Born this Day

1811 Franz Liszt – Hungarian-born composer and piano virtuoso (Liebestraum, Hungarian Rhapsodies)
1844 Louis Riel – Canadian Métis leader. He was the eldest of eleven children, born in a log cabin near St-Boniface, Manitoba. His mother, Marie-Anne Gaboury, was the daughter of the first white woman in the West. His father, Louis Riel Sr., had built a grist mill on the Seine River, and in 1839, helped break the Hudson's Bay Company trading monopoly through an organised resistance. In 1858, young Riel was sent by Bishop Alexander Taché to Montreal to study for the priesthood, but he left the seminary in the final years of his studies and clerked in a Montreal law office. After a disastrous love affair, he drifted to Chicago, then returned to the Red River settlement. In October, 1869, he and 17 others forced a group of Canadian surveyors off the farm of his cousin André Nault. During the insurrection that followed, Riel and his fellow rebels ordered an Ontario Orangeman, Thomas Scott, shot. In 1875, Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie granted Riel amnesty on the condition that he stay out of the country for five years. In January 1878, Riel settled in Montana, took a teaching position at a church school and married Marguerite Bellehumeur. In 1884 members of the Batoche Métis community implored Riel to come back to Saskatchewan and help them fight for their rights. The result was rebellion and, inevitably, defeat. Riel was found guilty of high treason by six English-speaking Protestant jurors, who recommended mercy. However, the jurors’ appeals were brushed aside, and Louis Riel was hanged in Regina in November, 1885
1844 Sarah Bernhardt - Legendary stage actress, born in Paris. She was known as The Devine Sarah by her admirers. In 1915 she had her leg amputated because of a gangrene infection that set in after an injury during a performance of Tosca. She was soon back performing, in specially written parts
1870 Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas – British poet (The City of the Soul, Sonnets – In Excelsis) His intimacy with Oscar Wilde eventually provoked his father, the Marquis of Queensbury to libel Wilde. Wilde’s prosecution of the Marquis was his downfall, and Wilde ended up being prosecuted for performing indecent acts
1904 Constance Bennett - Actress (Madame X, As Young as You Feel, Two-Faced Woman, Topper, Sin Takes a Holiday)
1917 Joan Fontaine – Tokyo-born Actress (Suspicion, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Ivanhoe, Gunga Din) She was the sister of Olivia de Havilland
1919 Doris Lessing – Persian-born British author (Children of Violence, African Stories, The Golden Notebook)
1920 Mitzi Green – Actress (Lost in Alaska, Little Orphan Annie, Tom Sawyer, So This is Hollywood)
1927 James Grout – British actor (David Copperfield, Rumpole of the Bailey, Mother Love, All Creatures Great and Small, The Abominable Dr. Phibes) He played Chief Superintendent Strange in the Inspector Morse TV series
1938 Sir Derek Jacobi – British stage and screen actor (I Claudius, The Odessa File, The Secret Garden, Breaking the Code, The Day of the Jackal, Little Dorrit, The Wyvern Mystery, Vicious) He also portrayed Cadfael in the Cadfael mysteries
1938 Christopher Lloyd - Actor (Taxi, Back to the Future, Star Trek III, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Addams Family Values)
1939 Tony Roberts - Actor (Play It Again Sam, Serpico, Annie Hall, Edge of Night)
1942 Annette Funicello - Actress (The Mickey Mouse Club, Beach Blanket Bingo, The Shaggy Dog) and singer (Tall Paul, O Dio Mio, Pineapple Princess)
1943 Catherine Deneuve – French actress (Repulsion, Indochine, The April Fools)
1945 Eddie Brigati – Singer and musician with The Young Rascals (Good Lovin', Groovin', A Beautiful Morning, People Got to be Free)
1952 Jeff Goldblum – Actor (The Fly, The Big Chill, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Right Stuff, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Silverado, Jurassic Park, Tenspeed and Brown Shoe, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Independence Day)
1972 Saffron Burrows – British actress (Boston Legal, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Marple: Towards Zero, Troy, Deep Blue Sea, Wing Commander, Cold Lazarus, Karaoke)


