On This Day
Every day of the year is a day on which someone of interest was born or died or some event of interest occurred…
June 19
June 21
Ernst, Duke of Coburg (1818), Reinhold Niebuhr (1892), Al Hirschfeld (1903), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905), Jane Russell (1921), Judy Holliday (1921), Maureen Stapleton (1925), Carl Stokes (1927), Judith Raskin (1928), Bernie Kopell (1933), Françoise Sagan [Quoirez] (1935), Mariette Hartley (1940), Marjorie Margolies Medzvinsky (1942), William Bradford Reynolds (1942), Malcolm Rifkiind (1946), Maurice Saatchi (1946), Dana Rohrbacher (1947), Shirin Ebadi (1947), Benazir Bhutto (1953), Joko Widodo (1961), Gretchen Carlson (1966), Chris Pratt (1979), Prince William (1982), Jussie Smollett (1982), Edward Snowden (1983) & Lana Del Rey [Elizabeth Grant] (1985) were born #OnThisDay. Wenceslaus II of Bohemia & Poland (1305), Edward III of England (1377), Niccolo Machiavelli (1527), Oda Nobunaga (1582), Jon Smith (1631), Inigo Jones (1652), Antonio López de Santa Anna (1876), Leland Stanford (1893), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1908), Édouard Vuillard (1940), Andrew Goodman, James Chaney & Michael Schwerner (1964), Bernard Baruch (1965), Sukarno (1970), Alan Hovhaness (2000), CArroll O’Connor (2001), Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila (2005) & Charles Krauthammer (2018) died on this day. Vespasian led Roman troops into Jericho during the Great Jewish Revolt (68), Catherine of Aragon’s appearance before the Blackfriars Legatine Court (1529), great fire in Moscow (1547), St. Paul’s Cathedral foundation stone laid (1675), New Hampshire ratified the Constitution(1788), Louis XVI captured at Varennes (1791), Richard Wagner’s opera “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” premiered in Munich (1868), Frank Woolworth opened his first store (1879), Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee (1887), Theodore Roosevelt nominated by Republicans (1904), Arthur Miller refused to name Communists (1956), Andrew Goodman, James Chaney & Michael Schwerner murdered in Mississippi (1964), “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” released (1966), Menachim Begin elected prime minister of Israel (1977), Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice’s musical “Evita” premiered in London (1978), Socialist/Communist majority elected in France’s parliamentary elections (1981), JK Rowling’s fifth book “Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix” published (2003) on this day.
June 22
George Vancouver (1757), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767), Giuseppe Mazzini (1805), Frank Damrosch (1859), Erich Maria Remarque (1898), Jennie Tourel (1900), John Dillinger (1903), Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906), Billy Wilder (1906), Peter Pears (1910), Joseph Papp (1921), Bill Blass (1922), Prunella Scales (1932), Dianne Feinstein (1933), Kris Kristofferson (1936), Ed Bradley (1941), Michael Lerner (1941), Klaus Maria Brandauer (1944), Jerry Rawlings (1947), Lindsay Wagner (1949), Meryl Streep (1949), Elizabeth Warren (1949), Graham Greene (1952), Cyndi Lauper (1953), Erin Brockovich (1960), Dan Brown (1964), Carson Daly (1973) & Bob the Drag Queen [Christopher Caldwell] (1986) were born #OnThisDay. Bishop John Fisher (1535), Vladimir Köppen (1940), David O. Selznick (1965), Judy Garland [Frances Gumm] (1969), Darius Milhaud (1974), Joseph Losey (1984), Fred Astaire [Austerlitz] (1987), Pat Nixon (1993) & Ann Landers [Eppie Lederer] (2002) died on this day. Bilbo Baggins returned to Bag End after his great adventure in “The Hobbit” (1342 in the reckoning of the shire), richard II succeeded Edward II as king of England (1377), Battle of Morat/Murten (1476), Bishop John Fisher executed (1535), Henry Hudson set adrift in Hudson Bay by mutineers (1611), Galileo Galilei forced to recant by the Inquisition (1633), Royal Greenwich Observatory established by Charles II (1675), Frederick the Great decreed freedom of religion & the press & the end of torture (1740), Zong slave ship trial (1783), Napoleon’s second abdication (1815), June uprising in Paris (1848), Haakon VII crowned king of Norway (1906), George V crowned king of England (1911), France’s surrender to Nazi Germany (1940), Nazi German invasion of Russia (Operation Barbarossa) (1941), FDR signed the GI Bill into law (1944), Battle of Okinawa ended (1945) & musicians & film industry professionals were named as Communists (1950) on this day.
June 23
Oda Nobunaga (1534), Johan Banér (1596), Justus Schottel (Schottelius) (1612), Maria Leszczyńska, queen of France (1703), Joséphine de Beauharnais (1763), Ernest Guiraud (1837), Anna Akhmatova (1889), Alfred Kinsey (1894), Edward VIII of England (1894), Jean Anouilh (1910), Alan Turing (1912), William P. Rogers (1913), Jean, Grand Duc du Luxembourg (1921), Bob Fosse (1927), Michael Shaara (1928), June Carter Cash (1929), James Levine (1943), Clarence Thomas (1948), Frances McDormand (1957), Selma Blair (1972) & Zinedine Zidane (1972) were born #OnThisDay. Emperor Vespasian (79), Cecil Sharp (1924), Reinhold Glière (1956), Sanjay Gandhi (1980), Vincent Chin (1982), Jonas Salk (1995), Andreas Papandreou (1996), Betty Shabazz (1997), Maureen O’Sullivan (1998) & Peter Falk (2011) died on this day. The Alþingi established in Iceland (930), William Penn’s treaty of friendship with the Lenni Lenape (1683), French Acadians ordered to declare allegiance to Britain or leave Nova Scotia (1713), Louis XVI rejected the demands of the Third Estate (National Assembly) (1789), Catherine the Great granted Jews permission to settle in Kiev (1794), Adolf Hitler toured Paris (1940), Gamel Abdel Nasser elected president of Egypt (1956) & a Thai soccer team became trapped in a cave (2018) on this day.
June 24
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1533), St. John of the Cross [Juan de Yepes y Álvarez] (1542), Éleuthère Irénée du Pont (1771), Horatio Kitchener (1850), Agrippina Vaganova (1879), Gerrit Rietveld (1888), Pierre Fournier (1906), John Ciardi (1916), Albert ‘Al’ Molinaro (1919), Pete Hamiill (1935), Julia Kristeva (1941), Michele Lee (1942), George Pataki (1945), Robert Reich (1946) & Mindy Kaling (1979) were born #OnThisDay. Lucrezia Borgia (1519), Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1604), Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia (1860), Grover Cleveland (1908), John Herbert ‘Jackie’ Gleason (1987), Rufino Tamayo (1991), Brian Keit (1997) & Patsy Ramsey (2006) died on this day. Battle of Bannockburn (1314), St. John’s Dance in Aachen (1374), Henry VIII crowned king of England (1509), Gustav Vasa initiated the Reformation in Sweden, seizing Catholic church property (1527), King Philip’s War began (1675), France’s first republican constitution adopted (1793), Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Armée began its invasion of Russia (1812), Battle of Solferino (1859), Adolf Hitler began a month-long prison sentence (1922), Soviet blockade of West Berlin began (1948), US Senate repealed the Gul of Tonkin resolution (1970) & Chinatown garment workers launched a strike in NYC (1982) on this day.
June 25
Antoni Gaudí (1852), Gustave Charpentier (1860), Louis Mountbatten (1900), George Orwell [Eric Arthur Blair] (1903), Sidney Lumet (1924), June Lockhart (1925), James Meredith (1933), Larry Kramer (1935), Marabel Morgan (1937), Carly Simon (1945), Jimmy Walker (1947), Phyllis George (1949), Sonia Sotomayor (1954), Anthony Bourdain (1956), Ricky Gervais (1961), George Michael [Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou] (1963) & Rain [Jung Ji-hoon] (1982) were born #OnThisDay. Mary Tudor, queen of France (1533), George Armstrong Custer (1876), Jonny Mercer (1976), Michel Foucault (1984), Warren Burger (1995), Jacques Cousteau (1997), Lester Maddox (2003), Michael Jackson (2009) & Farah Fawcett (2009) died on this day. Elena Cornaro Piscopia became the first woman to received a Ph.D. (1678), Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876), Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “The Firebird” premiered at the Opéra de Paris (1910), Korean War (1950), Madagascar declared its independence from France (1960), Prince’s “Purple Rain” album released (1984), Vigdis Finnbogadóttir elected president of Iceland (1988), & Kim Campbell was elected prime minister of Canada (1993) on this day.
June 26
Charles Messier (1730), Patrick Branwell Brontë (1817), Abner Doubleday (1819), William Thomson, Fist Baron Kelvin (1824), George Herbert, 5th Earl Carnarvon (1866), Pearl Buck (1892), Willy Messerschmmitt (1898), Hugues Cuénod (1902), Peter Lorre (1904), Babe Didrikson Zaharias (1911), Aimé Césaire (1913), Wolfgang Windgassen (1914), Claudio Abbado (1933), Chuck Robb (1939), Greg Le Mond (1961), Mikhail Khodorkovsky (1963), Sean Hayes (1970) & Ariana Grande (1993) were born #OnThisDay. Julian the Apostate, Francisco Pizarro (1541), George IV (1830), Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle (1836), Strom Thurmond (2003), Dennis Thatcher (2003), Liz Claiborne (2007) & Nora Ephron (2012) died on this day. Roman Emperor Julian killed in battle (363), Pied Piper of Hamelin (Lüneburg manuscript) (1284), Duke of Gloucester becomes Richard III of England (1483), Swedish troops under Gustaf Adolf landed at Peenemunde (1630), Hong Kong proclaimed a British crown colony (1843), Richard Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre” premiered in Munich (1870), Victoria & Albert Museum opened in London (1909), Gustav Mahler’s 9th Symphony premiered in Vienna (1912), US troops arrived in France (1917), FDR signed the Federal Credit Union Act in to law (1934), United Nations Charter signed by 50 member states in San Francisco (1945), US airlift to Berlin began (1948), St. Lawrence Seaway opened (1959), JFK’s speech in Berlin (1963), Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India (1975), Elvis Presley’s last live performance (1977), Nelson Mandela addressed Congress (1991), Bill Clinton launched Cruise missile strikes on Iraq (1993), “Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone” published (1997), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) on this day.
June 27
Henry VIII (1491), Peter Paul Rubens (1577), John Wesley (1703), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712), Étienne François, duc de Choiseul (1719), Joseph Joachim (1831), Luigi Pirandello (1867), Pierre Laval (1883), Richard Rodgers (1902), Sergiu Celibidache (1912), Mel Brooks (1926), Hans Blix (1928), Noriyuki ‘Pat’ Morita (1932), Leon Panetta (1938), Muhammad Yunus (1940), Gilda Radner (1946), Kathy Bates (1948), Thomas Hampson (1955) & Elon Musk (1971) were born #OnThisDay. Abraham Ortelius (1598), James Madison (1836), Franz Ferdinand (1914), Rod Serling (1975), José Iturbi (1980), Helen Gahagan Douglas (1980), Boris Christoff (1993), Mortimer Adler (2001), Brenda Howard (2005) & Robert Byrd (2010) died on this day. Battle of Kosovo (1389), Edward IV crowned king of England (1461), Charles V elected Holy Roman Emperor (1519), Catherine the Great seized power in a coup d’état (1762), Victoria crowned queen of England (1838), “Giselle” premiered at the Théâtre de l’Académie Royale de Musique in Paris (1841), Adolphe Sax patented the saxophone (1846), Treaty of Versailles signed (1919 of Versailles signed (1919), Night of the Long Knives (1934), Daniel Ellsberg indicted for leaking the Pentagton Papers (1968) & the Stonewall Riots began (1969) on this day.
June 29
Giacomo Leopardi (1798), Sergei Witte (1849), George Washington Goethals (1858), William James Mayo (1861), George Ellery Hale (1868), Robert Schuman (1886), Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900), Nelson Eddy (1901), Paul O’Dwyer (1907), Leroy Anderson (1908), Frank Loesser (1910), Prince Bernhard (1911), Rafael Kubelik (1914), Kwame Toure [Stokely Carmichael] (1941), Fred Grandy (1948) & Anne-Sophie Mutter (1963) were born #OnThisDay. Margaret Beaufort (1509), Henry Clay (1852), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1861), Ferdinand I of Austria (1875), Paul Klee (1940), Igancy Jan Padereski (1941), Jayne Mansfield (1967), Lana Turner (1995), Rosemary Clooney (2002), Katharine Hepburn (2003) & Carl Reiner (2020) died on this day. The Globe Theatre burnt down during a performance of “Henry VIII” (1613), Sofia declared herself regent of Russia (1682), first known recording of classical music Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” on wax cylinder) (1888), imperial decree against foreigners in China (1900), Goethals Bridge & Outerbridge Crossing opened on Staten Island (1928), Civil Rights Act passed the Senate (1964) & Isabel Martinez de Perón succeeded Juan Domingo Perón as president of Argentina (1974) on this day.
June 30
Charles VIII of France (1470), Johann Friedrich I, Elector of Saxony (1503), John Gay (1685), Jean-Dominique, Comte de Cassini (1748), Harold Laski (1893), Walter Ulbricht (1893), Willie Sutton (1901), Lena Horne (1917), Susan Hayward (1917), Thomas Sowell (1930), Esa-Pekka Salonen (1958), Rupert Graves (1963), Mike Tyson (1966) & Michael Phelps (1985) were born #OnThisDay. Aztec emperor Moctezuma II (1520), Jacob Israel de Haan (1924), Ernst Röhm (1934), Gregor Strasser (1934), Karl Ernst (1934), Kurt von Schleiger (1934), Gustav Ritter von Kahr (1934), Nancy Mitford (1973), Alberta King (1974), Lillian Hellman (1984), Federico Mompou (1987), Gale Gordon [Charles Thomas Aldrich, Jr] (1995), Buddy Hackett (2003), Christopher Fry (2005), Pina Bausche (2009), Harve Presnell (2009) & Yitzhak Shamir (2012) died on this day. Union of Kalmar concluded (1397), Hernán Cortés & Spanish Conquistadores expelled during ‘La Noche Triste’ (the Night of Sadness) (1520), Henri II of France mortally wounded in a joust (1559), Philip II moved into El Escorial (1598), Nazi ‘Night of the Long Knives’ (1934), Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” published (1936), the Congo independent from Belgium (1960), Rwanda & Burundi independent from Belgium (1962), Leopoldville renamed Kinshasa (1966), Mikhail Baryshnikov defected (1974), the CCP denounced Mao Zedong (1981), the Equal Rights Amendment failed by three states (1982), Pierre Elliott Trudeau resigned as prime minister of Canada (1984), Bowers v. Evans (1986), Margaret Thatcher elevated to the House of Lords as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven (1992), same-sex marriage recognized in Spain (2005), Mohamed Morsi sworn in as president of Egypt (2012), Misty Copeland the first African American principal dancer of the American Ballet Theatre (2015) & same-sex marriage recognized in Germany (2017) on this day.
July 1
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646), Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau (1725), George Sand [Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant] (1804), William Strunk, Jr. (1869), Walter Francis White (1893), Charles Laughton (1899), William Wyler (1902), Estée Lauder [Josephine Esther Mentzer] (1906), Olivia de Havilland (1916), Farley Granger (1925), Leslie Caron (1931), Jamie Farr (1934), Jean Marsh (1934), Sydney Pollack (1934), Claude Berri (1934), Twyla Tharp (1941), Geneviève Bujold (1942), David Duke (1950), Dan Aykroyd (1952), Diana Spencer (1961), Patrick McEnroe (1966), Pamela Anderson (1967) & Liv Tyler (1977) were born #OnThisDay. Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquis of Rockingham (1782), Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1784), Mikhail Bakunin (1876), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1896), Marius Petipa (1910), Erik Satie (1925), Pierre Monteux (1964), Juan Domingo Perón (1974), R. Buckminster Fuller (1983), Margaux Hemingway (1996), Marlon Brandon (2004), Karl Malden (2009) & Hugh Downs (2020) died on this day. Vespasian proclaimed Roman emperor by troops in Egypt (69), Titus set up battering rams as part of the Roman siege of Jerusalem (70), sunglasses invented in China (1200), Alfonso the Wise crowned king of Castile & Leon (1252), first burning of Protestants in the Netherlands (1517), Sir Thomas More’s treason trial (1535), William of Orange defeated James II at the Battle of the Boyne (1690), Battle of Gettysburg (first day) (1863), Dominion of Canada formed (Canada Day) (1867), Zanzibar-Helgoland Treaty (1890), Wilfrid Laurier sworn in as the first French-speaking prime minister of Canada (1896), Theodore Roosevelt & the Rough Riders in the Battle of San Juan Hill (1898), first Tour de France in Montgeron (1903), Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity (1905), German gunboat Panther arrived at Agadir (1911), Battle of the Somme (1916), Chinese Communist Party founded (1921), Franklin Delano Roosevelt nominated for president at the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago (1932), Richard Strauss opera “Arabella” premiered in Dresden (1933), Rev. Martin Niemöller arrested by the Nazis (1937), Spanish bishops supported Francisco Franco & his fascist movement (1937), Battle of El Alamein (1942), Bretton Woods conference (1944), George Kennan’s ‘X’ article published in “Foreign Affairs” (1947), Rwanda & Burundi independent from Belgium (1962), Medicare went into effect (1966), Prince Charles investiture as Prince of Wales (1969), Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (1974), Isabel Peron president of Argentina (1974), “O, Canada” Canada’s national anthem (1980), the Deutsche Mark replaced the Ostmark as East Germany’s official currency (1990), Hong Kong reverted to China (1997), Oresund Bridge (2000), Vermont’s civil unions law in effect (2000), Cassini-Huygens tracking of Saturn’s orbit (2004), Ford produced its last Thunderbird (2005), and William & Harry unveiled a statue of Diana (2021) on this day.
July 2
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury (1489), Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714), Hermann Hesse (1877), Alec Douglas-Home (1903), Olav V of Norway (1903), Thurgood Marshall (1908), Pierre Cardin (1922), Patrice Lumumba (1925), Medgar Evers (1925), Imelda Marcos (1929), Carlos Menem (1930), John Sununu (1939), Vicente Fox (1942), Larry David (1947), Luci Baines Johnson Nugent Turpin (1947), Sylvia Rivera (1951) & Lindsay Lohan (1986) were born #OnThisDay. Nostradamus [Michel de Nostre-Dam] (1566), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1778), Robert Peel (1850), Ernest Hemingway (1961), Betty Grable (1973), Vladimir Nabokov (1977), Michael Bennett (1987), James Stewart (1997), Beverly Sills [Belle Miriam Silverman] (1978), Elie Wiesel (2016), Michel Rocard (2016) & Lee Iacocca (2019) died on this day. Martin Luther promised St. Anne to become a monk if he survived a violent storm (1505), Chief Tecumseh urged Native Americans to unite against white settlers (1809), Bahia Independence Day (end of Portuguese colonial rule in Brazil) (1823), Amistad revolt (1839), alligator fell from the sky (1843), partial emancipation of Russian serfs (1858), Battle of Gettysbury (2nd day) (1863), James Garfield shot by Charles Guiteau (1881), Sherman Act enacted by Congress (1890) Jean Sibelius’ “Finlandia” premiered in Helsinki (1900), Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific (1937), Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” premiered in London (1941), South Vietnam recognized with Bảo Đại as head of state (1949), Kinkakuji in Kyoto burned down (1950), LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law (1964), Imelda Marcos & Adnan Khashoggi found not guilty of racketeering (1990), “Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets” published in the UK (1998), Ingrid Betancourt & 14 other FARC hostabes resued by the Colombian army (2008), GlaxoSmithKline settled the largest healthcare fraud case in history for $3 billion (2012) & Nicolas Sarkozy was charged with corruption (2014) on this day.
July 3
July 4
July 5
Sarah Kemble Siddons (1755), David Farragut (1801), P.T. Barnum (1810), Cecil Rhodes (1853), A.E. Douglass (1867), Édouard Herriot (1872), Wanda Landowska (1879), Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (1902), Andrei Gromyko (1909), Georges Pompidou (1911), Pierre Mauroy (1928), Katherine Helmond (1929), Nita Lowey (1937), Julie Nixon Eisenhower (1948), Edie Falco (1963), Meghan Rapinoe (1985) & Dolly the Sheep (1996) were born #OnThisDay. Stamford Raffles (1826), Walter Gropius (1969), Wilhelm Backhaus (1969), Harrison Salisbury (1993) & Régine Crespin (2007) died on this day. Scotland & France formed the Auld Alliance against England (1295), Isaac Newton’s “Principia” published by the Royal Society (1687), Napoléon’s victory over the Archduke Charles in the Battle of Wagram (1809), Venezuela’s Declaration of Independence (1811), France’s invasion of Algeria (1830), Thomas Cook opened the first travel agency (1841), Frederick Douglass delivered his “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” speech in Rochester (1852), Salvation Army founded (1865), Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany gave Austria-Hungary a ‘blank check’ of support (1914), António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo dictatorship (1932), National Labor Relations Act signed into law by FDR (1935), Clement Attlee led the Labour Party to victory in the British general election (1945), Philippines liberation declared (1945), Louis Réard introduced the bikini (1946), first US fatality in the Korean War (1950), Gen. Juvénal Habyarimana military coup d’état in Rwanda (1973), Arthur Ashe the first black man to win at Wimbledon (1975), Amazon.com founded by Jeff Bezos (1994), Dolly the sheep cloned (1996) & Babylon declared a World Heritage Site (2019) on this day.
July 6
John Paul Jones (1747), Stamford Raffles (1781), Nicholas I of Russia (1796), Maximilian von Habsburg, emperor of Mexico (1832), Marc Chagall (1887), Frida Kahlo (1907), Dorothy Kirsten (1910), Sebastian Cabot (1918), Nancy Reagan (1921), Bill Haley (1925), Merv Griffin (1925), Janet Leigh [Jeanetta Morrison] (1927), Pat Paulsen (1927), Della Reese (1932), Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama (1935), Ned Beatty (1937), Vladimir Ashkenazy (1937), George W. Bush (1946), Jamie Wyeth (1946), Sylvester Stallone (1946), Peter Singer (1946), Geoffrey Rush (1951), Hilary Mantel (1952), Jennifer Saunders (1958) & Kevin Hart (1979) were born #OnThisDay. Henry II of England (1189), Jan Hus (1415), Sir Thomas More (1535), Edward VI of England (1553), John Marshall (1835), Guy de Maupassant (1893), Kenneth Grahame (1932), George Grosz (1959), William Faulkner (1962), Louis Armstrong (1971), Otto Klemperer (1973), Marsha P. Johnson (1992), ruth Lady Fermoy (1993), Roy Rogers (1998), Joaquín Rodrigo (1999), Robert McNamara (2009) & Ennio Morricone (2020) died on this day. Richard the Lioneart crowned king of England (1189), Richard III crowned king of England (1483), Swedish troops under Gustavus Adolphus landed at Peenemunde (1630), Captain William Kidd captured in Boston (1699), Battle of Chesme (1770), Louis Pasteur successfully used a rabies vaccine (1885), Dadabhai Naoroji first Indian elected to the British House of Commons (1892), T.E. Lawrence captured the port of Aqaba (1917), Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institute for Sexual Science (1919), Anne Frank’s family went into hiding in the After House in Amsterdam (1942), AK-47 first produced in USSR (1947), Harry S. Truman Presidential Library established (1957), John Lennon met Paul McCartney for the first time (1957), Althea Gibson first African American to win at Wimbledon (1957), Beatles film “Hard Day’s Night” premiered in London (1964), civil war in Nigeria (1967), Carlos Salinas de Gortari elected president of Mexico (1988), “Forrest Gump” released (1994), US Army Private Barry Winchell died from attack over his relationship with Calpernia Addams (1999), Chilcot Report criticized Tony Blair for exaggerating the case for war in Iraq (2016) & Pokémon Go released (2016) on this day.
