1811 Harriet Beecher Stowe – US author (Mayflower, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, In the Footsteps of the Master, Bible Heroines) Her anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, did much to direct public sympathy to the emancipation of slaves. It sold 300,000 copies within three months and was so widely read that when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said, "So this is the little lady who made this big war." Harriet was the seventh child of the renowned Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher. In 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, with whom she had seven children. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, she became one of the original contributors to The Atlantic, which launched in November 1857
1864 Dr. Alois Alzheimer – Psychiatrist and pathologist who was the first to describe the disease named after him, Alzheimer's Disease
1875 Herman Smith (Jackrabbit) Johannsen – Norwegian born Canadian ski pioneer. Johannsen moved to Canada after World War I and settled in Piedmont Quebec. He started building ski trails across the Laurentian Mountains in 1932, including the trail for the Lachute to Ottawa marathon. Because of his energy and style, the local first nations people gave him the nickname Jackrabbit. In 1979 at age 104 he became involved with the Jackrabbit Ski League, a national cross-country ski program started in his honour. He died at Piedmont, Quebec in January 1987, at the age of 111
1909 Burl Ives - Singer (A Holly Jolly Christmas, A Little Bitty Tear, Call Me Mr. In-Between) and actor (The Big Country, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, East of Eden, The Bold Ones, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer)
1916 Dorothy McGuire - Actress (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gentlemen's Agreement, Rich Man Poor Man)
1919 Sam Wanamaker - Actor (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Taras Bulba, Death on the Nile, Private Benjamin, Baby Boom) and director (The Executioner, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, The Champions) He went to England in the late 1940s, and was responsible for organising both opinion and finance to rebuild Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, in Southwark, London, as close to the original site on the South Bank as possible. He was the father of actress Zoë Wanamaker
1921 Gene Barry - Actor (Bat Masterson, Burke's Law, The Name of the Game, War of the Worlds, Our Miss Brooks, La Cage aux Folles) He played Glenn Robertson in the Perry Mason TV movie The Case of the Lost Love
1925 Pierre Salinger – Press secretary to presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He also appeared as Lucky Pierre in the Batman episodes The Funny Feline Felonies and The Joke's on Catwoman
1928 Ernesto (Che) Guevara – Argentinean-born revolutionary who helped Fidel Castro overthrow the Batista government and take control of Cuba
1929 Cy Coleman – Pianist and composer (Young at Heart, Big Spender, If My Friends Could See Me Now, Hey Look Me Over)
1931 Marla Gibbs - Actress (Up Against the Wall, 227, The Jeffersons)
1940 Jack Bannon – Actor (Lou Grant, Trauma Center, We Got It Made, Little Big Man) He played Donald Sayer in the Perry Mason TV movie The Case of the Sinister Spirit
1946 Donald Trump – 45th and 47th President of the United States, real estate mogul, TV producer (The Apprentice, Miss Universe) and author (Trump: The At of the Deal, Surviving at the Top)
1949 Antony Sher – South African-born British actor (Mrs. Brown, The Moonstone, Erik the Viking, The Wind in the Willows, Indian Summer, Shakespeare in Love, Hornblower: The Frogs and the Lobsters, The Jury, The Wolfman)
1952 Eddie Mekka - Actor (Laverne and Shirley, Top of the World, Stuck in the Past)
1961 George O'Dowd (Boy George) – British singer with the group Culture Club (Do You Really Want to Hurt Me, Karma Chameleon)
1966 Traylor Howard – Actress (Monk, Son of the Mask, Two Guys a Girl and a Pizza Place, Boston Common, Me Myself and Irene)
1968 Yasmine Bleeth – Actress (Baywatch, Nash Bridges, Titans)
1972 Molly Parker – Canadian actress (Deadwood, Men With Brooms, Shattered, The Firm, Dexter)
1979 Pascale Hutton – Canadian actress (Arctic Air, Sanctuary, Flashpoint, Intelligence, Tornado Valley, Behemoth)


Died this Day

1801 Benedict Arnold – US soldier and traitor, who offered his services after the Revolution to the British, in return for £20,000. He went to England in 1781, where he received a small pension. Ostracised and in ill-health, he died in London
