Born this Day

1740 James Boswell – Scottish lawyer and author (Journal of the Tour to the Hebrides, Life of Samuel Johnson) He was born in Edinburgh to an ancient Scottish family. His father was a judge, the Lord of Auchinleck, and Boswell was heir to the title and a large fortune. He attended the University of Edinburgh, and later studied law in Holland, before touring Germany, Italy, and France. On his tour, he met Rousseau, Voltaire, and a prominent Corsican general leading the island in revolt against Genoa. Boswell took careful notes after his meetings and later used his detailed diaries to create vivid profiles of these famous personalities, which made him famous across Europe. Meanwhile, in 1763, he had met the prominent man of letters and lexicographer Samuel Johnson. Their friendship lasted until Johnson's death, and Boswell's greatest fame came from his study of the man. (Holmes to Watson in A Scandal in Bohemia: I am lost without my Boswell ) Boswell's lively and colourful chronicles helped familiarise generations of future readers with the literary characters of the late 18th century
1815 Daniel Emmett - Composer (Dixie)
1882 Jean Giradoux – French author, diplomat and playwright (Tiger at the Gates, The Madwoman of Chaillot)
1891 Fanny Brice – Actress, comedienne (Ziegfeld Follies, Baby Snooks) and singer (My Man, Second Hand Rose) Her life was immortalised in the musical Funny Girl
1899 Akim Tamiroff - Actor (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Lord Jim)
1921 Bill Mauldin - Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist (G.I. Joe and Willie)
1922 Neal Hefti - Composer of TV's Batman theme
1923 Dina Merril – Actress (Operation Petticoat, Butterfield 8, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The Sundowners, Desk Set) Her father was the financier E.F. Hutton
1925 Robert Hardy – British actor (All Creatures Great and Small, Hot Metal, Sense and Sensibility, Bramwell, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) He played Andrew Baydon in the Inspector Morse episode Twilight of the Gods. He also played Charles Augustus Milverton in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Eligible Bachelor
1925 Zoot Sims – Musician on the tenor and alto sax with many groups (Benny Goodman Band, Woody Herman Orchestra, Stan Kenton, Gerry Mulligan)
1945 Melba Moore – US singer (You Stepped into My Life) and actress (The Melba Moore-Clifton Davis Show)
1947 Richard Dreyfuss – Actor (Jaws, The Goodbye Girl, Mr. Holland's Opus, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, American Graffiti, The Graduate, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz)
1948 Kate Jackson – Actress (Charlie's Angels, The Rookies, Scarecrow and Mrs. King)
1967 Rufus Sewell – Briitsh actor (A Knight’s Tale, Zen, The Pillars of the Earth, Eleventh Hour, The Tourist, Middlemarch, The Illusionist)
1967 Joely Fisher – Actress (Zoe Busiek: Wild Card, Inspector Gadget, Desperate Housewives, The Mask) She is the daughter of Connie Stevens and Eddie Fisher, and the half-sister of Carrie Fisher
1971 Winona Ryder – Actress (Little Women, Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Age of Innocence, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Heathers) She was born Winona Horowitz, near Winona, Minnesota. Her hippie parents raised her on a commune and her godfather was the counterculture guru Timothy Leary


Died this Day

1618 Sir Walter Raleigh – English seafarer, writer and favourite courtier of Queen Elizabeth I. He was beheaded at Whitehall under a sentence brought against him fifteen years earlier for conspiracy against King James I. During Elizabeth's reign, Raleigh led three major expeditions to North America, and established the first English settlement there in 1587 - the ill-fated Roanoke settlement located in present-day North Carolina. After returning to England, Raleigh fell out of favour with Elizabeth after she learned of his love affair with Bessy Throckmorton, one of her maids-of-honour. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Upon his release, Raleigh married Bessy and distanced himself from the queen. When Elizabeth died in 1603, he was implicated as a foe of King James I and imprisoned with a death sentence. The death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1616 Raleigh was freed to lead another expedition to the New World, this time in pursuit of a rumoured gold mine in the Orinoco region of South America. However, the expedition was a failure, and when Raleigh returned to England the fifteen-year-old death sentence of 1603 was invoked against him
1828 Luke Hansard – British publisher and printer to the House of Commons. In Canada (and probably in Britain) the daily transcript of what transpired in the House of Commons is still known as Hansard
1901 Leon Czolgosz - President McKinley's assassin, was executed by electrocution
1911 Joseph Pulitzer, age 64 – US newspaperman. He died in Charleston, South Carolina
1924 Frances Hodgson Burnett, age 74 – British born US novelist (Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Little Princess, The Secret Garden)
1987 Woody Herman, age 74 – US clarinettist and big band leader


