Born this Day

1700 James Thomson – Scottish poet (Rule Britannia, The Castle of Insolence)
1862 O Henry – US short story writer (Cabbages and Kings, Whirligigs, The Gift of the Magi) He also wrote the Sherlockian parody The Adventures of Shamrock Jolmes
1885 D.H. Lawrence – British novelist (Lady Chatterly's Lover, Women in Love, Sons and Lovers)
1902 Jimmie Davis – Country songwriter (You are My Sunshine) and US politician who was twice Governor of Louisiana
1917 Herbert Lom – Prague born actor (War and Peace, Pink Panther movies, The Lady Killers, Spartacus, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Peter and Paul, The Dead Zone)
1917 Ferdinand Marcos - President of the Philippines from 1966 to 1986, when his corrupt government was overthrown
1928 Earl Holliman - Actor (Police Woman, Cannon, The Thorne Birds, Giant, Forbidden Planet)
1940 Brian De Palma - Director (Carrie, The Untouchables, Scarface)
1942 Lola Falana – Singer and actress (The New Bill Cosby Show, Ben Vereen Comin' at Ya, Lady Cocoa)
1944 Mickey Hart – Drummer and songwriter with the Grateful Dead (St. Stephen, Dark Star, Alabama Getaway)
1950 Amy Madigan – Actress (Field of Dreams, Carnivàle, Uncle Buck, Places in the Heart)
1959 John Hawkes – Actor (Deadwood, American Gangster, Lost, Contagion, The Perfect Storm
1962 Kristy McNichol - Actress (Family, Empty Nest, Little Darlings, The Summer of My German Soldier)
1963 Virginia Madsen – Actress (The Prophecy, Blue Tiger, Gotham, Dune)
1967 Harry Connick, Jr. - Singer (We are in Love) and actor (Copycat, When Harry Met Sally, Independence Day)


Died this Day

1956 Billy Bishop, age 62 - Canadian war hero. He was the top scoring Canadian and Imperial ace of the First World War, credited with shooting down 72 German aircraft. He was the first Canadian airman to win a Victoria Cross. He won it for a solo 1917 attack on a German airfield
1958 Robert W. Service, age 84 – British born Canadian known as the Poet of the Yukon (Songs of a Sourdough, The Spell of the Yukon, The Cremation of Sam McGee, Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man) He worked as an ambulance driver, newspaper correspondent, and a reporter for the Canadian Army Intelligence during the end of World War I
1973 Salvador Allende – President of Chile, died when Chile's armed forces staged a coup d'état against his democratically elected government. Allende retreated with his supporters to La Moneda, the fortress-like presidential palace in Santiago, which was surrounded by tanks and infantry and bombed by air force jets. Allende survived the aerial attack but then apparently shot himself to death as troops stormed the burning palace. The democratically elected Allende was succeeded by the brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled over Chile with an iron fist for the next 17 years
1987 Lorne Greene, age 72 – Canadian actor (Bonanza, Earthquake, Roots, Battlestar Galactica) He first became known, in Canada, as the "Voice of Doom" for his radio reports for the CBC during the Second World War
1987 Peter Tosh – Jamaican reggae singer (I’m the Toughest, 400 Years) He died when three armed robbers burst into his home and shot him. He died a few weeks before his 43rd birthday
1994 Jessica Tandy, age 85 – British-born US actress (Driving Miss Daisy, Cocoon, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Birds, The World According to Garp) She performed on Broadway with her husband, Hume Cronyn
2003 John Ritter - Actor (8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, Three's Company, Sling Blade) He was the son of singing-cowboy legend Tex Ritter. He died a week before his 55th birthday


