Today in History, 7/14

1698: The Darien Scheme begins with five ships, bearing about 1,200 people, departing Leith, Scotland for the Isthmus of Panama. The whole plan was for Scotland to establish it's own trading empire in the New World starting at Darien. Unfortunately, they never asked the Spanish who owned Panama. Nor did they ask the English who very much liked their own trading empire. The Spanish asked the English to do something and the English said "Cheerio!" and promptly passed a law prohibiting any Englishman from even thinking good thoughts about the Scots. In short, the Scottish merchants either starved or died of disease or from a spear through the chest. The 1,200 more people Scotland sent as backup only found graves and bodies. Then they died too. Scotland had almost half of its liquid capital invested in this scheme and its failure led directly to the Act of Union nine years later.
1789: Citizens of Paris storm the Bastille and free the seven prisoners held within. The citizens then tear down the massive fortress with their bare hands.1798: The Sedition Act becomes law in the US making it a crime to make false or malicious statements about the US government. It didn't last long enough to go before the Supreme Court, but most people think it would have been struck down.
1865: Edward Whymper becomes the first person to ascend the Matterhorn.1881: Billy the Kid is gunned down by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner, NM.

Pat Garrett

1898: Happy Chandler, baseball commissioner, is born.1906: Tom Carvel is born. The Carvel's ice cream cake empire didn't extend up here all that much (I think there was one in Rutland) but they were all over the tri-state area. No birthday was complete without a Carvel ice cream cake.

1911: Terry-Thomas is born. He specialized in playing British upper class twits, as in Lt. Col. Algernon Hawthorne in It's A Mad Mad Mad [etc] World.

1912: Woodie Guthrie is born.

1913: Gerald Ford is born.
1920: William Hanna, of Hanna-Barbera, is born.

1921: Sacco and Vanzetti are convicted.1926: Harry Dean Stanton is born. He is part of Roger Ebert's "Stanton-Walsh Law" which states that any movie with either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in it can't be all bad. Here is in in Repo Man explaining the Repo Code.

1932: Rosey Grier is born. He played football and starred in the cult movie The Thing With Two Heads.

1933: All political parties except for the Nazi party are outlawed in Germany.
1939: Sid Haig is born. He played scumbags in many of Jack Hill's blaxploitation movies like Coffy.

1946: Vincent Pastore is born. He played Big Pussy on The Sopranos.
1952: Joel Silver is born.
1960: Jane Lynch is born. She's been a staple of Christopher Guest's movies for several years now.
1965: The Mariner 4 flyby of Mars takes the first close-up photos of another planet.
1966: Richard Speck murders eight student nurses in their dormitory.
1969: In the US $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills are withdrawn from circulation. That's Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase on the 10k note.

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.