Today in History 1/24

41: Caligula is assassinated by his Praetorian Guards.
1679: King Charles II disbands Parliament.
1754: Andrew Ellicott is born. He surveyed the boundaries for Washington, DC.1776: Henry Knox arrives at Cambridge, MA with the artillery that he has transported from Fort Ticonderoga.
1848: James W. Marshall finds gold at Sutter's Mill in California, kicking off the California Gold Rush.1862: Edith Wharton is born. She wrote the dreary novels The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome.1873: Leon Czolgosz, anarchist and assassin of President William McKinley is born.
1907: Lord Robert Baden-Powell founds the Boy Scout movement.1916: In Brushaber v. Union Pacific, the Supreme Court declares the federal income tax constitutional.
1917: Ernest Borgnine is born.
1924: Saint Petersburg, Russia is renamed Leningrad.
1927: Alfred Hitchcock releases his first film, The Pleasure Garden.

1928: Desmond Morris is born. He wrote The Naked Ape in 1968 and it remains controversial today.
1935: The first cans of beer are sold in the US. (Krueger's Finest and Krueger's Cream Ale).
1939: Ray Stevens is born.

1941: Neil Diamond is born.
1943: Sharon Tate is born. She was an actress and one of the victims of the Manson Family Tate-LaBianca murders.1946: Michael Ontkean is born. He played Sheriff Harry S. Truman on Twin Peaks.
1947: Warren Zevon is born.
1949: John Belushi is born. I never thought he was very funny. The "I'm a slob!" act got old in a hurry. "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life," as Dean Wormer said to Flounder.

1951: Yakov Smirnoff is born. Now that's funny!
1957: Adrian Edmondson is born. He played the wannabe punker Vyv Basterd on The Young Ones, perhaps the most accurate portrayal of college ever put on TV.
1962: Stanley Lord, captain of the SS Californian on the night of the Titanic disaster dies.1965: Winston Churchill dies.
1967: Phil LaMarr is born. He provides the voice of the Green Lantern on the most recent incarnation of Justice League.
1968: Mary Lou Retton is born, and the world gets a little more perky.1970: Matthew Lillard is born. If you can watch him in the Wing Commander movie and not want to murder him, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
1972: Japanese Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi is found hiding in a Guam jungle where he had been since the end of WWII.
1975: Larry Fine, Stooge, dies.

Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up