1927 Jerome K. Jerome, age 68 – British novelist and playwright (Three Men in a Boat, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow)
1936 Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton - British critic, poet, essayist and author of the Father Brown crime-fiction series (The Innocence of Father Brown, The Wisdom of Father Brown, The Secret of Father Brown) Along with Dorothy L. Sayers, Chesterton founded the Detection Club, a group of mystery writers. He died two weeks after his 62nd birthday
1946 John Logie Baird, age 57 - Scottish inventor and TV pioneer who was the first man to demonstrate television, in 1926. He also helped develop radar and infrared television
1977 Alan Reed, age 69 – Actor (Viva Zapata!, Breakfast at Tiffany’s) He is best known as the voice of Fred Flintstone
1986 Alan Jay Lerner, age 67 – US lyricist and playwright (My Fair Lady, Camelot, Gigi, Brigadoon) He was half of the songwriting team, Lerner & Loewe
1991 Dame Peggy Ashcroft, age 83 – One of the major British actresses of the 20th century (The Jewel in the Crown, A Passage to India, She’s Been Away, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Murder By the Book, A Perfect Spy, The 39 Steps)
1994 Henry Mancini, age 79 – Composer, musician (Moon River, Days of Wine and Roses, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Victor/Victoria, The Pink Panther, Peter Gunn, Charade, Newhart) He studied at Julliard and became a pianist and arranger in Glenn Miller's orchestra. Mancini also composed the music for the Sherlock Holmes movies, Without A Clue, and The Great Mouse Detective


On this Day

1617 Marie Rollet arrived in Canada, at Tadoussac, Quebec, with her husband Louis Hébert and their three children. They were the first French family in Canada. Louis Hébert was Canada's first doctor and herbalist
1755 Dr. Samuel Johnson’s, A Dictionary of the English Language, went on sale, priced at £4/10 shillings for both volumes
1777 During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress adopted a resolution stating that "the flag of the United States be thirteen alternate stripes red and white" and that "the Union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation." According to legend, Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross designed the new canton for the Stars and Stripes, which consisted of a circle of 13 stars and a blue background, at the request of General George Washington. Historians have been unable to conclusively prove or disprove this legend. As new states entered into the US after independence, new stripes and stars were added to represent new additions to the Union. In 1818, however, Congress enacted a law stipulating that the 13 original stripes be restored and that only stars be added to represent new states. On June 14, 1877, the first Flag Day observance was held on the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the Stars and Stripes and the US flag was flown from all public buildings across the country. In 1949 Congress officially designated June 14 as Flag Day, a national day of observance
1789 British Captain William Bligh and 18 others, cast adrift from the HMS Bounty seven weeks earlier, reached Timor in the East Indies after travelling about 3,600 miles in a small, open boat. On April 28, Fletcher Christian, the master's mate on the Bounty, led a successful mutiny against Captain Bligh and his supporters. The captain and 18 of his crew were set adrift in a small boat with 25 gallons of water, 150 pounds of bread, 30 pounds of pork, six quarts of rum, and six bottles of wine. By setting the captain and his officers adrift in an overcrowded 23-foot-long boat in the middle of the Pacific, Christian and his conspirators had apparently handed them a death sentence. By remarkable seamanship, however, Bligh and his men reached Timor in the East Indies, from there, returning to England
1822 Charles Babbage presented the first scientific paper on mechanical computing to Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society. He proposed building a machine, which he called a "Difference Engine," capable of calculating equations and printing results
