1754: William Murdoch is born. He invented one of my favorite pieces of archaic technology, the pneumatic message tube.
1770: James Cook formally claims eastern Australia for Great Britain, naming it New South Wales.
1821: Jarvis Island is discovered by the crew of the Eliza Frances. It's an uninhabited rock in the middle of the Paciifc.
1831: Nat Turner leads black slaves and free blacks in a rebellion.
1858: The Lincoln-Douglas debates begin.
1863: Lawrence, Kansas is destroyed by Confederate guerrillas Quantrill's Raiders in the Lawrence Massacre.
1878: The American Bar Association is founded.
1888: The first successful adding machine in the United States is patented by William Seward Burroughs.
1904: Count Basie is born.
1906: Friz Freleng is born. He directed some of the best known Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes cartoons.
1911: The Mona Lisa is stolen by a Louvre employee.
1932: Melvin Van Peebles is born. He is credited with creating the blaxploitation genre with the film Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song (from which this blog humbly derives its name). The story of the making of the film is almost as entertaining as the film itself, as seen in the biopic made by Melvin's son Mario Van Peebles, BADASSSSS! or How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass.
1936: Speaking of badasssss brothers, Wilt Chamberlain is born. Here he is at 17, when he had only bedded 8,356 women.
1938: Kenny Rogers is born.
1939: Clarence Williams III is born. He got a generation of white kids to say, "Solid!" as Lincoln "Linc" Hayes on The Mod Squad.
1942: The Battle of Stalingrad begins. For an entertaining, if ahistorical, look at the battle check out Enemy at the Gates.1942: A Nazi flag is placed atop Mount Elbrus, in the Caucusus Mountains. At 18,510 feet, it is the highest summit in Europe. Actually, now that I read that, it makes a lot more sense. With all the doings in Georgia lately I had been boning up on my knowledge of the area and read somewhere that Elbrus is only 5,500 feet high. I thought. "....the Hell? I can climb a mountain that high!" But, as it turns out, it's actually 5,500 meters high. Not feet. Needless to say, I won't be climbing it anytime soon. Myth holds that this is the summit where Zeus chained Prometheus to get his entrails pecked out by birds for eternity as punishment for stealing fire.
1942: Allied forces involved in the Guadalcanal campaign defeated an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru.1943: Hugh Wilson is born. He is the creator of WKRP in Cincinnati.
1944: The Dumbarton Oaks Conference, a prelude to the United Nations, begins.
1945: Basil Poledouris is born. He did the scores for such movies as Conan the Barbarian, Red Dawn, RoboCop, The Hunt for Red October and Starship Troopers.
1952: Joe Strummer, of The Clash, is born.1956: Kim Cattrall is born.
1959: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an executive order proclaiming Hawaii the 50th state of the union.1967: Carrie-Ann Moss is born.
1986: Carbon dioxide gas erupts from volcanic Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing up to 1,800 people within a 20-kilometer range. Volcanic activity under the lake caused the water to become saturated with carbon dioxide and an tremor caused the CO2 to come out of solution all at once.
1991: Latvia declares renewal of its full independence after the occupation of Soviet Union.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.
