Born this Day

1638 James Gregory – Scottish mathematician and astronomer, who described the first practical reflecting telescope and contributed towards the discovery of calculus
1814 Adolph Sax – Belgian musical instrument maker who, invented the saxophone in 1840 and patented it in 1846. He also invented an instrument called the saxotromba
1854 John Philip Sousa – US composer and bandleader, whose compositions earned him the title of the March King (Stars and Stripes Forever, Semper Fidelis, El Capitan, King Cotton, The Thunderer, Washington Post March)
1860 Ignace Jan Paderewski - Polish patriot who was the first Premier of Poland in 1919, pianist and composer (Minuet in G) He was the first to bring white Zinfandel wine grapes to the US
1861 James A. Naismith – Canadian education instructor and inventor of the game of basketball. He was born on a farm near Altamonte, Ontario, to Scottish immigrants John Naismith and Margaret Young. He studied at McGill University and Presbyterian College in Montreal, where he starred in football and lacrosse. Naismith invented the game of basketball while working as the physical education director of the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. He also introduced the football helmet for American Football, in 1894
1892 Sir John Alcock – British aviator who, with Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, flew the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic in June, 1919. They made the crossing in a modified Vimy IV, taking off from Lester’s Field near St. John’s Newfoundland, and landing at Clifden, in Ireland sixteen hours and twenty-seven minutes later
1892 Ole (John Sigvard) Olsen – Entertainer with the vaudevillian team of Olsen & Johnson (Hellzapoppin') and actor (All Over Town, Country Gentlemen, Fireball Fun-for-All)
1916 Ray Conniff – Choral and orchestral director (Theme from Dr. Zhivago, Somewhere My Love)
1923 Donald Houston – Welsh actor (Where Eagles Dare, Doctor in the House, Carry On Jack) He played Dr. Watson in the 1965 Sherlock Holmes movie, A Study in Terror
1931 Mike Nichols – German-born US director (The Graduate, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Silkwood, Postcards from the Edge)
1932 Stonewall Jackson - Singer (Me and You and a Dog Named Boo, Help Stamp Out Loneliness, Why I'm Walkin')
1937 Eugene Pitt – Singer with The Genies (Who's that Knockin') the Jive Five (Never Never, What Time is It?, I'm a Happy Man) and solo (My True Story)
1946 Sally Field – Actress (Norma Rae, Places in the Heart, Steel Magnolias, Mrs. Doubtfire, Smokey and the Bandit series, Hooper, Forrest Gump, Absence of Malice, Sybil, The Flying Nun, Gidget, Brothers and Sisters)
1948 Glenn Frey – Singer, songwriter and musician with The Eagles (Take It Easy, One of these Nights, Hotel California, New Kid in Town, Heartache Tonight) and solo (Smuggler's Blues, The Heat is On, You Belong to the City)
1949 Nigel Havers – British actor (Chariots of Fire, A Passage to India, Nicholas Nickleby, Sleepers, Dangerfield, Don’t Wait Up) He played Ronald Ransom in the Rumpole of the Bailey episode, Rumpole and the Course of True Love
1955 Maria Shriver - TV newscaster (The American Parade, Today, NBC News) She is a member of the Kennedy clan
1961 Lori Singer - Actress (Footloose, Short Cuts, Sunset Grill, Summer Heat, Equinox, Fame)
1966 Peter DeLuise - Actor (seaQuest DSV, 21 Jump Street, Children of the Night, Robson Arms) He is the son of Dom DeLuise
1970 Ethan Hawke - Actor (Dead Poets Society, White Fang, Alive, Gattaca, Great Expectations)
1972 Rebecca Romijn – Actress (Ugly Betty, X-Men, Femme Fatale, The Alibi, Just Shoot Me, Lake City)
1988 Emma Stone – Actress (The Help, Easy A, Zombieland, Superbad)


Died this Day

1893 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, aged 53 – Russian composer. He died during a cholera epidemic in St. Petersburgh, Russia
1901 Kate Greenaway – British writer and illustrator of children’s books (Under the Window, A Apple Pie, Mother Goose or The Old Nursery Rhymes) Her pictures of demure little girls helped popularise a particular fashion for high-waisted, frilly dresses and sun-bonnets in the latter half of the 19th century
1991 Gene Tierney – Actress (Laura, Leave Her to Heaven, The Pleasure Seekers, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) She died 2 weeks before her 71st birthday


On this Day

1429 Henry VI was crowned King of England. Two years later he was also crowned King of France, in Paris
1528 Spanish conquistador Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked on a low sandy island off the coast of Texas. Starving, dehydrated, and desperate, he was the first European to set foot on the soil of the future Lone Star state. Cabeza de Vaca's unintentional journey to Texas was a disaster from the start. A series of dire accidents and Indian attacks plagued his expedition's 300 men as they explored north Florida. The survivors then cobbled together five flimsy boats and headed to sea, where they endured vicious storms, severe shortages of food and water, and attacks from Indians wherever they put to shore. With his exploration party reduced to less than 100 men, Cabeza de Vaca's became ship-wrecked on what was probably Galveston Island just off the coast of Texas. Unfortunately, landing on shore did not end Cabeza de Vaca's trials. During the next four years, the party barely managed to eke out a tenuous existence by trading with the Indians located in modern-day east Texas. The crew steadily died off from illness, accidents, and attacks until only Cabeza de Vaca and three others remained. In 1532, the four survivors set out on an arduous journey across the present-day states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Captured by the Karankawa Indians, they lived in virtual slavery for nearly two years. Only after Cabeza de Vaca had won the respect of the Karankawa by becoming a skilled medicine man and diplomat did the small band win their freedom. In 1536, the men encountered a party of Spanish slave hunters in what is now the Mexican state of Sinaloa. They followed them back to Mexico City, where the tale of their amazing odyssey became famous throughout the colony and in Europe. Despite the many hardships experienced by Cabeza de Vaca and his men during their northern travels, their stories inspired others to intensify exploration of the region that would one day become Texas
1558 Playwright Thomas Kyd was baptised in London. Kyd created the "revenge tragedy," a popular dramatic form that gave rise to tragedies like William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Little is known about Kyd's childhood, but scholars believe he was educated at the Merchant Taylor's School in London and raised to be a scrivener, a professional trained to draw up contracts and other business documents. In 1592, his play, The Spanish Tragedie, was entered in the Stationer's Register, which licensed the publication of the work. The play, about a father who seeks revenge for his son's murder, became the most popular play in England during its day
1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th US President over a heavily divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote, but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, a senator for Illinois. Lincoln first gained national stature during his campaign against Senator Douglas for the Illinois senate seat, which featured a remarkable series of public encounters on the issue of slavery, known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates. In the debates, Lincoln opposed the spread of slavery and Douglas maintained that each territory should decide whether it should be a free or slave state. Lincoln lost the senate race, but in 1860 defeated Douglas in his bid for the presidency. Announcement of Lincoln's victory signalled the secession of the Southern states, and by the time of his inauguration, seven states had seceded and the Confederate States of America had been established with Jefferson Davis as the elected president
1867 The first sitting of the Parliament of Canada convened in Ottawa
1879 Canada’s first modern Thanksgiving Day was observed. It was not the first thanksgiving, the first having occurred in Newfoundland in 1578. Also, in the 1600s, Samuel de Champlain and the French Settlers who came with him established an Order of Good Cheer, which held huge celebrations marking the harvests and other events, sharing their food with their Native American neighbours. Canadians also celebrated a special Thanksgiving on April 15, 1872 in thanks for the recovery of the future King Edward VII from a serious illness. The annual fall tradition of Thanksgiving started on this day in 1879, but much like the US, Canada seemed to have a difficult time deciding when a day of Thanksgiving should occur. The date bounced around from Mondays to Thursdays, and from November to October, until January 1957, when the Canadian Parliament issued a proclamation to fix permanently the second Monday in October as "a day of general Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed”
1917 After three months of horrific fighting, the Third Battle of Ypres finally ended when General Arthur Currie's Canadian Corps took the village of Passchendaele in Belgium. In one of the bloodiest battles of World War I, a combination of over-ambitious aims, terrible weather conditions, and misguided persistence by British Field Marshal Douglas Haig led to nearly 250,000 total casualties suffered by both sides. At the time Canadian and Australian forces were scheduled to begin the long-planned offensive, Allied artillery and unusually heavy rains had turned the battlefield into a sea of mud. Soldiers fought in the mud, slept in the mud, and a fair number drowned in the mud. When the offensive was finally called off after the Canadian victory at Passchendaele, the total Allied advance amounted to only five miles
1928 The first electric flashing sign was installed on all four sides of The New York Times building in New York City. The 360-foot-long signs flashed election results using more than fourteen thousand lamps and more than one million feet of wire, and it created more than twenty-one million lamp flashes per hour. Herbert Hoover beat Alfred E. Smith
1956 France and Britain ordered their invasion forces at the Suez Canal to cease fire. Canada's Lester B. Pearson presented a Suez peacekeeping plan which was adopted by the UN
1962 The General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution condemning South Africa's racist apartheid policies, and called on all member states to terminate economic and military relations with South Africa. Since the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, there had been unanimous condemnation of apartheid at the UN. However, in 1962 none of the major Western powers, nor any of South Africa's other main trading powers, supported a full economic or military embargo against the country. In 1963, a year of massive repression in South Africa, most countries adopted a resolution calling for the cessation of arms sales to South Africa, but a mandatory United Nations arms embargo was not imposed against the country until 1977
1987 An iceberg 740 feet thick broke away from the Antarctica. Scientists estimated the iceberg had enough water to supply a city the size of Los Angeles for nearly 700 years
1991 A Canadian team extinguished the last of the 751 oil fires that had been started by Iraqi troops at the end of the Gulf war