July 7
Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752), Gustav Mahler (1860), George Cukor (1899), Vittorio De Sica (1901), Satchel Paige (1906), Gian-Carlo Menotti (1911), Ringo Starr (1940), Michael Howard (1941), Matti Salminen (1945) & Michelle Kwan (1980) were born #OnThisDay. Edward I of England (1307), Thomas Gray (1771), Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1816), Mary Surratt (1865), Henri Nestlé (1890), Arthur Conan Doyle (1930), Max Horkheimer (1973), Veronica Lake [Constance Ockleman], Flora Robson (1984), Moshood Abiola (1998) & Jon Money (2006) died on this day. Joan of Arc exonerated of heresy at a retrial 25 years after her death (1456), Henri III & the Duc de Guise signed the Treaty of Nemours stripping France’s Huguenots of all their freedoms (1585), premiere of George Frideric Handel’s “Te Deum” & “Jubilate” (1713), British Jews granted citizenship (1753) Columbia U. founded as King’s College (1754), Toussaint L’Ouverture declared Haiti’s independence (1801), First Treaty of Tilsit signed by Napoleon & Alexander I of Russia (1807), Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold & George Atzerodt are executed for Abraham Lincoln’s assassination (1865), Hoover Dam construction began (1930), Heinrich Himmler ordered medical experiments on Auschwitz camp inmates (1942), Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini canonized as the first American saint (1946), Jimmy Carter married Rosalynn Smith (1946), Alaska statehood bill signed into law by Dwight Eisenhower (1958), “All You Need Is Love” album released by the Beatles (1967), US troops began a drawdown from South Vietnam (1969), French recognized as co-equal in Canada (1969), Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to the US Supreme Court (1981), 1st ‘Three Tenors’ concert featuring Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti at Baths of Caracalla in Rome (1990), Nelson Mandel stepped down as president of South Africa (1996), “Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows part 2” — the last Harry Potter film — premiered in London (2011) & Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro announced he’d tested positive for COVID-19 (2020) on this day.
July 8
Don Carlos of Spain (1545), Artemisia Gentileschi (1593), Jean de la Fontaine (1621), John Pemberton (1831), Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838), John D. Rockefeller (1830), Kathe Kollwitz (1867), Percy Grainger (1882), Philip Johnson (1906), Nelson Rockefeller (1908), Walter Scheel (1919), Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926), John Dingell (1926), Phil Gramm (1942), Jeffrey Tambor (1944), Cynthia Gregory (1946), Wolfgang Puck (1949), Anjelica Huston (1951), Anna Quindlen (1952), Marianne Williamson (1952), Kevin Bacon (1958) & Tzipi Livni (1958) were born #OnThisDay. Diego de Almagro (1538), Christian Huygens (1695), Ellihu Yale (1721), Percy Bysshe Shelley 91822), Oscar I of Sweden (1859), Havelock Ellis (1939), Jean Moulin (1943), Georges Bataille (1962), Vivian Leigh (1967), Fatima Jinnah (1967), Kim Il-Sung (1994), Betty Ford (2011), Ernest Borgnine (2012), Tab Hunter [Arthur Andrew Kelm] (2018) & Oliver Knussen (2018) died on this day. Battle of Malta in the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282), Charles II of England granted a royal charter to Rhode Island (1663), Battle of Poltava (1709), Battle of Dynekilen (1716), Liberty Bell tolled to announce the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence (1776), slavery banned in Vermont’s constitution (1777), France declared war on Prussia (1792), US State Department issued the first US passport (1796), Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s blackship Susquehanna sailed into Tokyo Bay (1853), Charles XV Gustaf acceded to the throne of Sweden & Norway (1859), Wall Street Journal began publishing (1889), William Jennings Bryan’s ‘Cross of Gold’ speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago (1896), Gen. Douglas MacArthur named commander-in-chief of UN forces in Korea (1950), 2,000th birthday of Paris (1951), Col. Castillo Armas elected president of Guatemala by the military junta (1954), first Americans killed in South Vietnam (1959), nationalization of French banks, steel & aviation by prime minister Pierre Mauroy (1981), US Supreme Court nominee Sandra Day O’Connor confirmed by the Senate 99-0 (1981), “Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban” (the 3rd book of the series by J. K. Rowling) published by Bloomsbury in the UK (1999), “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” (the 4th book of the series by J. K. Rowling) published by Bloomsbury in the UK (2000), Enrique Peña Nieto’s win in the country’s presidential election prompts massive demonstrations in Mexico City (2012), Jeffrey Epstein indicted on sex trafficking charges (2019)
July 9
Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (1578), Ottorino Respighi (1879), Barbara Cartland (1901), Edward Heath (1916), Mathilde Krim (1926), Donald Rumsfeld (1932), Michael Graves (1934), David Hockney (1937), O.J. Simpson (1947), Viktor Yanukovych (1950), Jimmy Smits (1955), Tom Hanks (1956) & Fred Savage (1976) were born #OnThisDay. Jan van Eyck (1441), Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand IV (1654), Philip V of Spain (1746), Catherine the Great’s coup (1762), Edmund Burke (1797), Gilbert Stuart (1828), Zachary Taylor (1850), King Gillette (1932), Benjamin Cardozo (1938), Earl Warren (1974), Charlotte, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg (1985), Barbara Woodhouse (1988), Melvin Belli (1996), Rod Steiger (2002), Isabel Sanford (2004), Eileen Ford (2014), Peter Carrington, 6th Baron Carrington (2018), Rip Torn (2019) & Ross Perot (2019) died on this day. Battle of Hwangsanbeol (660), Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV laid the foundation stone for the Charles Bridge in Prague (1357), Tamerlane (Timur) sacked Baghdad (1401), New York elected George Clinton its first governor (1777), the Second Treaty of Tilsit (1807), Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord became the first Prime Minister of France (1815), Argentina declared independence from Spain at the Congress of Tucumán (1816), the US seized Yerba Buena (San Francisco) from Mexico (1846), Zachary Taylor died after only 16 months in office (1850), Commodore Matthew Perry’s warships in Tokyo Bay (1853), first Wimbledon tournament (1877), Germany surrendered Southwest Africa to South Africa (1915), the Enigma code broken (1941), Henry Kissinger’s trip to Beijing (1971), Michael Fagan’s visit to Buckingham Palace (1982), massive demonstration against Chun Doo-hwan (1987), Oliver North admitted to shredding Iran-Contra documents (1987), Romanov family remains identified using DNA (1993), F.W. de Klerk indicted (1995), the African Union established (2002), South Sudan’s secession & independence from Sudan (2011) & Jokko Widodo elected president of Indonesia (2014) on this day.
July 10
John Calvin [Jehan Cauvin](1509) William Blackstone (1723), Camille Pissarro (1830), Henry Wieniawski (1835), Adolphus Busch (1839), Nikola Tesla (1856), Marcel Proust (1871), Ima Hogg (1882), Giorgio de Chirico (1888), Carl Orff (1895), Ljuba Welitsch (1913), David Brinkley (1920), Eunice Kennedy Shriver (1921), Mahathir bin Mohamad (1925), David Dinkins (1927), Jerry Herman (1933), Richard Hatcher (1933), Helen Donath (1940), Arthur Ashe (1943), Arlo Guthrie (1947), Cindy Sheehan (1957), Fiona Shaw (1958), Alec Mapa (1965) & Sofía Vergara (1972) were born #OnThisDay. Roman emperor Hadrian (138), Henri II of France (1559), William the Silent of Orange Nassau (1584), George Stubbs (1806), Louis-Jacques Daguerre (1851), Eugénie de Montijo, empress of France (1920), Donald Francis Tovey (1940), Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton [LeMothe] (1941), Arthur Fiedler (1979), Maria Jeritza [Jedlicka] (1982), Mel Blanc (1989), Roland Petit (2011), Omar Sharif [Michel Dimitri Shalhoub] (2015) & Jon [Jonathan Stewart] Vickers died on this day. Justin proclaimed Byzantine emperor in the Hippodrome (518), Dublin founded (988), Lady Godiva rode naked through the streets of Coventry (1040), Richard of York defeated Henry VI at Northampton (1460), Treaty of Calais (1520) signed by Henry VIII (1520), Lady Jane Grey proclaimed queen of England (1553), 1st Anglo-Dutch War (1652), George II authorized reprisals in the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739), Louis-François Roubiliac’s monument to George Frideric Handel unveiled in Westminster Abbey in London (1762) Louis XVI’s France declared war on Britain (1778), French forces under the Comte de Rochambeau landed at Newport (1780), Paul Verlaine wounded his lover Arthur Rimbaud with pistol (1873), Wyoming the 44th state (1890), Emma Goldman imprisoned for obstructing the draft (1917), Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic formed (1918), Italy banned all non-fascist parties (1923), Denmark took control of Greenland after Norway ended its claim (1924), Meher Baba’s Silence Day (1925), the Scopes Monkey Trial began in Tennessee (1925), Howard Hughes flew around the world in 91 hours (1938), Battle of Britain commenced (1940), failed assassination attempt on Hassan II of Morocco (1971), Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior sunk by France in Auckland harbor (1985), Boris Yeltsin sworn in as Russia’s first elected president (1991), Confederate flag lowered on the South Carolina capitol grounds (2015) & Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered the Hagia Sophia re-converted back into a mosque (2020) on this day.
July 11
Robert the Bruce (1274), Frederick I of Prussia (1657), John Quincy Adams (1767), E.B. White (1899), Gough Whitlam (1916), Yul Brynner (1920), Nicolai Gedda (1925), Hermann Prey (1929) & Giorgio Armani (1934) were born #OnThisDay. Elisabetta Farnese, queen of Spain (1766), George Gershwin (1937), Laurence Olivier (1989) & Claudia ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson (2007) died on this day. Antoninus Pius succeeded Hadrian as Roman emperor (138), Charles IV of Luxembourg elected Holy Roman Emperor (1346), Zheng He’s first major expedition to the Spice Islands 91405), Henry VIII of England excommunicated by Pope Clement VII (1533), Battle of the Boyne (1690), Battle of Oudenaarde (1708), France’s finance minister Jacques Necker dismissed by Louis XVI (1789), Alexander Hamilton killed by Aaron Burr in a duel (1804), Niagara Movement launched by W.E.B. Du Bois (1905), Battle of Verdun (1916), Prussian plebiscite on ‘Polish Corridor’ (1920), Mongolia independent from China (1921), Maréchal Philippe Pétain president of the Vichy régime (1940), USSR agreed to hand West Berlin to the US & UK (1945), Dwight Eisenhower Republican presidential nominee (1952), Ivory Coast, Dahomey (Benin) & Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) independent of France (1960), Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” published by J.B. Lippincott & Co. (1960), Ross Perot’s ‘you people’ NAACP speech (1992), “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” (the 5th film based on the books by J. K. Rowling) released (2007) & Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán recaptured (2015) on this day.
July 12
Josiah Wedgwood (1730), Henry David Thoreau (1817), George Eastman (1854), George Washington Carver (1864), Emil Hácha (1872), Louis B. Mayer (1884), Amedeo Modigliani (1884), Kirsten Flagstad (1895), Oscar Hammerstein II (1895), R. Buckminster Fuller (1895), Pablo Neruda (1904), Milton Berle (1908), Andrew Wyeth (1917), Van Cliburn (1934), Bill Cosby (1937), Lionel Jospin (1937), Cheryl Ladd (1951), Jamey Sheridan (1951), Kristi Yamaguchi (1971), Cheyenne Jackson (1975), Topher Grace (1978) & Malala Yousafzai (1997) were born #OnThisDay. Desiderius Erasmus (1536), Richard Cromwell (1712), Johann Joachim Quantz (1773), Alexander Hamilton (1804), William Howe (1814), Dolly Madison (1849), Alfred Dreyfus (1935), D.T. Suzuki (1966), Lon Chaney, Jr. (1973) & Sherwood Schwartz (2011) died on this day. Geoffrey Chaucer named chief clerk by Richard II of England (1389), Charles II of England ratified the Habeas Corpus Act (1679), Battle of the Boyne (1690), Stanislaw Leszcynski became king of Poland (1704), Civil Constitution of the Clergy adopted in France (1790), Alexander Hamilton shot by Aaron Burr (1804), Arthur Balfour succeeded Lord Salisbury as British prime minister (1902), Alfred Dreyfus exonerated of treason in France (1906), Battle of Kursk (1943), Congo, Chad & Central African Republic declared independence from France (1960), Moors Murders in England (1963), Thor Heyerdahl arrived in Morocco after crossing the Atlantic from Barbados on the raft Ra II (1970), George McGovern accepted the Democratic presidential nomination (1972), Sao Tomé e Príncipe independent of Portugal (1975), Geraldine Ferraro chosen as Walter Mondale’s running mate (1984) & Nelson Mandela rode with QEII through the streets of London (1998) on this day.
July 13
Julius Caesar (100 BCE), John Dee (1527), Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III (1608), Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821), Sydney Webb (1859), John Jacob Astor (1864), Kenneth Clark (1903), Carlo Bergonzi (1924), Simone Veil (1927), Bob Crane (1928), Wole Soyinka (1934), Jack Kemp (1935), Patrick Stewart (1940), Paul Prudhomme (1940), Jacques Perrin (1941), Harrison Ford (1942) & Ken Jeong (1969) were born #OnThisDay. Holy Roman Emperor Henry II (1024), Jean-Paul Marat (1793), Alfred Stieglitz (1946), Arnold Schoenberg (1951), Frida Kahlo (1954), Carlos Kleiber (2004), Red Buttons [Aaron Chwatt] (2006), George Steinbrenner (2010), Cory Monteith (2013), Nadine Gordimer (2014), Loren Maazel (2014), Liu Xiaobo (2017) & Nancy Barbato Sinatra (2018) died on this day. Northwest Territory created (1787), Jean-Paul Marat assassinated by Charlotte Corday (1793), Battle of the Vosges (1794), Queen Victoria moved into Buckingham Palace (1837), anti-draft mobs lynched African Americans in NYC (1863), “Go west, young man” (Horace Greeley in the New-York Tribune), William of Prussia’s Emser Depeche (1870), Treaty of San Stefano revised at the Congress of Berlin (1878), Hollywood sign dedicated (1923), Richard Strauss resigned as chair of the Reichskulturkammer (1935), Frank Sinatra’s recording debut (1939), JFK nominated by the Democratic Party (1960), “Ghost” released (1990), #BlackLivesMatter hashtag created (2013), Sandra Bland died in police custody (2015) Theresa May elected British prime minister (2016), Donald Trump met with QE II at Windsor while anti-Trump protestors took to the streets of London (2018) on this day.
July 14
Jules Mazarin (1602), Frederick Louis Maytag (1857), Gustav Klimt (1862), Annie Jones (1865), Gertrude Bell (1868), Gerald Finzi (1901), William Hanna (1910), Woodrow ‘Woody’ Guthrie (1912), Northrop Frye (1912), Gerald Ford (1913), Ingmar Bergman (1918), Polly Bergen [Nellie Burgin] (1930), Roosevelt ‘Rosey’ Grier (1932) & Franklin Graham (1952) were born #OnThisDay. Claude Fleury (1723), Richard Bentley (1742), Bernard-René de Launay (1789), Madame de Staël [Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein] (1817), Alfred Krupp (1887), Paul Kruger (1904), Adlai Stevenson II (1965), Cicely Saunders (2005) & Sir Charles Mackerras (2010) died on this day. Jerusalem captured in the First Crusade (1099), Bastille stormed (1789), “La Marseillaise” by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle France’s national anthem by the National Convention (1795), Congress enacted the Sedition Act (1798), Commodore Matthew Perry’s request for trade relations with Japan (1853), non-Nazi parties banned in Germany (1933), Jimmy Carter & Walter Mondale nominated at the Democratic national convention in NYC (1976) & the bicentennial of Bastille Day marked by Jessye Norman’s rendition of “La Marseillaise” (1989) on this day.
July 15
Inigo Jones (1573), Rembrandt van Rijn (1606), Emmeline Pankhurst (1858), Dorothy Fields (1904), Edward Shackleton (1911), Leopoldo Galtieri (1926), Jacques Derrida (1930), Julian Bream (1933), Linda Ronstadt (1946), Carl Bildt (1949), Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington (1950), Jesse Ventura [James Janos] (1951), Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1953), Forest Whitaker (1961), Scott Ritter (1961), Brigitte Nielsen (1963), David Miliband (1965) and Laura Benanti (1979) were born #OnThisDay. Ulrich von Jungingen (1410), Jean, duc d Berry (1416), Juan Ponce de León (1521), Annibale Carracci (1609), Farinelli (1782), Carl Czerny (1857), Anton Chekhov (1904), Hugo von Hofmannstal (1929), John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing (1948), Lawrence Tibbett (1960), Gianni Versace (1997), Louis Quilico (2000), Celeste Holm (2012) & Martin Landau (2017) died on this day. Jerusalem captured & plundered by Crusaders during the First Crusade (1099), Peasants’ Revolt leader John Ball executed in front of Richard II of England (1381), Battle of Brunwald (Tannenburg) (1410), Rosetta Stone found in Egypt (1799), Buchenwald concentration camp opened (1937), Billy Carter registered as a foreign agent of the Libyan government (1980), John Poindexter’s testimony at the Iran-Contra hearings (1987), Hutu flight to Zaire near the end of the Rwandan genocide (1994), Andrew Cunanan murdered Gianni Versace in a killing spree (1997), Odeo launched Twitter (2006), “Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince” (the 6th film based on the books by J. K. Rowling) was released worldwide (2009) on this day.
July 16
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723), Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796), Mary Baker Eddy (1821), Eugene Ysaye (1858), Roald Amundsen (1872), Anna Vyrubova (1884), Trygve Lie (1896), Barbara Stanwyck (1907), Orville Redenbacher (1907), Ginger Rogers (1911), Bess Myerson (1924), Richard Thornburgh (1932), Donald Payne (1934), Barbara Lee (1946), Assata Shakur (1947), Pinchas Zuckerman (1948), Rubén Blades (1948) & Tony Kushner (1956) were born #OnThisDay. Anne of Cleves (1557), Thomas Kyd (1594), Ivan VI of Russia (1764), Tad lincoln (1871), Mary Todd Lincoln (1882), Alfred Deller (1979), Harry Chapin (1981), Heinrich Böll (1985), Herbert von Karajan (1989), Frank Rizzo (1991), Robert Motherwell (1991), Stephen Spender (1995), John F. Kennedy, Jr. (1999), Celiz Cruz (2003) & John Paul Stevens (2019) died on this day. Mohammed’s flight from Mecca to Medina (622), Great Schism (1054), Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa [Battle of Al-Uqab] (1212), Mission San Diego founded by Father Junipero Serra (1769), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera “Die Entführung aus dem Serail” premiered in Vienna (1782), Jacques Necker reinstated as France’s finance minister by Louis XVI (1789), Washington, D.C. designated bye new capital by Congress (1790), Nicholas II & the Romanov family executed in Ykaterinburg (1918), Augusto César Sandino launched the resistance to US occupation of Nicaragua (1927), first atomic bomb exploded by the Manhattan Project in New Mexico (1945), “Catcher in Rye” by J. D. Salinger published by Little Brown & Co. (1951), Apollo 11 launched into orbit (1969), Amazon’s on-line book business launched (1995), John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette Kennedy & sister-in-law Lauren Bessette killed in a plane crash (1999), Millenium Park opened in Chicago (2004), Martha Stewart sentenced to five months (2004) & “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”, the 6th book in the series by J. K. Rowling was published worldwide (2005) on this day.
July 17
Elbridge Gerry (1744), John Jacob Astor [Johann Jakob Astor] (1763), Xianfeng emperor of China (1831), Donald Francis Tovey (1875), Erle Stanley Gardner (1889), Georges Lemaître (1894), James Cagney (1899), Art Linkletter (1912), Eleanor Steber (1916), Phyllis Diller (1917), Donald Sutherland (1935), Diahann Carroll (1935), P.D.Q. Bach [Peter Schickele] (1935), Elmer Fudd (1937), Camilla Parker Bowles (1947), Lucie Arnaz 91951), David Hasselhoff (1952), Angela Merkel (1954), Wong Kar-Wai (1958), Dawn Upshaw (1960) & Felipe Juan Froilán de Marichalar y de Borbón (1998) were born #OnThisDay. Tsar Peter III of Russia (1762), Adam Smith (1790), Charlotte Corday (1793), Charles Grey (1845), Dorothea Dix (1887), James McNeill Whistler (1903), Tsar Nicholas II of Russia & the imperial family (1918), Raoul Wallenberg (1947), Billie Holiday (1959), John Coltrane (1967), John Coltrane (1967), Katharine Graham (2001), Edward Heath (2005), Walter Cronkite (2009), Elaine Stritch (2014) & John Lewis (2020) died on this day. Charles VII crowned king of France (1429), Martin Luther entered an Augustinian monastery at Erfurt (1505), Babington plot against Elizabeth Tudor discovered (1585), Sir Walter Raleigh arrested by James I of England (1603), George Frideric Handel’s “Water Music” on the Thames (1717), Peter III of Russia assassinated (1762) National Guardsmen fired on Jacobins at the Champs de Mars in Paris (1791), British satirical magazine “Punch” first published (1841), George V’s proclamation changing the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the House of Windsor (1917), Nicholas II & the Romanovs executed in Yekaterinburg (1918), Potsdam Conference (Truman, Churchill & Stalin) (1945), Republic of Korea’s constitution (1948), Berlin ‘Operation Little Vittles’ (1948), Disneyland opened in Anaheim (1955), “High Society” released by MGM (1956), serfdom abolished in Tibet (1959), Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” released (1959), Suharto’s Indonesia annexed East Timor (1976), Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle fled to Miami (1979), Ronald Reagan accepted the Republican nomination for president (1980), Pierre Mauroy resigned as prime minister of France (1984), Eric Garner murdered by Daniel Pantaleo & the NYPD (2014), Malaysia Airlines flight 17 shot down over Russia (2014 & Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán was recaptured (2019) on this day.
July 18
Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552), Feargus O’Connor (1796), Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811), Pauline Viardot (1821), Vidkun Quisling (1887), Herbert Marcuse (1898), Clifford Odets (1906), S.I. Hayakawa (1906), Andrei Gromyko (1909), Mohammed Daoud Khan (1909), Hume Cronyn (1911), Nelson Mandela (1918), John Glenn (1921), Thomas Kuhn (1922), Richard Pasco (1926), Kurt Masur (1927), James Brolin (1940), Richard Branson (1950), Elizabeth McGovern (1961), Wendy Williams (1964), Kristen Bell (1980) & Priyanka Chopra (1982) were born #OnThisDay. Bartolomé de las Casas (1566), Caravaggio [Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio] (1610), Jean-Antoine Watteau (1721), John Paul Jones (1792), Jane Austen (1817), Benito Juarez (1872), Thomas Cook (1892), Horatio Alger (1899), George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly (1954), William Westmoreland (2005) & Jerry Hadley (2007) died on this day. Gauls defeated Romans at the Battle of the Allia (390 BCE), Great Fire of Rome (64), Edward I ordered the expulsion of all JEws from England (1290), Thomas Aquinas canonized by Pope John XXII (1323), the Pope’s authority declared null & void in England (1536), Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” published (1925), Benelux customs union created by the Ouchy Convention (1932), Gen. Francisco Franco issued a manifesto in Morocco precipitating a Spanish army uprising & the Spanish Civil War (1936), Indian Independence Act signed by George VI (1947), Presidential Succession Act signed into law by Harry Truman (1947), “The Nun’s Story” premiered in LA (1959), riots in Harlem in Manhattan & Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn (1964), Ted Kennedy drove a car with Mary Jo Kopechne off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island (1969), Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” published (1995), Kim Jong-un appointed supreme leader of North Korea (2012), Elon Musk apologized for calling British cave diver a ‘pedo guy’ (2018), Google fined $5.1 billion by the EU (2018) & June 2019 was determined to be the hottest June on record (2019) on this day.
