Born this Day

1837 Washington Roebling - US civil engineer who took over the design of the Brooklyn Bridge after his father's death during the construction of the bridge
1853 John Wesley Hardin - Infamous US gunslinger who was reputed to have killed in excess of 40 people during a six-year stretch beginning in 1868, when he was 15, and killed an ex-slave in a fight. Two years later he was arrested in Waco, Texas, for a murder he had not committed. Not wanting to run the risk of being convicted, he escaped to the town of Abilene, which was run by his friend, Wild Bill Hickok. However, one night Hardin was disturbed by the snoring in an adjacent hotel room and fired two shots through the wall, killing the man. Fearing that not even Wild Bill would stand for such a senseless crime, Hardin moved on again. On May 26, 1874, Hardin was celebrating his 21st birthday when he got into an altercation with a man who fired the first shot. Hardin fired back and killed the man. A few years later, Hardin was tracked down in Florida and brought to trial. Because it was one of the more defensible shootings on his record, he was spared the gallows and given a life sentence. After spending 15 years in a Texas prison, he was pardoned and moved to El Paso, becoming an attorney. But his past caught up with him, and the following year he was shot in the back as revenge for one of his many murders
1867 Queen Mary - Wife of Britain's King George V. She was born Princess Mary of Teck, and was the grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II
1877 Isadora Duncan - US dancer who introduced a new style of dancing which influenced modern dance. She established schools in Europe and scandalised society with her private life and loves
1886 Al Jolson – Russian born US singer (April Showers, Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye) and actor (Rhapsody in Blue, Say It with Songs, Wonder Bar, Hollywood Calvalcade, Rose of Washington Square) In 1927 he was in The Jazz Singer, the first “talkie” movie
1891 Paul Lukas – Hungarian actor (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Lady Vanishes, Lord Jim, Tender Is the Night, Kim, Watch on the Rhine, Dinner at the Ritz, The Three Musketeers, Father Brown Detective, Little Women)
1893 Norma Talmadge - Actress (The Forbidden City, The Social Secretary, Dubarry)
1904 George Formby - British comedian, singer and ukulele player (When I'm Cleaning Windows, Swimmin' With the Wimmen, Fanlight Fanny, Come Hither With Your Zither, Mr. Wu, Levi’s Monkey Mike) He was the son of a music hall artist of the same name, and learned his art in the music halls
1907 John Wayne - US actor known as The Duke (True Grit, The Alamo, The Shootist, Hondo, Rio Bravo, Red River, Sands of Iwo Jima, Rooster Cogburn, The Green Berets)
1908 Robert Morley - British actor (Marie Antoinette, The African Queen, War and Remembrance, Of Human Bondage, Istanbul, Little Dorritt) He also played Mycroft Holmes in the 1965 movie, A Study in Terror
1911 Ben Alexander - Actor (All Quiet on the Western Front, Dragnet)
1912 Jay Silverheels - Canadian lacrosse player, boxer and actor (The Lone Ranger, Broken Arrow, Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, Laramie, Saskatchewan, Key Largo, Cat Ballou, The Nebraskan)
1913 Peter Cushing – British actor (The Curse of Frankenstein, The Horror of Dracula, Tales from the Crypt, Top Secret!, The Mummy, Dr. Who and the Daleks, Star Wars IV: A New Hope, Hamlet, At the Earth’s Core) He did many movies for the Hammer House of Horror. He was in the movie Dr. Phibes Rises Again, with John Thaw. In the movie, The Great Houdini, he portrayed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He played Sherlock Holmes in a 1959 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the 1984 movie The Masks of Death, and in the 1967 BBC Sherlock Holmes series
1920 Peggy Lee - Singer (Fever, It's a Good Day, I Hear Music, Mr. Wonderful, Baubles Bangles & Beads), actress (Mister Music, The Jazz Singer, Pete Kelley's Blues) and song writer (Bella Notte, The Siamese Cat Song, Don’t Make Believe, La La Lu, It’s a Funny Old World, Theme from Johnny Trouble)
1923 James Arness - Actor (Gunsmoke, How the West was Won, Hondo, The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory, The Thing, Them!) He was a Minneapolis, MN radio newscaster and the brother of Peter Graves
1923 Roy Dotrice - British actor (Beauty and the Beast, Amadeus, Picket Fences, The Scarlet Letter, Madigan Men)
1926 Miles Davis - Jazz trumpet and flugelhorn musician who combined be-bop, modal chord progressions and rock rhythms to create "cool jazz"
1940 Levon Helm - Rock musician with The Band, and actor (The Last Waltz, Fire Down Below, The Dollmaker, The Coal Miner's Daughter)
1948 Stevie Nicks - Singer/songwriter with Fleetwood Mac, and solo (Dreams, Don't Stop, Stop Draggin' My Heart Around, Leather & Lace, Stand Back, Edge of Seventeen, Go Your Own Way)
1949 Philip Michael Thomas - Actor (Miami Vice, Hair, A Fight for Jenny) He played Chuck Gilmore in the Perry Mason TV movie The Case of the Ruthless Reporter
1949 Hank Williams Jr. - Country singer (Whiskey Bent and Hell-Bound, Family Tradition, I Fought the Law)
1949 Pam Grier - Actress (Fort Apache the Bronx, Badge of the Assassin, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, Escape from LA, Jackie Brown, Ghosts of Mars, Snow Day, Mars Attacks!, Crime Story)
1951 Sally Ride - The first US woman in space, in the space shuttle in 1983
1958 Margaret Colin - Actress (Independence Day, Chicago Hope, The Butcher's Wife, Gossip Girl, The Devil’s Own, Three Men and a Baby) She also played Jane Watson in The Return of Sherlock Holmes
1962 Genie Francis - Actress (General Hospital, North and South, Bare Essence, The Young & the Restless) She is married to Jonathan Frakes from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was in the Perry Mason movie The Case of the Killer Kiss
1962 Bobcat Goldthwait - Comedian
1964 Lenny Kravitz - Singer (It Ain't Over Til It's Over, Are You Gonna Go My Way, Mama Said) He is the son of actress Roxie Roker
1966 Helena Bonham Carter - British actress (A Room With A View, Lady Jane, Hamlet, Howard’s End, Frankenstein, Margaret's Museum, Fight Club, The King’s Speech, Alice in Wonderland, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Enid, Harry Potter movies, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
1960 Doug Hutchison – Actor (The Green Mile, A Time to Kill, I Am Sam, The Salton Sea, Lost, 24)
1979 Elisabeth Harnois – Actress (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Mars Needs Moms, Solstice, One Tree Hill, Point Pleasant, Keith)


