Born this Day

1791 Lydia Sigourney - Author (Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands, Letters to Young Ladies, How to Be Happy)
1854 Engelbert Humperdinck - German opera composer (Hansel and Gretel) His name was ‘borrowed’ by pop singer Arnold George (Jerry) Dorsey
1866 James (Gentleman Jim) Corbett – US world heavyweight boxing champion from 1892 to 1897
1875 Edgar Rice Burroughs – Author (Tarzan of the Apes stories, A Princess of Mars)
1900 Don Wilson – Announcer and actor (The Jack Benny Show, Out of This World, Larceny, Sailor Beware, Niagara) He also played Walter Klondike in the Batman episodes Dizzonor the Penguin and Hizzonor the Penguin
1920 Richard Farnsworth - Actor (Misery, Comes a Horseman, The Fire Next Time, The Two Jakes, The Natural, Anne of Green Gables, Lassie, The Grey Fox, Legend of the Lone Ranger, Havana, The Boys of Twilight, Travis McGee, The Texas Rangers, Cherokee Trail, Tom Horn, Roots, The Straight Story) He worked as a stuntman for almost forty years before taking up acting full time. In 1961 he co-founded the Stuntmen's Association
1922 Yvonne De Carlo – Canadian actress (The Munsters, Salome Where She Danced, The Ten Commandments, McLintock!, Frontier Gal, River Lady, Casbah, Black Bart Highwayman, Calamity Jane and Sam Bass, Buccaneer’s Girl)
1923 Rocky Marciano – Boxer and World Heavyweight Champion. He was the only world heavyweight to have won every fight in his professional career and retire undefeated
1928 George Maharis – Actor (Route 66, Doppelganger, Rich Man Poor Man, Sylvia, A Covenant with Death, The Desperados, The Most Deadly Game, The Sword and the Sorcerer)
1928 Robert Pirsig - US author (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
1931 Boxcar Willie (Lecil Travis Martin) – Songwriter and singer known as 'The Singing Hobo' (Not the Man I Used to Be, Lonesome Whistle Blues, Hobo Til I Die, Thru a Boxcar Door) Tommy Lee Jones was his cousin
1933 Conway Twitty – Country singer (It's Only Make Believe, Danny Boy, Lonely Boy Blue, What Am I Living For, Next In Line, Hello Darlin', 15 Years Ago, You've Never Been This Far Before, Don't Cry Joni, After the Fire is Gone, Happy Birthday Darlin’, Desperado Love) He was among the most successful country performers of all time, and had at one time passed up a chance to become a professional baseball player with the Philadelphia Phillies
1937 Ron O'Neal - Actor (The Final Countdown, When A Stranger Calls, Red Dawn, North and South, The Equalizer)
1939 Lily Tomlin – Comedienne and actress (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, 9 to 5, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, And the Band Played On, Short Cuts, Nashville, All of Me, Murphy Brown, Big Business)
1943 Don Stroud - Actor (The Choirboys, Murph the Surf, The Buddy Holly Story, Mike Hammer)
1946 Barry Gibb – British-born musician, songwriter and singer with his family group The Bee Gees (Stayin' Alive, Night Fever, How Deep Is Your Love, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, Tragedy, Lonely Days, Massachusetts)
1948 James Rebhorn – Actor (Independence Day, The Game, The Talented Mr. Ripley, White Collar, Meet the Parents, Guarding Tess, My Cousin Vinny)
1957 Gloria Estefan – Singer known as the 'Queen of Latin Pop' with the Miami Sound Machine (Conga, Don't Want to Lose You, Turn the Beat Around)
1974 Burn Gorman – U.S. born British actor (Torchwood, Bleak House, Revenge, The Oxford Murders, Layer Cake, Marple: Ordeal by Innocence, Turn, Stan Lee’s Lucky Man, Forever, Game of Thrones)


Died this Day

1557 Jacques Cartier, age 66 – French explorer of North America. He was the first European to explore, chart, and attempt colonisation in the St. Lawrence area
1715 Louis XIV – King of France, died of gangrene. His 72-year reign is the longest in European history. At the time of his death, he was also the King of Canada. He died four days before his 77th birthday
1729 Sir Richard Steele – Irish-born essayist (The Christian Hero, The Importance of Dunkirk Consider’d) He was the founder of Tatler magazine
1951 Nellie McClung, age 77 – Canadian advocate for women's rights. She began her political activities in Manitoba, where she was active in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, as well as fighting for dower rights for women and female suffrage. She moved to Alberta in 1915, where she served in the provincial legislature
1977 Ethel Waters – Actress and singer who performed on the vaudeville circuit. She began recording in the 1920s and became popular as a stage actress in the late 1930s


