York Symphony Orchestra at ten
1923 Aaron Spelling - TV executive producer (Day One, And the Band Played On, Charlie's Angels, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place)
1926 Charlotte Rae - Actress (Diff'rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, Car 54 Where Are You?)
1936 Glen Campbell - Country singer (By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Gentle on My Mind, Galveston, Wichita Lineman, Southern Nights, Rhinestone Cowboy), TV host (The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour) and actor (True Grit, Norwood, Strange Homecoming)
1937 Jack Nicholson - Actor (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Terms of Endearment, Five Easy Pieces, The Shining, Batman, Broadcast News, Chinatown, Easy Rider, The Last Detail, Little Shop of Horrors, A Few Good Men)
1939 Mel Carter - Singer (Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me)
1942 Denis Lill – New Zealand-born actor (Rumpole of the Bailey, Only Fools and Horses, Bertie and Elizabeth, Mrs. Dalloway, Outside Edge, Batman, Blackadder's Christmas Carol, Reilly: The Ace of Spies, The Royal) He played Inspector Bradstreet in the Sherlock Holmes episodes The Man With the Twisted Lip, The Bruce Partington Plans and The Mazarin Stone
1946 John Waters - Director (Serial Mom, Cry-Baby, Hairspray, Polyester)
1950 Peter Frampton - British guitarist, singer (Show Me the Way, Do You Feel Like We Do, I Can't Stand it No More)
1954 Joseph Bottoms - Actor (The Black Hole, Holocaust, Liar's Edge, Treacherous Crossing, Surfacing, The Dove, Inner Sanctum)
1959 Ryan Stiles - Actor (The Drew Carey Show, Whose Line is it Anyway?, Hot Shots!)
1964 Chris Makepiece – Canadian actor (My Bodyguard, Undergrads, Last Chase, Aloha Summer, The Terry Fox Story, Captive Hearts, The Falcon and the Snowman)
1967 Sherri Shepherd – Actress (Less Than Perfect, Precious, Sherri, Suddenly Susan)
1971 Eric Mabius – Actor (Ugly Betty, The O.C., Cruel Intentions, Outcasts, Resident Evil. The Crow: Salvation)
Died this Day
1778 James Hargreaves - British inventor of the spinning jenny
1994 Richard M. Nixon, age 81 - The 37th president of the US. He died four days after suffering a stroke
1996 Erma Bombeck, age 69 - US humorist, died in San Francisco
On this Day
1509 Henry VIII ascended the throne of England following the death of his father, Henry VII. He would reign until his death in 1547, marrying six times and beheading two of those wives. Under his rule, England broke with Rome and the King became the head of the Church of England. Queen Elizabeth I was Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn
1737 The first iron smelter in Canada was established, at Trois-Rivières, Québec
1760 The first known pair of roller-skates were worn by a young Belgian musical instrument maker who rolled into a London party while playing a violin. He finally crashed into a mirror
1848 A group of 105 Franklin expedition survivors abandoned the Royal Navy ships, Erebus and Terror, fifteen miles off Victory Point on the north east of King William Island. They started their trek via the Back River toward the Hudson's Bay Company posts on Great Slave Lake
1864 Congress authorised the use of the phrase "In God We Trust" on US coins
1886 Ohio passed a statute that made seduction unlawful. Covering all men over the age of 21 who worked as teachers or instructors of women, this law prohibited men from having consensual sex with women of any age whom they were instructing. The penalty for disobeying this law ranged from two to 10 years in prison. Ohio's seduction law was not the first of its kind. An 1848 New York law made it illegal for a man to have an "illicit connexion with any unmarried female of previous chaste character" if the man did so by promising to marry the girl. Georgia's version of the seduction statute made it unlawful for men to "seduce a virtuous unmarried female and induce her to yield to his lustful embraces, and allow him to have carnal knowledge of her." These laws were only sporadically enforced, but a few men were actually prosecuted and convicted. In Michigan, a man was convicted of three counts of seduction, but the appeals court did everything in its power to overturn the decision. It threw out two charges because the defence reasoned that the woman was no longer virtuous after the couple's first encounter. The other charge was overturned after the defence claimed that the woman's testimony-that they had had sex in a buggy-was medically impossible. On many occasions, women used these laws in order to coerce men into marriage. A New York man in the middle of an 1867 trial that was headed toward conviction proposed to the alleged victim. The local minister was summoned, and the trial instantly became a marriage ceremony