Died this Day

1806 Thomas Sheraton – English furniture designer and maker
1903 Tom Horn – Old West hired killer. He was hanged for having allegedly murdered Willie Nickell, the 14-year-old son of a southern Wyoming sheep rancher, although his guilt has been disputed by some historians. He died a month before his 43rd birthday. Born in Memphis, Missouri, Horn showed an aptitude for hunting and marksmanship at an early age. After moving westward in the mid-1870s, he was at various times a cowboy, miner, army scout, deputy sheriff, and packer for the Rough Riders in Cuba, but his most notorious career was as a hired gun. Horn first worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency which hired him to track down and apprehend western outlaws who were preying on banks and railroads that could afford to pay for private law enforcement where the public system failed them. But after four years as a Pinkerton, Horn had become bored, and in 1894 he signed on as a hired killer with the privately run Wyoming Cattlemen's Association. For several years the big Wyoming cattlemen had been fighting a vigilante war in Johnson County against a diverse group of small farmers, sheep ranchers, and rustlers who were resisting their domination. By 1894, negative publicity had made a public war too costly, and the ranchers shifted to more stealthy means, hiring Horn to use his gun-handling skills to deadly effect by ambushing and murdering any man the ranchers marked as a troublemaker. Since he often shot from as much as 200 yards away, most of Horn's victims never even knew what hit them. Some historians suggest that Horn was deliberately convicted for a crime he did not commit by Wyoming citizens seeing an opportunity to take revenge
1906 Paul Cézanne, age 67 – French Impressionist painter
1934 Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd - Notorious US bank robber, was fatally shot by Federal agents near a farm in East Liverpool, Ohio. Floyd, who grew up in a small farming community in Oklahoma, entered a life of crime at the age of eighteen. The young criminal was soon convicted for armed robbery and sent to the Jefferson City Penitentiary for three years. Upon his release, Floyd moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and found work in organised crime as a hired gun, and was given the nickname Pretty Boy by the madam of a Kansas City brothel. Floyd went into business on his own, and over a twelve-year period he robbed as many as thirty banks, and killed at least ten men. The well-groomed Floyd became a folk hero to the people of Oklahoma, who believed him a "Sagebush Robin Hood" who stole from the wealthy banks to help the poor. In 1933, Floyd was implicated along with two others in the Union Station Massacre in Kansas City, a bloody attempt to free Frank "Gentleman" Nash, an underworld figure. Five men, including an FBI agent, were killed, prompting an intensive national manhunt for Floyd and his associates. Over sixteen months later, Floyd's luck ran out in the backwoods of Ohio, when he was discovered hiding out on a farm and fatally shot in the back as he attempted to run
1973 Pablo Casals, age 96 - Spanish cellist, conductor and composer. He died in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico


On this Day

1692 When Iroquois Indians attacked her Québec village, 14-year-old Madelaine Jarret de Verchères took charge and gathered about 20 local habitant farmers into her family's fortified home. With her father François, a militia colonel, away in Montreal, the girl led the defence of the fort against the Iroquois siege for the next 8 days, with only 2 militia and her young brother to aid her. When help arrived, she said, “I surrender my arms to you”, and then collapsed
1721 Peter the Great became Tsar of Russia
1746 Princeton University in New Jersey received its charter
1797 The world's first recorded parachute jump was made by Andre-Jacques Garnerin from a hot air balloon 2,300 feet above Parc Monceau in Paris, France. Garnerin first conceived of the possibility of using air resistance to slow an individual's fall from a high altitude while a prisoner during the French Revolution. Although he never employed a parachute to escape from the high ramparts of the Hungarian prison where he spent three years, Garnerin never lost interest in the concept of the parachute. In 1797, Garnerin completed his first parachute, a canopy thirty-five feet in diameter with over thirty suspension lines. On the fateful test day, Garnerin attached himself and the parachute to a hot air balloon, ascended to an altitude of 2,300 feet, and severed the parachute from the balloon. As he failed to include an air vent at the top of the prototype, Garnerin oscillated wildly in his descent. Nevertheless, the jump was a success, and Garnerin landed shaken but unhurt half a mile from the balloon's takeoff site. In 1799, Garnerin's wife, Jeanne-Genevieve, became the first female parachutist, and in 1823, while preparing to test a new parachute, Garnerin died in a balloon accident
1836 Sam Houston was inaugurated as the first constitutionally elected president of the Republic of Texas
1881 The first edition of the British magazine, Tid Bits, was published
1883 The original Metropolitan Opera House in New York held its grand opening with a performance of Gounod's Faust
1917 The Trans-Australian Railway was opened, running from Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta
1945 The Canadian Citizenship Act received its first reading in the House of Commons. Until the Act became law in January, 1947, "Canadian national" or "British subject" were the legal terms used for Canadians
1962 The Cuban Missile Crisis began as President John F. Kennedy disclosed that US spy planes had discovered the existence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. He announced that he was ordering a naval blockade of Cuba, and explained that the US would not tolerate the existence of the missile sites currently in place. Over the next six days, the crisis escalated to a breaking point as the world tottered on the brink of nuclear war. Finally, on October 28, in exchange for a secret US pledge not to invade Cuba, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced his country's willingness to remove the weapons. The crisis ended as suddenly as it began, and the world breathed a sigh of relief. In November, Kennedy called off the blockade, and by the end of the year the missiles had left Cuba
1979 The US government allowed the deposed Shah of Iran to travel to New York for medical treatment - a decision that precipitated the Iran hostage crisis
1981 The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organisation was decertified by the US federal government for its strike the previous August
1987 American Tim Cahill and Canadian Garry Sowerby completed the first Trans-Americas drive, completing the 14,739-mile distance from Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in a total elapsed time of twenty-three days, twenty-two hours, and forty-three minutes