On this Day

1682 William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, landed at what is now Chester, PA
1787 Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, was performed for the first time, in Prague
1814 Robert Fulton launched the first steam warship for the US
1835 The Morse alphabet code for telegraphy was patented
1858 The first store opened in a small frontier town in Colorado Territory that a month later would take the name of Denver
1863 The Red Cross was founded by Swiss philanthropist Henri Dunant
1901 Nurse Jane Toppan was arrested in Amherst, Massachusetts, for single-handedly killing the Davis family of Boston with an overdose of morphine during a period of six weeks in July and August. Toppan's childhood was very troubled. Her mother died when she was very young, and her father had severe mental problems. A tailor by trade, he was sent to an asylum after he stitched together his own eyelids. Jane bounced around between several orphanages for years until she was finally adopted. She went on to study nursing and developed a fascination with the morgue, corpses and autopsies. Toppan worked as a private nurse, taking care of elderly patients throughout the New England area, but no one took note of her patients' survival rate until she murdered the Davis family. By the time she was arrested, authorities produced solid evidence of 11 murders, and she confessed to 20 more. Some believe that the serial killer may have been responsible for as many as 100 deaths. At her trial, Toppan told the court, "That is my ambition, to have killed more people, more helpless people, than any man or woman who has ever lived." She was sent to a Massachusetts mental asylum, where she allegedly implored the workers to get some morphine so that they could have fun by killing the other patients. Toppan died in 1938
1929 The Great Stock Market Crash of ’29 occurred, when an unstable world economy reached its breaking point, and investors on Wall Street lost seventy-four billion dollars in the stock exchange as the ticker ran four hours behind. The crash marked the beginning of the Great Depression. Bread lines, world-wide economic depression, and demonstrations for social revolution followed the crash
1947 Flying in a specially outfitted aircraft, Vincent Schaefer of the General Electric Company dropped small dry-ice pellets into cumulus clouds over a forest fire near Concord, Massachusetts, in an attempt to produce artificial precipitation and douse the flames. Shortly after Schaefer landed, a rain did indeed begin to fall over the area, but because of simultaneous rainfall from unseeded clouds nearby, it was impossible to determine how successful the experiment had been. Nevertheless, the forest fire was extinguished and Schaefer, who had succeeded in producing snow in a cold chamber in 1946 and performed his first dry-ice tests over Massachusetts in the same year, was encouraged to continue his work in the field of artificial weather
1952 The International Joint Commission approved a joint Canada-United States application for permission to develop 2.2-million horsepower of electric energy on the international section of the St. Lawrence River
1956 The Suez Canal crisis began as Israel launched an attack on Egypt and its Arab allies in response to Egypt's nationalisation of the Suez Canal and barring of Israeli shipping. In a lightning attack, Israeli forces under General Moshe Dayan seized the Gaza Strip and drove through the Sinai to the east bank of the Suez Canal. Two days later, Britain and France, whose ships were also barred from the Suez, and whose diplomats were expelled from Egypt, entered the conflict in a coalition with Israel, demanding the immediate evacuation of Egyptian forces from the Suez Canal Zone. The Suez Canal, which stretches 101 miles across the Isthmus of Suez connecting the Mediterranean and Red seas, was first completed under the direction of French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1869. The canal rapidly became one of the world's most heavily travelled shipping lanes, and in 1882, British troops invaded Egypt, beginning a forty-year occupation of the country and a seventy-five-year occupation of the Suez Canal Zone. During the early 1950s, Egyptian nationalists rioted in the Canal Zone and organised attacks on British troops, and in July 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdal Nasser nationalised the canal, setting the stage for the crisis. The international community expressed outrage at the hostilities, and Britain, France, and Israel agreed to withdraw as a UN emergency force was sent to the area. By the spring of 1957, all troops had withdrawn and the Suez Canal passed into Egyptian hands
1964 Thieves made off with the Star of India and other gems from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The Star and most of the other gems were recovered
1998 John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, returned to space 36 years later, at age 77