Born this Day

1809 Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy – German composer, pianist and teacher (The Wedding March, The Midsummer Night's Dream, Elijah)
1811 Horace Greeley - US journalist who founded and edited The New York Tribune and coined the phrase "Go west, young man!" He was also a politician who helped found the Republican Party
1821 Elizabeth Blackwell - British born woman who became the first woman to receive a medical degree in the US. Many 19th century physicians, including a few women, practised without a degree, but Blackwell desired professional status. While rejected by all the major medical schools in the nation because of her sex, her application to Geneva Medical School, now Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, was referred to the student body. They accepted with great hilarity thinking it was a spoof from a rival school. Working with quiet determination, she turned aside the hostility of the professors, students, and townspeople, and earned her medical degree in 1849
1843 Sir William C. Van Horne - US born Canadian railway official who directed the construction of Canada's first transcontinental railroad
1857 Wilhelm Ludvig Johannsen - Danish botanist and geneticist. In 1909, he proposed that each portion of a chromosome that controls a phenotype be called a "gene," after the Greek "to give birth to"
1874 Gertrude Stein - US author and critic (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Tender Buttons, Brewsie and Willie, Wars I Have Seen)
1883 Clarence E. Mulford - US western writer who created Hopalong Cassidy in a short story "Bar-20" in 1907. The first Cassidy novel was published in 1912 and the last in 1950, during which time Mulford only set foot in the West once - and he hated it!
1894 Norman Rockwell - US artist who was widely known for his realistic, homespun cover art for The Saturday Evening Post
1904 Charles (Pretty Boy) Floyd – Notorious US bankrobber. He was born on a farm in Bartow County, Georgia
1907 James A. Michener - US author (Tales of the South Pacific, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Journey, Hawaii, Iberia, Centennial, Mexico)
1918 Joey Bishop - Comedian, actor (The Joey Bishop Show, Liar's Club, The Naked and the Dead, Delta Force) He was a member of the 'Rat Pack' with Frank Sinatra
1925 John Fiedler - Actor (True Grit, The Odd Couple, The Bob Newhart Show) He is also the voice of "Piglet" in many of the Winnie-the-Pooh cartoons
1926 Shelley Berman - Comedian, actor (The Best Man, Motorama, Rented Lips)
1928 Frankie Vaughn - British singer (Garden of Eden, Tower of Strength)
1932 Peggy Ann Garner - Actress (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betrayal)
1938 Victor Buono - Actor (Beneath the Planet of the Apes, The Strangler, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, The Man from Atlantis) He was also King Tut in the Batman TV series and he guest starred in several Perry Mason episodes
1943 Blythe Danner - Actress (Brighton Beach Memoirs, To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge) She is the mother of Gwyneth Paltrow
1947 Stephen McHattie – Canadian actor (Cold Squad, Emily of New Moon, Stone Cold, Geronimo: An American Legend, Beauty and the Beast, Centennial, James Dean, Haven, 300, XIII: The Series, Jesse Stone TV movies)
1947 Dave Davies - Rock musician with The Kinks (Lola, You Really Got Me, Come Dancing)
1947 Melanie - Singer (Brand New Key, Lay Down, Peace Will Come)
1950 Morgan Fairchild - Actress (Dallas, Flamingo Road, North and South, Chuck)
1950 Pamela Franklin - Actress (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, David Copperfield, Eleanor and Franklin)
1956 Nathan Lane - Actor (The Birdcage, Joe Versus the Volcano, The Lion King, The Mousehunt, The Producers)
1965 Maura Tierney – Actress (ER, Rescue Me, Welcome to Mooseport, Insomnia, NewsRadio, Primary Colors, Liar Liar)
1970 Warwick Davis – British actor (Harry Potter movies, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Ray, The 10th Kingdom, Leprechaun, Willow, The Princess and the Dwarf, Star Wars: Episode VI – The Return of the Jedi)