July 19
Giuseppe Castiglione (1688), Samuel Colt (1814), Edgar Degas (1834), Lizzie Borden (1860), Edgar Snow (1905), George McGovern (1922), Nicola Sturgeon (1970) & Benedict Cumberbatch (1976) were born #OnThisDay. Francesco Petrarca [Petracco] (1374), Philippa of Lancaster, queen of Portugal (1415), Mary Boleyn (1543), Agustín de Iturbide [crowned Agustin I], Margaret Fuller (1850), Gen. Aung San (1947), Syngman Rhee (1965), Mary Jo Kopechne (1969), Paolo Borsellino (1992), Frank McCourt (2009) & Garry Marshall (2016) died on this day. The Peasants’ War began in Germany (1524), sinking of Henry VIII’s flagship Mary Rose (1545), Lady Jane Grey deposed as queen of England (1553), Albert Friedrich became Duke of Prussia (1569), Rosetta Stone discovered (1799), Medusa frigate survivors rescued off the coast of Senegal after 17 days on a raft (1816), Seneca Falls Convention (1848), Red River Rebellion precipitated by Louis Riel’s discussion of Metis rights (1869), Franco-Prussian War (1870), Aung San & eight others assassinated in Burma (1947) & the Nation-State Law was enacted by Israel’s Knesset (2018) on this day.
July 20
Alexander the Great (356 BCE), Francesco Petrarca (1304), Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659), Gregor Mendel (1822), Vladimir Nabokov (1870), László Moholy-Nagy (1895), Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910), Edmund Hillary (1919), Elliot Richardson (1920), Jacques Delors (1925), Frantz Fanon (1925), Nam June Paik (1932), Nelson Doubleday (1933), Barbara Mikulski (1936), Diana Rigg (1938), Natalie Wood [Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko] (1938), Kim Carnes (1945), Paul Valéry [Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry], Carlos Santana (1947), Thomas Friedman (1953), Enrique Peña Nieto (1966), Sandra Oh (1971) & Haakon Magnus of Norway (1973) were born #OnThisDay. Pancho Villa [José Doroteo Arango Arámbula] (1923), Claus Schenk von Sauffenberg (1944), Paul Valéry [Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry] (1945), Anna Vyrubova (1974), Bruce Lee (1973), Vince Foster (1993) & Tammy Faye Messner Bakker (2007) died on this day. Euston Station opened in London (1837), Napoléon III met Count Cavour at Plombières (1858), Sitting Bull’s surrender (1881), Franz von Papen’s coup d’état against the Prussian government (1932), Pope Pius XII’s accord with Nazi Germany (1933), failed assassination plot against Adolf Hitler (1944), Syngman Rhee elected the first president of the Republic of Korea (1948), Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon (1969), War Powers Act passed by the Senate (1973), Viking 1 landed on Mars (1976), Hyde Park & Regent’s Park bombings in London (1982) & 12 were killed in the Aurora mass shooting in Colorado (2012) on this day.
July 21
Ernest Hemingway (1899), Hart Crane (1899), Marshall McLuhan (1911), Isaac Stern (1920), Manuel Valls (1920), Mollie Sugden (1922), Don Knotts (1924), Norman Jewison (1926), Edolphus Towns (1934), Janet Reno (1938), Les Aspin (1938), John Negroponte (1939), James Clyburn (1940), Edward Herrmann (1943), Paul Wellstone (1944), Alton Maddox (1945), Ken Starr (1946), Cat Stevens [Steven Demetre Georgiou; Yusaf Islam] (1948), Garry Trudeau (1948), Robin Williams (1951), Stevan Lofven (1957), Cori Bush (1976) & Eivør [Pálsdóttir] (1983) were born #OnThisDay. Henry Percy [Harry Hotspur] (1403), Manuel Paleologus (1425), Robert Burns (1796), Basil Rathbone (1967), Robert Young (1998), Mako (2006) & Alexander Cockburn (2012) died on this day. Henry IV of England defeated Henry ‘Harry Hotspur’ Percy at the Battle of Shrewsbury (1403), Treaty of Passarowitz between Ottoman Turkey, Austria & Venice (1718), Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji between Ottoman Turkey & Russia (1774), Battle of the Pyramids at Embabeh (1798), Belgium independent from the Netherlands (1831), Central Park created by an act of the New York state legislature (1853), First Battle of Bull Run at Manassas (1861), Alexander Kerensky prime minister of Russia (1917), “Stormy Weather” premiered (1943), Geneva Accords on Indochina (1954), Sirimavo Bandaranike first woman elected head of government in Sri Lanka or anywhere in the world (1960), Aswan High Dam (1970), House Judiciary Committee voted two articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon (1974), Tony Blair elected British Labour Party leader (1994), “Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows” (the final book in the series) by J. K. Rowling is published worldwide (2007), Philippe succeeded Albert II as king of Belgium (2013), Sean Spicer’s resignation as White House press secretary (2017), Ricardo Rosselló announced he wouldn’t seek re-election as governor of Puerto Rico (2019) & Omar Hassan al-Bashir went on trial for the 1989 coup in Sudan (2020) on this day.
July 22
Philip the Fair, first Habsburg king of Spain (1478), Tsar Michael Romanov (1596), Emma Lazarus (1849), Edward Hopper (1882), Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890), Alexander Calder (1898), Stephen Vincent Benet (1898), Licia Albanese (1909), Bob Dole (1923), Margaret Whiting (1924), Orson Bean (1928), Oscar de la Renta (1932), Terence Stamp (1938), Alex Trebek (1940), Kay Bailey Hutchison (1943), Danny Glover (1946), Mireille Mathieu (1946), Albert Brooks (1947), Alan Menken (1949), Willem Dafoe (1955), David Spade (1964), John Leguizamo (1964), Colin Ferguson (1972), Rufus Wainwright (1973), Caroline Giuliani (1989), Selena Gomez (1992) & Prince George of Cambridge (2013) were born #OnThisDay. Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (1932), John Dillinger (1934), Mackenzie King (1950), Carl Sandburg (1967), Martti Talvela (1989), Hermann Prey (1998), Uday & Qusay Hussein (2003), Estelle Getty (2008), Nan Merriman (2012), & Li Peng (2019) died on this day. Philip the Fair’s expulsion of Jews from France (1306), Smolny Cathedral consecrated in St. Petersburg (1835), Battle of Atlanta (1864), “El Sombrero de Tres Picos” (The Three-Cornered Hat) ballet premiered in London (1919), John Dillinger gunned down by FBI agents in Chicago (1934), FDR’s court packing plan rejected by the Senate (1937), Warsaw Ghetto Jews sent to Treblinka (1942), King David Hotel in Jerusalem bombed by the Zionist Irgun (1946), Edward Heath elected Conservative Party leader to succeed Alec Douglas-Home (1965), Jeffrey Dahmer apprehended in Milwaukee (1991), “March of the Penguins” premiered (2005), Oslo & Utøya terrorist attacks (2011) on this day.
July 23
Francesco Sforza (1401), Francesco Cilea (1866), Emil Jannings (1884), Raymond Chandler (1888), Haile Selassie [Ras Tafari Makonnen] (1892), Anthony Kennedy (1936), Don Imus (1940), Kaity Tong (1950), Woody Harrelson (1961), Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967), Raphael Warnock (1969), Monica Lewinsky (1973) & Daniel Radcliffe (1989) were born #OnThisDay. Don Carlos of Spain (1568), Domenico Scarlatti (1757), Ulysses S. Grant (1885), Helmuth von Moltke (1944), D.W. Griffith (1948), Philippe Pétain (1951), Cordell Hull (1955), Jan de Vries (1964), Montgomery Clift (1966), Eddie Rickenbacker (1973), Jessica Mitford (1996), Hassan II of Morocco (1999), Eudora Welty (2001), Leo McKern (2002), Chaim Potok (2002), Amy Winehouse (2011), Nguyễn Cao Kỳ (2011) & Sally Ride (2012) died on this day. Arab conquest of Palestine (636), Peace of Nuremberg between Emperor Charles V & the Schamlkaldic League (1532), Battle of Custozza (1848), Austrian ultimatum to Serbia (1914), use of foreign words in Italy banned by Mussolini’s fascist government (1929), Adolf Hitler’s Directive #45 issued ordering the German army to advance on Stalingrad (1942), Maréchal Philippe Pétain put on trial in France (1945), Henry Wallace nominated for president by the Progressive Party (1948), King Farouk ousted in a military coup in Egypt led by Gamal Abdal Nasser (1952), Grace Bumbry first black singer to perform at the Bayreuth Festival (1961), Miss America Vanessa Williams nude photos scandal (1984), three killed on the set of the “Twilight Zone: The Movie” (1982) & Boris Johnson was elected by Conservative Party members to replace Theresa May as British prime minister (2019) on this day.
July 24
Simón Bolívar (1783), Alexandre Dumas (1802), Francisco Solano López of Paraguay (1826), Frank Wedekind (1864), Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870), Ernest Bloch (1880), Robert Graves (1895), Amelia Earhart (1897), Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900), Bella Abzug (1920), Giuseppe di Stefano (1921), Charles Mathias, Jr. (1922), William Ruckelshaus (1932), Pat Oliphant (1935), Ruth Buzzi (1936), Peter Serkin (1947), Marvin the Martian (1948), Kristin Chenoweth (1968), Jennifer Lopez (1969), Rashida Tlaib (1976), Anna Paquin (1982) & Bindi Irwin (1998) were born #OnThisDay. Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (1846), Martin Van Buren (1862), Peter Sellers (1980), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1991), Andrew Cunanan (1997), William J. Brennan, Jr. (1997), Chad Everett [Raymon Lee Cramton] (2012), Sherman Hemsley (2012) & Regis Philbin (2020) died on this day. Jacques Cartier arrived in Canada & claimed it for France (1534), Mary, Queen of Scots forced to abdicate (1567), Fort Ponchartrain (future Detroit) founded by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac (1701), Brigham Young & Mormon follwers arrived on the site of the future Salt Lake City in Utah (1847), Tennessee first Confederate state readmitted to the Union (1866), Björkö Treaty between Nicholas II of Russia & Wilhelm II of Germany (1905), Hiram Bingham III discovered Machu Picchu (1911), Kellogg-Briand Pact announced by Herbert Hoover (1929), Richard Nixon & Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘Kitchen Debate’ (1959), “Vive le Québec libre” speech by Charles de Gaulle (1967), Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve (1979), French DGSE officers Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart arrested & charged with murder over the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior (1985), “Saving Private Ryan” released (1998), & Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was sworn in as prime minister of Bulgaria (2001) on this day.
July 25
Agostino Steffani (1654), Thomas Eakins (1844), Arthur Balfour (1848), Maxfield Parrish (1870), Gavrilo Princip (1894), Yvonne Printemps (1895), Gianandrea Gavazzeni (1909), Rosalind Franklin (1920), Estelle Getty (1923), Frank Church (1924), Maureen Forrester (1930), Adnan Khashoggi (1935), Emmett Till (1941), Christine C. Quinn (1966), Maureen Herman (1966), Lynda Lemay (1966) & Matt Le Blanc (1967) were born #OnThisDay. Lorenzo Cardinal Campeggio (1539), Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I (1564), André Chenier (1794), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1834), Engelbert Dollfuss (1934), Frank O’Hara (1966), Douglas Moore (1969), Vincente Minnelli (1986), Carlo Bergonzi (2014) & Olivia de Havilland (2020) died on this day. Constantine proclaimed Roman emperor by his troops (306), Henri II crowned king of France (1547), Henri IV converted to Catholicism to gain entry to Paris as king of France (1593), Napoleon’s victory over Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Abukir (1799), George Stephenson’s first steam locomotive (1814), July Ordinances signed into law in France by Charles X (1830), First Battle of Custozza (1848), Korea a Japanese protectorate (1907), Serbia’s reply to the Austrian ultimatum (1914), Mata Hari (Margaretha Gertruida Zelle) sentenced to death (1917), Benito Mussolini dismissed & arrested on the orders of Victor Emmanuel III (1943), Mao Zedong swam the Yangtze River (1966), Pope Paul VI published his encyclical “Humanae Vitae” (1968), Ted Kennedy plead guilty to a minor charge in the Chappaquiddick incident (1969), Rock Hudson’s spokesperson confirmed his AIDS diagnosis (1985) & Ricardo Rosselló resigned as governor of Puerto Rico (2019) on this day.LikeCommentShare
July 26
John Field (1782), George Catlin (1796), George Bernard Shaw (1856), Serge Koussevitzky (1874), Carl Jung (1875), George Grosz [Georg Ehrenfried Groß] (1893), Aldous Huxley (1894), Donald Voorhees (1903), Salvador Allende (1908), Vivian Vance (1909), Blake Edwards (1922), Jason Robards (1922), Stanley Kubrick (1928), Alexis Weissenberg (1929), John Howard (1939), Mary Jo Kopechne (1940), Mick Jagger (1943), Helen Mirren [Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironoff] (1945), Dorothy Hamill (1956), Kevin Spacey (1959), Sandra Bullock (1964), Jeremy Piven (1965) & Jacinda Ardern (1980) were born #OnThisDay. Inca emperor Atahualpa (1533), Sam Houston (1863), William Jennings Bryan (1925), Eva Perón [Evita] (1952),, Diane Arbus [Nemerov] (1971), George Gallup (1984), Ed Gein (1984), Averell Harriman (1986), Matthew Ridgway (1993), George Romney (1995), Merce Cunningham (2009) & Bobbi Kristina Brown (2015) died on this day. Francisco Pizarro ordered the death of the last Inca emperor Atahualpa (1533), Giacomo Casanova arrested in Venice (1755), James Wolfe’s British fleet captured Fort Louisbourg (1758), US postal system established by the Second Continental Congress (1755), New York ratified the US Constitution (1788), Liberian independence declared (1847), Richard Wagner’s opera “Parsifal” premiered in Bayreuth (1882), first book in Esperanto published (1887), Tahiti annexed by France (1891), FBI founded (1908), Clement Attlee led Labour to a landslide in the British general election (1945), Potsdam Declaration (1945), National Security Act signed into law by Harry Truman (1947), Harry Truman issued Executive Order No. 9981 desegregating the US military (1948), Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser announced his plan to nationalize the Suez Canal (1956), George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act into law (1990) & Donald Trump announced his recission of Barack Obama’s lifting the ban on transgender inclusion in the US military (2017) on this day.
July 27
Ludovico Sforza (‘il Moro’), duke of Milan (1452), Edward Montagu, 1st Earl of Sandwich (1625), Charlotte Corday (1768), Giosuè Carducci (1835), Enrique Granados (1867), Hilaire Belloc (1870), Ernst von Dohnányi Dohnányi Ernő, Mario del Monaco (1915), Norman Lear (1922), Vincent Canby (1924) & Pina Bausch (1940) were born #OnThisDay. Ferruccio Busoni (1924), Gertrude Stein (1946), António de Oliveira Salazar (1970), Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran (1980), William Wyler (1981), James Mason (1984), Miklós Rózsa (1995), Bob Hope (2003), Lindy Boggs Marie Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs & Sam Shepard III (2017) died on this day. 1st Battle of Bouvines (1214), Walter Raleigh brought tobacco from Virginia back to England (1586), Battle of Gainsborough (1643), Battle of Killicrankie (1689), Maximilien Robespierre overthrown in a coup d’état (1794), Battle of Talavera (1809), revolution in Paris against Charles X of France (1830), Chartist riots in Birmingham (1839), Gen. George McClellan took command of the Army of the Potomac (1861), Vincent Van Gogh shot himself in Auvers-sur-Oise (1890), Tex Avery & Bob Givens’ Bugs Bunny debuted in the Warner Bros. cartoon “Wild Hare” (1940), Korean War armistice (1953), Austria’s sovereignty restored after the end of Allied occupation (1955), Richard Nixon nominated for president at the Republican national convention in Chicago (1960), cigarette warning bill signed into law by LBJ (1965), the House Judiciary Committee voted 27-11 to recommend the impeachment of Richard Nixon (1974), Alan Menken & Howard Ashman’s musical “Little Shop of Horrors” opened at the Orpheum Theatre in NYC (1982), Mafia bombings in Italian cities (1993), bombing in Olympic Centennial Park in Atlanta (1996), Barack Obama issued a statement defending Israel’s pursuit of genocide in Gaza (2014) on this day.
July 28
Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muslim mystic and philosopher (The Meccan Revelations) (1165), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844), Beatrix Potter (1866), Marcel Duchamp (1887), Rudy Vallee (1901), Karl Popper (1902), Gottlob Frick (1906), Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929), Jacques d’Amboise (1934), Alberto Fujimori (1938), Riccardo Muti (1941), Bill Bradley (1943), Jim Davis (1945), Sally Struters (1947), Georgia Engel (1948), Santiago Calatrava (1951), Hugo Chávez (1954), Lori Loughlin (1964), Liz Cheney (1966), Alexis Arquette (1969), Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi (1971), Alexis Tsipras (1974), Huma Abedin (1976) & Juan Guaidó (1983) were born #OnThisDay. Thomas Cromwell (1540), Cyrano de Bergerac (1655), Antonio Vivaldi (1741), Johann Sebastian Bach (1750), Maximilien Robespierre (1794), Clemens Brentano (1842), Joseph Bonaparte (1844), Frank Loesser (1969), Helen Traubel (1972), Bruno Kreisky (1990), Rosalie Crutchley (1997), William Scranton (2013) & Margot Adler (2014), the Treaty of Berlin ending the First Silesian War between Maria Theresa’s Austria & Prussia’s Frederick the Great (1742), Maximilien Robespierre & 22 others guillotined in Paris (1794), Peru’s independence from Spain (1821), ratification of the 14th Amendment announced by Secretary of State William Seward (1868), Russia’s interior minister Vyacheslav Plehve assassinated (1904), Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia (1914), UN Charter ratified by the US Senate (1945), Nagasaki bombed (1945), Elia Kazan’s film “On the Waterfront” released (1954), LBJ announced an escalation in Vietnam from 75,000 to 150,000 troops (1965) & Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination (2016) on this day.
July 29
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805), Benito Mussolini (1883), William Powell (1892), Dag Hammarskjöld (1905), Melvin Belli (1907), Paul Taylor (1930), Nancy Landon Kassebaum (1932), Peter Schreier (1935), Elizabeth Hanford Dole (1936), Charles Schwab (1937), Peter Jennings (1938), Marilyn Tucker Quayle (1949), Ken Burns (1953), Tim Gunn (1953) & Chang-Rae Lee (1965) were born #OnThisDay. Offa of Mercia (796), Olaf Haraldsson (Óláfr Haraldsson), Olaf II of Norway (1030), Philip I of the Franks (1108), William Wilberforce (1833), Robert Schumann (1856), Vincent Van Gogh (1890), Giovanni ‘John’ Barbirolli (1970), ‘Mama’ Cass Elliot (1974), Herbert Marcuse (1979), Robert Moses (1981), David Niven (1983), Luis Buñuel (1983), Bruno Kreisky (1990), Dorothy Hodgkin (1994), Jerome Robbins [Rabinowitz] (1998), Foday Sanko (2003), Michel Serrault (2007) & Tom Snyder (2007) died on this day. Battle of Stiklestad (1030), Kublai Khan’s emissaries to Japan beheaded (1279), James VI crowned king of Scotland (1567), Antonio Perez & the Princess of Eboli arrested by Philip II of Spain (1579), Spanish Armada defeated off Graveline (1588), Iroquois chiefs shot by Samuel de Champlain at Ticonderoga (1609), Arc de Triomphe inaugurated in Paris (1836), Umberto I of Italy assassinated by Gaetano Bresci (1900), Taft-Kaitsura Agreement (1905), Boy Scouts founded by William Baden-Powell (1907), telegrams between Kaiser Wilhelm II & Tsar Nicholas II (1914), language equality in Belgium (1921), Adolf Hitler became head of the Nazi Party (1921), Beijing & Tianjin occupied by Japanese troops (1937), Olympic National Park (1938), “The Fellowship of the Ring” published by George Allen & Unwin (1954), NASA created (1958), royal wedding of Charles & Diana (1981), Cherry Garcia (1987) & Ahed Tamimi was released from prison after eight months (2018) on this day.
July 30
Giorgio Vasari (1511), Maria Anna ‘Nannerl’ Mozart (1751), Emily Brontë (1818), Helena Blavatsky (1831), Thorstein Veblen (1857), Henry Ford (1863), Robert McCormick (1880), Fatima Jinnah (1893), Gerald Moore (1899), Peter Bogdanovich (1939), Pat Schroeder (1940), Paul Anka (1941), Frances de la Tour (1944), Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947), Anita Hill (1956), Delta Burke (1956), Laurence Fishburne (1961), Lisa Kudrow (1963) & Hillary Swank (1974) were born #OnThisDay. Thomas Wriothesley, 1st Earl of Southampton (1550), 1683 Maria Theresa of Spain, queen of Louis XIV of France (1683), William Penn (1718), Thomas Gray (1771), Otto von Bismarck (1898), Joyce Kilmer (1918), George Szell (1970), Claudette Colbert (1996), Bảo Đại, last Emperor of Vietnam (1997), Max Showalter (2000), Ingmar Bergman (2007) & Herman Cain died on this day. The Battle of Vercellae (101 BCE), Baghdad founded by Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur (762), First Defenestration of Prague (1419), Virginia’s House of Burgesses formed (1619), Baltimore founded (1729), Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s Catherine Palace presented to the Empress Elizabeth & the Russia court (1756), German parliamentary election (1878), mobilization in Russia in response to mobilization in Austria-Hungary (1914), Penguin’s first paperback book published (1935), Russian Politburo’s NKVD Order no. 00447 in the Great Purge (1937), USS Indianapolis torpedoed by a Japanese submarine (1945), Dwight Eisenhower signed “In God We Trust” bill into law (1956), Medicare bill signed into law by LBJ (1965), Richard Nixon released the Watergate tapes (1974), Bruce (Caitlyn) Jenner won the Olympic decathlon (1976), King Hussein dissolved Jordan’s House of Representatives & renounced sovereignty over the West Bank (1988), Sarbanes Oxley Act signed into law by George W. Bush (2002), “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” released (2004), “Slumdog Millionaire” released (2008), US & EU sanctions on Russia expanded prompting Vladimir Putin to expel American diplomats in Moscow (2014) on this day.
July 31
Philippe le Bon, duc de Bourgogne (1396), Albrecht III, duke of Saxony (1443), Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II (1527), Jean Dubuffet (1901), Irving ‘Kup’ Kupcinet (1912), Milton Friedman (1912), Norman Del Mar (1919), Primo Levi (1919), Oriana Fallaci (1929), Ted Cassidy (1932), John Searle (1932), Geraldine Chaplin (1944), William Weld (1945), Wesley Snipes (1962), J.K. Rowling (1965), Emilia Fox (1974) & Harry Potter (1980) were born #OnThisDay. Aurelia Cotta, mother of Julius Caesar (54 BCE), St. Ignatius of Loyola (1556), Bartholome de Casas (1566), Sybilla Schwarz (1638), Denis Diderot (1784), Loui Christophe François Hachette (Librairie Hachette) (1864), Andrew Johnson (1875), Franz Liszt (1886), Jean Jaurès (1914), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1944), Robert A. Taft (1953), Gen. Omar Torrijos (1981), Baudouin I of Belgium (1993), Gore Vidal (2012) & Jeanne Moreau (2017) died on this day. French defeated by the English at the Battle of Cravant in Burgundy (1423), Christopher Columbus reached Trinidad (1498), Puritans (‘Pilgrim Fathers’) left Leiden for England on their way to New England (1620), surrender of the Fronde leaders in Bordeaux (1653), Charles Albert of Bavaria’s invasion of Upper Austria & Bohemia (1741), 19-year-old Marquis de Lafayette made a major-general of the Continental Army by George Washington (1777), Robert Burns poems published in Scotland (1786), Jean Jaurès assassinated (1914), Battle of Passchendaele (3rd Battle of Ypres) (1917), Loi Van Cauwelaert enacted by Belgium’s parliament (1921), general strike in Italy against fascist violence (1922), Aristide Briand elected prime minister of France for the sixth time (1929), Nazi Party won 37.3% in German parliamentary elections (1932), homosexuals banned in Germany by Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart (1940), uprising in Tibet against the PRC (1958), Israel welcomed its millionth immigrant (1960), Thomas Eagleton withdrew as vice-presidential nominee of the Democratic Party (1972), Jimmy Hoffa reported missing (1975), Seychelles independence (1976), Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia (1990), Medininkai Massacre in Lithuania (1991), Fidel Castro succeeded by Raúl Castro as president of Cuba (2006), Michael Phelps became the biggest medal winner in Olympic history (2012), Barack Obama agreed to resupply arms to Israel in the midst of its pursuit of genocide in Gaza (2014), Anthony Scaramucci fired as White House communications director (2017), Alan Alda’s Parkinson’s diagnosis made public (2018), Facebook’s disclosure of Russian-linked network of websites attempting to influence American politics (2018) on this day.
