Born this Day

1866 Helen Beatrix Potter – British artist and author of the Peter Rabbit books. During her later years she was widely respected throughout England as a mycologist, an expert on fungi. She amassed a set of detailed watercolours of fungi from her from many walks in the woods. The collection is in the Armitt Library, Ambleside, England. Around the time of her death in 1943 many of her notes, including her paper on spores, were burned during the bombing of London in WWII
1892 Joe E. Brown – Comedian and actor (It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Around the World in 80 Days, Show Boat, Some like It Hot, Earthworm Tractors, The Tender Years)
1901 Rudy Vallee - Singer (My Time is Your Time, The Vagabond Lover) and actor (Live a Little, Love a Little, The Admiral was a Lady, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Second Fiddle) He played Lord Phogg in the Batman TV series
1907 Earl Tupper – US inventor of Tupperware plastic containers
1909 Malcolm Lowry – British novelist and short story writer (Under the Volcano, October Ferry to Gabriola)
1929 Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis - First Lady and wife of the 35th US President John F. Kennedy, and later, wife of Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. She was an editor for Doubleday Publishing
1931 Darryl Hickman - Actor (The Americans, The Tingler, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Network, Rhapsody in Blue, Captain Eddie) He is the brother of actor, Dwayne Hickman. He played Steve Harris in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece
1945 Jim Davis - Cartoonist (Garfield)
1945 Rick Wright – Musician and keyboardist with Pink Floyd (Another Brick on the Wall)
1946 Linda Kelsey - Actress (Lou Grant, Day by Day)
1947 Sally Struthers - Actress (All in the Family, Five Easy Pieces, The Odd Couple, The Getaway, 9 to 5, Gilmore Girls
1948 Georgia Bright Engel - Actress (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Betty White Show, Goodtime Girls, Jennifer Slept Here, Coach)
1949 Peter Doyle - Singer with the group The New Seekers (I'd like to Teach the World to Sing, Look What They've Done to My Song Ma)
1958 Michael Hitchcock – Actor (Serenity, United States of Tara, Bridesmaids, MadTV, Grosse Pointe, Best in Show)
1958 Terry Fox - Canadian youth who had attempted to run across Canada for cancer fund-raising. Fox had lost a leg to cancer before embarking on his "Marathon Of Hope" run across Canada. He raised nearly 25-million dollars to fight cancer and won the love and admiration of millions, before cancer struck again, and he was forced to abandon his dream at Thunder Bay, Ontario. Thousands of people take part in annual fund-raising runs across the country named after Fox
1964 Lori Loughlin – Actress (Full House, Summerland, Hudson Street, A Stranger in the Mirror, 90210, Old Dogs)


