Born this Day

1274 Robert I, the Bruce – King of Scotland who seized the throne in 1306, beat the English at Bannockburn in 1314, and united the clans
1754 Thomas Bowdler – British doctor, man of letters and “bowdleriser” of Shakespeare, taking out all the “naughty bits” to produce his Family Shakespeare
1767 John Quincy Adams – The 6th US President, and son of the 2nd US President was born, in Braintree, Massachusetts
1826 John Fowler - British developer of the steam-hauled plough
1892 Thomas Mitchell – Actor (Stagecoach, Lost Horizon, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gone with the Wind, It’s a Wonderful Life, High Noon, Only Angels Have Wings, Glencannon, Mayor of the Town, Buffalo Bill, The Outlaw, Bataan)
1899 E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White - US writer of essays and children's books, and editor for The New Yorker (Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, The Elements of Style)
1906 Harry Von Zell - Radio/TV actor, announcer (Eddie Cantor, Burns and Allen programs) He uttered the famous blooper, "Ladies and gentleman, the President of the United States, Hoobert Heever -- I mean, Herbert Hoover"
1915 Yul Brynner – Russian born US actor (The King and I, The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven, Anastasia, The Brothers Karamazov, Taras Bulba, Futureworld, Westworld) He had been a trapeze artist before finding fame in Hollywood
1922 Gene Evans - Actor (My Friend Flicka, Walking Tall, Support Your Local Sheriff, Operation Petticoat)
1929 David Kelly – Irish actor (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Waking Ned, Slinger’s Day, Robin’s Nest, The Italian Job)
1931 Tab Hunter - Singer (Young Love, Ninety-Nine Ways, Apple Blossom Time) and actor (Battle Cry, Damn Yankees, Island of Desire, Judge Roy Bean, Ride the Wild Surf)
1944 Bobby Rice - Singer (Sugar Shack, You Lay So Easy on My Mind)
1947 Jeff Hanna – Guitarist and singer with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (Mr. Bojangles, Modern Day Romance, Long Hard Road)
1949 Liona Boyd – British-born Canadian classical guitarist
1950 Bruce McGill – Actor (The Legend of Bagger Vance, Wolf Lake, My Cousin Vinny, Cinderella Man, Legally Blonde 2, Ali, Animal House, Rizzoli & Isles, The Cleveland Show, Black Sheep, Timecop, MacGyver, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Silkwood)
1951 Bonnie Pointer – Singer with her family group The Pointer Sisters (Fairy Tale, I'm So Excited, Jump For My Love)
1952 Stephen Lang – Actor (Terra Nova, Avatar, Crime Story, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Gettysburg, Fire Down Below, Tombstone, Manhunter)
1953 Leon Spinks - World heavyweight champion in 1981 and 1983
1956 Sela Ward - Actress (CSI: NY, Sisters, The Fugitive, The Day After Tomorrow, House, The Stepfather, Once and Again, 54, Hello Again, Emerald Point N.A.S., FBI)
1958 Mark Lester – British child actor (Oliver!, The Prince and the Pauper, Fahrenheit 451, Who Slew Auntie Roo?, Black Beauty) He is now an osteopath in England
1959 Richie Sambora - Rock guitarist with Bon Jovi (Wanted Dead or Alive, You Give Love a Bad Name, Livin’ on a Prayer)
1960 Caroline Quentin – British actress (Jonathan Creek, Blue Murder, Life of Riley, Marple: The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side, Life Begins, Kiss Me Kate, Men Behaving Badly)
1964 Craig Charles – British actor (Red Dwarf, Coronation Street, Doctors, Captain Butler, Business as Usual)
1966 Greg Grunberg – Actor (Heroes, Felicity, Alias, Hollow Man, Malibu’s Most Wanted, Connie and Carla)
1972 Michael Rosenbaum – Actor (Smallville, Bringing Down the House, Sweet November, Urban Legend, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil)
1990 Connor Paolo – Actor (Revenge, Gossip Girl, Mercy, Alexander, Mystic River)


Died this Day

1937 George Gershwin, age 40 - US lyricist who wrote with his brother Ira. (Lady Be Good, Someone to Watch Over Me, I’ve Got Rhythm)
1941 Sir Arthur John Evans - British archaeologist who excavated the ruins of the ancient city of Knossos in Crete. He died three days after his 90th birthday
1989 Sir Laurence Olivier, age 82 – Legendary British stage and screen actor who has been described by many as the best actor of his generation. He died in his sleep. (Henry V, Hamlet, War Requiem, The Boys from Brazil, Brideshead Revisited, Carrie, The Jazz Singer, Peter the Great, Richard III, Spartacus, The Merchant of Venice, Marathon Man, Khartoum, The Bounty, Sleuth, Rebecca) He also played Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes movie, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution


On this Day

1533 Pope Clement the Seventh excommunicated England's King Henry VIII
1656 Ann Austin and Mary Fisher, two Englishwomen, became the first Quakers to immigrate to the American colonies when the ship carrying them landed at Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The pair came from Barbados, where Quakers had established a centre for missionary work. Shortly after arriving to Massachusetts, Austin and Fisher, whose liberal teachings enraged the Puritan colonial government, were arrested and jailed. After five years in prison, they were deported back to Barbados. In October 1656, the Massachusetts colonial government enacted their first ban on Quakers, and in 1658 it ordered Quakers banished from the colony "under penalty of death." Quakers found solace in Rhode Island and other colonies. Massachusetts' anti-Quaker laws were later repealed
1750 The newly-established community of Halifax was destroyed by fire
1776 Captain James Cook set sail on his third and last voyage with the HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery from Portsmouth, England. He was seeking a North-West Passage round the north coast of North America from the Pacific
1798 The US Marine Corps was created by an act of Congress
1873 The bloody battle known as the Cypress Hills Massacre took place at a fur trading post along Battle Creek on the Canadian prairies. A group of US whisky traders and wolf hunters massacred a group of as many as 200 Assiniboine Indians, including women and children. After a long process that had dragged on for years, a bill had been passed that May authorising the government to establish a police force known as the North West Mounted Police (which would later become the Royal Canadian Mounted Police). The massacre galvanised public opinion about the new police force, and convinced Sir John A. McDonald to move quickly to implement it. By that November the new force was assembled for training
1896 Wilfrid Laurier was sworn in as Canada's 7th Prime Minister. He was Canada's first French-speaking Prime Minister
1916 US President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Aid Road Act, the first grant-in-aid enacted by Congress to help the states build roads. At that time, roads throughout the US were generally poor and most were susceptible to weather. Since the introduction of the Ford Model T in 1908, there was a call for federally funded long-distance highways. Farmers balked at the idea, arguing that paying taxes so city people could go on car tours was unfair. As the car became more important to farmers, however, the ground became fertile for legislation to raise the quality of roads across the country. In 1907, the legal issue of the federal government's role in road-building was settled in the Supreme Court when it wrote that the federal government could "construct interstate highways" because of their constitutional right to regulate interstate commerce. By 1912, bills concerning federal funding of the highways were considered, but a split in constituencies had divided the advocates. Farmers wanted sturdy, all-weather postal roads, and urban motorists wanted paved long-distance highways. In the end, a bill was passed that included the stipulation that all states have a highway agency staffed by professional engineers who would administer the federal funds as they saw fit. The cause of interstate highways would not be addressed until many years later during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration, but the Federal Aid Road Act was the cornerstone for today's US highway system
1934 President Roosevelt became the first chief executive to travel through the Panama Canal while in office
1937 Welsh poet Dylan Thomas married Caitlin Macnamara in Penzance, Cornwall. Thomas met Caitlin in a London pub. Although the lively Irish girl did not initially find him attractive, his charm won her over, and the pair married the following year. Their happiness was short-lived. He immediately suspected her of infidelity and wrote several poems to that effect. Meanwhile, both drank heavily, caused scenes in public places, and fell into debt. Despite their tumultuous relationship, they had three sons. Thomas’ powerful style, combining compassion and violence, made his readings in the US a success. However, during his several tours of the US he drank recklessly, and in 1953, he collapsed at the White Horse Inn on Hudson Street in New York City and died. Caitlin drank more than ever after his death. Eventually, she met and fell in love with a Sicilian film-production worker, Giuseppe Fazio, who helped her stop drinking. She had a son with Fazio when she was 49, and remained intensely bitter toward Thomas until her death at age 80
1938 The radio drama, Mercury Theatre on the Air, debuted featuring Orson Welles and John Houseman, founders of the Mercury Theatre in New York. The show, a dramatic anthology program, is best remembered for its 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds, a fictional drama about a Martian invasion in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. The program, which aired on Halloween, sparked a panic among listeners who believed the play was a real news broadcast
1950 BBC television first transmitted the children’s programme, Andy Pandy
1955 The Air Force Academy was dedicated at Lowry Air Base in Colorado
1975 China’s great terracotta army was uncovered near the ancient Chinese capital of Xian. Over 6,000 life-sized warriors were made around 206BC to guard the tomb of the first Ch-in emperor
1979 After six years of orbiting Earth, the US space Skylab broke up and disintegrated. Launched in 1973, Skylab safely housed three separate three-man crews for extended periods of time. Originally the spent third stage of a Saturn 5 moon rocket, the cylindrical Skylab space station was 118 feet tall, weighed 77 tons, and carried the most varied assortment of experimental equipment ever assembled in a single spacecraft to that date. The crews of Skylab spent more than 700 hours observing the sun and brought home more than 175,000 solar pictures. They also provided important information about the biological effects of living in space for prolonged periods of time. Five years after the last Skylab mission, the space station's orbit began to deteriorate earlier than was anticipated, because of unexpectedly high sunspot activity. Skylab made a spectacular return to earth, breaking up in the atmosphere and showering burning debris over the Indian Ocean and Australia
1998 Air Force Lieutenant Michael Blassie, a casualty of the Vietnam War, was laid to rest near his Missouri home after the positive identification of his remains, which had been enshrined at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington, Virginia