August 1
Roman emperor Claudius (10 BCE), Roman emperor Publius Helvius Pertinax (126), Sabbatai Zevi (1626), Benedetto Marcello (1686), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744), William Clark (1770), Francis Scott Key (1779), Herman Melville (1819), Robert Todd Lincoln (1843), Meir Kahane (1932), Dom DeLuise (1933), Yves Saint Laurent (1936), Alfonse ‘Al’ D’Amato (1937), Giancarlo Giannini (1942), Jerry Garcia (1942), Sam Mendes (1965) & Honeysuckle Weeks (1979) were born #OnThisDay. Mark Antony [Marcus Antonius] (30 BCE), Cosimo de Medici (1464), Anne Stuart, queen of England (1714), Korad Duden (1911), Francis Gary Powers (1977), Pddy Chayefsky (1981), Benson Fong (1987), Svyatoslav Richter (1997) & Corazon Aquino (2009) died on this day. Mark Antony [Marcus Antonius] suicide (30 BCE), Justinian I the sole rule of the Byzantine Empire (527), Treaty of Verdun among Charles the Bald, Louis the German & Lotharius II (843), Doomsday Book presented to William the Conqueror (1086), Christopher Columbus landed on the Paria Peninsula in what is now Venezuela (1498), assassination of Henry III of France by friar Jacques Clément (1589), Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II’s demand that all Austrian Protestants convert to Catholicism (1628), Georg Ludwig king of England as George I (1714), oxygen discovered by Joseph Priestley (1774), surrender of British troops under Gen. Cornwallis at Yorktown (1781), metric system adopted by France (1793), French fleet at Aboukir Bay destroyed by the British Royal Navy under Admiral Horatiao Nelson in the Battle of the Nile (1798), British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 effectively abolished slavery throughout the British empire (1834), Castle Clinton opened in Manhattan (1855), Colorado admitted to the Union as the 38th state (1876), first Michelin Guide published by the brothers Édouard and André Michelin (1900), German declaration of war on Russia (1914), Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica founded by Marcus Garvey (1914), Sukarno arrested by the Dutch colonial regime in Batavia (1933), Olympic Games in Berlin opened by Adolph Hitler (1936), Harlem Riot of 1943 began (1943), Adam Clayton Powell Jr. elected 1st African-American member of Congress from New York (1944), Anne Frank’s last diary entry (1944), Warsaw Uprising (1944), Baoudouin king of Belgium following Leopold III’s abdication (1950), Dahomey (Benin) independent of France (1960), Arthur Ashe first African American tennis play named to the US Davis Cup team (1963), Watergate first reported by Woodward & Bernstein in the Washington Post (1972), Māori Language Act came into force in New Zealand (1987), Rush Limbaugh’s radio show premiered (1988), Hedy Lamarr arrested for shoplifting in Florida (1991), George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy novel “A Game of Thrones” published (1996), Elon Musk upbraided by the Egyptian government for claiming that the pyramids were built by space aliens (2020) on this day.
August 2
Philippe, Duc d’Orléans & regent of France (1715-23) (1674), Pierre Charles l’Enfant (1754), Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (1834), Constantine I of Greece (1868), Myrna Loy (1905), Shimon Peres (1923), Carroll O’Connor (1924), James Baldwin (1924), Peter O’Toole (1932), Benjamin Barber (1939), Isabel Allende (1942), James Fallows (1949) & Lance Ito (1950) were born #OnThisDay. Ælfweard of Wessex (924), Henri III of France (1589), Thomas Gainsborough (1788), Horace Mann (1859), Wild Bill Hickok [James Butler] (1876), Enrico Caruso (1921), Alexander Graham Bell (1922), Warren G. Harding (1923), Paul von Hindenburg (1934), Pietro Mascagni (1945), Fritz Lang (1976), Michel Debré (1996) & William S. Burroughs (1997) died on this day. Macedonian victory in the Battle of Chaeronea (338), Battle of Cannae in the Second Punic War (216), Holy Roman Emperor Charles V concluded the Peace of Passau with the Protestant princes of Germany (1552), Battle of the Nile (1798), Napoléon Bonaparte declared ‘consul for life’ after winning a national referendum in France (1802), Charles X of France’s abdication (1830), Battle of Bad Axe in Wisconsin (1832), Luxembourg invaded by German troops (1914), East Prussia invaded by Russian troops (1914), Benito Mussolini’s peace treaty with Abyssinia (Ethiopia) (1928), Adolf Hitler commander-in-chief of German armed forces (1934), USS Indianapolis survivors found in the Pacific Ocean (1945), Potsdam Conference (1945), “In the Heat of the Night” premiered (1967), Hedy Lamarr arrested for shoplifting in LA (1991), Michael Phelps’ fifth gold medal won at the Rome Olympics (2009), Michael Phelps’ third consecutive gold medal in the London Olympics (2012) on this day.
August 3
Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope (1753), Elisa Otis (1811), Auguste Schmidt (1833), Stanley Baldwin (1867), Haakon VII of Norway (1872), Rupert Brooke (1887), Ernie Pyle (1900), John T. Scopes (1900), Habib Bourguiba (1902), Dolores del Rio (1904), Maggie Kuhn (1905), Leonhard Huizinga (1906), Ernesto Geisel (1907), Irene Tedrow (1907), Lawrence Brown (1907), P.D. [Phyllis Dorothy] James (Baroness James of Holland Park) (1920), Leon Uris (1924), Tony Bennett [Benedetto] (1926), Martin Sheen (1940), Martha Stewart (1941), Jack Straw (1946), Tom Brady (1977), Ryan Lochte (1984) & Charlotte Casiraghi (1986) was born #OnThisDay. Bernardino de Mendoza (1604), Francesco Borromini (1667), Giovanni Battista Martini (1784), Richard Arkwright (1792), Sir Roger Casement (1916), Joseph Conrad (1924), Thorstein Veblen (1929), Colette [Sidonie-Gabrielle], Flannery O’Connor (1964), CBS broadcast footage of US Marines burning huts in the village of Cam Na in Vietnam (1965), Ida Lupino (1995), Henri Cartier-Bresson (2004), Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (2006), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (2008) & Robert Hardy (2017) died on this day. Vikings defeated by Frankish forces at the Battle of Saucourt-en-Vimeu (881), Christopher Columbus & the Santa María, Pinta & Niña sailed to ‘the Indies’ from Palos de la Frontera (1492), Teatro alla Scala opened in Milan (1778), Battle of the Nile (1798), Gioachino Rossini’s last opera “Guillaume Tell” premiered at the Salle Le Peletier in Paris (1829), Belgium invaded by Germany (1914), Germany & France declared war on each other (1914), British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey declared, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time” (1914), Sir Roger Casement hanged (1916), Calvin Coolidge succeeded Warren G. Harding as president (1923), Adolf Hitler declared himself ‘Führer’ (1934), Jesse Owens won the 100 meter race in front of Adolf Hitler at the Berlin Olympics (1936), Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of being a Soviet spy (1948), Niger’s independence from France (1960), “The Macarena” reached the top of the pop music charts (1996), “The Princess Diaries” with Anne Hathaway (2001), Juan Carlos announced his intention to leave Spain & go into exile (2020) on this day.
August 4
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792), Louis Vuitton (1821), Walter Pater (1839), Knut Hamsun (1859), Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother) (1900), Louis Armstrong (1901), Raoul Wallenberg (1912), Helen Thomas (1920), Sheldon Adelson (1933), Jonas Savimbi (1934), David Lange (1942), Kristoffer Tabori [Siegel] (1952), Alberto Gonzales (1955), Barack Obama (1961), Lori Lightfoot (1962), Daniel Dae Kim (1968) & Meghan Markle (1981) were born #OnThisDay. Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester (1265), Hugh le Despencer, 1st Baron Despencer (1265), Wenceslaus III of Bohemia, king of Hungary (1306), William Cecil, first Baron Burghley (1598), Hans Christian Andersen (1875), Siegfried Wagner (1930) & Vladimir Jabotinsky (1940) died on this day. Frederick the Great’s flight to England (1730), feudalism abolished in France by the new National Assembly (1789), Treaty of Sistova ending the Habsburg/ Ottoman wars (1791), Lizzie Borden’s father & stepmother murdered with an axe (1892), armed forces left Tianjin for Beijing to put down the Boxer Rebellion (1900), German war crimes in the Belgian village of Battice (1914), Germany declared war on Belgium & Britain declared war on Germany (1914), US neutrality declared (1914), Rodin Museum opened in Paris in the Hôtel Biron (1919), Jesse Owens won his second gold medal at the Berlin Olympics (1936), Anne Frank arrested in Amsterdam by the German Security Police (Grüne Polizei) (1944), Nelson Mandela captured by South African police (1962), Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman & James Chaney’s bodies found (1964), Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of 50,000 Asians of Indian descent from Uganda (1972), Bettino Craxi sworn in as prime minister of Italy (1983), Prince’s “Purple Rain” #1 on the charts (1984), Upper Volta became Burkina Faso (1984), California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage overturned by Judge Vaughn Walker in the case Perry v. Schwarzenegger (2010), Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame won a third term with 98.63% of the vote (2017) & nine killed in a mass shooting in Dayton (2019) on this day.
August 5
Guillaume Dufay (1397), Charles d’Albert, duc de Luynes, favorite of Louis XIII (1578), Ambroise Thomas (1811), Ivar Aasen (1813), Guy de Maupassant (1850), Erich Kleiber (1890), Richard Kleindienst (1923), Neil Armstrong (1930), Alan Howard (1937), Janet Dubois (1945), Loni Anderson (1945), Hun Sen (1952), Maureen McCormick (1956) & Marine Le Pen (1968) were born #OnThisDay. Frederick Lord North, Tory prime minister to George III (1792), Friedrich Engels (1895), Victoria, queen of Prussia & empress of Germany (1901), Carmen Miranda (1955), Marilyn Monroe (1962), Richard Burton (1984), Robert Muldoon (1992), Todor Zjivkov (1998), Alec Guiness (2000), Charlotte Rae (2018) Toni Morrison (2019) & Brazilian indigenous leader Aritana Yawalapiti (2020) died on this day. Roman capture of Bar Kochba’s last outpost Betar (135), Vikings defeated by Edward & Æþelræd of Mercia & Wessex at the Battle of Tettenhall (910), Henry I crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey (1100), William Wallace executed in London (1305), Ottoman Turks decisively defeated by a Habsburg army under Eugene of Savoy at the Battle of Petrovaradin/Peterwardein (1716), public announcement of the first partition of Poland (1772), first transatlantic telegraph cable completed (1858), Karl IV of Sweden & Norway crowned king of Norway in Trondheim (1860), flogging abolished by the US Army (1861), income tax bill signed into law by Abraham Lincoln (1861), Battle of Mobile Bay (1864), first meeting of Russian & Japanese representatives chez Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay (1905), Battle of Liège between Belgian forces & German troops led by Erich Ludendorff (1914), Montenegro declared war on Austria-Hungary (1914), first “Little Orphan Annie” comic strip published in the New York Daily News (1924), Plaid Cymru formed (1925), Jesse Owens won his third gold medal at the Berlin Olympics (1936), Munich Pact cancelled by the British government (1942), 348 Jews freed from a German forced labor camp in Warsaw by Polish insurgents (1944), Burkina Faso independent from France (1960), Marilyn Monroe found dead (1962), Nelson Mandela arrested (1962), Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed by the US, UK & USSR (1963), Martin Luther King, Jr. stoned during the Chicago march (1966), Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 air traffic controllers (1981), “Risky Business” with Tom Cruise released (1983), Rodney King riots in Los Angeles (1992), Barack Obama signed the Iron Dome bill into law providing $225 million in additional funding for Israel’s defense (2014), India’s prime minister Narendra Modi changed the status of Kashmir from a state to a union territory (2019), Narendra Modi laid the cornerstone for a new Hindu temple at Ayodhya Ram to replace a Muslim mosque (2020) on this day.
August 6
Louise de La Vallière, mistress of Louis XIV (1644), Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII (1697), Daniel O’Connell (1775), Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809), Edith Carrow Roosevelt (1861), Alexander Fleming (1881), Louella Parsons (1881), Lucille Ball (1911), Robert Mitchum (1917), Andy Warhol (1928), Roh Moo-hyun (1946), Jim McGreevey (1957), Michelle Yeoh (1962), M. Night Shyamalan (1970), Geri Halliwell Horner (‘Ginger Spice’) (1972), Leslie Odom, Jr. (1981) & Jon Benet Ramsey (1990) were born #OnThisDay. Anne Hathaway (1623), Ben Jonson (1637), Diego Velázquez (1660), Wilhelm Liebknecht (1900), Eduard Hanslick (1904), Leon Bismarck ‘Bix Beiderbecke (1931), Warner Oland (1938), Hiram Johnson (1945), Preston Sturges (1959), Cedric Hardwicke (1964), Teodor Adorno (1969), Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar (1973), Pope Paul VI (1978), Harry Reasoner (1991), Dorothy Tutin (2001), Marvin Hamlisch (2012) & Ruggiero Ricci (2012) died on this day. Bogotá (Colombia) founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (1538), Brandenburg Gate opened (1791), Holy Roman Empire abolished by Napoleon (1806), Bolivia’s independence from Peru (1825), France defeated by Prussia at the Battle of Spicheren (1870), Madagascar annexed by France (1896), Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia (1914), Serbia declared war on Germany (1914), atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (1945), LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act into law (1965), Jon Stewart’s last “Daily Show” (2015) & Alex Jones de-platformed by Facebook, Apple, YouTube & Spotify (2018) on this day.
August 7
Elizabeth Báthory (1560), Georg Stiernhielm (1598), Nathanael Greene (1742), Mata Hari [Margaretha Geertruida Zelle] (1876), François Darlan (1881), Billie Burke [Mary William Ethelbert Appleton] (1884), Louis Leakey (1903), Ralph Bunche (1904), Edwin Edwards (1927), Edward Hardwicke (1932), Jean-Luc Dehaene (1940), Garrison Keillor (1942), David Duchovny (1960), & Charlize Theron (1975) were born #OnThisDay. Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV (1106), Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (1817), Caroline of Brunswick, queen of England (1821), Joseph Marie Jacquard (1834), Rabindranath Tagore (1941), Oliver Hardy (1957), Salvatore Ferragamo (1960), Peter Jennings (2005) & Hugh Carey (2011) died on this day. Otto I crowned king (936), first organized witch trials in Europe begin in the Valais (later a canton of Switzerland) (1428), Gen. Cao Qin’s coup against the Tianshun emperor of Ming China (1461), Battle of Guinegate between Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I & France’s Louis XI (1479), Henry Tudor’s army landed at Milford Haven in Wales (1485), Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” performed for James I in the Great Hall at Hampton Court (1606), astronomer Johannes Kepler’s mother arrested for witchcraft (1620), Louis XIII defeated his mother Marie de Medici’s army at the Battle of Ponts-the-Ce in Poitou (1615), slave rebellion in Curaçao (1750), Napoléon reinstated slavery in Haïti (1802) Spanish army in Colombia defeated by Simón Bolívar at the Battle of Boyacá (1819), Theodore Roosevelt nominated for president by the Progressive (‘Bull Moose’) Party (1912), Russian invasion of East Prussia (1914), Battle of Gallipoli (1915), Assyrian Martyrs Day in Iraq (1933), government ban on James Joyce’s “Ulysses” strudk down by the US Court of Appeals (1934), Alsace Lorraine annexed by Nazi Germany (1940), Thor Heyerdahl & the crew of the Kon-Tiki reached a reef in the Tuamotu Islands after 101 days crossing the Pacific Ocean (1947), Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) independence from France (1960), Gulf of Tonkin resolution overwhelmingly passed by Congress (1964), Singapore’s separation agreement with Malaysia after two years of political union (1965), Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center (1974), NASA’s Viking 2 orbiting Mars (1976), Operation Desert Shield ordered by George H.W. Bush to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait (1990), “Crazy Rich Asians” premiere in LA (2018), China banned “Christopher Robin” the Winnie the Pooh movie (2018) on this day.
August 8
Godfrey Kneller (1646), Charles Bulfinch (1763), Cecile Chaminade (1857), Emiliano Zapata (1879), Dino De Laurentiis (1919), Esther Williams (1921), Richard Anderson (1926), Josef Suk (1929), Dustin Hoffman (1937), Connie Stevens [Concetta Ingoglia] (1938), Randy Shilts (1951), Mohamed Morsi (1951), Ron Klain (1961), Giuseppe Conte (1964), Michael Urie (1980), Roger Federer (1981), Beatrice, Princess of York (1988) & Shawn Mendes (1998) were born #OnThisDay. George Canning (1827), Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1879), Jacob Burckhardt (1897), Louise Brooks (1985), Fay Wray (2004), Barbara Bel Geddes (2005), Patricia Neal (2010), Regina Resnik (2013), Glen Campbell (2017) & Barbara Cook (2017) died on this day. Henry II of France declared war on England (1549), Louis XVI ordered France’s Estates-General to convene (1788), Brigham Young chosen to succeed Joseph Smith as head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (1844), Hundred Days’ Offensive launched by the Allies in World War I with the Battle of Amiens (1918), Treaty of Rawalpindi recognizing Afghanistan’s independence (1919), United Nations Charter signed by Harry Truman (1945), Treaty of London signed laying down procedures for the Nuremberg trials (1945), USSR declared war on Japan & invaded Manchuria (1945) Bhutan’s independence (1949), authoritarian Syngman Rhee elected president of the Republic of Korea (1952), Richard Nixon announced his intention to resign (1974), coup d’état in Guatemala against dictator Efraín Rios Montt (1983) & Sonia Sotomayor was sworn in as associate justice of the US Supreme Court (2009) on this day.
August 9
Reynaldo Hahn (1874), Erich Hückel (1896), Leonide Massine (1896), Jean Piaget (1896), Zino Francescatti (1902), Robert van Gulik (1910), Herman Talmadge (1913), Ferenc Fricsay (1914), Tove Jansson (1914), Leonid Kuchma (1938), Chris Haney (1950), Melanie Griffith (1957), Michael Kors (1959), Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (1962), Whitney Houston (1963), Hoda Kotb (1964), Chris Cuomo (1970) & Audrey Tautou (1976) were born #OnThisDay. Roman Emperor Trajan (117), Hieronymus Bosch (1516), Ruggero Leoncavallo (1919), Hermann Hesse (1962), Joe Orton (1967), Sharon Tate (1969), Dmitri Shostakovich (1975), Jerry Garcia (1995), Bernie Mac (2008) & Michael Brown (2014) died on this day. Goths defeated a Roman army under Emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianople (378), khanate of Bulgaria founded on the Danube (681), construction of the Tower of Pisa commenced (1173), Napoleon Bonaparte set sail for exile on St. Helena (1815), Louis-Philippe formally accepted the crown of France following the abdication of Charles X (1830), Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” published (1854), Hector Berlioz’ opera “Béatrice et Bénédict” premiered in Baden-Baden (1862), Edward VII crowned king of England (1902), Nagasaki incinerated by an atomic bomb (1945), Singapore’s separation from the Federation of Malaysia (1965), Charles Manson’s crime family’s murder of five people (1969), Gerald Ford sworn in as president following Richard Nixon’s resignation (1974), Belgium’s constitution revised (1980), Albert II crowned king of Belgium (1993) & Michael Brown was killed by the police in Ferguson (2014) on this day.
August 10
Philipp Nicolai (1566), William Howe, 5th Viscount Howe (1729), Charles Napier (1782), Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810), Henri Nestlé (1814), Alexander Glazunov (1865), Herbert Hoover (1874), John Joseph ‘Jack’ Haley (1898), Marie-Claire Alain (1926), Eddie Fisher (1928), Jimmy Dean (1928), Anwar Ibrahim (1947), Rosanna Arquette (1959), Antonio Banderas (1960), Andrew Sullivan (1963) & Kylie Jenner (1997) were born #OnThisDay. Al-Mansur, regent of Cordoba (1002), Guillaume Cardinal Dubois (1723), Rin Tin Tin (1932), Berthold Schenk von Stauffenberg (1944), Estes Kefauver (1963), Isaac Hayes (2008) & Eydie Gormé [Edithe Gormezano] (2013) died on this day. Treaty of Verdun (843), Battle of Lechfeld (955), Diego Diaz first European to see Madagascar (1500), sinking of the Swedish warship Vasa in Stockholm (1628), Peace of Vásvár between the Habsburg & Ottoman empires (1664), Royal Observatory in Greenwich foundation stones laid by Charles II & John Flamsteed (1675), Charles III crowned king of Spain (1759), news of the Declaration of Independence reached London (1776), “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” (A Little Night Music) composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1787), opening of the Musée du Louvre in Paris (1793), Missouri admitted as the 24th state (1821), incorporation of Chicago (1833), Battle of the Yellow Sea (1904), House of Lords’ power reduced by the Parliament Act (1911), 2nd Balkan War ended with the Treaty of Bucharest (1913), Treaty of Sèvres between the Allies & Turkey (1920), British Mandate Palestine recognized by the Turkish government (1920), FDR stricken with what was believed to be polio but could have been Guillain–Barré syndrome (1921), “Sunset Boulevard” premiered at Radio City Music Hall (1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” premiered in LA (1960), Ruth Bader Ginsburg sworn in as a US Supreme Court Justice (1993), anti-government protests in Bucharest (2018) & Jeffrey Epstein found dead of ‘suicide’ in his jail cell (2019) on this day.
August 11
Holy Roman Emperor Henry V (1081), Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778), Alex Haley (1921), Claus von Bülow (1926), Raymond Leppard (1927), Jerry Falwell, Sr. (1933), Allegra Kent [Iris Cohen] (1937), Anna Massey (1937), Elizabeth Holtzman (1941), Pervez Musharraf (1943), Steve Wozniak (1950), Joe Rogan (1967) & Chris Hemsworth (1983) were born #OnThisDay. Hans Memling (1494), Johann Tetzel (1519), Hamnet Shakespeare (1596), Ottavio Piccolomini (1656), Thaddeus Stevens (1868), Andrew Carnegie (1919), Edith Wharton (1937), Jean Bugatti (1939), Jackson Pollock (1956), Alfred A. Knopf (1984), Clara Peller (1987), Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1988), Peter Cushing (1994), Diana Mitford (2003), Eunice Shriver (2009), Dan Rostenkowski (2010), Robin Williams (2014) & V.S. Naipaul (2018) died on this day. Penang established as a British colony by Captain Francis Light in Malaysia (1786), Francis II first emperor of Austria (1804), Cambodia made a French protectorate (1863), Herrero crushed by German Gen. Lothar von Trotta at the Battle of Waterberg in German Southwest Africa (1904), Weimar Republic’s constitution approved in Germany (1919), Chad’s independence from France (1960), Meir Kahane renounced his US citizenship to retain his seat in the Israeli Knesset (1988), Voyager 2’s discovery of two partial rings of Neptune (1989), Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate (2020) & Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya fled persecution by Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko (2020) on this day.