1889 The Oklahoma Land Rush began at noon, in Indian Territory, as a pistol shot signalled the opening of nearly two million acres in central Oklahoma for settlement. Thousands of settlers raced in to stake their claims. Oklahoma, with a name derived from the Choctaw Indian words "okla," meaning people, and "humma," meaning red, was first set aside as Indian Territory in 1834. By 1880, dozens of tribes, forced into relocation by European immigration and the US government, had moved to the territory. In 1889, under pressure by cattlemen and land-hungry frontier farmers, a large strip of land formerly belonging to the relocated Creek and Seminole tribes was opened for settlement. The Oklahoma land rush was scheduled to begin at noon on April 22, although over the previous days, thousands had grabbed some of the best land in the region. Those who had already made illegal entry to beat the starting gun were called Sooners, hence Oklahoma's nickname. In fact, two hours before the starting gun was fired along the territorial border, Guthrie, the pre-designated capital of the new territory had already swelled with settlers. In 1890, the Indian and Oklahoma territories were formally established as separate entities, but in 1907, after much of the rest of Indian Territory had opened for settlement, the two territories were united as the State of Oklahoma
1915 The Second Battle of Ypres began as German forces shock Allied soldiers along the western front by firing more than 150 tons of lethal chlorine gas against two French colonial divisions at Ypres, Belgium. This was the first major gas attack by the Germans, and it devastated the Allied line. It was Germany’s first and only offensive of the year. Known as the Second Battle of Ypres, the offensive began with the usual artillery bombardment of the enemy's line. When the shelling died down, the Allied defenders waited for the first wave of German attack troops but instead were thrown into panic when chlorine gas wafted across no-man's land and down into their trenches. The Germans targeted four miles of the front with the wind-blown poison gas and decimated two divisions of French and Algerian colonial troops. The Allied line was breached, but the Germans, perhaps as shocked as the Allies by the devastating effects of the poison gas, failed to take full advantage, and the Allies held most of their positions. A second gas attack, against a Canadian division, on April 24, pushed the Allies further back, and by May they had retreated to the town of Ypres. The Second Battle of Ypres ended on May 25, with insignificant gains for the Germans. The introduction of poison gas, however, would have great significance in World War I.
1930 The US, Britain and Japan signed the London Naval Treaty, which regulated submarine warfare and limited shipbuilding
1932 During an electrical storm, fifty-two wild geese were struck by lightning as they flew over the town of Elgin, Manitoba. The jolt killed the birds, sending them plummeting to the ground. Those collected were distributed to townspeople, providing dinner for many Elgin households
1944 During World War II, US forces began invading Japanese-held New Guinea with amphibious landings near Hollandia
1945 In the Netherlands, the Canadian Army halted its front operations in western Holland due to the need to feed the starving Dutch people. Their barns had been looted by the retreating Germans, and their fields had been flooded
1952 An atomic test conducted in Nevada became the first nuclear explosion shown on live network television
1954 The televised Senate Army-McCarthy hearings began
1964 President Johnson opened the New York World's Fair
1965 The Rolling Stones started their first North American tour in Montreal, Quebec
1970 Millions of people participated in marches world-wide to mark the first official Earth Day. Increased awareness of the state of the Earth's atmosphere and the polluting of air and water by public and private sectors had led to the establishment of several major anti-pollution activist groups
1972 British rower John Fairfax and his girlfriend Sylvia Cooke arrived at Hayman Island off Australia's Queensland coast, after rowing over 8,100 miles on a voyage from San Francisco
1980 The US and Canada decided to boycott the Moscow Olympic Games in protest of the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan
1983 £1 coins were introduced into British currency, replacing their equivalent in paper money
1992 A series of explosions in Guadalajara's sewer system rocked a 20-block area of Mexico's second largest city, killing 194 people. The cause was listed as a leak in a pipeline operated by the state-run Pemex oil company
1993 The US Holocaust Memorial Museum was dedicated in Washington, DC
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