1608: At Ticonderoga (now Crown Point, New York), Samuel de Champlain shoots and kills two Iroquois chiefs. This was to set the tone for French-Iroquois relations for the next one hundred years.
1619: In Jamestown, Virginia, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses, convenes for the first time.
1818: Emily Bronte is born.
1825: Malden Island is discovered.
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1863: Henry Ford is born.
1864: At the Battle of the Crater, Union forces attempt to break Confederate lines by exploding a large bomb under their trenches.
1866: New Orleans's Democratic government orders police to raid an integrated Republican Party meeting, killing 40 people and injuring 150.1881: Smedley Butler, Marine Corps general, is born.
1890: Casey Stengel is born. He was one of only four men to manage both the Yankees and the Mets. (the other three were Yogi Berra, Dallas Green and Joe Torre)
1916: Dick Wilson is born. He is best known for playing Mr. Whipple in the Charmin commercials.1929: Sid Kroft, of Sid & Marty Kroft is born.
1932: Walt Disney's Flowers and Trees, the first Academy Award winning cartoon and first cartoon short to use Technicolor premieres.
1936: Buddy Guy is born.
1941: Paul Anka is born. He was an early teen idol and starred with Mamie van Doren in the MST3K episode Girls Town.
1945: Japanese submarine I-58 sinks the USS Indianapolis (CA-35), killing 883 seamen. I'd post Quint's monologue from Jaws, but it's been blacklisted from YouTube.
1947: William Atherton is born. He's made a good living playing slickly evil bureaucrats in movies like Real Genius, Die Hard and Ghostbusters.
1947: Arnold Schwarzenegger is born. His first movie role was in the low-budget Hercules in New York twelve years before Conan.1948: Jean Reno is born. If you need an evil French hitman for your movie, he's the guy.
1956: Delta Burke is born.
1961: Laurence Fishburne is born.
1963: Lisa Kudrow is born.
1964: Vivica A. Fox is born. I just watched her as the Druidic warrior priestess in the surprisingly good Idle Hands.1965: US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Social Security Act of 1965 into law, establishing Medicare and Medicaid.
1970: Christopher Nolan, director of the rebooted Batman movies, is born.
1971: Tom Greene is born.
1975: Jimmy Hoffa disappears from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, at about 2:30 p.m. He is never seen or heard from again.
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.