August 12
Christian III of Denmark (1503), Tsar Alexei I of Russia (1629), Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber (1644), George IV (1762), Robert Southey (1774), Edith Hamilton (1867), Cecil B. DeMille (1881), Alexei Nikolaevich, last tsarevich of Russia (1904), Jane Wyatt (1910), Cantinflas [Mario Moreno] (1911), Dale Bumpers (1925), George Soros (1930), John Poindexter (1936), George Hamilton (1939), Peter Hofmann (1944), Willie Horton (1951), Chen Kaige (1952), François Hollande (1954), Miss Cleo [Youree Dell Harris] (1962), Pete Sampras (1971) & Casey Affleck (1975) were born #OnThisDay. Cleopatra VII Philopator (30 BCE), Ming emperor Yongle (1424), Giovanni Gabrieli (1612), Jacopo Peri (1633), Philippe de Champaigne (1674), William Blake (1827), Leoš Janáček (1928), Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. (1944), Thomas Mann (1955), Ian Fleming (1964), Henry Fonda (1982), John Cage (1992), Merv Griffin (2007) & Lauren Bacall (2014) died on this day. King Philip’s War ended (1676), Battle of Mohacs (1687), Battle of Kunersdorf (1759), Chicago incorporated (1833), Isaac Singer patented the sewing machine (1851), armistice ending the Spanish–American War (1898), France & Britain declared war on Austria-Hungary (1914), Battle of Halen in Belgium (1914), Battle of Amiens (1918), Battle of Warsaw (1920), “The Wizard of Oz” movie premieres in Oconomowoc (Wisconsin) (1939), New Jersey Governor James McGreevey came out publicly as gay (2004), James ‘Whitey’ Bolger found guilty of racketeering (2013), London archaeologists discover a mass grave of 30 bodies from the 1665 plague (2015), “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville (2017) on this day.
August 13
William Caxton (1422), Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, queen consort of William IV (1792), Annie Oakley [Phoebe Ann Moses] (1860), Giovanni Agnelli (1866), Karl Liebknecht (1871), Bert Lahr [Irving Lahrheim] (1895), Makarios III [Michail Moeskos] (1913), Fidel Castro (1926), Pat Harrington, Jr. (1929), Don Ho (1930), Roy Evans (1931), Jocelyn Elders (1993), Madhur Jaffrey (1933), Janet Yellen (1946), Kathleen Battle (1948), Dan Fogelberg (1951), Danny Bonaduce (1959), Lady Bunny [Jon Ingle] (1962), Sarah Huckabee Sanders (1982) & Ibram X. Kendi (1982) were born #OnThisDay. Johann Elias Schlegel (1749), Eugène Delacroix (1863), John Everett Millais (1896), Collis P. Huntington (1900), Florence Nightingale (1910), Jules Massenet (1912), H.G. Wells (1946), Manfred Wörner (1994), Mickey Mantle (1995), David Lange (2005), Brooke Astor (2007), Helen Gurley Brown (2012) & Frans Brüggen died on this day. Spanish conquistadors under Hernán Cortés captured Aztec Emperor Cuauhtémoc in Tenochtitlan bringing about the end of the Aztec Empire (1521), Spanish theologian & physician Michael Servetus arrested as a heretic in Geneva (1553), Cardinal Richelieu appointed Chief Minister of France by Louis XIII (1624), Albrecht von Wallenstein dismissed as supreme commander of imperial troops by Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (1630), Martian south polar cap discovered by Christiaan Huygens (1642), John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough combined British, German and Dutch army to victory over the French at the Battle of Blenheim (Second Battle of Höchstädt) (1704), the Bayreuth Festspielhaus opened with the first complete performance of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle (1876), US forces under Admiral George Dewey captured Manila during Spanish–American War (1898), Edward VII & Franz Josef met at Ischl (1908), revolt in Catalonia (1917) Mustafa Kemal Atatürk Pasja elected president by the Turkish National Congress (1923), the Battle of Shanghai in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937), Hermann Goering’s ‘Adlertag’ offensive launched in the Battle of Britain (1940), Central African Republic & Chad proclaimed their independence from France (1960), Berlin Wall construction initiated in East Berlin (1961), last broadcast of “The Waltons” on CBS-TV (1981), Swedish prosecutors dropped allegations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange of sexual molestation and coercion (2015), Grace Mugabe, wife of the president of Zimbabwe, accused of assault in Johannesburg, South Africa (2018) & Ugandan pop singer Bobi Wine arrested by the Ugandan army at a campaign rally in Arua & later allegedly tortured (2020) on this day.
August 14
Margaret Pole, 8th Countess of Salisbury (1473), Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia (1688), Louise Élisabeth of France, twin daughter of Louis XV (1727), Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840), John ‘Doc’ Holliday (1851), John Galsworthy (1867), John Ringling North (1903), Georges Prêtre (1924), Russell Baker (1925), Lina Wertmüller [Arcangela Braueich] (1928), Steve Martin (1945), Danielle Steel (1947), Gary Larson (1950), Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson (1959) & Halle Berry (1966) were born #OnThisDay. David Farragut (1870), Charles Crocker (1888), William Randolph Hearst (1951), Bertolt Brecht (1956), Leonard Woolf (1969), Karl Böhm (1981), John Boynton Priestley (1984), Gale Songergaard (1985), Enzo Ferrari (1988), John Sirica (1992), Julian Bream (2020) & James R. Thmpson (2020) died on this day. Duncan I of Scotland killed in battle against his first cousin and rival Macbeth (1040), Christopher Columbus landed at the mouth of the Orinoco River in what is now Venezuela (1498), Christopher Marlowe’s play “Tamburlaine the Great” published (1590), Prussian army occupied Saksen, beginning 2nd Silesian War (1743), Prussian victory over Russia at Zorndorf (1758), Russian settlement in Alaska (1784), Henry David Thoreau jailed for refusing to pay taxes (1846), Queen Victoria received Zulu chief Cetewayo (1882), China declared war on Germany & Austria (1917), Tannu Tuva (later Tuvinian People’s Republic) established as a completely independent country (supported by Russia) (1921), FDR signed the Social Security Act into law (1935), China declared war on Japan (1937), V-J Day: Japan’s surrender (1945), Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” hit #1 (1965), Pakistani military coup against Bangladeshi President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1975) Illich Ramirez Sanchez (‘Carlos the Jackal’) captured in Khartoum (1994) on this day.
August 15
Napoleone Buonaparte (Napoléon Bonaparte) (1769), Jacques Ibert (1890), Lillian Carter (1898), Julia Child (1912), Wendy Hiller (1912), Oscar Romero (1917), Lukas Foss [Fuchs] (1922), Phyllis Schlafly (1924), Oscar Peterson (1925), Maxine Waters (1938), Stephen Breyer (1938), Linda Ellerbee (1944), Melinda Gates (1964), Debra Messing (1968), Ben Affleck (1972), Abiy Ahmed (1976) & Jennifer Lawrence (1990) were born #OnThisDay. Frankish commander Roland (778), Macbeth, king of Scots (1057)Philippa of Hainault, queen consort of Edward III of England (1369), Marin Marais (1728), Will Rogers (1935), Artur Schnabel (1951), René Magritte (1967), Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1975), Licia Albanese (2014) & Julian Bond (2015) died on this day. Roland, commander of the rearguard of Charlemagne’s army, defeated by the Basques at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (778), Scotland’s king Macbeth slain in battle by Malcolm Canmore — the son of King Duncan (1057), Empire of Trebizond surrendered to forces of Sultan Mehmet II (1461), Louis XI crowned King of France at Reims cathedral (1461), Society of Jesus (Jesuits) formed by Ignatius Loyola (1534), Asunción founded in Paraguay (1537), Mary, Queen of Scots arrived in France at the age of six (1548), the Mayflower set sail from Southampton, England, with 102 Puritans (1620), Cardinal de Rohan arrested on the orders of Louis XVI (1785), Franz Joseph Haydn departed England (1795), freed American slaves established Liberia on the West African coast through the American Colonization Society (ACS) (1824), Tivoli Gardens amusement park opened in Copenhagen (1843), Anglo-Satsuma War between the British & the Satsuma daimyo in Japan (1863), Representation of the People Act enacted by the British parliament (1867), Transcontinental Railway completed in Colorado (1870), 4th & last British government of William Gladstone formed (1892), Dowager Empress Cixi & the imperial court forced to flee the Forbidden City in the midst of the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900), Russian troops advanced further into Manchuria (1900), Edward VII met with Wilhelm II to discuss the escalating rivalry between the British & German naval forces (1906), Taliesin murders in Frank Lloyd Wright’s house (1914), Polish troops under Józef Piłsudski defeated Soviet troops at the Battle of Warsaw (Miracle on the Vistula) (1920), Eamon de Valera arrested in Irish Free State (1923), Spitsbergen annexed by Norway (1925), “The Wizard of Oz” directed by Victor Fleming premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood (1939), Chartres liberated by the 7th US armored division (1944), Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender in World War II (1945), India’s independence (1947), Republic of Korea (South Korea) proclaimed (National Day) (1948), Sukarno proclaimed the unitary Republic of Indonesia & became its first president (1950), Alfredo Stroessner named himself president of Paraguay (1954), the Woodstock Festival opened in Bethel on Max Yasgur’s Dairy Farm (1969), South Korean President Park Chung-Hee escaped an assassination attempt (1974), Bangladesh military coup under Khondakar Moustaque Ahmed (1975), the Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland (the worst terrorist incident of The Troubles) killed 29 people & injured 220 (1998) & Kabul fell to the Taliban, completing its takeover of Afghanistan (2021) this day.
August 15
Hongxi [Zhu Gaochi], fourth emperor of the Ming dynasty (1378), Agostino Carracci (1557), Jean de La Bruyère, Louis, Duke of Burgundy, grandson of Louis XIV (1682), Heinrich August Marschner (1795), T. E. Lawrence [Lawrence of Arabia] (1888), Otto Messmer, American cartoonist (Felix the Cat) (1892), George Meany (1894), Robert Ringling (1897), Menachem Begin (1913), Eydie Gormé [Edithe Gormezano] (1928), Robert Culp (1930), Forrest E. Mars Jr. (1931), Julie Newmar (1933), Suzanne Farrell (1945), Lesley Ann Warren (1946), Carol Moseley-Braun (1947), Gianna Rolandi (1952), James Taylor (1953), Kathie Lee Gifford (1953), James Cameron (1954),Angela Bassett (1958), Madonna [Ciccone] (1958), Timothy Hutton (1960) & Steve Carell (1962) were born #OnThisDay. Wenceslaus, King of the Romans & King of Bohemia (1419), Andrew Marvell (1678), Robert Bunsen (1899), Babe Ruth (1948), Margaret Mitchell (1949), Bela Lugosi (1956), Wanda Landowska (1959), Elvis Presley (1977), John Diefenbaker (1979), Shamu the Whale (1991), John Cameron Swayze (1995), Abu Nidal (2002), Idi Amin (2003), Alfredo Stroessner (2006), William Windom (20122), John McLaughlin (2016), Arethra Franklin (2018) & Peter Fonda (2019) died on this day. Battle of the Spurs at Guinegate (1513), Peterloo Massacre in Manchester (1819), Queen Victoria telegraphed US President James Buchanan for 1st time by transatlantic telegraph cable (1858), Battle of Acosta Ñu (1869), Richard Wagner’s opera “Siegfried” premiered in Bayreuth (1876), Puyi the puppet emperor of Manchukuo captured by Soviet troops (1945), Sen. William Fulbright challenged LBJ’s interpretation of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1967) & Moroccan King Hassan II’s B727 was shot during a failed coup attempt by General Mohamed Oufkir failed (1972) on this day.
August 16
Hongxi [Zhu Gaochi], fourth emperor of the Ming dynasty (1378), Agostino Carracci (1557), Jean de La Bruyère, Louis, Duke of Burgundy, grandson of Louis XIV (1682), Heinrich August Marschner (1795), T. E. Lawrence [Lawrence of Arabia] (1888), Otto Messmer, American cartoonist (Felix the Cat) (1892), George Meany (1894), Robert Ringling (1897), Menachem Begin (1913), Eydie Gormé [Edithe Gormezano] (1928), Robert Culp (1930), Forrest E. Mars Jr. (1931), Julie Newmar (1933), Suzanne Farrell (1945), Lesley Ann Warren (1946), Carol Moseley-Braun (1947), Gianna Rolandi (1952), James Taylor (1953), Kathie Lee Gifford (1953), James Cameron (1954), Angela Bassett (1958), Madonna [Ciccone] (1958), Timothy Hutton (1960) & Steve Carell (1962) were born #OnThisDay. Wenceslaus, King of the Romans & King of Bohemia (1419), Andrew Marvell (1678), Robert Bunsen (1899), Babe Ruth (1948), Margaret Mitchell (1949), Bela Lugosi (1956), Wanda Landowska (1959), Elvis Presley (1977), John Diefenbaker (1979), Shamu the Whale (1991), John Cameron Swayze (1995), Abu Nidal (2002), Idi Amin (2003), Alfredo Stroessner (2006), William Windom (20122), John McLaughlin (2016), Arethra Franklin (2018) & Peter Fonda (2019) died on this day. Battle of the Spurs at Guinegate (1513), Peterloo Massacre in Manchester (1819), Queen Victoria telegraphed US President James Buchanan for 1st time by transatlantic telegraph cable (1858), Battle of Acosta Ñu (1869), Richard Wagner’s opera “Siegfried” premiered in Bayreuth (1876), Grand Central Station construction began (1904), Puyi the puppet emperor of Manchukuo captured by Soviet troops (1945), & Morocco King Hassan II’s B727 was shot during failed coup Sen. William Fulbright challenged LBJ’s interpretation of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1967), attempted coup by General Mohamed Oufkir against Hassan II of Morocco failed (1972) on this day.
August 17
Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, son of King Edward IV, one of the princes in the tower who disappeared (1473), Jan Sobieski of Poland (1629), Davy Crockett (1786), Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Duchess of Kent & mother of Queen Victoria (1786), Samuel Goldwyn Shmuel Gelbfisz, Marcus Garvey (1887), Harry Hopkins (1890), Mae West (1893), Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. (1914), Maureen O’Hara (1920), Geoffrey Elton (1921), Jiang Zemin (1926), Francis Gary Powers (1929), Ted Hughes (1930), V.S. Naipaul (1932), Ibrahim Babanginda (1941), Robert De Niro (1943), Larry Ellison (1944), David Koresh (1959) & Sean Penn (1960) were born #OnThisDay. Frederick the Great, King of Prussia (1786), José de San Martín (1850), Ole Bull (1880), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1969), Ira Gershwin (1983), Rudolf Hess (1987), Franklin D. Rosevelt, Jr. (1988), Mohammad Zia Ul-Haq (1988), Pearl Bailey (1990), Gérard Souzay (2004) & Francesco Cossiga (2010) died on this day. Charles IX of France declared an adult at 13 (1563), Peace of Bergerac guaranteed political rights for Huguenots in France (1577), François, duc d’Alençon traveled to England to visit Elizabeth Tudor (1579) France’s Superintendent of Finances Nicolas Fouquet invited Louis XIV to Vaux-le-Vicomte for dinner (1661), Dakota uprising in Minnesota (1862), Richard Wagner’s opera “Götterdämmerung” premiered in Bayreuth (1876) Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared Indonesia (Dutch East Indies) independent from the Netherlands (1945), Korea divided into North and South Korea along the 38th parallel (1945), George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” published (1946), Indonesia independent from Netherlands (1950), East German shot dead by guards at the Berlin Wall (1962), last day of the Woodstock Music Festival (1969), & Bill Clinton admitted under oath to a relationship with Monica Lewinsky (1998) on this day.
August 18
Antonio Salieri (1750), Meriwether Lewis (1774), John Russell (1792), Franz Josef of Austria (1830), Marshall Field (1834), Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (1900), [Francis] Max Factor (1904), Edgar Faure (1908), Casper Weinberger (1917), Shelley Winters (1920), Mohammad Zia Ul-Haq (1924), Rosalynn Smith Carter (1927), Marge Schott (1928), Roman Polanski (1933), Roberto Clemente (1934), Robert Redford (1936), Patrick Swayze (1952), Edward Norton (1969) & Parker McKenna Posey (1995) were born #OnThisDay. Genghis Khan [Temüjin Borjigin] (1227), Ming emperor Wanli (1620), William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire (1707), Holy Roman Emperor Francis I (1765), Honoré de Balzac (1850), Walter Chrysler (1940), Nikolaus Pevsner (1983), Frederick Ashton (1988), BF Skinner (1990), Gottlob Frick (1994), Hiram Fong (2004), Michael Deaver (2007), Kim Dae Jung (2009), Robert Novak (2009) & Kofi Annan (2018) died on this day. Florence announced a competition to design the dome of the cathedral, ultimately won by Filippo Brunelleschi (1418), Russian Tsar Peter the Great arrives in Zaandam (1698), Curaçao slave revolt crushed by the militia (1795), Prussia defeated France at the Battle of Gravelotte-St. Privat, resulting in 32,000 casualties (1870), French troops under general Dubail occupy Sarrebourg (1914), 19th Amendment ratified by one vote in Tennessee (1920), Sukarno elected 1st President of Indonesia by the Preparatory Committee for Indonesian Independence (PPKI) (1945), Korean axe murder incident in the DMZ (1976), South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko is arrested at a roadblock (1977), coup d’état launched against Boris Gorbachev (1991), Steve Bannon fired as White House strategist by Donald Trump (2017), Iceland held a funeral for the first glacier lost to climate change at site of Okjökull glacier (2019), California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared state of emergency as 27 fires burned across the state amid a continuing heat wave (2020) & Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta resigned amid a military coup condemned by the UN Security Council (2020) on this day.
August 19
Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James VI & I of Scotland & England, Electress of the Palatinate & ‘Winter Queen’ of Bohemia (1596), Samuel Richardson (1689), Edward John Dent (1790), Gustave Caillebotte (1848), Bernard Baruch (1870), Orville Wright (1871), Georges Enesco (1881), Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel (1883), Arthur Waley (1889), Ogden Nash (1902), Malcolm Forbes (1919), Renée Richards [Richard Raskind] (1934), Diana Muldaur (1938), Fred Thompson (1942), [William Jefferson] Bill Clinton (1946), Tipper Gore (1948), Nanni Moretti (1953), Mary Matalin (1953), Adam Arkin (1956), Matthew Perry (1969) & Mette-Marit, crown princess of Norway (1973) were born #OnThisDay. Augustus Caesar [Gaius Octavius] (14 CE), Andrea Palladio [Andrea di Pietro della Gondola] (1580), Blaise Pascal (1662), Balthasar Neumann (1753), 1936 Federico Garcia Lorca (1936), Alcide de Gasperi (1954), Ima Hogg (1975), Groucho Marx [Julius] (1977), Otto Frank (1980), Hermione Badeley (1986), Linus Pauling (1994), Don Hewitt (2009), José Sarria (2013) & Dick Gregory (2017) died on this day. Octavian (Augustus) compelled the Roman Senate to elect him consul (43 BCE), Richard II of England surrendered to his cousin Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) (1399), Mary, Queen of Scots arrived in Leith, Scotland to assume the throne after spending 13 years in France (1561), at the Battle of Slankamen (the bloodiest battle of the century), Austrian Hapsburg forces defeated Ottoman army, killing Grand Vizer Köprülü Fazıl Mustafa Pasha (1691), Bonnie Prince Charlie raised his standard at Glenfinnan, igniting the second Jacobite rebellion in Scotland (1745), at the Battle at Gross Jagerndorf, the Russian army defeated Prussia (1757), Gustav III seized effective control of the Swedish government & restored absolute monarchy through a royal coup d’état (1772), Tsar Nicholas II installed Russia’s Imperial Duma without legislative powers (1905), Operation Barbarossa: German invasion of Russia (1941), Mohammad Mosaddegh overthrown in a coup d’état in Iran (1953), Republicans nominated Gerald Ford for president at the convention in Kansas City (1976), Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan for president at the convention in Dallas (1984), coup d’état against Mikhail Gorbachev initiated by Communist Party reactionaries in the Soviet Union (1991), NASA satellite photos revealed the death of the Aral Sea (2014) on this day.
August 20
Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, Spanish cardinal & viceroy of Naples (1517), Jacopo Peri (1561), Josef Strauss (1827), Benjamin Harrison (1833), Raymond Poincaré (1860) Eliel Saarinen (1873), Paul Tillich (1886), Salvatore Quasimodo (Nobel 1901), Jacqueline Susann (1918), George J. Mitchell (1933), Ron Paul (1935), Carla Fracci (1936), William H. Gray III (1941), Dave Brock (1941), Rich Brooks (1941), Robin Oakley (1941), Jo Ramírez (1941), Slobodan Milošević (1941), Rajiv Gandhi (1944), Connie Chung [Constance Yu-Hwa Chung Povich] (1946), Andrew Garfield (1983) & Demi Lovato (1992) were born #OnThisDay. Anne Hutchinson (1643), Johan de Witt (1672), Louis Antoine de Bougainville (1811), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1854), Hua Guofeng (2008), Phyllis Diller (2012) & Jerry Lewis (2017) died on this day. Venus & Jupiter in conjunction — possible astrological explanation for the Star of Bethlehem (2CE), Battle of Yarmuk (636), Hungary established as a Christian kingdom by Stephen I (1000), Richard I of England & Crusaders killed 3,000 Muslim prisoners in Akko (1191), the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown (1619), Grand Pensionary of Holland Johan de Witt & his brother Cornelis brutally murdered by an angry mob in the Hague (1672), Gioachino Rossini’s opera “Le Comte Ory” premiered in Paris (1828), Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War over (1866), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” premiered in Moscow (1822), the second salon exhibition by Society of Independent Artists held in Paris including Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1886), the Congo Free State became Belgian Congo (1908), Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico on Stalin’s orders (1940), Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s return to France (1944), Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi ordered the arrest of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in a CIA supported coup d’état (1953), 250,000 Soviet & Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring (1968), Nelson Rockefeller chosen to be vice-president by Gerald Ford (1974), Viking 1 to Mars launched (1975), the Oslo Peace Accords signed (1993), Pope Francis sent a letter to Catholics condemning priest abuse (2018), Venezuela issued a new currency the “Bolivar Soberano” in attempt to stop runaway hyperinflation (2018), Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned (2020) & Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nomination (2020) on this day.
August 21
Philip Augustus of France (1165), William IV of England (1765), Rudolf von Habsburg (1858), Aubrey Beardsley (1872) Lili [Marie-Juliette Olga] Boulanger (1893), [William] Count Basie (1904), Isadore ‘Friz’ Freleng (1905), C. Dillon Douglas (1909), Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928), Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (1930), Janet Baker (1933), Wilt Chamberlain (1936), Kenny Rogers (1938), Peter Weir (1944), Kim Cattrall (1956), Stephen Hillenburg (1961), Mohammed VI of Morocco (1963), Stéphane Charbonnier [Charb] (1967) & Sergey Brin (1973) were born #OnThisDay. Elizabeth Báthory (1614), Adelbert von Chamisso (1838), Leon Trotsky (1940), Sobhua II of Swailand (1982), Benigno Aquino, Jr. (1983) & Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1991) died on this day. Kublai Khan accepted the surrender of his younger brother Ariq Böke at Xanadu at the end of the Mongol civil war (1264), Ottoman Turks under Suleiman the Magnificent captured Buda (1541), Gustav III’s coup d’état completed with the adoption of a new constitution in Sweden (1772), Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte of France elected crown prince of Sweden by the Swedish Riksdag (1810), Nat Turner’s slave rebellion (1831), the first debate over slavery between Abraham Lincoln & Stephen Douglas (1858), American Bar Association founded (1878), “Mona Lisa” stolen from the Louvre by Vincenzo Perugia; recovered in 1913 (1911), Italy declared war on Turkey (1915), Walt Disney’s animated movie “Bambi” released (1942), Hawaii admitted as the 50th state (1959), Alexander Dubček arrested & forced to sign the Moscow Protocols subjecting Czechoslovakia to continued Soviet control (1968), al-Aqsa mosque fire in Jerusalem (1969), “Matlovich vs US Air Force” first gay-themed TV film to air (1978), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) founded (1980), coup d’état against Mikhail Gorbachev thwarted by Boris Yeltsin (1991) & Donald Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort was convicted on 8 counts of fraud (2018) on this day.
