Born this Day

1723 Adam Smith – Scottish social philosopher and political economist, born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. He wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776
1819 John Couch Adams – British mathematician and astronomer who discovered the planet Neptune in 1841
1850 Pat Garrett - US sheriff who shot Billy the Kid
1878 Pancho Villa - Mexican revolutionary guerrilla leader
1883 John Maynard Keynes - British economist and advisor to the Treasury who pioneered the theory of full employment, and whose studies of unemployment and recession revolutionised 20th-century economics. He was born in Cambridge, England
1894 Roy Herbert Thomson, Lord Thomson of Fleet – Canadian born publisher (The Times of London, Edinburgh's The Scotsman, The Globe and Mail) He began his media career with a radio station in North Bay, Ontario before diversifying into newspapers, cable TV, travel, North Sea oil and retail (The Hudson's Bay Company)
1895 William Boyd - Actor known for his numerous Hopalong Cassidy movies and TV series
1925 Bill Hayes - Singer, entertainer (The Ballad of Davy Crockett, Wringle Wrangle) and actor (Days of our Lives)
1928 Tony Richardson – British director (Blue Sky, Tom Jones, The Phantom of the Opera, Charge of the Light Brigade) He had been married to Vanessa Redgrave, and is the father of Natasha and Joely Richardson
1928 Robert Lansing - Actor (Twelve O'Clock High, The Equalizer, Under the Yum Yum Tree, The Man Who Never Was) He played Gary Seven in the Star Trek episode Assignment Earth
1934 Bill Moyers – Journalist and commentator (Now with Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers' Journal)
1939 Joe Clark - 16th Prime Minister of Canada, and the youngest to hold that office
1939 Margaret Drabble – British author (The Waterfall, Bird of Paradise, For Queen and Country)
1945 Don Reid – Singer with The Statler Brothers (Flowers on the Wall, Bed of Roses)
1946 Fred Stone - Singer with Sly and the Family Stone (Everyday People, Thank You)
1949 Ken Follett – Welsh author (The Eye of the Needle, Pillars of the Earth, On Wings of Eagles)
1951 Ellen Foley – Actress (Night Court, Married to the Mob, Cocktail, Fatal Attraction, Tootsie)
1954 Nancy Stafford – Actress (Matlock, St. Elsewhere, Sidekicks, Season of Miracles)
1960 Leslie Hendrix – Actress (Law & Order, Arthur, Sweet Home Alabama, Exiled, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Made for Each Other)
1962 Jeff Garlin – Actor (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, The Bounty Hunter, Daddy Day Care, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Mad About You)
1971 Mark Wahlberg – Actor (The Italian Job, Planet of the Apes, The Perfect Storm, Renaissance Man, The Fighter, The Lovely Bones, Date Night, The Departed) and singer who went by the name Marky Mark. He is the brother of actor Donnie Wahlberg
1974 Chad Allen – Actor (Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, My Two Dads, Our House, St. Elsewhere, Ice Blues)
1977 Liza Weil – Actress (Gilmore Girls, Scandal, Little Fish Strange Pond, Year of the Dog)
1977 Navi Rawat – Actress (Numb3rs, The O.C., House of Sand and Fog, Thoughtcrimes, 24, The Princess and the Marine)


