Born this Day

1865 William Butler Yeats – Irish poet, writer & dramatist (Mosada, The Trembling of the Veil, At The Hawks Well, The Wind Among the Reeds, The Tower, Easter 1916) He was one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin
1892 Basil Rathbone – South African-born British actor (The Mark of Zorro, Captain Blood, The Last Hurrah, The Hound of the Baskervilles, House of Fear, David Copperfield, Last Days of Pompeii, Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes, A Christmas Carol, The Comedy of Terrors) He is famous for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes
1893 Dorothy L. Sayers – British mystery author who introduced the world to the educated and fanciful upper-class detective Lord Peter Wimsey (Whose Body?, Hangman’s Holiday, The Nine Taylors, Murder Must Advertise) Sayers received an excellent education in Latin, French, history, and mathematics from her father, an Oxford teacher and minister. She won a scholarship to Oxford, and received highest honours on her final exams in 1915, becoming one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford. Although women at the time were not granted degrees, the rules changed retroactively in 1920. With G.K. Chesteron, Sayers founded the Detection Club, a group of mystery writers. She was also a dedicated Sherlockian
1910 Mary Wickes - Actress (Little Women, Sister Act, Postcards from the Edge, Father Dowling Mysteries, The Trouble With Angels, Cimarron, Dennis the Menace)
1918 Ben Johnson - Actor (Angels in the Outfield, The Getaway, The Last Picture Show, Shane)
1926 Paul Lynde - Comedian, actor (The Paul Lynde Show, Hollywood Squares, Love American Style, Bewitched, The Red Buttons Show)
1928 John Nash – Mathematical genius whose life was the inspiration for the movie A Beautiful Mind
1943 Malcolm McDowell – British actor (A Clockwork Orange, O Lucky Man, Blue Thunder, Caligula, Gulag, Look Back in Anger, Cat People, Star Trek: Generations)
1948 Dennis Locorriere – Guitarist and singer with the group Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show (Sylvia's Mother, The Cover of Rolling Stone, When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman)
1949 Simon Callow – British actor (The Phantom of the Opera, Marple: The Body in the Library, Thunderpants, Shakespeare in Love, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Postcards from the Edge, A Room with a View) He was in The Sweeney episode, Down To You Brother He played Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes movie The Crucifer of Blood He also played Dr. Theodore Kemp in the Inspector Morse episode The Wolvercote Tongue
1951 Richard Thomas - Actor (The Waltons, All Quiet on the Western Front, Johnny Belinda, Just Cause, Blood Hounds Inc)
1953 Tim Allen - Actor (Home Improvement, The Santa Clause, Toy Story)
1962 Ally Sheedy - Actress (War Games, St. Elmo’s Fire, Short Circuit, Maid to Order)
1965 Lisa Vidal – Actress (Third Watch, ER, The Event, The Division)
1986 Mary-Kate & Ashley Olsen – Twin actresses (Full House, Two of a Kind, The Adventures of Mary-Kate & Ashley)


Died this Day

323BC Alexander the Great, age 33 – Macedonian military genius who forged an empire stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to India, conquering half the known world. He died following an illness in Babylon, after a long banquet accompanied by heavy drinking. His body was later returned to Alexandria, where it was laid to rest in a golden coffin
1833 Robert Lyon, age 19 – Canadian law student, died in the last fatal duel in Ontario. He was killed by his former friend and fellow law student, John Wilson, as they quarrelled over remarks made by Lyon about a local teacher, Elizabeth Hughes. The dispute was aggravated by the prompting of Lyon’s second, Henry Le Lievre, a bellicose army veteran. Lyon was killed in the second exchange of shots. Wilson, who would be acquitted of murder, later married Elizabeth Hughes, and became a Member of Parliament, and a judge of the Ontario Supreme Court
1886 Ludwig II - King of Bavaria, drowned in Lake Starnberg
1986 Benny Goodman, age 77 - Clarinet-playing King of Swing, died in New York


