Born this Day

1801 George Bradshaw – British publisher and originator of the Bradshaw Railway Guide, which was used so often by Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson
1869 Booth Tarkington - Author (The Magnificent Ambersons, Alice Adams)
1885 Theda Bara – US silent-film star and one of cinema's first sex symbols (A Fool There Was, The Unchastened Woman, The Love Goddesses, Camille, Cleopatra, Salome) She was born Theodosia Goodman, the daughter of a Cincinnati tailor. Her film studio purposely created a mystique around her, giving her a new name they publicised as "an anagram for Arab death." She was rumoured to be the daughter of a French artist father and an Egyptian mother. Cultivating the mystique, she surrounded herself with symbols of death and the underworld, giving interviews while stroking a pet snake
1887 Sigmund Romberg - Composer of operettas (Blossom Time, The Student Prince, The Desert Song) and songs (When Hearts are Young, Deep in My Heart Dear, Lover Come Back to Me, When I Grow Too Old to Dream)
1892 William Powell – US stage and screen actor (How To Marry a Millionaire, Mister Roberts, The Treasure of the Lost Canyon, Dancing in the Dark, Beau Geste, Double Wedding) He was best known as Nick Charles in the Thin Man series of movies. He appeared on Broadway for ten years before making his film debut in 1922, as Professor Moriarty in the movie Sherlock Holmes
1905 Clara Bow - US film actress known as the “it girl” (Hula, Dancing Mothers, Mantrap, Free to Love, Down to the Sea in Ships)
1921 Richard Egan - Actor (Love Me Tender, A Summer Place, Blackbeard the Pirate, Pollyanna, Love Me Tender)
1924 Lloyd Bochner – Canadian actor (Dynasty, The Richard Boone Show, Dick Francis: Blood Sport, Hong Kong, Naked Gun 2 1/2, Morning Glory) He played Eric Pollard in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Latent Lover
1924 Robert Horton - Actor (Wagon Train, A Man Called Shenandoah, Kings Row, The Green Slime)
1933 Robert Fuller - Actor (Laramie, Wagon Train, Emergency, Maverick, Donner Pass: The Road to Survival)
1938 Peter Jennings – Canadian-born US news anchor with ABC TV
1941 David Warner – British actor (Tron, Tom Jones, Time Bandits, Star Trek V & VI, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Man with Two Brains, The Bofors Gun, The Company of Wolves, Signs and Wonders, Horatio Hornblower, Titanic, Wallander, Sweeney Todd, Doctor Who: Dreamland) He was in the Perry Mason TV movies The Case of the Poisoned Pen and The Case of the Skin-Deep Scandal He also portrayed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1998 TV movie Houdini
1942 Tony Sirico – Actor (The Sopranos, Goodfellas, Bullets Over Broadway, Copland, Romeo is Bleeding)
1950 Mike Starr – Actor (Ed, Goodfellas, Jesse Stone: Night Passage, Summer of Sam, Dumb & Dumber, Ed Wood, On Deadly Ground, Uncle Buck, Blue Steel)
1953 Ken Burns – Documentary maker for PBS (The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, Frank Lloyd Wright, The Statue of Liberty)
1965 Dean Haglund – Canadian actor (The X-Files, The Lone Gunmen, Face of Terror, Atlantis Down)
1969 Timothy Omundson – Actor (Judging Amy, Psych, Jericho, Mission Impossible III, Deadwood, Starship Troopers, This Is Us)
1972 Wil Wheaton - Actor (Stand by Me, Toy Soldiers, Star Trek: the Next Generation, The Liar's Club, Neverland)
1974 Josh Radnor – Actor (How I Met Your Mother, Liberal Arts, Not Another Teen Movie, Eureka, The Guild)
1982 Allison Mack – German-born U.S. actress (Smallville, Hiller and Diller, Camp Nowhere, Wilfred)
1990 Munro Chambers – Canadian actor (Degrassi: The Next Generation, The Latest Buzz, Murder in the Hamptons, Little Men, A Wrinkle in Time)


Died this Day

1833 William Wilberforce – British campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire
1890 Vincent van Gogh - Dutch painter, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Auvers, France
1900 King Umberto I - Italian king. He was shot to death in Monza, Italy, by anarchist Gaetano Bresci. Crowned in 1878, King Umberto became increasingly authoritarian in the late 19th century, enacting a program of suppression against the radical elements in Italian society, particularly members of the popular anarchist movements. In 1898, the crops were poor, and much of the peasantry was starving. Seeking a respite from their government, peasants and workers marched to Milan to petition the king for relief. King Umberto ordered the demonstrators to disperse, and when they did not, he ordered the Italian army to force them out of Milan. Soldiers fired cannons and numerous rounds into the crowd, and hundreds were killed. Bresci resolved that the king should die, and felled the king with three bullets. He was arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to a life of hard labour at Santo Stefano Prison on Ventotene Island. In May, 1901, Bresci was found dead in his cell, allegedly a victim of suicide
1974 Cass Elliot, age 30 – US singer known as Mama Cass, of the Mamas and the Papas (California Dreamin’, Monday Monday, San Francisco) She died in singer Harry Nillson’s London flat
1983 Raymond Massey, age 86 – Canadian actor (Dr. Kildare, Arsenic and Old Lace, The Forty-Ninth Parallel, God is My Co-Pilot, Seven Angry Men, Mackenna’s Gold, How The West Was Won, Illinois, I Spy) He died a month before his 87th birthday, of pneumonia. He played Sherlock Holmes in the 1931 production of The Speckled Band. His brother was Vincent Massey, the first Canadian-born Governor General of Canada. His children were Anna Massey, who was at one time married to Jeremy Brett, and Daniel Massey, who appeared in the Inspector Morse episode Deceived by Flight, and the Sherlock Holmes episode The Problem of Thor Bridge
1983 David Niven, age 73 – Scottish born actor (Separate Tables, Moon is Blue, Paper Tiger, The Pink Panther, The Guns of Navarone, Around the World in 80 Days, Casino Royale, Murder by Death, Death on the Nile)