Died this Day

1468 Johannes Gutenberg - German craftsman, printer and inventor of movable type, which launched a new era in information distribution. His movable type was used together with a new type-metal alloy, a new press, and an oil based printing ink. In combination, this was a new method of printing never used before. His screw press pressed paper lying on an inked type form in a manner similar to presses used in winemaking. This new method of casting metal type made it cheaper and easier to publish books, making them widely available for the first time. The Gutenberg Bible, the first mass-produced book in history, is credited with spreading literacy. Some believe that taking the Bible out of the hands of the clergy and putting it into the hands of the people also led people to question the infallibility of the Catholic Church
1832 George Crabbe - British poet (The Village, The World of Dreams, In a Neat Cottage)
1889 Belle Starr - The Bandit Queen of the Wild West, was killed when an unknown assailant fatally wounded her with two shotgun blasts from behind, two days before her 41st birthday. She was buried in front of her log cabin
1959 Buddy Holly, age 22, Ritchie Valens, age 17, and JP Richardson (The Big Bopper), age 28 - Were all killed when their chartered Beechcraft Bonanza plane crashed in Iowa a few minutes after takeoff on a flight from Mason City to Moorehead, Minnesota. Holly had chartered the plane for his band to fly between tour dates during the Winter Dance Party Tour. However, Richardson, who had a cold, talked Holly's band member Waylon Jennings out of his seat, and Ritchie Valens won a coin toss for another seat on the plane. This day is known as "the day the music died". Singer Don McLean memorialised Holly, Valens, and Richardson in the 1972 No. 1 hit American Pie
1985 Frank Oppenheimer, age 72 - US atomic pioneer
1996 Audrey Meadows – Actress (The Honeymooners, The Jackie Gleason Show, Too Close for Comfort, That Touch of Mink, Bob and Ray) She died 5 days before her 70th birthday


On this Day

1690 The first paper money in the colonies was issued by Massachusetts. The currency was used to pay soldiers fighting a war against Québec
1730 The first stock exchange quotations were published in London's The Daily Advertiser
1780 In one of the most famous crimes of the post-Revolution US, Barnett Davenport committed an awful mass murder in rural Connecticut. Caleb Mallory, his wife, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren were killed in their home by their boarder, Davenport, changing forever the common perceptions of crime. Davenport, born in 1760, enlisted in the Patriot army as a teenager and had served at Valley Forge and Fort Ticonderoga. In the waning days of the war with the British, he came to live in the Mallory household. On this fateful day, apparently unprovoked, Davenport beat Caleb Mallory to death with a swingle and a pestle, old wooden farm tools. He then beat Mallory's seven-year-old grandchild with a rifle and killed his daughter-in-law. Davenport looted the home before setting it on fire, killing two others. His shocking confession was the basis of much soul-searching for the fledgling nation's press. Many books were written about the crime, and the perception of murderers began to change in the US. Until then, crime was most often seen as the result of common sinners losing their way. But Davenport's crime and its portrayal to the public caused people to perceive criminals as evil and alien to the rest of society. To some degree, this view has persisted through the years, though today, Davenport's crime might be ascribed to some type of post-war stress syndrome
1783 Spain recognised US independence
1809 The territory of Illinois was created
1865 The Canadian legislature resolved in an address to the Queen to ask for union of the provinces of British North America
1865 President Lincoln and Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens held a peace conference aboard a ship off the Virginia coast. The talks deadlocked over the issue of Southern autonomy
1877 "The Celebrated Chop Waltz", better known as "Chopsticks" was registered at the British Museum. It was written by 16 year old Euphemia Alten under the pseudonym Arthur de Lull
1913 The 16th Amendment to the US Constitution, providing for a federal income tax, was ratified
1916 Fire destroyed the centre block of Canada's original Parliament Buildings. Seven people were killed in the blaze. Iron doors saved the adjoining Parliamentary Library, but the centre block containing the House of Commons and the Senate had to be rebuilt. Reconstruction of the building's Gothic revival style was completed in 1920
1927 The US appointed its first ambassador to Canada, William Phillips
1938 Vaudeville comedy team Bud Abbott and Lou Costello first appeared as regulars on the Kate Smith Hour radio programme. The pair went on to have their own radio show from 1940 to 1949 and later made more than 30 films
1948 The first Cadillac with tailfins was produced on this day, signalling the dawn of the tailfin era. General Motors increased the size of the Cadillac's "tailfeathers" every year throughout the 1950s. In 1959 the model's sales slumped dramatically, sounding the death knell for the tailfin
1954 Queen Elizabeth II visited Australia, the first reigning monarch to do so
1966 The US launched its first operational weather satellite, ESSA-1 to provide cloud-cover photography to the US National Meteorological Centre for preparation of operational weather analyses and forecasts. The spacecraft was an 18-sided polygon, made of aluminium alloy and stainless steel, and covered with 9,100 solar cells, which served to charge the 63 batteries. It was equipped with two cameras which could be pointed at some point on Earth every time the satellite rotated along its axis. ESSA-1 was able to view the weather of each area of the globe, photographing a given area at the exact same local time each day