Died this Day

AD 755 St. Boniface – English missionary who went to Germany to establish Christianity and was murdered by unbelievers
1900 Stephen Crane, age 28 – US poet and novelist (The Red Badge of Courage, The Little Regiment, The Black Rider, Wounds in the Rain, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets) The youngest of 14 children, Crane grew up in New York and New Jersey. His father died when Crane was 9, and the family settled in Asbury Park, New Jersey. He attended Syracuse University, where he played baseball for a year, but then left. He became a journalist in New York, working short stints for various newspapers and living in near poverty. After publishing his first successful book, a newspaper syndicate dispatched him to write about the West and Mexico. In 1897 Crane headed to Cuba to cover the insurrection against Spain. On the way there, he met his future lifelong companion, Cora Howard Taylor, the proprietress of a rundown hotel where he was staying. In 1897 he also survived the sinking of The Commodore off the coast of Florida, and turned his harrowing adventure into his classic short story, The Open Boat. Crane later covered the war between Greece and Turkey, and settled in England, where he befriended Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, and Henry James. Crane contracted tuberculosis in his late 20s. Cora Howard Taylor nursed him while he wrote furiously in an attempt to pay off his debts. He exhausted himself and exacerbated his condition, which took his life
1910 O. Henry, age 47 – US short story writer (Cabbages and Kings, Heart of the West, The Trimmed Lamp, The Voice of the City, Whirligigs, Postscripts, The Gift of the Magi) Born William Sydney Porter, he began writing in the late 1880s, but only applied himself to it seriously in 1898, when he was jailed for embezzling from a bank in Austin, Texas. Porter, who came from a poor family in Texas, was married and had a daughter. He initially fled to Honduras to avoid imprisonment but returned to the US when his wife was diagnosed with a terminal illness. He spent three years in jail and wrote tales of adventure to support his daughter. After his release, he moved to New York and was hired by New York World to write one story a week. He kept the job from 1903 to 1906. In 1904, his first story collection was published, with additional collections appearing until his death, in 1910. He specialised in closely observed tales of everyday people, often ending with an unexpected twist. Despite the enormous popularity of the nearly 300 stories he published, he led a difficult life, struggling with financial problems and alcoholism until his death
1922 George W. Carmack, age 61 – US prospector whose discovery of gold led to the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush in Canada’s Yukon Territory. Carmack was born into a life of prospecting and mining. His father was a forty-niner who settled his family in Contra Costa County, California. When he was in his early 20s, Carmack followed his father's example, setting off on long prospecting journeys that took him from Juneau, Alaska, to the Yukon. There, he married a woman from the Tagish, a small tribe of Native Americans from the southern Yukon. Unlike many prospectors, Carmack was not consumed by the lust to find gold, and for several years, he was happy to wander about the Yukon with his wife's people. In the summer of 1896, he and his friends were fishing for salmon near the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike River when they decided to explore Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Klondike. Carmack stopped occasionally to pan for signs of gold along the creek, at first finding little of the telltale yellowish colour in his pan. He then stumbled across a deposit of gold so rich that he needed no pan to see it, as thumb-sized pieces of gold lay scattered about the creek bed. The discovery sparked one of the last great western gold rushes as thousands of would-be miners raced for the Klondike the following year. After making several valuable claims, Carmack abandoned his wandering life with the Tagish and set to work mining gold. According to some reports, when he returned to the US in 1898 he had found gold worth more than a million dollars. Now a wealthy and influential man, Carmack moved to Vancouver, BC, where he married the daughter of a successful mining operator. No mention was made of his earlier Tagish wife, and it is speculated Carmack abandoned her. He died in Vancouver
1983 Harry James – US trumpeter and bandleader
1993 Conway Twitty, age 59 – Country singer (It's Only Make Believe, Danny Boy, Lonely Boy Blue, Hello Darlin', After the Fire is Gone) He died of an aneurysm as he was returning to Nashville after a performance in Branson, Missouri. He passed up a chance to become a professional baseball player with the Philadelphia Phillies, instead becoming a musician
1999 Mel Tormé, age 73 – Singer nicknamed The Velvet Fog (The Christmas Song, Careless Love)
2004 Ronald Reagan, age 93 - 40th US President and former actor (Hellcats of the Navy, Knute Rockne All American, Bedtime for Bonzo, Kings Row) He had been married to his wife, Nancy, for 52 years at the time of his death


On this Day

1752 Benjamin Franklin flew a kite with a metal frame during a thunderstorm as part of his experiments with electricity. He set out to prove lightning was a form of static electricity, and that it was attracted to metal
1794 The US Congress passed the Neutrality Act, prohibiting citizens from enlisting in the service of a foreign power
1813 About 700 British soldiers won a victory over 2,000 US troops in a surprise attack at Stoney Creek, Ontario, during the War of 1812
1817 The first steamship on the Great Lakes was launched at Kingston, Ontario. The Frontenac made its inaugural trip west, to the town of York, now Toronto
1876 The Supreme Court of Canada held its first sitting
1884 Civil War hero General William T. Sherman refused the Republican presidential nomination, saying, “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected”
1897 Canadian Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier sailed to England to attend Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. He would return knighted, Sir Wilfrid Laurier
1933 The US went off the gold standard
1934 Christopher Morley convened the first meeting of the Baker Street Irregulars, at Cella’s Restaurant, 144 East 45th Street in New York City
1943 The US Army signed a contract with the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School to develop an electronic computer. The contract granted the Moore School $61,700 for the next six months. The computer, later known as ENIAC, for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, would take more than three years to build. Although the machine was developed to speed the calculation of firing tables for artillery, the computer was not finished until shortly after World War II
1947 Secretary of State George C. Marshall, speaking at Harvard University, outlined an aid program for Europe that came to be known as the Marshall Plan
1951 Gordon M. Buehrig was issued a US patent for his "vehicle top with removable panels," an invention that would eventually appear as a T-top on the 1968 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray. Buehrig was a member of the first generation of automobile stylists. In 1928 he was the fourth man hired by GM for their new Art and Colour Section, the first GM department dedicated solely to design concerns. He went on to design for Stutz and Duesenberg. In 1936 he designed the Cord 810, which had disappearing headlights, a hidden gas cap, and venetian blind louvers that accentuated the car’s lean "coffin-nosed" hood
1963 British Secretary of War John Profumo resigned his post following revelations that he had lied to the House of Commons about his sexual affair with Christine Keeler, an alleged prostitute. At the time of the affair, Keeler was also involved with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché who some suspected was a spy. Although Profumo assured the government that he had not compromised national security in any way, the scandal threatened to topple the government
1967 Israel and the United Arab Emirates started what came to be known as the Six Day War
1968 At 12:50 am PDT, presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot three times in a hail of gunfire in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He was rushed to the hospital, where he fought for his life for the next 24 hours
1972 The Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, was buried at Frogmore, Windsor
1975 Egypt announced the reopening of the Suez Canal to international shipping. The canal had been closed eight years earlier by the Arab-Israeli Six Day War
1988 Lone yachtswoman Kay Cottee sailed into Australia’s Sydney Harbour to a huge welcome, becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the world non-stop. It had taken her six months