Claude Debussy (1862), George Herriman, American cartoonist (Krazy Kat) (1880), Dorothy Parker (1893), Elisabeth Bergner (1897), Leni Riefenstahl (1902), Deng Xiaoping (1904), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908), Ray Bradbury (1920), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928), (1961), Diana Sands (1934), Norman Schwarzkopf (1934), E. Annie Proulx (1935), Valerie Harper (1939), Diana Nyad (1949), I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby (1950), Ty Burrell (1967), Rich Lowry (1968), Giada De Laurentiis (1970), Richard Armitage (1971), Kristin Wiig (1973), James Corden (1978) & Steve Kornacki (1979) were born #OnThisDay. Flavius Stilicho (408), Philip VI of France (1350), Richard III of England (1485), John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland (1553), Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland (1572), Luca Marenio (1590), Johann Georg II, Elector of Saxony (1680), Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1806), Xianfeng, Manchu emperor of China (1861), Erns II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1893), Michael Collins (1922), Mikhail Fokine (1942), Jacob Bronowski (1974), Juscelino Kubitschek (1976), Sebastian Cabot (1977), Jomo Kenyatta (1978), Huey P. Newton (1989), Diana Vreeland (1989), Colleen Dewhurst (1991) & Mary Louise Smith (1997) died on this day. Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485), failed assassination of Gaspard de Coligny in Paris (1572), George III of England proclaimed the American colonies in open rebellion (1775), Sierra Leone settled by the British as a haven for former slaves (1798), Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt the 1st European to rediscover the Nabataean city of Petra (modern Jordan) (1812), New Mexico annexed by the United States (1848), First Geneva Convention (1864), International Red Cross founded in Geneva (1864), Japan’s annexation of Korea (1910), assassination of Michael Collins (1922), the International Zionist Congress opened in Prague (1933), Adolf Hitler ordered the destruction of Paris (1944), Romania occupied by Soviet troops (1944), coup d’état in Vietnam launched by Ho Chi Minh (1945), Althea Gibson became the first African American to compete in a US Lawn Tennis Association match (1950), Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s return to Tehran (1953), Dwight Eisenhower nominated for re-election at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco (1956), failed assassination attempt on France’s president Charles de Gaulle (1962), Fannie Lou Hamer spoke at the Democratic National Convention about voter registration in Mississippi (1964), protests against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), Bolivia’s president Juan José Torres overthrown in a military coup d’état led by Gen. Hugo Bánzer Suárez (1971), Ronald Reagan nominated for re-election at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco (1984), first complete ring around Neptune (1989), & Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” (1910 version) & “Madonna” were stolen at gunpoint from the Munch Museum in Oslo (2004) on this day.
August 22
August 23
Charles Martel (686), Tsar Ivan IV of Russia(1740), Louis XIV of France (1754), Georges Cuvier (1769), Alexander Milne Calder (1846), Gene Kelly (1912), Clifford Geertz (1926), Vera Miles (1929), Barbara Eden (1931), Mark Russell (1932), Pete Wilson (1933), Keith Moon (1946), David Robb (“I, Claudius”)(1947), Shelley Long (1949), Charles Busch (1954), River Phoenix (1970), Kobe Bryant (1978) & Jeremy Lin (1988) were born #OnThisDay. Gnaeus Julius Agricola (93), William Wallace (1305), Olav IV of Norway (1307), George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1628), Rudolph Valentino (1926), Nicola Sacco & Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1927) Oscar Hammerstein II (1960) & Shamu the orca (1971) died on this day. Mount Vesuvius eruption (79), William Wallace executed (1305), levée en masse enacted by France’s National Convention (1793), Prussian victory over France at the Battle of Grossbeeren (1813), Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington rescued by Dolly Madison (1814), British capture of Hong Kong (1839), Treaty of Prague ending the war between Prussia & Austria (1866), Theodor Herzl’s declaration of a Jewish state at the 6th Zionist Congress (1903), Battle of Mons (1914), Japan’s declaration of war on Germany (1914), Tsar Nicholas II’s personal command of the Russian army (1915), Karl Liebknecht sentenced to four years by a military court in Berlin (1916), “Gasoline Alley” cartoon strip premiered in the Chicago Tribune (1919), Nicola Sacco & Bartolomeo Vanzetti executed (1927), Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany & the Soviet Union (1939), “The Big Sleep” directed by Howard Hawks premiered (1946), Lou Reed’s last performance with the Velvet Underground (1970), defection of the Bolshoi Ballet dancer Alexander Godunov (1979), Pete Rose banned from baseball (1989), Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war against the US (1996), Hurricane Katrina hit the Bahamas (2005), Natascha Kampusch’s escape from Wolfgang Priklopil after eight years of captivity (2006), hashtag invented by product designer Chris Messina (2007), overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi (2011), Donald Trump nominated for re-election by the Republican National Convention (2020) & Jacob Blake shot by police in Kenosha (2020).
August 24
Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou (1113), William Wilberforce (1759), Max Beerbohm (1872), Jorge Luis Borges (1899), Fernand Braudel (1902), Carlo Gambino (1902), Howard Zinn (1922), Yasser Arafat (1933) Kenny Baker (1934) Marsha P. Johnson [born Malcolm Michaels Jr.] (1945), Mike Huckabee (1955), Stephen Fry (1957), Marlee Matlin (1965), Ava DuVernay (1972), Dave Chappelle (1973) & Rupert Grint (1988) were born #OnThisDay. Gaspard de Châtillon, Comte de Coligny (1572), Simone Weil (1943), Getulio Vargas (1954), Henry J. Kaiser (1967), Bayard Rustin (1987), E.G. Marshall [Everett Eugene Grunz] (1998), Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (2004), Richard Attenborough (2014), Walter Scheel (2016) & Robin Leach (2020) were born on this day. Mount Vesuvius eruption (79), Rome overrun by Visigoths under Alaric I for the first time in nearly 800 years (410), 6,000 Jews, blamed for the Plague, killed in Mainz (1349), English victory over Spain at the Battle of Gravelines (1558), St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants by Roman Catholics in Paris & France (1572), Battle of Málaga: largest naval battle in the War of the Spanish Succession (1704), freedom of speech in France proclaimed by the National Assembly (1789), British troops set fire to the White House (1814), Spanish Viceroy Juan de O’Donojú signed the Treaty of Córdoba ending the Mexican War of Independence (1821), Captain Matthew Webb became the first man to successfully swim the English Channel without assistance (1875), the motion picture camera patented by Thomas Edison (1891), FBI given the authority to pursue fascists & communists by FDR (1936), Dwight Eisenhower signed the Communist Control Act outlawing the Communist Party (1954), Hiram Fong sworn in as 1st Chinese-American senator & Daniel K. Inouye sworn in as 1st Japanese-American U.S. Representative (both from Hawaii) (1959), France became the world’s fifth thermonuclear power with a detonation on Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific (1968), Mark David Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life for the murder of John Lennon (1981), Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as head of the Soviet Communist Party (1991), Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union (1991), diplomatic relations established between the People’s Republic of China & the Republic of Korea (South Korea) (1992), Israel & the PLO initialed accord giving autonomy to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank in education, health, taxation, social welfare & tourism (1994), Steve Jobs succeeded by Tim Cook as CEO of Apple Inc. (2011), Scott Morrison became prime minister of Australia after defeating Peter Dutton in a leadership contest, replacing Malcolm Turnbull (2012) Britain’s Prince Andrew denied knowing his friend Jeffrey Epstein was involved in sexual trafficking of underage girls after public accusations made against him (2012) & Anders Behring Breivik was sentenced to 21 years in prison in Norway (2012) on this day.
August 25
Ivan IV [Ivan the Terrible], 1st tsar of Russia (1530), George Stubbs (1724), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744), Ludwig I of Bavaria (1786), Bret Harte (1836), Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845), Võ Nguyên Giáp (1911), Erich Honecker (1912), Walt Kelly (1913), Mel Ferrer (1917), Leonard Bernstein (1918), George Wallace (1919), Monty Hall (1921), Althea Gibson (1927), Sean Connery (1930), Regis Philbin (1931), Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1934), José Van Dam (1940), Conrad Black (1944), Gene Simmons [Chaim Witz], (KISS) (1949), Martin Amis (1949), Elvis Costello Declan Patrick McManus, Tim Burton (1958), Billy Ray Cyrus (1961), Blair Underwood (1964), Michael Cohen (Donald Trump’s lawyer) (1966) & Rachael Ray (1968) were born #OnThisDay. Gratian (Flavius Gratianus), emperor of Rome (383), Louis IX (Saint Louis), king of France (1270), Margaret of Anjou (1482), David Hume (1776), James Watt (1819) William Herschel (1822), Michael Faraday (1867), Friedrich Nietzsche (1900), Henri Becquerel (1908), Alfred Kinsey (1956), Truman Capote (1984), Samantha Smith (1985), Lewis Powell, Jr. (1998), Edward [Ted] M. Kennedy (2009), Neil Armstrong (2012) & John McCain (2018) died on this day. Nicene Creed establishing the doctrine of the Holy Trinity adopted by the First Council of Nicaea (325), Havana in modern day Cuba founded by the Spanish Conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar (1515), Théodore Géricault’s painting “Raft of the Medusa” exhibited in Paris (1819), Belgian revolt against the Netherlands (1830), “The Great Moon Hoax” published in the “New York Sun” (1835), Captain Matthew Webb made the 1st observed & unassisted swim across the English Channel in 21 hours & 45 minutes (1875), Uruguay declares independence from Brazil (1825), Yellow Cab founded (1910), Guomindang founded in China (1912), Louvain in Belgium burned by German troops (1914), Russia defeated in the Battle of Warsaw (1920), “The Wizard of Oz” opened in US movie theaters (1939), Paris liberated from Nazi occupation (1944), Bruce Springsteen’s landmark third album “Born To Run” released (1975) & Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Saturn (63,000 miles/100,000 km) (1981) on this day.
August 26
Frederick V, Count Palatine & King of Bohemia (1596), Robert Walpole (1676), Antine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743), Albert of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha, Prince Consort of Queen Victoria (1819), Guillaume Apollinaire (1880), Peggy Guggenheim (1898), Rufino Tamayo (1899), Christopher Isherwood (1904), Mother Teresa [Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu] (1910), Ben Bradlee (1921), Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923), Alain Peyrefitte (1925), Geraldine Ferraro (1935), Robert Torricelli (1951), Branford Marsalis (1960), Keith Raniere (Nxivm sex cult leader) (1960), Nancy Martinez (French-Canadian pop-dance singer) (1960), Ola Ray (American model) (1960), Daphne Caruana Galizia (1964), Melissa McCarthy (1970), Macaulay Culkin (1980) & John Mulaney (1982) were born #OnThisDay. Ottokar II, king of Bohemia (1272), Franz Hals (1666), Louis-Philippe, Duke of Chartres, the last King of France (1850), William James (1910), Leonidas ‘Lon’ Chaney (1930), Andrew Mellon (1937), Ralph Vaughan Williams (1958), Charles Lindbergh (1974), Lotte Lehmann (1976), Charles Boyer (1978), Ted Knight [Tadeusz Wladyslaw Konopka] (The Mary Tyler Moore Show”) (1986), Gaston Thorn (2007) & Neil Simon (2018) died on this day. Byzantine army defeated by Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert (1071). Philip VI’s France defeated by Edward III’s English longbows at the Battle of Crécy (1346), conspiracy against Piero di Cosimo de Medici in Florence led by Luca Pitti was discovered (1466), Gustaf Adolf’s Swedish & German forces defeated by the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II’s army & Spanish forces at the Battle of Nördlingen (1634) popular uprising against Anne of Austria & Cardinal Mazarin in France (1648), English astronomer Edmond Halley first observed the comet named after him (1682), the National Constituent Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man & of the Citizen at the beginning of the French Revolution (1789), Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio “Elijah” premiered at the Birmingham Festival in England (1846), first free kindergarten in the U.S. started by Susan Blow in the St. Louis suburb of Carondelet (1873), Battle of Tannenberg (1914), 7,000 Jews are rounded up in Vichy France (1942), victory parade in Paris to celebrate the liberation of France from Nazi German occupation (1944), “An American In Paris” with music by George Gershwin, directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Gene Kelly & Leslie Caron premiered in London (1951), fluoridation of San Francisco water (1952), British Motor Corporation introduced the Morris Mini-Minor designed by Alec Issigonis (1959), LBJ nominated for president at the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City (1964), “Hey Jude” single released by the Beatles in the US (1968), Democratic National Convention in Chicago engulfed by massive anti-Vietnam War protests (1968), Guinea-Bissau became independent of Portugal (1974), Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice became Pope John Paul I (1978), the French government denied knowledge of attack on the Greenpeace flagship the Rainbow Warrior (1985), Robert Chambers, the ‘Preppie Killer’ murdered Jennifer Levin in New York City’s Central Park & afterwards claimed ‘rough sex’ as the motive (1986), Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law (1996), Russia unilaterally recognized the independence of the former Georgian breakaway republics of Abkhazia & South Ossetia (2008), San Francisco 49ers Colin Kaepernick kneeled in protest during the US national anthem at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium while playing against the San Diego Chargers, objecting to racial injustice and police brutality in the US (2016), Pope Francis asked for forgiveness in a speech on child abuse in Dublin, during first official visit to Ireland since 1979 (2018), & Emmerson Mnangagwa was sworn in as President of Zimbabwe (2018) on this day.
August 27
Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, governor of the province of Maryland (1637), Ivan V, Tsar of Russia (1666), Baal Shem Tov (founder of Hasidic Judaism) (1698), Michel-Richard Delalande (1739), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770), Hannibal Hamlin (1809), Umberto Giordano (1867), Theodore Dreiser (1871), May Ray (1890), Lyndon B. Johnson (1908), Martha Raye [Margaret Reed] (1916), Joan Kroc [Mansfield] (1928), Mangosuthu Buthelezi (1928), Antonia Fraser (1932), Cesária Évora (1941), Pee-wee Herman [Paul Reubens] (1952), Roger Stone (1952), Kathy Hochul (1958), Cesar Millan (1969), Avil Haines (1969) & Sebastian Kurz (1986) were born #OnThisDay. Josquin Des Prez (1521), Titian [Tiziano Vecelli] (1576), Tomés Luis de Victoria (1611), Lope Félix de Vega Carpio (1635), Francisco Zurbarán (1664), Luis Botha (1919), W.E.B. Du Bois (1963), Le Corbusier [Charles Jeanneret] (1965), Marina, princess of Greece & Denmark & duchess of Kent (1968), Bennett Cerf (1971) Margaret Bourke-White (1971), Haile Selassie [Ras Tafari Makonnen], emperor of Ethiopia (1930-74) (1975), Louis Lord Mountbatten (1979) & Pierre Poujade (2003) died on this day. Greek victory over Persia at the Battle of Plataea & the Battle of Mycale (479 BCE), Baekje kingdom & Yamato Japanese allies defeated by Tang Chinese & Silla Korean forces at the Battle of Baekgang (663), John Dudley Earl of Warwick destroyed Robert Kett’s army at the Battle of Dussindale, ending Kett’s rebellion in Norfolk (1549), Denmark’s Christian IV defeated at the Catholic League at the Battle of Lutter (1626), Treaty of Nerchinsk between Russia & Qing China (1689), Americans defeated by the British at the Battle of Long Island (1776), Jacques Neeker named France’s minister of finance (1788), the “Declaration of Rights of Man & Citizen” issued by France’s National Assembly (1789), Austrians defeated by French forces under Napoleon at the Battle of Dresden (1813), Uruguay’s independence (1828), Sauk leader Black Hawk’s surrender (1832), 40,000 killed by the Krakatoa volcano explosion west of Java (1883), NYC’s Metropolitan Opera House damaged by fire (1892), Zanzibar defeated by British forces in a 38-minute war, the shortest recorded war in history (1896), second day of the Battle of Tannenberg (1914), Romania declared war on Austria-Hungary (1916), Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), Shah of Iran Rezā Shāh Pahlavi’s abdication in favor of his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941), “Roman Holiday” starring Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck & Eddie Albert released (1953), Renee Richards barred from competing in the US Tennis Open (1976), 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma assassinated (1979) & Major Gen. Muhammadu Buhari’s regime in Nigeria was overthrown by Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (1985) on this day.
August 28
Taichang Emperor [Zhu Changluo], 14th emperor of Ming China (1582), George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592), Charlotte Christine of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Wife of Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich of Russia (1694), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749), Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, 1st American Catholic saint (1774), Umberto Giordano (1867), Karl Böhm (1894), Charles Boyer (1899), Bruno Bettelheim (1903), Richard Tucker [Reuben Ticker] (1913), C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite) (1916), Jack Kirby (1917), Nancy Kulp (1921), Roxie Roker (1929), István Kertész (1929), Ben Gazzara (1930), John Shirley-Quirk (1931), William Cohen, US Secretary of Defense (1940), Paul Peter Plishka (1941), Ai Weiwei (1957), Scott Hamilton (1958), Jack Black (1969) & Sheryl Sandberg (1969) were born #OnThisDay. Frankish king Louis the German (876), Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle (1550), Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia (1618), Hugo de Grotius (1645), Axel Gustafson Oxenstierna (1654), Junípero Serra (1784), Frederick Law Olmsted (1903), Emmett Till (1955), Charles Darrow (1967), Ruth Gordon (1985) & Chadwick Boseman (2020) died on this day. Orestes, father of Emperor Romulus Augustulus, captured & executed by Odoacer & his followers (476), Ferdinand II elected Holy Roman Emperor (1619), William Herschel discovered Saturn’s moon Enceladus (1789), Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act given royal assent (1833), Venice under Daniele Manin surrendered to Austrians under Radetsky (1849), Richard Wagner’s opera “Lohengrin” premieres at Weimar (1850), Zulu King Cetshwayo captured by the British (1879), third day of Battle of Tannenberg (1914), Germans defeated by the British at the Battle of Helgoland (1914), Germany declared war on Romania & Italy declared war against Germany (1916), Woodrow Wilson picketed by women suffragists (1917), Mauthausen concentration camp opened in Austria (1938), general strike against Nazi Germany’s occupation of Denmark (1943), Chicago teenager Emmett Till kidnapped & murdered in Mississippi (1955), Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech addressing the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedo (1963), Democratic National Convention in Chicago engulfed in antiwar protests (1968), the first Gay Games held in San Francisco (1982), Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin announced his resignation (1983), first LGBT pride parade in Japan (1994), divorce of the Prince & Princess of Wales (1996), Greta Thunberg arrived in New York after sailing across the Atlantic in an emissions-free voyage (2019), British prime minister Boris Johnson prorogued parliament (2019) &US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand ended her campaign for president (2019) on this day.
August 29
Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619), John Locke (1632), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780), Maurice Maeterlinck (1862), Ingrid Bergman (1915), Isabel Sanford (1917), Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker (1920), Richard Attenborough (1923), Marmaduke Hussey (1923), Dinah Washington (1924), Charles Gray (1928), John McCain (1936), James Florio (1937) (Elliott Gould (1938), Robert Rubin (1938), Robin Leach (1941), Michael Jackson (1958) & Neil Gorsuch (1967) were born #OnThisDay. John the Baptist (29), Charles Napier (1853), Brigham Young (1877), Éamon de Valera (1975), Ingrid Berman (1982), Lee Marvin (1987), Pierre Messmer (2007) & Gene Wilder (2016). Hungarians decisively defeated by Ottoman Turks under Suleiman the Magnificent at the Battle of Mohács (1526), Atahuallpa, the 13th and last emperor of the Incas, strangled by Francisco Pizarro’s Spanish Conquistadors (1533), Seven Years’ War (1756), Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts (1786), 1st Factory Act enacted by the British parliament (1833), Treaty of Nanjing ending the Opium War in China (1842), 2nd Battle of Bull Run in Manassas (1862), Japan’s system of prefectures created by the Emperor Meiji (1871), seismic sea waves created by Krakatoa eruption created a rise in English Channel 32 hrs after explosion (1883), Count Witte dismissed as Russia’s finance minister by Tsar Nicholas II (1903), Japan changed Korea’s name to Chōsen (1910), 4th day of the Battle of Tannenberg (1914), Hubert Humphrey nominated for president at the Democratic national convention in Chicago (1968), a Native American group occupied Mount Rushmore to protest the broken Treaty of Fort Laramie (1970), the house of the Ray brothers — three HIV-positive Florida boys — burned down in what was almost certainly a case of arson (1987), Hurricane Katrina made its 2nd & 3rd landfall as a category 3 hurricane (2005), Germany handed back human remains of Namibian Herero & Nama people murdered during 1904-08 genocide at church service in Berlin (2018), scientists announced that there is no single ‘gay’ gene with genetics accounting for at most 25% of same-sex behavior in a study published in “Science” (2019) on this day.
August 30
Peter the Cruel, king of Castile & Leon (1334), Jacques-Louis David (1748), Mary Shelley (1797), George Frederick Root, American songwriter (The Battle Cry of Freedom) (1820), Huey Long (1893), Shirley Booth (1898), John Gunther (1901), Roy Wilkins (1901), [Rose] Joan Blondell (1906), Fred MacMurray (1908), Denis Healey (1917), Regina Resnik (1922), Laurent de Brunhoff (1925), Geoffrey Beene (1927), Bill Daily (1927), Warren Buffett (1930), Robert Crumb (cartoonist, Fritz the Cat) (1943), Molly Ivins (1944), Timothy Bottoms (1951), Ron George (1954), David Paymer (1954), Alexander Lukashenko, 1st & only president of Belarus (1954), Anna Politkovskaya (1958), Cameron Diaz (1972) & Lisa Ling (1973) were born #OnThisDay. Louis XI, king of France (1483), Max Factor (1938), Guy Burgess (1963), Charles Bronson (2003), Seamus Heaney (2013), Lotfollah ‘Lotfi’ Mansouri (2013), Oliver Sacks (2015) & Valerie Harper (2019), died on this day. Battle of Lake Poyang (1363), Battle of Groß Jägersdorf (1757), Second Battle of Bull Run in Manassas (1862), Benjamin Harrison signed into law the first federal statute requiring inspection of meat products (1890), Battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia (1914), Nazi-Germany annexed Luxembourg (1942) & Thurgood Marshall was confirmed as the first African American US Supreme Court justice (1967) on this day.