Died this Day

1540 Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex – Chancellor to King Henry VIII. He fell from grace when he advised Henry to marry the unpopular Anne of Cleves, and ended up accused of being a heretic and traitor. Condemned without a hearing, he was executed
1655 Cyrano de Bergerac, age 36 – French soldier and author (The States and Empires of the Sun) He was also the subject of the famous play by Rostand, whose title bears his name. He is said to have fought more than 1,000 duels because of insults about his large nose
1741 Antonio Vivaldi, age 63 – Italian baroque violin virtuoso and composer (The Four Seasons, Primavera, Griselda, Magnificat)
1750 Johann Sebastian Bach – Celebrated Baroque composer, died in Liepzig, Germany
1923 James McLaughlin, age 81 – US Indian agent, best known today for his inadvertent role in the death of Sitting Bull. Unlike some Indian agents of the later 19th century, McLaughlin genuinely liked and respected his charges. His wife was half Sioux, and she taught her husband to speak her native language reasonably well. In 1871, this valuable skill won McLaughlin a position at the Devils Lake Indian Agency in Dakota Territory and he eventually became the chief agent, gaining a reputation for fair and sympathetic treatment of Indians. However, like most Indian agents of his day, he believed that his mission was to "civilise" the Indians by forcing them to adopt white ways. He viewed traditional Indian practices like the Sun Dance and buffalo hunting as obstacles to the inevitable assimilation of the Native Americans into white society, and while he worked hard to improve Indian living conditions, he simultaneously tried to stamp out their culture by promoting the use of English and the adoption of sedentary farming. In 1881, McLaughlin was transferred to the larger Sioux reservation at Standing Rock, South Dakota. Two years later, the great Sioux Chief Sitting Bull was assigned to the reservation. McLaughlin worried about Sitting Bull, as the chief was infamous for his role in the defeat of Custer's 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. He was also among the last of the Sioux to accept confinement to a reservation, and his disdain for white ways was well known. For several years, McLaughlin and Sitting Bull enjoyed a strained but peaceful relationship. In 1890, however, a popular religious movement known as the Ghost Dance swept through the Standing Rock reservation. The Ghost Dancers believed that an apocalyptic day was approaching when all whites would be wiped out, the buffalo would return, and the Indians could return to their traditional ways. McLaughlin wrongly suspected that Sitting Bull was a leader of the Ghost Dance movement, and in December 1890, he ordered the arrest of the old chief, believing this might calm the tense situation on the reservation. Unfortunately, during the arrest, a fight broke out and McLaughlin's policemen killed Sitting Bull. The murder only exacerbated the climate of fear and mistrust, which contributed to the tragic massacre of 146 Indians by US soldiers at Wounded Knee later that month. In 1895, McLaughlin moved to Washington, DC, where he became an inspector for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He eventually became familiar with Indians all around the nation, leading him to write a 1910 memoir entitled, My Friend the Indian. He died in Washington DC and was buried at the South Dakota reservation town that bears his name
1969 Frank Loesser – US composer and lyricist (Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, Luck Be a Lady, Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) He died a month after his 59th birthday


On this Day

1586 The first potatoes arrived in Britain from Columbia, brought by Sir Thomas Harriot when he docked at Plymouth
1814 Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley eloped with 17-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, despite the fact that he was already married. Shelley, the heir to his wealthy grandfather's estate, was expelled from Oxford when he refused to acknowledge authorship of a controversial essay. He eloped with his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a tavern owner, in 1811. However, just a few years later, Shelley fell in love with the young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of a prominent reformer and early feminist writer. Shelley and Godwin fled to Europe, marrying after Shelley's wife committed suicide in 1816. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley later went on to write Frankenstein
1821 Peru declared its independence from Spain
1847 The Ontario communities of London and Brantford were incorporated as cities
1858 Fingerprints were used for the first time as a means of identification by William Herschel, in the Indian Civil Service. He got a local contractor to give him a print, and then followed this up by establishing a fingerprint register
1868 The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, guaranteeing to African Americans citizenship and all its privileges, was officially adopted into the US Constitution
1896 The city of Miami, Florida, was incorporated
1932 Federal troops forcibly dispersed the so-called Bonus Army of World War I veterans who had gathered in Washington, DC, to demand money they weren't scheduled to receive until 1945
1945 A US Army pilot, flying a B-25 light bomber, crashed into the 79th floor of New York's Empire State Building, killing 14 people
1945 A section of Prospect Point, overlooking the US side of Niagara Falls, broke off and tumbled into the Niagara River Gorge
1959 Postal codes were introduced into Britain by the Postmaster-General, together with new postal sorting machines
1965 President Johnson announced he was increasing the number of US troops in South Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000
1976 Britain broke diplomatic relations with the Ugandan government of Idi Amin, marking the first time London severed ties with a Commonwealth country
1976 An earthquake measuring between 7.8 and 8.2 magnitude on the Richter scale flattened Tangshan, a Chinese industrial city with a population of about one million people. Almost everyone was asleep in their beds, instead of outside in the relative safety of the streets. An estimated 242,000 people in Tangshan and surrounding areas were killed, making the earthquake one of the deadliest in recorded history, surpassed only by the 300,000 who died in the Calcutta earthquake in 1737, and the 830,000 thought to have perished in China's Shaanxi province in 1556
1979 Cushioned by shaving cream and cotton, a grade-A egg was dropped into a net from the observation deck of Toronto's CN Tower. Although it fell from a height of 1,122 feet, it did not break