Died this Day

AD 604 Augustine - The first Archbishop of Canterbury, who initially came to Britain to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity
1703 Samuel Pepys, age 70 - British admiralty official and diarist
1868 Michael Barrett - Irish nationalist who was responsible for the Clerkenwell Outrage, which left 13 dead. He was hanged outside London's Newgate Prison, the last public execution in England
2005 Eddie Albert, age 99 – Actor (Green Acres, Roman Holiday, Oklahoma!, The Sun Also Rises, Switch) He was the father of actor Edward Albert


On this Day

1521 The works of Martin Luther were banned by the Edict of Worms because of his religious beliefs and writings
1637 The Pequot Massacres began with the first major battle of the Pequot War, when an allied Puritan and Mohegan force attacked a Pequot village in Connecticut. They completely destroyed the village and massacred some 500 Indian women, men, and children. As the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay spread further into Connecticut, they came into conflict with the Pequots. By the spring of 1637, thirteen English colonists and traders had been killed by the Pequot, and Massachusetts Bay governor John Endecott organised a large military force to retaliate. Pequot warriors responded defiantly to the colonial mobilisation by attacking a Connecticut settlement, killing six men and three women, and taking two girls away. Two hours before dawn on May 26, the Puritan and their Indian allies marched on the Pequot village at Mystic, slaughtering all but a handful of its inhabitants. The Pequot War came to an end on July 28, near present-day Fairfield, Connecticut with a final Puritan attack on the Pequot. Most of the surviving Pequot were sold into slavery, although a handful escaped to join other southern New England tribes
1805 Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned King of Italy, in Milan Cathedral
1826 Former US citizens and naturalised residents of Upper Canada were given the right to vote and stand for election to the Assembly
1864 President Abraham Lincoln signed an act establishing the Montana Territory, anxious to create new free territories during the Civil War. The vast area of what is now called Montana became a US possession in 1803 under the terms of the Louisiana Purchase. Significant US settlement did not begin in Montana until the 1850s, when the discovery of gold brought people to mining camps such as those at Bannack and Virginia City. In 1864, Montana was deemed worthy of territorial status and 25 years later entered the Union as the 41st state
1865 Arrangements were made in New Orleans for the surrender of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi
1868 The Senate impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson ended with his acquittal as the Senate fell one vote short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction
1868 Queen Victoria approved a design for the Great Seal of Canada, with arms of the four provinces
1874 The Canadian Parliament passed the Dominion Elections Act, bringing in the secret ballot. It also stipulated that elections were to be held simultaneously, and it abolished property qualifications for Members of Parliament
1887 The main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway was opened for public traffic, 18 months after the last spike was driven at Craigellachie, British Columbia. Trains had been running from Montreal to Vancouver for a year, but passengers now could ride all the way on over 2,900 miles of CPR track
1897 Bram Stoker's classic vampire tale, Dracula, was first offered for sale in London
1906 The city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan was incorporated
1908 The first major oil strike in the Middle East was made in Persia
1943 Québec passed a law requiring free and compulsory education in the province
1953 It Came from Outer Space, the first science fiction film to be screened in 3-D, debuted in Los Angeles. Based on a Ray Bradbury story, the film was about an alien ship that crashed in Arizona. Two days later, Walt Disney released the first 3-D cartoon, Melody
1966 British Guiana became independent and took the name Guyana
1969 The Apollo 10 astronauts returned to Earth after a successful eight-day dress rehearsal for the first manned moon landing
1978 The first legal casino in the eastern US opened in Atlantic City, NJ
1989 The BBC broadcast the 10,000th episode of the daily radio serial, The Archers - a favourite of Inspector Morse
1998 The Supreme Court ruled that Ellis Island, historic gateway for millions of immigrants, is mainly in New Jersey, not New York