August 31
Caligula [Gaius Caesar], 3rd Roman Emperor (37-41 AD) (12), Commodus, Roman Emperor (180-192 AD) (161), Théophile Gautier (1811), Amilcare Ponchielli (1834), Maria Montessori (1870), Wilhelmina, queen of the Netherlands (1880), DuBose Heyward (1885), Fredric March (1897), Alan Jay Lerner (1918), Barnyard Dawg [George P Dog], Warner Bros. cartoon character created by Robert McKimson (Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series), debuted in “Walky Talky Hawky” (1942), Itzhak Perlman (1945), Richard Gere (1949), Marcia Clark [Kleks], LA DA (O.J. Simpson Case) (1953), Tsai Ing-wen, 7th President of the Republic of China (Taiwan) (1956), Mohammed bin Salman & Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia (1985) were born #OnThisDay. Theodora, Byzantine empress (1056), Henry V of England (1422), Charles-Pierre Baudelaire (1867), Mathilde Wesendonk (1902), Georges Braque (1963), Henry Moore (1986), Urho Kekkonen, 8th president of Finland (1986), Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales (1997), Dodi Fayed (1997) & Ike Pappas (2008) died on this day. Henry VI became King of England at the age of 9 months (1422), Jack the Ripper’s first victim murdered (1888), Britain & Russia signed treaty with Afghanistan, Persia & Tibet (1907), Britain, Russia & France formed the Triple Entente (1907), Theodore Roosevelt gave his ‘square deal’ speech in Kansas (1910), the Sullivan Act requiring licenses for concealable firearms in effect in New York (1911), Sun Yat-sen elected commander-in-chief in China (1917), anthropologist Margaret Mead’s arrival in Samoa (1925), Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weil’s “The Threepenny Opera ” premiered in Berlin (1928), Neutrality Act signed into law by FDR (1935), Foghorn Leghorn, Warner Bros. cartoon character created by Robert McKimson & Warren Foster, (Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies series), debuted in “Walky Talky Hawky” (1946), Federation of Malaya’s independence (1957), “The Battle of Algiers”, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, starring Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef, premiered at the Vienna International Film Festival (1966), Polish government’s accord with Gdansk shipyard workers (1980), Uzbekistan declared independence from the Soviet Union following the failed coup in Moscow (1991), Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash in a road tunnel in Paris (1997), Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream” recovered from a raid by Norwegian police after having been stolen on 8.22.04 (2006) & Dilma Rousseff was impeached, convicted & removed as president by the Brazilian Senate (2016) on this day.LikeCommentShare
September 1
Edward Alleyn, English actor & founder of Dulwich College (1566), Johann Pachelbel (1653), Emmanuel Schikaneder (1751), Mark Hopkins (1813), Engelbert Humperdinck (1854), Roger David Casement (1864), Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875), Walter Reuther (1907), Melvin Laird (1922), Yvonne De Carlo (1922), Cecil Parkinson (1931), Cecil Parkinson (1933), Conway Twitty [Harold Jenkins] (1933), Ann Richards (1933), Seiji Ozawa (1935), Alan Dershowitz (1938), Lily Tomlin (1939), Leonard Slatkin (1944), Barry Gibb (1946), Roh Mooy-hyun (1946), Dr. Phil McGraw (1950), Gloria Estefan [Fajardo] (1957) & Padma Lakshmi (1970) were born #OnThisDay. Jacques Cartier (1557), Louis XIV (1715), William Clark (1838), Lillian Wald (1940), Siegfried Sassoon (1967), Ethel Waters (1977), Albert Speer (1981), Clifford Curzon (1982), Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson (1983) & A. Bartlett Giamatti (1989) died on this day. Königsberg (modern day Kaliningrad) founded by Teutonic Knights & named in honor of the Bohemian King Ottokar II (1255), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 6th string quartet opus 10 published in Vienna (1785), Chechen separatist rebels enters a school in southern Russia (1807), Jenny Lind brought to New York by P.T. Barnum (1850), Atlanta fell to Union forces (1864), Napoleon III captured at Sedan (1870), Cetshwayo succeeded his father Mpande as king of the Zulu nation (1873), St. Petersburg’s name changed to Petrograd (1914), Battle of Megiddo (1918), Benito Mussolini canceled the civil rights of Italian Jews (1938), Adolf Hitler ordered the extermination of mentally ill through the T4 Euthanasia Program (1939), World War II began with Germany’s invasion of Poland (1939), Jews living in Germany required to wear a yellow Star of David (1941), a 1942 US Federal judge upheld the detention of Japanese-Americans (1942), Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the establishment of Israeli secret service Mossad (1951), “Rear Window” directed by Alfred Hitchcock & starring James Stewart & Grace Kelly released (1954), language laws in Belgium went into effect causing a riot (1963), Charles de Gaulle of France denounced US policy in Vietnam & urged the US to pull its troops out of Southeast Asia (1966), Col. Muammar Gaddafi deposed King Idris in the Libyan revolution (1969), failed assassination attempt on Jordanian king Hussain (1970), Bobby Fischer beats Russian champion Boris Spassky, becoming the first American to win the title of chess grandmaster(1972), last broadcast of “Columbo” starring Peter Falk on NBC (1978), a Korean Boeing 747 (flight 007) strayed into Siberia & was shot down by a Soviet jet (1983), “What’s Love Got to Do With It” single topped the charts, giving Tina Turner her 1st No. 1 as a solo artist (1984), wreck of the Titanic found (1985), Princess Anne & Mark Phillips announced their separation (1989), “Roger and Me”, the first documentary directed by Michael Moore, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival (1989), Chechen separatist rebels stormed a school in southern Russia (2004), Aretha Franklin’s funeral held in Detroit (2018) on this day.
September 2
Louis Bonaparte, King of the Netherlands (1778), Liliuokalani [Lydia Kamakaʻeha], last queen of Hawaii (1891-93) (1838), Yang Hsiu-ch’ing, commander-in-chief of the Taiping Rebellion (1856), Hiram Johnson, governor of California (1866), Martha Mitchell [nee Beall], wife of Attorney General John Mitchell (1918), Daniel Arap Moi, president of Kenya (1924), Mathieu Kérékou, dictator president of Benin (1933), Derek Fowlds (1937), Christa McAuliffe (1948), Linda Purl (1955), Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil (1959), Keanu Reeves (1964) & Salma Hayek (1966) were born #OnThisDay. Pheidippides (490 BCE), Henri Rousseau (1910), Ho Chi Minh [Nguyễn Sinh Cung] (1969), J.R.R. Tolkien (1973), Ljuba Welitsch (1996), Rudolf Bing (1997), Christiaan Barnard (2001), Troy Donahue (2001), Bob Denver (2005) & Alan Kurdi (2015) died on this day. Octavian’s forces defeated those of Mark Antony & Cleopatra off the western coast of Greece at the Battle of Actium (31 BCE), the Great Fire of London began at 2 a.m. in Pudding Lane (1666), Habsburg armies took Buda from Turks (1686), September Massacres of the French Revolution in Paris (1792), Union General William T. Sherman captured & burned Atlanta (1864), 2nd & final day of the Battle of Sedan (1870), Lord Kitchener led British forces to victory at the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan (1898), Theodore Roosevelt advised “Speak softly & carry a big stick” (1901), Reichspräesident Friedrich Ebert declared “Deutschland Über Alles” the German national anthem (1922), Holocaust diarist Anne Frank sent to Auschwitz concentration camp (1944), Japan’s surrender ended World War II (V-J Day) (1945), Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent from France (National Day) (1945), “The Third Man” — directed by Carol Reed & starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli & Orson Welles — released in the United Kingdom (1949), Democracy Day — the first election of the parliament of the Central Tibetan Administration in the history of Tibet (1960), CBS expanded the “CBS Evening News” program anchored by Walter Conkrite from 15 to 30 minutes (1963), Gerald Ford signed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) into law (1974) & 64-year-old Diana Nyad became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without the use of a shark cage for protection (2013).
September 3
Diane de Poitiers, maîtresse-en-titre of Henry II of France (1499), Pietro Locatelli (1695), Eugène de Beauharnais, stepson of Napoleon I (1781), Louis Sullivan (1856), Jean Jaurès (L’Humanité), 1859, Ferdinand Porsche (1875), Kitty Carlisle (1910), Alan Ladd (1913), Dixy Lee Ray (1914), Thurston Dart (1921), Gaston Thorn (1928), Whitey Bulger (1929), Mario Draghi (1947), Charlie Sheen [Carlos Estévez] (1965) & Noah Baumbach (1969) were born #OnThisDay. Gian Galeazzo Visconti (1402), Oliver Cromwell (1658), Marie Thérèse Louise de Savoie, Princesse de Lamballe (1792), Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1820), Adolphe Thiers (1877), Ivan Turgenev (1883), E. E. Cummings (1962), Vince Lombardi (1970), Frank Capra (1991), Pauline Kael (2001), W. Clement Stone (2002), William Rehnquist (Chief Justice of the United States) (2005), Sun Myung Moon (2012) & Adrian Cadbury (2015) died on this day. San Marino founded by St. Marinus (301), Richard the Lionheart crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey in London (1189), Cardinal Beaton replaced the Earl of Arran as regent for Mary, Queen of Scots (1543), Oliver Cromwell’s New Model army destroyed English royalist force of mainly Scots in the last battle of English Civil War at the Battle of Worcester (1651), Richard Cromwell (‘Tumbledown Dick’) succeeded his father as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth (1658), Treaty of Paris signed in Paris ending the American Revolutionary War (1783), France’s first constitution declaring France a constitutional monarchy adopted by the National Assembly (1791), rebellious slaves set fire to Paramaribo in Suriname (1832), Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery disguised as a sailor (1838), 700 soldiers under Gen. William S. Harney avenged the Grattan Massacre by attacking a Sioux village, killing 100 men, women & children in Nebraska (1855), Confederate forces enter Kentucky (1861), Battle of Verdun (1916), Woodrow Wilson began a campaign to promote the League of Nations (1919), Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa & Canada declared war on Germany following its invasion of Poland (1939), Nazi sympathizer Unity Mitford attempted suicide after Britain declared war on Germany (the bullet lodged in her brain eventually killed her in 1948) (1939), Allied invasion of Italy began (1943), Holocaust diarist Anne Frank sent to Auschwitz concentration camp (1944), Espionage & Sabotage Act of 1954 signed into law by Dwight Eisenhower (1954), Wilderness Act signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson (1964), Swedes began driving on the right-hand side of the road (Dagen H) (1967), Nixon’s operatives broke into Daniel Ellsberg’s doctor’s office (1971), over 300 people killed in a Chechen terrorist siege of a school (2004), the first public caning & conviction of a lesbian couple attempting to have sex by the Sharia High Court in Malaysia’s Terengganu state (2018), Walmart announced it would stop selling handguns & some ammunition & ask customers not to openly carry firearms in response to the El Paso shootings (2019) & MacKenzie Scott (philanthropist & ex-wife of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos) became the world’s richest woman worth $68 billion (2020) on this day.
September 4
Wanli, Ming emperor of China (1563), Count Axel von Fersen (1755), Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, King of Netherlands (1806-10) (1778), Sarah Childress Polk (1803), Anton Bruckner (1824), Daniel Burnham (1846), Lewis Howard Latimer (1848), Darius Milhaud (1892), Mary Renault [Challans] (1905), Henry Ford II (1917), Paul Harvey (1918), Dick York (“Bewitched”) (1928), Thomas Eagleton (1929), Mitzi Gaynor [Francesca von Gerber] (1931), Carlos Romero Barceló (1932), René Pape (1964), Anthony Weiner (1964) & Beyoncé Knowles (1981) were born #OnThisDay. Tughril (1063), Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1588), Edvard Grieg (1907), Robert Schuman (1963), Albert Schweitzer (1965), Georges Simenon (1989), Irene Dunne (1990), Steve Irwin (2006), Astrid Varnay (2006), Joan Rivers (2014) & Bill Daily died on this day. Romulus Augustulus, the last Western Roman Emperor, abdicated after forces led by Odoacer invaded Rome, marking the traditional end of the Western Roman Empire (476), Henry Hudson became the first European to see the island of Manhattan & sail into New York harbor (1609), the Third French Republic proclaimed after the overthrow of Emperor Napoleon III in France (1870), Apache Chief Geronimo surrendered, ending armed resistance to the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Native Americans in the US (1886), “Swing Time” — directed by George Stevens & starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers — released (1936), German invasion of Danzig (Gdansk) (1939), Netherlands & Belgium declared their neutrality (1939), Wilhelmina’s abdication as queen of the Netherlands after 58 years, the longest reign of any Dutch monarch (1948), “Beetle Bailey” comic strip debuted in twelve newspapers (1950), Little Rock’s Central High School desegregation blocked by Gov. Orval Faubus (1957), Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova defected to the West while on tour with the Kirov Ballet in London & was granted political asylum (1970) & Marxist Salvador Allende won a narrow plurality of votes in Chile’s presidential election (1970) on this day.
September 5
Louis XIV of France (1638), Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, mistress to King Charles II of England (1649), Johann Christian Bach (English Bach) (1735), Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791), Jesse James (1847), Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867), Joseph Szigeti (1892), John Cage (1912), Jack Valenti (1921), Arthur C. Nielsen (1923), Paul Volcker (1927), Bob Newhart (1929), Carol Lawrence (1934), Werner Erhard (1935), John Danforth (1936), Raquel Welch (1940), Werner Herzog (1942), Freddie Mercury [Farrokh Bulsara] (1946), Cathy Guisewite (1950), Michael Keaton (1951), Rose McGowan (1973) & Pierre Casiraghi (1987) were born #OnThisDay. Catharine Parr (1548), Suleiman the Magnificent (1566), Pieter Brueghel (1569), Bernardo Tasso (1569), Pomponne de Bellièvre (1607), Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1683), Auguste Comte (1857), Crazy Horse [Tashunka Witko] (1877), Charles Péguy (1914), Sir Georg Solti [György Stern] (1997), Mother Teresa [Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu] (1997), Heywood Hale Broun (2001) & Phyllis Schlafly (2016) died on this day. Hernán Cortés defeated the Tlascala Aztecs at the Second Battle of Tehuacingo in Mexico (1519), Battle of Nordlingen (1634), Frances’ Superintendent of Finances Nicolas Fouquet arrested on the orders of Louis XIV (1661), the Great Fire of London ended, leaving 13,200 houses destroyed & 8 dead (1666), Russian Tsar Peter the Great imposed a tax on beards (1698), Philadelphia designated the first capital of the United States by the Continental Congress (1774), a French fleet of 24 ships under the Comte de Grasse defeated British forces under Admiral Graves at the Battle of the Chesapeake [Battle of the Virginia Capes] & trapped Gen. Cornwallis (1781), la Terreur (the Terror) initiated during the French Revolution (1793), at the Battle of Masurische Meren, Russian troops defeated by Prussians & driven out of East Prussia (1814), Sam Houston elected President of the Republic of Texas (1836), First Opium War began in China (1839), Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse fatally bayoneted by a U.S. soldier after resisting confinement in a guardhouse at Fort Robinson in Nebraska (1887), German Christine Hardt patented the first modern brassiere (1889), the Treaty of Portsmouth & signed concluding the Russo-Japanese War (1905), Tsar Nicholas II assumed personal command of his nation’s military forces (1915), FDR declared US neutrality at start of World War II in Europe (1939), “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac published by Viking Press in New York (1957), “Doctor Zhivago” novel by Boris Pasternak published in the US (1958), Léopold Sédar Senghor elected as the first President of Senegal (1960), Lt. William Calley charged for the My Lai massacre (1969), the first assassination attempt on US President Gerald Ford by Lynette Fromme in Sacramento (1975), Jim Henson’s “The Muppet Show” premiered on television with Mia Farrow as the guest star (1976), Hurricane Irma became the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin region (2017), Togo’s government shut down the internet for a week to quell government opposition (2017), Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, became the first woman president of the British Supreme Court (2017) & British prime minister Theresa May confirmed in parliament that two Russian military intelligence officers undertook novichok nerve agent attack (2018) on this day.
September 6
Guillaume Dubois (1565), Moses Mendelssohn (1729), Marquis de Lafayette (1757), Anton Diabelli (1781), Jane Addams (1860), Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. (1888), Franz Josef Strauss (1915), Roger Waters (1943), Swoosie Kurtz (1944), Jane Curtin (1947), Carly Fiorina (1954), Bill Ritter (1956), Elizabeth Vargas (1962), Chris Christie (1962), Geert Wilders (1963) & Rosie Perez (1964) were born #OnThisDay. Gertrude Lawrence (1952), Hendrik Verwoerd (1966), Margaret Sanger (1966), Akira Kurosawa (1998), Luciano Pavarotti (2007), Burt Reynolds (2018), Claudio Scimone (2019) & Robert Mugabe (2019) died on this day. Ferdinand Magellan’s Spanish expedition aboard the Vitoria returned to Spain without their captain, the first to circumnavigate the earth (1522), the Battle at Nördlingen ended in Swedish/Protestant German defeat (1634), Charles II of England spent a day hiding in an oak tree during his escape after losing the Battle of Worcester (1651), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera “La Clemenza di Tito” premiered in Prague (1791), William McKinley shot by Leon Czolgosz while visiting the Pan-American Exposition in New York (1901), First Battle of the Marne (1914), Jews over age 6 ordered to wear a star in Germany (1941), Juliana crowned queen of The Netherlands (1948), “La Strada” directed by Federico Fellini premiered at the Venice Film Festival (1954), South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd stabbed to death (1966), “Amadeus” (based on the play by Peter Shaffer) film directed by Milos Forman premiered in Los Angeles (1984), Leningrad renamed Saint Petersburg (1991), funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales held at Westminster Abbey in London (1997), “The King’s Speech” directed by Tom Hooper starring Colin Firth & Geoffrey Rush premiered at the Telluride Film Festival (2010), Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president (2012), Catalonia’s parliament enacted law to allow referendum on independence from Spain (2017) on this day.
September 7
Elizabeth Tudor (1533), Grandma Moses [Anna Mary Robertson] (1860), John Pierpont Morgan, Jr. (1867), Edith Sitwell (1887), Elia Kazan (1909), Peter Lawford (1923), Daniel K. Inouye (1924), John Paul Getty, Jr. (1932), Buddy Holly [Charles Holley] (1936), Gloria Gaynor [Fowles] (1943), Peggy Noonan (1950), Julie Kavner (1950), Michael Feinstein (1956), Jean-Yves Thibaudet (1961), Leslie Jones (1967) & Rudy Galindo (1969) were born #OnThisDay. Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou (1151), Edward Grey, Viscount of Fallodon (1933), José Clemente Orozco (1949), Everett McKinley Dirksen (1969), KeithMoon (1978), A.J.P. Taylor (1990), Eric John Crozier (1994) & Mobutu Sese Seko (1997) died on this day. A Roman army under General Titus occupied & plundered Jerusalem (70), Flemish pretender Perkin Warbeck acclaimed as English King Richard IV on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall (1497), Treaty of Baden between the Holy Roman Empire & France ending the War of the Spanish Succession (1714), 70,000 killed in the Battle of Borodino (1812), political cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902) began popularizing the image of Uncle Sam (1813), Pedro I, son of King Joao VI declared Brazil’s independence from Portugal (National Day) (1822), Atlanta evacuated (1864), Peace of Peking ended the Boxer Rebellion in China (1901), first day of the Luftwaffe’s London Blitz (1940), Jimmy Carter & Panama’s General Omar Torrijos signed the Panama Canal treaties (1977), Desmond Tutu became Anglican archbishop of Cape Town (1986) & China’s Xi Jinping announced plans to develop a new ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ (2013) on this day.
September 8
Richard I [Richard the Lion Hearted], king of England (1189-99) (1157), Ludovico Ariosto (Orlando Furioso) (1474), Nicolas de Grigny (1672), Marie Thérèse Louise de Savoie, Princesse de Lamballe (1749), August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767), August Wilhelm Schlegel (1778), Eduard Friedrich Mörike (1804), Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (1828), Frederic Mistral (1830), Antonín Dvořák (1841), Gojong, king & emperor (Gwangmu) of Korea (1852), Siegfried Sassoon (1886), Robert A. Taft (1889), Claude Pepper (1900), Hendrik Verwoerd (1901), Jean-Louis Barrault (1910), Lyndon LaRouche (1922), Sid Caesar (1922), Peter Sellers (1925), Christoph von Dohnányi (1929), Patsy Cline [Virginia Henlsey] (1932), Peter Maxwell Davies (1934), Sam Nunn (1938), Bernie Sanders (1941), David Carr (1956), Stefano Casiraghi (1960), David Arquette (1971), Martin Freeman (1971), Lachlan Murdoch (1971) & Pink [Alecia Beth Moore] (1979) were born #OnThisDay. Amy Robsart (1560), George Carey, 2nd Baron Hunsdon (1603), Carlo Gesauldo (1613), John Coke (1645), Richard Strauss (1949), Dorothy Dandridge (1965), Samuel Joel ‘Zero’ Mostel (1977), Jean Piaget (1980), Roy Wilkins (1981), Leni Riefenstahl (2003), Frank Middlemass (2006), Magda Olivero (2014) & the Lady Chablis [Benjamin Knox] (2016) died on this day. The Statute of Kalisz guaranteeing Jews safety & personal liberties promulgated by Boleslaus the Pious, Duke of Greater Poland (1264), Stefan Dušan declared himself king of Serbia (1331), Battle of Kulikovo (1380), Battle of Tumu Fortress (1449), Michelangelo’s statue of David unveiled in Florence (1504), China & Russia signed Treaty of Nertsjinsk (Nierchul) (1689), William IV crowned king of England (1831), British and French troops captured Sevastopol from the Russians, effectively ending the Crimean War (1855), Margaret Gorman the first Miss America crowned in Atlantic City (1921), Sen. Huey Long shot in the Louisiana state capitol building (1935),the siege of Leningrad began (1941), Gen. Dwight Eisenhower announced the surrender of Italy to the Allies (1943), Ernest Hemingway’s novel “The Old Man & the Sea” published (1952), the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) formed (1954), Althea Gibson became the first African American to win the US Open (1957), Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Psycho” starring Anthony Perkins & Janet Leigh released throughout the US (1960), “Star Trek” premiered on NBC (1966), “That Girl” starring Marlo Thomas premiered on ABC (1966), Uganda abolished traditional tribal kingdoms, becoming a republic (1967), John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts opened in Washington, D.C. (1971), Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon of all federal crimes (1974), Guinea-Bissau declared independence from Portugal (1975), “The Oprah Winfrey Show” first broadcast nationally (1986), “The Joy Luck Club” — the first major studio movie with an all Asian American (mostly female) cast — premiered (1993), “The Rachel Maddow Show” hosted by Rachel Maddow” & based on her radio show premiered on MSNBC (2008), Stephen Colbert debuted as the new host of CBS’s “The Late Show” (2015), two ex-Myanmar soldiers testified they were ordered to rape and kill Muslim Rohingya villagers — the first public confession of army-directed crimes against Rohingya (2020) & the Moria refugee camp — Europe’s biggest migrant camp — burned down on the Greek island of Lesbos, leaving 13,000 without shelter (2020) on this day.
September 9
Aurelian, Roman Emperor (270-275), Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583), Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu (1585), William Bligh (1754), Leo Tolstoy [Lev Nikolayevich] (1828), Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855), Alf Landon (1887), Colonel Harland Sanders (1890), [Chaim] Topol (1935), Otis Redding (1941), Christopher Francis Palmer (1946), Hugh Grant (1960), Mario Batali (1960), Adam Sandler (1966), Michael Bublé (1975) & Michelle Williams (1980) were born #OnThisDay. Olaf Tryggvason of Norway (1000), William the Conqueror (1087), James IV of Scotland (1513), Stéphane Mallarmé (1898), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1901), Roger Fry (1934), Jussi Björling (1960), Mao Zedong (1976), Jacques Lacan (1981), Helen O’Connell (1993), Burgess Meredith (1997), Edward Teller (2003) & Shere Hite [Shirley Diana Gregory] died on this day. King Olaf of Norway leapt from the Long Serpent to his death in the Battle of Svolder on the Baltic Sea (1000), James IV of Scotland defeated by an English army at the Battle of Flodden Fields (1513), Mary Stuart at nine months old crowned Queen of Scots in the Scottish town of Stirling (1543), a meeting of theologians convened by Catherine de’ Medici at the Conference of Poissy (1561), Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature” published (1836), California admitted as the thirty-first state of the Union (1850), Luxembourg’s independence (1867), Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary & Artistic Works finalized (1886), Easter Island/Rapa Nui annexed by Chile (1888), Captain Alfred Dreyfus sentenced based on false testimony (1899), the National Broadcasting Company created by the Radio Corporation of America (1926), Luxembourg liberated by Allied forces (1944), the Red Army supported a coup in Bulgaria instituting new Communist government (1946-1990) during the ‘National Uprising’ (1944), Uganda declared its independence from Britain (1967) Ronald Reagan ordered sanctions against apartheid South Africa (1985), Israel & the Palestine Liberation Organization exchanged letters of mutual recognition (1993), a court in the Philippines ordered Imelda Marcos to repay the government almost $280,000 for funds taken from the National Food Authority by Ferdinand Marcos in 1983 (2010), Erna Solberg elected prime minister of Norway (2013), Elizabeth II surpassed her great-great-grandmother Victoria’s record as the longest-reigning monarch in British history at 63 years & seven months (2015) CBS chief Les Moonves resigned after six more women make allegations of sexual abuse in “The New Yorker” (2018) & the global death toll from COVID-19 passed 900,000 with the US the most deaths at 190,589 (2020) on this day.
