1609: Galileo Galilei demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.
1718: Hundreds of French colonists arrive in Louisiana, with some of them settling in present-day New Orleans.
1768: James Cook begins his first voyage.
1819: Allan Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, is born. They're still around, but I bet they're not the hired goons (Hired goons?) they were in their strikebreaking days.
1835: The New York Sun perpetrates the Great Moon Hoax, involving life on the moon including bison, goats, unicorns, bipedal tail-less beavers and bat-like winged humanoids.1894: Shibasaburo Kitasato discovers the infectious agent of the bubonic plague and publishes his findings in The Lancet.
1909: Michael Rennie is born. He is most famous for playing the alien visitor Klaatu in The Day The Earth Stood Still.1910: Yellow Cab is founded.
1912: The Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalist party, is founded.
1913: Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo, is born.
1916: The United States National Park Service is created.1916: Van Johnson is born. He's a real actor having appeared in movies like The Caine Mutiny but I remember him best as the pouty newspaper columnist in the MST3K episode San Francisco International. He was, apparently, as gay as Paris in the spring, which I wasn't aware of.
1918: Leonard Bernstein is born.
1919: George Wallace is born. He was governor of Alabama and a bigot in ways that we can barely comprehend these days. Towards the end of his life he underwent a "Road to Damascus" type conversion. His most famous quote is:I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!1921: The first skirmishes of the Battle of Blair Mountain occur. This was the largest organized armed uprising in American labor history and led almost directly to the labor laws currently in effect in the United States.
1921: Monty Hall is born.
1930: Sean Connery is born. My saintly mother has raised an eyebrow at the number of cheesecake pictures I was posting, so here's something for the ladies.
1931: Regis Philbin is born.1933: Tom Skerritt is born.
1938: Frederick Forsyth is born. He wrote The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa file.
1944: Paris is liberated by the Allies.
1944: Anthony Heald is born. He is best known for portraying Hannibal Lecter's smarmy jail nemesis, Dr. Frederick Chilton in The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon.
1945: Ten days after World War II ended with Japan announcing its surrender, armed supporters of the Communist Party of China killed Baptist missionary John Birch, He is regarded by a portion of the American right as the first victim of the Cold War.1946: Rollie Fingers, relief pitcher from the 70's and 80's is born. He's one of the few people outside of the 19th Century who could really make a handlebar mustache work.
1948: The House Un-American Activities Committee holds first-ever televised congressional hearing: "Confrontation Day" between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.1949: John Savage is born. He played the eye-spinningly crazy Captain Ransom in the Star Trek: Voyager episode Equinox.
1949: Gene Simmons of KISS is born.
1950: President Harry Truman orders the US Army to seize control of the nation's railroads to avert a strike.1954: Elvis Costello is born.
1958: Tim Burton is born.
1962: David Packer is born. He played the human traitor to the lizard overlords in the epic 80's miniseries V.
1968: Rachel Ray is born. Everybody hates her these days, but I think she's just as cute as a button. She still doesn't make my short list of wives for my polygamy ranch. I think she would say "yum-o" one too many times and I'd sic Tina Fey on her.
1975: The album "Born to Run" is released by Bruce Springsteen.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.