On this Day

1381 A large mob of English peasants marched into London and began burning and looting the city during the Peasant's Revolt. Several government buildings were destroyed, prisoners were released, and a judge was beheaded along with several dozen other leading citizens. The Peasant's Revolt had its origins in a severe manifestation of bubonic plague in the late 1340s, which killed nearly a third of the population of England. The scarcity of labour brought on by the Black Death led to higher wages and a more mobile peasantry. Parliament, however, resisted these changes to its traditional feudal system and passed laws to hold down wages while encouraging landlords to reassert their ancient manorial rights. In 1380, peasant discontent reached a breaking point when Parliament restricted voting rights through an increase of the poll tax, and the Peasant's Revolt began. The leader, Wat Tyler led the peasants into London after he was denied a meeting with King Richard II. The next day, the 14-year-old king met with peasant leaders at Mile End and agreed to their demands to abolish serfdom and restrictions on the marketplace. However, fighting continued elsewhere at the same time, and Tyler led a peasant force against the Tower of London, capturing the fortress and executing the archbishop of Canterbury. On June 15, the king met Tyler at Smithfield, and Tyler presented new demands, including one calling for the abolishment of church property. During the meeting, the mayor of London, angered at Tyler's arrogance in the presence of the king, lunged at the rebel leader with a sword, fatally wounding him. As Tyler lay dying on the ground, Richard managed to keep the peasant mob calm until the mayor returned with armed troops. Hundreds of rebels were executed and the rest dispersed. During the next few days, the Peasant Revolt was put down with severity all across England, and Richard revoked all the concessions he had made to the peasants at Mile End. For several weeks, Wat Tyler's head was displayed on a pole in a London field
1805 Meriwether Lewis reached the Great Falls of the Missouri River, confirming that the explorers were headed in the right direction. The Lewis and Clark Expedition had set out the previous year. The Hidatsa Indians told Lewis and Clark they would come to a large impassable waterfall in the Missouri when they neared the Rocky Mountains, but assured the captains that the portage around the falls was less than half a mile. When Lewis and Clark journeyed up the Missouri early in June, they came to a fork at which two equally large rivers converged. "Which of these rivers was the Missouri?" Lewis asked in his journal. The north fork of the river most resembled the Missouri in its muddy turbulence, while the water from the south fork was clear and fast running. Most of the men believed the muddy water must be the correct way, while Lewis reasoned that the water from the Missouri would have travelled only a short distance from the mountains and resemble the south fork. The decision was critical. If the explorers chose the wrong river, they would not be able to find the Shoshone Indians from whom they planned to obtain horses for the portage over the Rockies. It was decided that a small party, led by Lewis, should proceed up the south fork on foot, and if the falls were not there, the party would return and the expedition would backtrack to the other river. Upon finding the falls, Lewis rejoined Clark and told him the good news. However, they soon discovered that the portage around the Great Falls was not the easy half-mile jaunt reported by the Hidatsa, but rather a punishing 18-mile trek over rough terrain covered with spiky cactus. The Great Portage, as it was later called, would take the men nearly a month to complete
1841 The first Canadian parliament opened in Kingston, Ontario
1842 Queen Victoria, accompanied by Prince Albert, travelled by train for the first time, from Slough, near Windsor Castle, to Paddington. A special coach had been built earlier, but the Queen had been reluctant to try this new form of travel
1871 A hurricane killed 300 on the Labrador coast
1884 The world's first roller coaster opened at Coney Island, New York
1886 Fire wiped out much of Vancouver, BC, destroying nearly 1,000 buildings. Fifty people were killed, and only four houses were left standing. Rebuilding began within days, aided by the recent arrival in the city of the Canadian Pacific Railway
1898 The Yukon territory separated from Northwest Territories and was given separate territorial status, two years after the Klondike gold discovery. Dawson City was named the capital and in its heyday, became the largest community north of Seattle and west of Winnipeg, with about 30,000 people
1916 Emily Murphy of Edmonton, Alberta, was appointed the first woman police magistrate in the British Empire
1930 It rained mud in Provost, Alberta, a combination of wind blown dirt and precipitation
1966 The US Supreme Court issued its landmark Miranda versus Arizona decision. The court held that a suspect cannot be interrogated by police until he is informed of his constitutional rights
1971 The New York Times began publishing the “Pentagon Papers,” a secret study of the US’s involvement in Vietnam
1981 A scare occurred during a Trooping of the Colours Ceremony in London when a teen-ager fired six blank shots at Queen Elizabeth II
1983 The US asked Canada for formal authority to test the cruise missile in Canada. Approval was granted the next month
1983 After more than a decade in space, Pioneer 10, the world's first outer-planetary probe, left the solar system as it crossed the orbit of Neptune. The next day, it radioed back its first scientific data on interstellar space. In March 1972, the NASA spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to Jupiter. In December 1973, after successfully negotiating the asteroid belt and a distance of 620 million miles, Pioneer 10 reached Jupiter and sent back to Earth the first close-up images of the spectacular gas giant. NASA officially ended the Pioneer 10 project on March 31, 1997, with the spacecraft having traveled a distance of some six billion miles. Headed in the direction of the Taurus constellation, Pioneer 10 will pass within three light years of another star, Ross 246, in the year 34,600 AD. Bolted to the probe's exterior wall is a gold-anodized plaque, 6 by 9 inches in area, that displays a drawing of a human man and woman, a star map marked with the location of the sun, and another map showing the flight path of Pioneer 10. The plaque, intended for intelligent life forms elsewhere in the galaxy, was designed by astronomer Carl Sagan
1985 The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that almost all laws in Manitoba were constitutionally invalid because they were in English only, however, they would remain in effect until translation into French had been completed