On this Day

1807 Former US Vice-President Aaron Burr was acquitted of treason for plotting to annex parts of Louisiana and Spanish territory in Mexico to be used toward the establishment of an independent republic. In 1804, Burr had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Affairs of honour were commonplace in the US at the time, but few actually resulted in deaths, and the nation was outraged by the killing of a man as eminent as Alexander Hamilton. Charged with murder in New York and New Jersey, Burr, still vice president, returned to Washington, DC, where he finished his term immune from prosecution. In 1805 Burr, now thoroughly discredited, concocted a plot with James Wilkinson, commander-in-chief of the US Army, to seize the Louisiana Territory and establish an independent empire, which Burr, presumably, would lead. He contacted the British government and unsuccessfully pleaded for assistance in the scheme. Later, when border trouble with Spanish Mexico heated up, Burr and Wilkinson conspired to seize territory in Spanish America for the same purpose. In the fall of 1806, Burr led a group of well-armed colonists toward New Orleans, prompting an immediate US investigation. General Wilkinson, in an effort to save himself, turned against Burr and sent dispatches to Washington accusing Burr of treason. In February 1807, Burr was arrested in Louisiana for treason and sent to Virginia to be tried in a US court. He was acquitted on a technicality, on the grounds that, though he had conspired against the US, he was not guilty of treason because he had not engaged in an "overt act," a requirement of the law governing treason. Nevertheless, the public condemned him as a traitor, and he went into exile to Europe. He later returned to private life in New York, the murder charges against him forgotten
1830 Sarah J. Hales published a poem in Boston entitled Mary Had a Little Lamb. In 1867 it was set to music and became a classic children’s nursery rhyme
1858 The Government of the Canadas abolished imprisonment for debt
1880 In London, England, an Imperial Order-in-Council took effect, transferring all British possessions in North America to Canada, including ownership of all Arctic Islands. The only exception was Newfoundland
1897 The first section of Boston's subway system was opened
1904 Helen Keller, who had become both deaf and blind in infancy, graduated with honours from Radcliffe College
1905 The Saskatchewan Act and the Alberta Act were adopted by the Canadian House of Commons and the two new provinces officially joined Canada
1923 The Japanese cities of Tokyo and Yokohama were devastated by an earthquake that claimed 150,000 lives
1932 New York City Mayor James “Gentleman Jimmy” Walker resigned following charges of graft and corruption in his administration
1933 H.G. Wells’ classic science-fiction novel, The Shape of Things to Come, was published
1939 The Second World War began as Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war against Germany two days later
1944 The Second Division of the First Canadian Army liberated Dieppe, France, returning in triumph to the scene of a disastrous Canadian raid two years earlier. They would continue on to clear Boulogne and Calais, then move to take the strategically important port of Antwerp, Belgium
1969 Muammar al-Qaddafi, a 27-year-old Libyan army captain, and son of a Bedouin farmer, led a successful military coup against King Idris I of Libya. Idris was deposed and Qaddafi was named chairman of Libya's new governing body, the Revolutionary Command Council. He established a fervently anti-Western dictatorship in Libya by removing US and British military bases and taking control of foreign-owned oil fields
1980 Canadian Terry Fox was forced to abandon his cross-Canada Marathon of Hope Run at Thunder Bay, Ontario, when his cancer spread to his lungs. Fox had started his run, to raise funds for cancer research, 135 days earlier in St. John’s, Newfoundland. In 1977, Fox was studying physical education when he lost most of one leg to bone cancer. Fox passed away the following June
1985 Seventy-three years after it sunk to the North Atlantic ocean floor, a joint US-French expedition located the wreck of the RMS Titanic. The sunken liner was about 400 miles off Newfoundland in the North Atlantic. Robert D. Ballard headed the expedition, which used an experimental, unmanned submersible developed by the US Navy to search for the ocean liner. The Argo travelled just above the ocean floor, sending photographs up to the research vessel Knorr. The Argo was investigating debris on the ocean floor when it suddenly passed over one of the Titanic's massive boilers, lying at a depth of about 13,000 feet