On this Day

1565 Mary, Queen of Scots married her cousin, Lord Darnley
1588 Off the coast of Gravelines, France, Spain's so-called Invincible Armada was defeated by an English naval force under the command of Lord Charles Howard and Sir Francis Drake. Just after midnight on July 29, the English sent eight burning ships into the crowded harbour at Calais. The panicked Spanish ships were forced to cut their anchors and sail out to sea to avoid catching fire. The disorganised fleet, completely out of formation, was attacked by the English off Gravelines at dawn. In a decisive battle, the superior English guns won the day, and the devastated Armada was forced to retreat north to Scotland. The English navy pursued the Spanish as far as Scotland and then turned back for want of supplies. Battered by storms and suffering from a dire lack of supplies, the Armada sailed on a hard journey back to Spain around Scotland and Ireland. Some of the damaged ships foundered in the sea while others were driven onto the coast of Ireland and wrecked. By the time the last of the surviving fleet reached Spain in October, half of the original Armada was lost and some 15,000 men had perished. Queen Elizabeth's decisive defeat of the Invincible Armada made England a world-class power and introduced effective long-range weapons into naval warfare for the first time, ending the era of boarding and close-quarter fighting
1776 Silvestre de Escalante and Francisco Dominguez, two Spanish Franciscan priests, left on an epic journey through the Southwest. Escalante and Dominguez hoped to blaze a trail from New Mexico to Monterey, California, but their main goal was to visit with the native inhabitants and convert as many as possible to the Catholic faith. The two priests and seven men departed the Spanish frontier town of Santa Fe and headed northwest into what is today the state of Colorado. They continued north, exploring the rugged Great Basin and canyon land country of Utah. By early October, winter was approaching, and they began to encounter fierce snowstorms travelling through high mountain passes. Accustomed to desert living, the priests were unequipped to deal with snow and bitter cold, and they soon ran short of provisions. They abandoned their goal of reaching California and headed back for Santa Fe. During the long journey home, they very nearly starved to death. The men ate their horses first. When the horseflesh was gone, they ate only prickly pear cactus. On January 2, 1777, the exhausted men staggered into Santa Fe. They had travelled nearly 1,700 miles in just 159 days through some of the roughest country in the southwest, yet all nine members of the party made it home safely. Although they never found a route to Monterey, the two intrepid priests were the first to explore extensively the Great Basin country of the Southwest, and Escalante's written account of the expedition became an essential guide to future explorers
1848 The Tipperary Revolt ended in failure as, at the height of the Potato Famine in Ireland, an abortive nationalist revolt against English rule was crushed by a government police detachment in Tipperary. In a brief skirmish in a cabbage patch, Irish nationalists under William Smith O'Brien were overcome and arrested. O'Brien was arrested and sentenced to death for treason, but his sentence was commuted to transportation to the penal colony at Tasmania. The nationalists, members of the Young Ireland movement, had planned to declare an independent Irish republic, but they lacked support from the Irish peasantry, who were occupied entirely with surviving the famine. By the mid-19th century, the Irish population, which suffered under the system of absentee landlords, had been reduced to a subsistence diet based largely on potatoes. When a potato blight struck the country in the 1840s, disaster ensued. Between 1846 and 1851, more than one million people starved to death, and some two million people left the country, mostly to North America. With the desperate times of the famine came an increased radicalism in the Irish nationalist movement. After the failure of the Young Ireland revolt, many embittered Irish nationalists immigrated to the United States, Australia, and Canada, where they redoubled their agitation against England
1899 The permanent court of arbitration was established at The Hague
1899 The first known motorcycle race was held in Manhattan
1948 King George VI opened the 14th Olympic Games, the first in twelve years due to the war, at Wembley Stadium in London
1967 Fire swept the USS Forrestal in the Gulf of Tonkin, killing 134 servicemen
1981 Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer as nearly one billion television viewers in 74 countries tuned in to witness the marriage of the heir to the British throne to a young English schoolteacher. They were married in a grand ceremony at St. Paul's Cathedral in the presence of 2,650 guests