Born this Day

1819 Charles Kingsley – British Anglican clergyman, teacher and author (The Water Babies, Westward Ho!, Hereward the Wake)
1897 Sir Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon - British Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957
1914 William Lundigan - Actor (I'd Climb the Highest Mountain, The Fighting 69th, Pinky, Love Nest, The White Orchid)
1915 Priscilla Lane - Actress (Arsenic and Old Lace, Four Daugters, The Roaring Twenties, Saboteur)
1916 Irwin Allen - Producer, director (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, The Land of the Giants, The Time Tunnel, Lost in Space)
1919 Uta Hagan - Actress (Reversal of Fortune, The Boys from Brazil)
1920 Peter Jones – British actor (The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s, Carry On Doctor, Chariots of Fire, Whoops Apocalypse)
1924 George H. Bush - 41st US President, and father of President George W. Bush
1927 Al Fairweather - Jazz musician
1928 Vic Damone - Singer (On the Street Where You Live, An Affair to Remember, You Were Only Fooling) and actor (Kismet)
1929 Anne Frank - Diarist and Holocaust victim, who died in 1945 during the Second World War. She was 13 years old when she received a diary as a birthday gift. A month later, she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis in rooms behind her father's office. For two years, the Franks and four other families hid, fed and cared for by Gentile friends. The families were discovered by the Gestapo, which had been tipped off, in 1944. The Franks were taken to Auschwitz, where Anne's mother died. Friends in Amsterdam searched the rooms and found Anne's diary hidden away. Anne and her sister were transferred to another camp, Bergen-Belsen, where Anne died of typhus a month before the war ended. Anne's father survived Auschwitz and published Anne's diary in 1947 as The Diary of a Young Girl. The book has been translated into some 30 languages
1930 Jim Nabors - Actor (Gomer Pyle USMC, The Andy Griffith Show, The Jim Nabors Hour, Stoker Ace, Cannonball Run II) and singer (Back Home Again in Indiana)
1932 Rona Jaffe - Author (The Last Chance, Class Reunion)
1941 Chick Corea - Jazz musician, pianist and composer (Return to Forever) He worked with Miles Davis before forming his own group
1944 Reg Presley – Singer with the group the Troggs (Wild Thing, Give It to Me, Love is All Around)
1953 Gary Farmer – Canadian actor (Blackstone, Moose TV, Elijah, One Dead Indian, Indian Summer: The Oka Crisis, A Thief of Time, Coyote Waits, Henry & Verlin, Easy Money)
1957 Timothy Busfield - Actor (Thirtysomething, Byrds of Paradise, Little Big League, Field of Dreams, Revenge of the Nerds, Sneakers)
1958 Rebecca Holden – Actress (Knight Rider, General Hospital, The Hollywood Beach Murders, General Hospital)
1959 Scott Thompson – Canadian comedian and actor (The Kids in the Hall, Larry Sanders Show, Mickey Blue Eyes)
1959 Jenilee Harrison – Actress (Dallas, Three's Company)
1962 Eamonn Walker – British actor (Oz, The Whole Truth, The Company Men, Kings, The Messenger, Justice, Lord of War, Othello, Supply & Demand, The Bill)
1963 Tim DeKay – Actor (White Collar, Carnivàle, Big Eden, Party of Five, The Crow: Salvation, The Russell Girl)


Died this Day

1963 Medgar Evers – US civil-rights activist who was assassinated in the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. He was shot to death by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. During World War II, Evers volunteered for the US Army and participated in the Normandy invasion. In 1952, he joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and travelled through his home state encouraging poor African-Americans to register to vote and recruiting them into the civil rights movement. After a funeral in Jackson, he was buried with full military honours at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. In 1964, the first trial of chief suspect Byron De La Beckwith ended with a deadlock by an all-white jury, and when a second all-white jury also failed to reach a decision, De La Beckwith was set free. Three decades later, the state of Mississippi reopened the case in Jackson and Beckwith was found guilty of murder
1980 Sir Billy Butlin – South African born British holiday camp promoter
1983 Norma Shearer – Canadian actress (The Barretts of Wimpole Street, The Divorcee, A Free Soul, Private Lives) She was married to Irving Thalberg. She died a month before her 81st birthday
1994 Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman – Murder victims who were slashed to death outside her Los Angeles home. O.J. Simpson was later acquitted of the killings in a criminal trial, but held liable in a civil action
2003 Gregory Peck, age 87 – Actor (To Kill A Mockingbird, Spellbound, David and Bathsheba, Moby Dick, The Guns of Navarone, Arabesque, Roman Holiday, Cape Fear, The Boys from Brazil, MacArthur, Mackenna’s Gold, Gentleman’s Agreement, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit)