On this Day

1709 The battle of Malplaquet, the bloodiest battle of the War of the Spanish Succession, took place between France and the British-Dutch-Austrian Alliance
1754 Fur trader Anthony Henday became the first white man to enter what is now Alberta
1777 At the Battle of Brandywine Creek in the US War of Independence, the British, commanded by General Howe, defeated the US troops lead by George Washington
1833 The Quebec-built steamship Royal William reached England safely at Gravesend. The wooden paddle wheeler was the first ship to cross Atlantic entirely under steam power. Engineers had to stop every few days to clean salt from the boilers. The steamship had departed from Pictou, Nova Scotia on August 18th
1841 The commuter age began early for the south-east of England when the London to Brighton commuter express train began regular service, taking just 105 minutes
1847 The song Oh! Susanna, written by Stephen Foster, was performed for the first time. It became Foster's first big hit, and was played at a concert in a Pittsburgh saloon, soon becoming a standard for minstrel troupes. Foster wrote several other classic popular songs, including Old Folks at Home and Beautiful Dreamer
1850 Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, gave her first concert in the US, at Castle Garden in New York
1857 Mormon guerrillas, aided by the local Paiute Indians, murdered 120 emigrants at Mountain Meadows, Utah. Although historical accounts differ, the conflict with the wagon train of emigrants from Missouri and Arkansas apparently began when the Mormons refused to sell the train any supplies. Some of the emigrants then began to commit minor depredations against Mormon fields, abuse the local Paiute Indians, and taunt the Mormons with reminders of how the Missourians had attacked and chased them out of that state during the 1830s. Angered by the emigrants' abuse and fired by a zealous passion against the growing tide of invading gentiles, a group of Mormons guerrillas from around Cedar City decided to take revenge. Co-operating with a group of Paiute Indians who had already attacked the train on their own initiative, the Mormon guerrillas initially pretended to be protectors. The guerrillas persuaded the emigrants that they had convinced the Paitues to let them go if they would surrender their arms and allow the Mormons to escort the wagon train through the territory. But as the train again moved forward under the Mormon escort, a guerrilla leader gave a pre-arranged signal. The Mormons opened fire on the unarmed male emigrants, while the Paiutes reportedly murdered the women. Later accounts suggested that some Mormons had only fired in the air while others killed as few of the emigrants as they could. But when the shooting stopped in Mountain Meadows, 120 men and women were dead. Only 18 small children were spared. As a direct result of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the US government demanded a new settlement from Brigham Young. In 1858, the Mormons agreed to accept a continued presence of federal troops and a gentile governor for Utah Territory. The era of complete Mormon domination of Utah ended as a result of the tragedy that day in Mountain Meadows
1861 The Toronto Street Railway line opened. It ran the first horse-drawn streetcars in Canada
1888 Canadian Governor General Frederick Arthur, Baron Stanley of Preston, recorded an address to the President of the United States onto an Edison phonograph cylinder. This is the world's oldest known sound preserved on a record. Lord Stanley is also known for donating the Stanley Cup as an award for the best hockey team
1903 The oldest major speedway in the world, the Milwaukee Mile, became a permanent fixture in the Wisconsin State Fair Park. The circuit had actually been around since the 1870s as a horseracing track, but the proliferation of the automobile brought a new era to the Milwaukee Mile. However, the horses stuck around until 1954, sharing the track with the automobiles until the mile oval was finally paved. At one point, the horses and autos also had to make room for professional football. The Green Bay Packers played in the track’s infield for almost ten years during the 1930s
1914 W.C. Handy published his St. Louis Blues. It has been since been recorded well over 100 times
1915 The first British Women’s Institute opened at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (try saying that three times fast! ), Anglesey, Wales
1936 President Roosevelt dedicated the Boulder Dam (now the Hoover Dam) by pressing a key in Washington to signal the start-up of the dam's first hydroelectric generator in Nevada
1942 The Government ordered all Canadian women, single and married, born between 1918 and 1922, to register with the Unemployment Insurance Commission, due to the critical shortage of labour in wartime. Many of the women volunteered to help with that fall’s harvest
1968 In Canada's first air hijacking, an Air Canada jet scheduled to fly from Toronto to Moncton, was ordered to fly to Cuba instead. The hijacker, Charles Lavern Beasley of Texas, gave himself up at a refuelling stop at Dorval Airport in Montréal
1970 The Ford Pinto was introduced, at a cost of less than $2,000. It was designed to compete with an influx of compact imports. But it was not the Pinto’s low cost that grabbed headlines. Ford’s new best-selling compact contained a fatal design flaw: because of the placement of the gas tank, the tank was likely to rupture and explode when the car was involved in a rear end collision of over 20 mph. In addition, it was eventually revealed that Ford knew about the design flaw before the Pinto was released. An internal cost-benefit analysis prepared by Ford calculated that it would take $11 per car to correct the flaw at a total cost of $137 million for the company. When compared to the lowly estimate of $49.5 million in potential lawsuits from the mistake, the report deemed it “inefficient” to go ahead with the correction. The infamous report assigned a value of $200,000 for each death predicted to result from the flaw. Ford’s irresponsibility caused a public uproar, and in 1978, a California jury awarded a record-breaking $128 million to a claimant in the Ford Pinto case
1997 Scots voted to create their own Parliament after 290 years of union with England
2001 Terrorists hijacked two airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York, causing the 110-story twin towers to collapse. Another hijacked airliner hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania