Born this Day

1803 Christian Johann Doppler – Austrian physicist who discovered the Doppler effect, which explains the change in pitch of a siren as it approaches and then retreats, and is used when examining the red shift of light from distant stars
1832 Lousia May Alcott – US author (Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, Hospital Sketches, A Whisper in the Dark) She was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania. During the Civil War, she worked as an army nurse in a Union Army Hospital
1849 Sir John Ambrose Fleming – British electrical engineer who invented the diode in 1904
1898 C.S. Lewis – Belfast born, Oxford educated theologian and author (The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, Surprised by Joy)
1895 Busby Burkeley – Choreographer and director (42nd Street, The Gold Diggers of 1933, Babes in Arms) He devised a new style of choreography and photography which revolutionised Hollywood musicals
1932 Diane Ladd - Actress (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Chinatown, Black Beauty, A Kiss Before Dying, Cold Lazarus) She is the mother of Laura Dern. She played Miss Frances in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Shifty Shoebox
1934 Tony Coe – British saxophonist and clarinettist. His is the distinctive sax on the title music of the Pink Panther films
1940 Chuck Mangione – Composer and musician (Bellavia, Feels So Good)
1940 Denny Doherty – Canadian singer/songwriter with the Mamas and the Papas (California Dreaming, Monday Monday, Dedicated to the One I Love) and actor (Theodore Tugboat)
1941 Jody Miller - Singer (There's a Party Goin' On, He's So Fine, Baby I'm Yours)
1943 Sue Miller – US author (The Good Mother, Family Pictures, While I Was Gone)
1944 Felix Cavaliere – Singer with the group The Young Rascals (Groovin', Good Lovin', Beautiful Morning)
1949 Stan Rogers – Canadian folksinger and songwriter (Watching the Apples Grow, Dark Eyed Molly, Evangeline, Take It From Day to Day, Guysborough Train, Northwest Passage, Barrett's Privateers, Make and Break Harbour, The Mary Ellen Carter)
1949 Garry Shandling - Comedian, actor (The Larry Sanders Show, It's Garry Shandling's Show)
1952 Jeff Fahey – Actor (Lost, The Lawnmower Man, Machete, Grindhouse, The Marshall, Wyatt Earp, Silverado)
1954 Joel Coen - Director (Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, Raising Arizona)
1955 Howie Mandel – Canadian comedian and actor (St. Elsewhere, A Fine Mess, Howie, Parenthood)
1960 Cathy Moriarty - Actress (Raging Bull, The Mambo Kings, Soapdish, Cop Land)
1961 Kim Delaney - Actress (NYPD Blue, CSI: Miami, Tour of Duty, All My Children) She was in the Perry Mason movie The Case of the Sinister Spirit
1961 Tom Sizemore – Actor (Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, Wyatt Earp, Natural Born Killers)
1962 Andrew McCarthy – Actor (Kingdom Hospital, Mulholland Falls, The Joy Luck Club, Weekend at Bernie's, Less Than Zero, Mannequin, St. Elmo's Fire)
1964 Don Cheadle – Actor (Hotel Rwanda, Crash, Ocean's Twelve, After the Sunset, Traffic, Picket Fences)
1982 Gemma Chan – British actress (Crazy Rich Asians, Mary Queen of Scots, Bedlam, Humans, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Watership Down, Captain Marvel, Eternals, Don’t Worry Darling)

Died this Day

1530 Cardinal Thomas Wolsey – Lord Chancellor during the time of King Henry VIII. He died enroute from York to London
1780 Maria Theresa, age 63 – Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia for over forty years. She renewed Austria’s power and authority, and was the mother of Marie Antoinette
1924 Giacomo Puccini, age 65 - Italian composer (Madame Butterfly) He died in Brussels, before he could complete his opera, Turandot. Franco Alfano finished it
1981 Natalie Wood, age 43 – Actress (From Here to Eternity, West Side Story, Splendour in the Grass, Rebel Without a Cause, Marjorie Morningstar, Gypsy, Love with the Proper Stranger, Miracle on 34th Street, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Sex and the Single Girl, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) She drowned in a boating accident off Santa Catalina Island, California
1986 Cary Grant, age 82 – British born actor (Topper, She Done Him Wrong, Bringing Up Baby, Charade, The Philadelphia Story, Arsenic and Old Lace, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, Notorious, Operation Petticoat, Father Goose) He died in Davenport, Iowa of a stroke. Grant was born to a poor family in England, and left home at age 13. He travelled the country with an acrobatic troupe and went them to New York in 1920, where he found work as a lifeguard in Coney Island. He returned to England in 1923 and began appearing in musical comedies when he caught the attention of US producers who brought him to Broadway and later Hollywood
2001 George Harrison, age 58 - Former Beatle who went on to have a solo career (My Sweet Lord, Isn't It A Pity, What is Life?, All Those Years Ago)


On this Day

1745 During the War of the Austrian Succession, or King George's War, the French burned Saratoga, and later Albany in New York, to retaliate for the efforts of Mohawk Valley Indian trader William Johnson to get the Iroquois on the warpath
1760 The French formally surrendered Detroit to the British
1814 Britain's London Times became the first newspaper to be printed by a steam-powered press
1864 The Sand Creek Massacre took place at dawn in Colorado territory, when a militia under Major John Chivington attacked a winter encampment of Cheyenne Indians at Sand Creek, massacring over four hundred Indians, the majority of whom were women, children, or old men. During that summer, Indian raids along the Santa Fe Trail prompted the Colorado territorial government to order that the Cheyenne Indians, living under a land treaty in Colorado, report to the nearest US fort and lay down their arms. Despite the fact the chief proponents of the raids were Comanche and Sioux raiders, Cheyenne leader Black Kettle obliged, leading his band to Fort Lyon on the Santa Fe Trail, where he expressed his willingness to honour the terms of his land treaty, even though the government had failed to pay the compensation promised in the agreement. The fort's Federal Army officers ordered Kettle to lead his band back to Sand Creek, and assured him that they would remain under US protection. Meanwhile, a volunteer militia regiment was formed in Denver by Union Major John Chivington, for the express purpose of permanently settling the Indian problems in the territory. In late November, Chivington marched his force, augmented by regular troops from Fort Lyon, to the Sand Creek site. At dawn on November 29, the soldiers descended on the encampment without warning, and Chivington ordered his men to take no prisoners. Several hours later, at least 400 Cheyenne were dead, the majority of whom were non-combatants. Only nine US soldiers were killed during the attack. At first, Chivington was widely praised for his "victory" at the Battle of Sand Creek, and he and his troops were honoured with a parade in Denver where they exhibited Indian scalps to cheering crowds. Soon, however, rumours of drunken soldiers butchering unarmed women and children began to circulate, and Congress ordered a formal investigation of the Sand Creek Massacre. Chivington was eventually threatened with a court-martial by the US Army, but as he had already left his military post, no criminal charges were ever filed against him
1929 Admiral Richard E. Byrd radioed that he had made the first airplane flight over the South Pole. At 3:29 p.m. the previous day, Byrd, the pilot Bernt Balchen, and two others took off from their base on the Ross Ice Shelf, headed for the South Pole. Magnetic compasses were useless so near the pole, so the explorers were forced to rely on sun compasses and Byrd's skill as a navigator. At 8:15 p.m., they dropped supplies for a geological party near the Queen Maud Mountains and then continued on. The most challenging phase of the journey came an hour later, when the Floyd Bennett struggled to gain enough altitude to fly safely above the Polar Plateau. They cleared the 11,000-foot pass between Mount Fridtjof Nansen and Mount Fisher by a few hundred yards and then flew on to the South Pole, reaching it at around 1 a.m. on November 29. They flew a few miles beyond the pole and then to the right and the left to compensate for any navigational errors. Byrd dropped a small US flag on the pole, and the explorers headed for home, safely landing at 10:11 a.m., just under 19 hours later
1942 The US Office of Price Administration (OPA) announced that coffee would be rationed. Rationing had originally begun as a voluntary crusade when almost 90 percent of US rubber imports were cut off by the Japanese capture of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya. President Roosevelt launched a successful scrap-rubber drive, and before long, rationing was extended to gasoline and, soon thereafter, food items. Latin American coffee producers exported record shipments during the war years, but shipping demands — as well as increased consumption by civilians and members of the armed forces — led the OPA to issue coffee rationing stamps. These stamps were removed only from the rationing books of children under fifteen
1945 The monarchy was abolished in Yugoslavia and a republic was proclaimed
1961 Enos the chimp was launched from Cape Canaveral aboard the Mercury-Atlas 5 spacecraft, which orbited earth twice before returning
1963 One week after President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, President Lyndon B. Johnson established a special commission, headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the assassination. After ten months of gathering evidence and questioning witnesses in public hearings, the Warren Commission report was released, concluding that there was no conspiracy in the assassination, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin, acted alone. The report also found that Jack Ruby, the night-club owner who murdered Oswald on live national television, had no prior contact with Oswald. The report failed to silence conspiracy theories surrounding the event