September 10
Pope Julius II [Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte] (1550-55) (1487), Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 7th Duke of Medina Sidonia (1550), Maria Theresa of Spain, wife of Louis XIV & queen of France (1638), Henry Purcell (1659), Charles Peirce (1839), Elsa Schiaparelli (1890), Georges Bataille (1897), Gwen Watford (1927), Arnold Palmer (1929), Karl Lagerfeld (1933), Charles Kuralt (1934), Stephen Jay Gould (1941), Thomas Allen (1944), José Feliciano (1945), Margaret Trudeau (1948), Chris Columbus (1958), Colin Firth (1960), Alison Bechdel (1960), John Sununu (1964), Jack Ma (1964), Guy Ritchie (1968) & Misty Copeland (1982) were born #OnThisDay. Qin Shi Huang Di (210 BCE), Empress Matilda (Maud) )1167), Jean Sans Peur (John the Fearless) (duke of Burgundy (1419), Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV of France & wife of Charles I & queen of England (1669), Mary Wollstonecraft (1797), Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1851), Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, and wife of Franz Josef (1898), Harold Gillies (1960), Yves Montand [Ivo Livi] (1991), Alfredo Kraus (1999), Jane Wyman (2007) & Diana Rigg (2020) died on this day. English victory over Scottish forces at the Battle of Pinkie in Midlothian (1547), US victory over a squadron of British warships at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812 (1813), Hector Berlioz’s opera “Benvenuto Cellini” premiered in Paris (1838), Georges Bizet’s opera “Les Pêcheurs de Perles” premiered in Paris (1863), first drunk driving arrest (1897), Empress Elisabeth of Austria assassinated by anarchist Luigi Lucheni (1898), Canada’s prime minister Mackenzie King declared war on Germany (1939), Buckingham Palace hit by a German bomb (1940), Vidkun Quisling sentenced to death for collaborating with Nazis (1945), “Gunsmoke” premiered on CBS (1955), Portugal recognized the independence of Republic of Guinea-Bissau (1974), last guillotine execution in France (1977), Picasso’s “Guernica” returned to Spain (1981), Pope John Paul II consecrated the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro (Côte d’Ivoire) (1990), Senate Committee hearings on the Clarence Thomas nomination began (1991) on this day.
September 11
Pierre de Ronsard (1523), Johan Georg, Elector of Brandenburg (1571-91) (1525), Mungo Park (1771), Eduard Hanslick (1825), O. Henry [William Sydney Porter] (1862), D. H. Lawrence (1885), Alice Tully (1902), Theodor Adorno (1903), Anne Seymour (1909), Ferdinand Marcos (1917), Charles Evers (1922), Daniel Akaka (1924), Reubin Askew (1928), Sonny [Herbert Leon] Callahan (1932), Bob Packwood (1932), Theodore Olson (1940), Bashar al-Assad (1965), Harry Connick Jr. (1967), Maria Bartiromo (1967), Taraji P. Henson (1970), Markos Moulitsas (1971) & Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya (1982) were born #OnThisDay. François Couperin (1773), David Ricardo (1823), Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1948), Nikita Khrushchev (1971), Salvador Allende (1973), Erich Leinsdorf (1993), Jessica Tandy (1994), Todd Beamer (2001), Mark Bingham (2001), Father Mychal F. Judge (2001), John Ritter (2003), Alexis Arquette (2016), Peter Hall (2017) & Fenella Fielding (2018), died on this day. Roman troops defeated by Germans at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (9), Scottish rebel forces under William Wallace defeated an English army at the Battle at Stirling Bridge (1297), Oliver Cromwell killed 3,000 royalists in the Massacre of Drogheda (1649), forces under Prince Eugene of Savoy defeated Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Zenta (1697), Charles XII of Sweden stopped his march to conquer Moscow outside Smolensk, marking the turning point in the Great Northern War (1708), British, Austrian & Dutch forces defeated a French army at the Battle at Malplaquet during War of the Spanish Succession (1709), French & Spanish troops under the Duke of Berwick occupied Barcelona (1714), Maria Theresa addressed the Hungarian parliament (1741), Benjamin Franklin wrote, “There never was a good war or bad peace” (1773), Alexander Hamilton appointed 1st Secretary of the US Treasury (1789), the French Blue gem (later the Hope Diamond) stolen with other French crown jewels from Royal storehouse in Paris during Reign of Terror (1792), US Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough destroys a British squadron in the Battle of Plattsburg on Lake Champlain (1814), opera singer Jenny Lind (‘the Swedish Nightingale’) gave her first US concert in New York City, promoted by P.T. Barnum (1850), a group of African Americans & white abolitionists skirmished with a Maryland posse in the Christiana Riot in Pennsylvania (1851), 120 emigrants murdered by Mormons in the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857), the Jewish Colonization Association established by Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1891), the Mahatma Gandhi coined the term ‘Satyagraha’ to characterize the non-violence movement in South Africa (1906), the British mandate in Palestine began (1922), Buckingham Palace damaged by German bombs (1940), Adolf Hitler began operation Seelöwe (Sealion), the aborted invasion England (1940), Hideki Tojo attempted suicide (1945), Igor Stravinsky’s opera “The Rake’s Progress” (with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman) premiered at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice (1951), West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed a reparation pact for the Jewish people (1952), Chile’s president Salvador Allended was murdered in a violent military coup d’état led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet & supported by the CIA at Nixon & Kissinger’s instigation (1973), the Battle of Brandywine began (1777), the World Trade Center’s two towers in New York City brought down by al-Qaeda (2001), a plane hijacked by al-Qaeda hit the Pentagon (2001), resistance by the passengers & crew of United Airlines Flight 93 to al-Qaeda hijackers led to its crashing in a field in Pennsylvania (2001), Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip (2005), the US consulate in Benghazi stormed, looted & burned down, killing five people, including the US ambassador to Libya (2012), one million marched in Barcelona in support of independence for Catalonia (2017) & Erna Solberg led a right-wing coalition to victory in Norway’s general election (2017) on this day.
September 12
François I of France (1494), Henry Hudson (1575), H.L.Mencken (1880), Maurice Chevalier (1888), Alfred Knopf (1892), Irene Jliot-Curie (1897), Juscelino Kubitschek (1902), Jesse Owens 91913), Sir Ian Holm (1931), Tatiana Troyanos (1938), Henry Waxman (1939), Michael Ondaatje (1943), Luis Lima (1948), Sam Brownback (1956, Leslie Cheung (1956), Louis C.K. [Louis Székely] (1967), Tarana Burke (1973), Yao Ming (1980) & Jennifer Hudson (1981) were born #OnThisDay. Blanche of Lancaster (1369), Cinq Mars (1642), Johann Georg III, Elector of Saxony (1691), Jean-Philippe Rameau (1764), Steven Biko (1977), Anthony Perkins (1992), Raymond Burr (1993), Johnny Cash (2003), Ian Paisley (2014) & Edith Windsor [née Schlain] (2017) died on this day. Athenian victory over the Persian army at the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE), Charles V abdicated as Holy Roman Emperor in favor of his brother Ferdinand I (1556), Habsburg victory over the Ottoman Turks in the Battle of Vienna (1683), Stanislaw Lesczynski elected king of Poland (1733), Giacomo Casanova sentenced to five years in prison in Venice (1755), court martial trial for the participants in the mutiny on the Bounty (1792), Greek War of Independence ended after 8 years & 6 months (1829), Switzerland’s federal system established (1848), Leopold II opened the Congo conference (1876), the Cleopatra Needle installed in London (1878), Gustav Mahler’s 8th Symphony (“Symphony of A Thousand”) premiered in Munich with 1028 musicians (1910), Lascaux cave discovered by four teenagers (1940), US troops entered Germany for the first time in World War II (1944), John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier in Newport (1953), the US Supreme Court ordered the all-white Central High School in Little Rock to desegregate (1958), “The Monkees” premiered on NBC (1966), “Maude” premiered on CBS (1972), Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown in a coup d’état in Ethiopia (1974), anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko died in police custody from his injuries after being beaten & tortured by police (1977), “The Smurfs” premiered in North America (1981), Article V of the NATO agreement invoked for the first and only time in response to the September 11 attacks against the United States (2001), in Fallujah, US forces mistakenly shot & killed eight Iraqi police officers (2003), excavators announce that they found the remains of King Richard III of England under a carpark in Leicester (2012) & Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the British Labour Party (2015) on this day.
September 13
Cesare Borgia (1475), William Cecil, first Baron Burghley (1520), Daniel Defoe (1660), François Joseph Paul de Grasse (1723), Clara Wieck Schumann (1819), Walter Reed (1851), Milton S. Hershey (1857), John J. Pershing Blackjack, Arnold Schoenberg (1874), Sherwood Anderson (1876), J.B. Priestly (1894), Claudette Colbert Lily Chauchoin, Roald Dahl (1916), Yma Sumac Chavarri, Maurice Jarre (1924), Mel Tormé (‘The Velvet Fog’) (1925), Nicolai Ghiaurov (1929), Judith Martin (Miss Manners) (1938), Larry Speakes (1939), Óscar Arias Sánchez (1940), Tadao Ando (1941), Hissène Habré (1942), Jean Smart (1951), Ralph Northam (1959), Bong Joon-ho (1969) & Tyler Perry (1969) were born #OnThisDay. Titus Falvius Vespasianus (81), Andrea Mantegna (1506), John Cheke (1557), Michel de Montaigne (1592), Philip II of Spain (1598), James Wolfe (1759), Charles James Fox (1806), Ambrose Burnside (1881), Emmanuel Chabrier (1894), Lili Elbe born Einar Wegener, Lin Biao (1971), Arthur Fagg (1977), Leopold Stokowski (1977), William Loeb (1981), Tupac Shakur (1996), George Wallace (1998), Ann Richards (2006) & Pete Domenici (2017) died on this day. Construction of Hadrian’s Wall began (122), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre consecrated in Jerusalem (335), Pedro Álvares Cabral’s Portuguese expedition arrived in Calicut (1500), French troops defeated Habsburg & Papal forces at the Battle of Marignano (1515), Primo de Rivera’s coup in Spain (1923), Buckingham Palace damaged by German bombs (1940), Margaret Chase Smith’s election to the Senate made her the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress (1948), Gov. Nelson Rockefeller ordered a massacre at Attica prison in upstate New York (1971), “Law & Order” premiered on NBC (1990), the Oslo Accords signed (1993), Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” released (1997), Oprah Winfey gave away 276 cars (2004), Spain’s parliament voted to exhume former dictator Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen (2018) & Felicity Huffman sentenced to 14 days in prison for her role in the college admissions scandal (2019) on this day.
September 14
Luigi Cherubini (1760), Alexander von Humboldt (1769), Margaret Sanger (1879), Gaston Defferre (1910), Jacobo Árbenz (1913), Eric Bentley (1916), Deryck Cooke (1919), Sir Angus Ogilvy (1928), Harve Presnell (1933), Zoe Caldwell (1933), Kate Millett (1934), Sam Neill (1947), Kostas Karamanlis (1956), Dmitry Medvedev (1965), Ron DeSantis (1978) & Amy Winehouse (1983) were born #OnThisDay. Dante Alighieri (1321), Aaron Burr (1836), James Fenimore Cooper (1851), Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (1852), William McKinley (1901), Isadora Duncan (1927), Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1937), Fritz Busch (1951), Grace Kelly (1982), Christian Ferras (1982) & Patrick Swayze (2009) died on this day. Domitian succeeded Titus as Roman emperor (81), Harun al-Rashid succeeded his brother Al Hadi as Abbasid caliph (786), French/Venetian victory at the Battle of Marignano (1515), Georg Friedrich Händel finished “Messiah” (1741), the Gregorian Calender was adopted in Britain & throughout its empire (1752), Napoleon entered Moscow as the Great Fire of Moscow began (1812), Francis Scott Key wrote the poem set to music as the Star-Spangled Banner (1814), Gen Winfield Scott captured Mexico City (1847), Leopold II of Belgium concluded the Congo conference (1876), uprising in German South-West Africa suppressed (1894), Theodore Roosevelt sworn in as president following William McKinley’s death (1901), Russia’s prime minister Peter Stolypin assassinated in Kiev (1911), Lord Kitchener poster published on the cover of London Opinion magazine (1914), Austria-Hungary’s note requesting peace discussions rejected by the Allies (1918), Miguel Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship established in Spain (1923), Isadora Duncan was killed in a car accident (1927), first pre-frontal lobotomy in the US performed at the George Washington University Hospital (1936), Nikita Khrushchev appointed first secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR (1953), Col. Joseph-Désiré Mobutu’s coup d’état in Congo (1960), Pope Paul VI canonized Mother Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton as the first US-born saint (1975), Princess Grace of Monaco died in an auto accident (1982), “The Golden Girls” debuted on NBC (1985), Swedish voters voted down a proposal to join the Euro zone (2003), Elizabeth Warren announced her intention to seek the 2012 Democratic presidential nomination (2011), 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for bringing a clock to school (2015) & Paul Manafort pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges (2018) on this day.
September 15
Marco Polo (1254), François, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613), James Fenimore Cooper (1789), William Howard Taft (1857), Bruno Walter (1876), Max Factor (1877), Ettore Bugatti (1881), Agatha Christie (1890), Jean Renoir (1894), Umberto II, the last king of Italy 91904), Fay Wray (1907), Penny Singleton (1908), John Mitchell (1913), Margaret Lockwood (1916), Nipsey Russell (1918), Bobby Short (1924), Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos (1933), Emmerson Mnangagwa (1942), Jessye Norman (1945), Tommy Lee Jones (1946), Oliver Stone (1946), Lloyd Blankfein (1954), Letizia, queen of Spain (1972), Prince Harry [Henry Charles Albert David Windsor] & Prince of Wales (1984) were born #OnThisDay. Publius Quinctilius Varus (9), Jan de Bakker [Johannes Pistorius] (1525), Hideyoshi Toyotomi (1598), André Le Nôtre (1700), Anton von Webern (1945), Vincent Canby (2000), Johnny Ramone (2004), Sidney Luft (2005), Oriana Fallaci (2006) & Moussa Traoré (2020) died on this day. Philip II’s palace San Lorenzo del Escorial completed (1584), Battle of Sekigahara (1600), Germantown in Pennsylvania founded by 13 immigrant families (1683), Friedrich Wilhelm I divided Brandenburg-Prussia into cantons (1733), Battle of Signal Hill (1762), Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev captured by Russian troops (1774), “Lyrical Ballads” of William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge published (1795), Napoleon captured the Kremlin in Moscow (1812), Charles Darwin & the HMS Beagle reached the Galapagos Islands (1835), Confederate troops seized the arsenal at Harpers Ferry in West Virginia (1862), the first trenches were dug on the Western Front during World War I (1914), first use of tanks in warfare at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette (1916), Russia proclaimed a republic by Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government (1917), Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin while studying influenza (1928), the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of citizenship & made the swastika the official symbol of Germany’s Nazi regime (1935), British prime minister Neville Chamberlain visited Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden (1938), the turning of the tide in the Battle of Britain (1940), US & UN forces landed at Incheon in the midst of the Korean War (1950), the European Parliament formed in Strasbourg (1952), the UN turned Eritrea over to Ethiopia (1952), Marilyn Monroe filmed her iconic grate scene in “The Seven Year Itch” (1954), Konrad Adenauer’s CDU won the Bundestag elections in West Germany (1957), Nikita Khrushchev began a 13-day visit to the US (1959), Birmingham church bombing in Alabama killed four African American girls (1963), Ben Bella elected the first president of Algeria (1963), “Lost in Space” premiered on TV (1965), “Columbo” premiered on NBC (1971), Sandra Day O’Connor’s nomination to the US Supreme Court approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee (1981), Pope John Paul II’s encyclical “Laborem Exercens” inveighed against both capitalism & Marxism (1981), Menachem Begin resigned as prime minister of Israel (1983), “L.A. Law” premiered on NBC (1986), George Soros’ Quantum Fund dumped millions of pounds, provoking a sterling crisis that forced the currency out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism the following day (1992), Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy (2008), & Viktor Orban’s fascist government closed Hungary’s border with Serbia to migrants (2015).
September 16
Drusilla, daughter of Germanicus & Agrippina (16), Hildegard von Bingen (1098), Henry V (1387), Ming emperor Jiajing (1507), Qing emperor Daoguang (1782), Charles Crocker (1822), Andrew Bonar Law (1858), Yuan Shikai (1859), James Cash Penney (1875), Clive Bell (1881), Nadia Boulanger (1887), Hans ‘Jean’ Arp (1887), Karl Dönitz (1891), Lee Kuan Yew (1923), Lauren Bacall (1924), Peter Falk (1927), Ed Begley, Jr. (1949), Susan Ruttan (1949), David Copperfield (1956), John Bel Edwards (1966), Marc Anthony [Marco Antonio Muñiz] (1968), Amy Poehler (1971), Julian Castro (1974) & Nick Jonas (1992) were born #OnThisDay. Charles V of France (1380), Tomas de Torquemada (1498), Anne Bradstreet (1672), James II of England (1701), Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1736), Louis XVIII of France (1824), Maria Callas (1977), Millicent Fenwick (1992), McGeorge Bundy (1996), Mary Travers (2009), Princess Ragnhild Alexandra of Norway (2012), Carlo Azeglio Ciapmi (2016) & Edward Albee (2016) died on this day. Owain Glyndŵr was declared Prince of Wales by his followers (1400), the Mayflower left Plymouth with 102 Pilgrims and about 30 crew for the New World (1620), James Francis Edward Stuart (‘the Old Pretender’) became the Jacobite claimant to the thrones of England and Scotland on the death of his father James II (1701), Padre Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla launched the Mexican War of Independence with his Grito de Dolores (Cry of Dolores) (1810), slavery abolished in France & all French territories (1848), Lake Nyasa ‘discovered’ by David Livingstone (1859), the last Prussian troops from the Franco-Prussian War left France (1873), the largest land rush in history began in Oklahoma’s Cherokee Strip (1893), William Durant created General Motors (1908), Wall Street bombing killed 38 & injured 143 (1920), Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi began a hunger strike to protest the British decision to organize India’s electoral system by caste (1932), the Burke-Wadsworth Act enacted by Congress created Selective Service & instituted the first peacetime draft (1940), the Federation of Malaysia formed by Malaya, Singapore, British North Borneo (Sabah) & Sarawak (1963), the new Metropolitan Opera House opened in Lincoln Center with Leontyne Price as Cleopatra in “Antony & Cleopatra” by Samuel Barber (1966), BART began regular service in the San Francisco Bay area (1974), Gerald Ford announced conditional amnesty for US Vietnam War deserters (1974), Papua New Guinea’s independence from Australia (1975), the Episcopal Church USA approved the ordination of women (1976), the families of Peter Strelzyk & Gunter Wetzel arrived in West Germany from Communist East Germany in a hot air balloon (1979), New York City’s PBS channel (13) WNET-TV began round clock broadcasting (1987), “Frasier” starring Kelsey Grammer & David Hyde Pierce premiered on NBC (1993), “Judge Judy” with Judge Judith Sheindlin premiered in the US (1996), “Dr. Phil” with Phil McGraw & co-created by Oprah Winfrey debuted on syndicated US TV (2002), Navy Yard massacre in Washington, D.C. (2013), military coup in Burkina Faso (2015) & Guantánamo Bay is the world’s most expensive prison at US $13 million per prisoner according to investigation by “The New York Times” (2019) on this day.
September 17
Wenceslaus II, king of Bohemia & Poland (1271), Pope Paul V [Camillo Borghese] (1550), Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben (1730), Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743), Frederick Ashton (1904), Warren Burger (1907), Chaim Herzog (1918), Hank Williams (1923), Roddy McDowell (1928), Anne Bancroft [Anna Italiano] (1931), David Souter (1939), John Ritter (1948), Wile E. Coyote (1949), Road Runner (1949), Narendra Modi (1950) & Baz Luhrmann (1962) were born #OnThisDay. Hildegard von Bingen (1179), Sabbatai Zevi (1676), Dred Scott (1858), Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1879), Charles Alfred Pillsbury (1899), Count Folke Bernadotte (1948), Fritz Wunderlich (1966), Anastasio Somoza Debayle [Tachito] (1980), Katherine Porter (1980), Laura Ashley (1985), Zino Francescatti (1991), Karl Popper (1994), Spiro Agnew (1996), Red Skelton [Richard] (1997), Patrick Kennedy Lawford (2006), David Willcocks (2015) & Cokie Roberts (2019) died on this day. Alexandria taken by Arab forces under Amr Ibn al-‘As (642), Emperor Frederick Barbarossa issued the ‘Privilegium Minus’ decree elevating Austria to the status of a duchy (1156), Jews expelled from France by order of Charles VI (11394), Henri IV recognized as king of France by Pope Clemens VIII (1595), Gustaf Adolf’s Swedish army defeated troops of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II under Johann Tserclaes, Graf Tilly at the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631), France & Spain signed the Treaties of Nijmegen (1678), Georg-August University opened in Göttingen (1737), the Presidio created in San Francisco (1776) the US Constitution signed by delegates in Philadelphia (1787), William Herschel discovered Saturn’s moon Mimas (1789), Finland ceded by Sweden to Russia by the Treaty of Fredrikshamn (1809), Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in Maryland with two of her brothers (1849), Joshua Abraham Norton proclaimed himself Emperor Norton I in San Francisco (1859), 22,000 killed or wounded in the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), the first Civil War battle on Union soil (1862), the Commonwealth of Australia proclaimed (1900), Treaty of Rapallo (1924), “The Third Man” directed by Carol Reed won the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film at the Cannes Film Festival (1949), “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding published by Faber and Faber in London (1954), Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” premiered in NYC (1961), “Bewitched” premiered on ABC (1964), “Hogan’s Heroes” premiered on CBS (1965), “Mission Impossible” premiered on CBS (1966), “M*A*S*H” premiered on CBS (1972), Solidarnosc (Solidarity) founded by Lech Wałęsa in the Gdańsk shipyard (1980), Brian Mulroney succeeded John Turner as Canada’s prime minister (1984), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuiania, North & South Korea, Marshall Islands & Micronesia admitted to the UN (1991), Occupy Wall Street launched in Manhattan’s Zucotti Park (2011), Greta Thunberg told US Congress members, “I know you are trying but just not hard enough. Sorry” (2019) on this day.
September 18
Trajan, Roman emperor (98-117 CE) (53 CE), Samuel Johnson (1709), Justinus Kerner (1786), John Diefenbaker (1895), Agnes De Mille (1905), Greta Garbo (1905), Robert Blake (1933), Frankie Avalon [Francis Avallone] (1940), Ben Carson (1951), Chris Hedges (1956), James Gandolfini (1961), Lance Armstrong (1971), Anna Netrebko (1971), Jada Pinkett Smith (1971) & Jason Sudeikis (1975), were born #OnThisDay. Domitian (96), Hubert van Eyck (1426), Toytomi Hideyoshi (1598), William Hazlitt (1830), Dion Boucicault (1890), Peter Stolypin (1911), Frank Morgan [Francis Wuppermann] (1949), Dag Hammarskjöld (1961), Sean O’Casey (1964), Clive Bell (1964), Jimi Hendrix (1970), Katherine Anne Porter (1980) & Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2020). Nerva proclaimed Roman Emperor following Domitian’s assassination (96), Philip Augustus became king of France (1180), Peace of Crépy signed by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V & French King Francis I ending the Fourth Hapsburg-Valois War (1544), Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II declared war on France (1635), the Royal Opera House opened in Covent Garden (1809), British East India Company forces under Baron Minto conquered Java & appointed Stamford Raffles lieutenant governor (1811), the Great Fire of Moscow burned out after 5 days (1812), Tiffany & Co. founded by Charles Lewis Tiffany & John B. Young (1837), the Fugitive Slave Law enacted by Congress as part of the Compromise of 1850 (1850), the New York Times started publishing (1851), Oscar II became king of Sweden & Norway (1872), Lord Kitchener’s ships reached Fashoda in Sudan (1898), Scott Joplin granted copyright for his “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899), Peter Stolypin assassinated in Russia (1911), Ralph Bunche confirmed as acting UN mediator in Palestine (1948), “A Streetcar Named Desire” — directed by Elia Kazan & based on Tennessee Williams’ 1947 play of the same name, starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh — released (1951), “I Dream of Jeannie” premiered on NBC (1965), Dag Hammarskjöld killed in a plane crash (1961), “Funny Girl” released (1968), Momofuku Ando marketed the first Cup Noodle (1971), Patty Hearst captured by the FBI in San Francisco (1975), Mao Zedong’s funeral in Beijing (1976), the Assemblée Nationale voted to abolish capital punishment in France (1981) & Israel’s confederates murdered thousands of Palestinians in the Sabra & Shatila massacres in Lebanon (1982) on this day.