On this Day

1458 Magdalen College, Oxford, was founded. The college, with its distinctive bell tower, has been seen in many Inspector Morse episodes
1665 England installed a municipal government in New York, formerly the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam
1667 Jean-Baptiste Denys of Montpellier University, and personal physician to Louis XIV, carried out a successful blood transfusion using sheep’s blood. The patient was a 15-year old boy. Although claimed as the first successful transfusion involving a human subject, the Incas practised successful blood transfusions much earlier than European doctors
1690 Henry Kelsey set out from York Factory, at Churchill, Manitoba, with a party of Stone and Assiniboine Indians on journey which would last two years. The Hudson's Bay Company employee would record the first European description of grizzly bears and buffalo
1776 Virginia's colonial legislature became the first to adopt a Bill of Rights
1793 Alexander Mackenzie reached the Continental Divide at Portage Lake, British Columbia. His party were the first Europeans to cross the Continental Divide and reach the Pacific Ocean north of the Spanish territories
1811 Thomas Douglas, the Earl of Selkirk was granted 116,000 square miles of Red River territory in an area now occupied by Manitoba, Minnesota and North Dakota. Lord Selkirk paid 10 shillings a year rent on the land, the area of which was five times bigger than his native Scotland. Lord Selkirk brought many immigrants, known as the Selkirk Settlers, over to populate the land
1838 The Iowa Territory was organised
1839 Abner Doubleday invented baseball at Cooperstown, New York
1846 Fire swept through a theatre in Québec City, killing 200 people
1898 During the Spanish-American War, Filipino rebels led by Emilio Aguinaldo proclaimed the independence of the Philippines after 300 years of Spanish rule. By mid-August, Filipino rebels and US troops had ousted the Spanish, but Aguinaldo's hopes for independence were dashed when the US formally annexed the Philippines as part of its peace treaty with Spain. In 1935, the Commonwealth of the Philippines was established with US approval, and Manuel Quezon was elected the country's first president. On July 4, 1946, full independence was granted to the Republic of the Philippines by the United States
1901 The City of Montreal passed a by-law making indoor toilets compulsory
1903 Niagara Falls, Ontario was incorporated as a city
1939 The US Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated in Cooperstown, NY, on the 100th anniversary of the day Abner Doubleday invented the sport
1947 The radio show, Sergeant Preston of The Yukon, was first broadcast. The show, about a Canadian Mountie and his trusty dog King, continued until 1955. It was created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker, who also originated The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet
1950 Two agreements were signed in Ottawa by Canada and the US to avoid double taxation of their citizens and to prevent income tax evasion
1987 President Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, publicly challenged Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall"
1987 Princess Anne was made Princess Royal, the title awarded to the monarch’s eldest daughter
1991 CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, held a seminar about the World Wide Web, a new hypertext system designed by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee during a fellowship there. In May, Berners-Lee had presented the architecture for the World Wide Web to a CERN committee and released a version of the Web on CERN's computers. Berners-Lee had been developing the system, which allowed Internet documents to "link" to each other easily, since 1989. By 1990, he had created the basic parameters of the World Wide Web, which were posted on the Internet in the summer of 1991. Berners-Lee continued to develop the Web through 1993, working with feedback from Internet users. By late 1991 and early 1992, the Web was widely discussed, and in early 1993, when Marc Andreessen and other graduate students at the University of Illinois released the Mosaic browser, Netscape's precursor, the Web rapidly became a popular communications medium. And don’t we know it!