1919 At 14:13GMT, British pilots Captain John William Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten-Brown took off from Lester's Field, near St. John's, Newfoundland, in a modified Vickers Vimy IV bomber, a two-motor biplane. Although they would not be the first to make the Atlantic crossing, it was to be the first non-stop transatlantic flight. Their harrowing journey included a fog so thick that it muffled the sound of the engines, and prevented them from seeing the blades of the propellers, and an engine exhaust pipe cylinder that had split, shooting naked flames into the slip-stream. Twice, they encountered turbulent clouds, the first one sent them in to a descending spiral within 65 feet of the ocean, the second one within 16 or 20 feet of the Atlantic. They flew through a winter storm which covered the plane with ice and snow, compelling Brown to make a trip out onto the wings to de-ice. With astonishing bravery, Brown repeated his dangerous acrobatics, not once, but four times. They finally landed in a swampy peat bog at Clifden, Ireland after flying 1,890 nautical miles in 16 hours and 27 minutes. The news of the adventure spread like wildfire and the two men were received as heroes in London. For their accomplishment they were presented with Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail prize of £10,000 by Winston Churchill who was then Britain's Secretary of State. The two fliers insisted that the Vickers and Rolls-Royce mechanics who had helped them should receive a £2,000 pound share of their prize money. A few days later both men were knighted at Buckingham Palace by King George V for recognition of their pioneering achievement
1946 The Canadian Library Association was founded at Ottawa, Ontario
1951 The US Census Bureau dedicated UNIVAC, the world's first commercially produced electronic digital computer. UNIVAC, which stood for Universal Automatic Computer, was developed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, makers of ENIAC. These giant computers, which used thousands of vacuum tubes for computation, were the forerunners of today's digital computers. A 19th century Englishman, Charles Babbage, is credited with devising most of the principles on which modern computers are based. His Analytical Engine, begun in the 1830s and never completed for lack of funds, was based on a mechanical loom and would have been the first programmable computer. By the 1920s, companies such as the International Business Machines Corporation were supplying governments and businesses with complex punch-card tabulating systems. These mechanical devises had only a fraction of the calculating power of the first electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, completed by John Atanasoff of Iowa State in 1939. The ABC could, by 1941, solve up to 29 simultaneous equations with 29 variables. Eckert and Mauchly set about building the first general-purpose electronic digital computer in 1943, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, or ENIAC, completed in 1946. Following the success of ENIAC, Eckert and Mauchly decided to go into private business, but proved less able businessmen than they were engineers, and in 1950 their struggling company was acquired by Remington Rand, an office equipment company. Remington Rand delivered its first computer, UNIVAC I, to the US Census Bureau. It weighed 16,000 pounds, used 5,000 vacuum tubes, and could perform about 1,000 calculations per second
1954 President Eisenhower signed an order adding the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance
1982 The Falkland Islands War ended, when Argentina, suffering through six weeks of military defeats against Britain's armed forces, surrendered to Great Britain. The Falklands, located about 300 miles off the southern tip of Argentina, had long been claimed by the British. In 1690 British Navy Captain John Strong made the first recorded landing there, naming them after Viscount Falkland, First Lord of the Admiralty. In 1820 Argentina proclaimed its sovereignty over the Falklands and built a fort on East Falkland, but in 1832 it was destroyed by the USS Lexington in retaliation for the seizure of US seal ships in the area. In 1833, a British force expelled the remaining Argentine officials and began a military occupation, and by the 1880s a British community of some 1,800 people on the islands was self-supporting, and attained colonial status in 1892. For the next 90 years, life on the Falklands remained much unchanged, despite persistent diplomatic efforts by Argentina to regain control of the islands. In 1981, the Falkland Islanders voted in a referendum to remain British. Meanwhile, in Argentina, the military junta was suffering criticism for its oppressive rule and economic management and invaded the Falklands in April, 1982, as a means of promoting patriotic feeling and propping up its regime. Britain assembled a naval task force of 30 warships to retake the islands, but being 8,000 miles from the Falklands, it took several weeks for the British warships to arrive. Britain lost five ships and 256 lives in the fight to regain the Falklands, and Argentina lost its only cruiser and 750 lives