Today in History, 8/7

322 BC: The Battle of Crannon between Athens and Macedon following the death of Alexander the Great.
1679: The brigantine Le Griffon, commissioned by René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, is towed to the south-eastern end of the Niagara River, to become the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes of North America.
1782: George Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle. It is later renamed to the more poetic Purple Heart.1789: The United States War Department is established.
1794: The Whiskey Rebellion begins as farmers in the Monongahela Valley of Pennsylvania rebel against the federal tax on liquor and distilled drinks.
1876: Mata Hari is born.
1884: Billie Burke is born. She is most famous for playing Glinda the Good Witch of the North in The Wizard of Oz.

1903: Louis Leakey is born.1912: The Progressive Party nominates Theodore Roosevelt for president.
1926: Stan Freeburg is born.

1927: The Peace Bridge opens, between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York.1940: The Alsace Lorraine is annexed by the Third Reich during World War II.

The red bit is the Alsace-Lorraine

1942: Battle of Guadalcanal begins as U.S. Marines initiate the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.
1942: Garrison Keillor is born.

"Tricksey little hobbitses!"

1944: David Rasche is born. He is most famous for playing a psychotic cop-on-the-edge in the short lived TV series Sledge Hammer!

1947: Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 7000-km (4375-mile) journey across the Pacific Ocean proving that pre-historic peoples could have traveled from South America.
1952: Alexei Sayle is born. He was a regular on The Young Ones (usually as the boys' landlord Mr. Balowski) but here he is playing Il Duce:

1955: Wayne Knight is born. He is most famous for playing Newman on Seinfeld.1959: The Lincoln Memorial design on the U.S. penny goes into circulation. It replaces the "sheaves of wheat" design and is still in use.
1960: David Duchovny is born. God, I hate him.

1960: Jacquie O'Sullivan, lead singer for the 80's girl group Bananarama, is born.

1964: The U.S. Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving US President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces.
1974: Philippe Petit performs a high wire act between the twin towers of the World Trade Center 1,368 ft (417.0 m) in the air.1975: Charlize Theron is born.
1978: Cirroc Lofton is born. He played Jake Cisco on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In a big switch for the various Star Trek franchises, Jake was a regular kid who got into trouble (a lot) and lusted after the various fabulous babes on the station. Most Star Trek kids are so goodie-goodie (like most Star Trek adults) and it was nice to see someone acting like an actual human being. Put it this way: Wesley Crusher used the Holodeck for skiing lessons, while Jake used it to try and hack into Quark's Vulcan Love Slave program. Which one sounds more like an average fourteen-year old to you?

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.

Today in History, 8/6

1787: Sixty proof sheets of the Constitution of the United States are delivered to the Constitutional Convention.
1806: Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, abdicates, thus ending the Holy Roman Empire after over a thousand years. Voltaire pointed out that it was neither holy, Roman or an empire.1809: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, is born. His most famous poem is The Charge of the Light Brigade.1819: Norwich University founded in Vermont as the first private military school in the United States. It was founded in Norwich, VT and then moved to Northfield, VT, (after a catastrophic fire in 1866) which causes no end of confusion for tourists.1862: The Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas is scuttled on the Mississippi River after suffering damage in a battle with USS Essex near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.1881: Alexander Fleming, inventor of penicillin, is born.1890: At Auburn Prison in New York, murderer William Kemmler becomes the first person to be executed by electric chair.
1890: Cy Young makes his major league debut with the Cleveland Spiders of the National League.1892: Hoot Gibson, movie cowboy, is born.1901: Kiowa land in Oklahoma is opened for white settlement, effectively dissolving the contiguous reservation.
1908: Will Lee is born. He played Mr. Hooper on Sesame Street.

1911: Lucille Ball is born.

1914: Denis Patrick Dowd Jr. enlists in the French Foreign Legion, becoming the first American to fight in World War I.
1917: Robert Mitchum is born.1923: Henry Sullivan swims the English Channel.
1926: Gertrude Ederle becomes first woman to swim across the English Channel.
1926: Harry Houdini performs his greatest feat, spending 91 minutes underwater in a sealed tank before escaping.
1928: Andy Warhol is born.1934: Piers Anthony is born.
1938: Paul Bartel is born. He was a regular in the later years of American International Pictures and directed the cult black comedy Eating Raoul.1942: Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands is the first reigning queen to address a joint session of the United States Congress.1945: Hiroshima is devastated when an atomic bomb, "Little Boy", is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 70,000 people were killed instantly, and some tens of thousands died in subsequent years due to burns and radiation poisoning.1951: Catherine Hicks is born. She played Kirk's love interest in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.1956: After going bankrupt in 1955, the DuMont Television Network has its final broadcast, a boxing match from St. Nicholas Arena.
1964: Prometheus, the world's oldest tree, is cut down.
1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into United States law.

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.

Today in History, 8/5

910: The last major Viking army to raid England is defeated at the Battle of Tettenhall by the allied forces of Mercia and Wessex, led by King Edward and Earl Aethelred.
1100: Henry I is crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey.1305: William Wallace, who led Scottish resistance to England, is captured by the English near Glasgow and transported to London for trial and execution. While it's about as ahistorical as you can get without being 1941 (Edward I neither practiced nor encouraged jus primae noctis, for example) Braveheart is still a cracking good film.
1583: Sir Humphrey Gilbert establishes first English colony in North America, at what is now St John's, Newfoundland.
1620: The Mayflower departs Southampton, England.
1858: Cyrus West Field and others complete the first transatlantic telegraph cable after several unsuccessful attempts. It operated for less than a month. If you've ever worked hard on a project, only to have a small detail derail the whole operation at the last minute, say a prayer for poor Cyrus Field. The first attempt at laying the cable failed when the cable broke and was lost to the depths. On the second attempt, the cable broke no less than three times and was salvaged. Once connection was made, it only worked for about a month until an operator overloaded the voltage on the line and burned it out.1861: In order to help pay for the Civil War, the United States government issues the first income tax as part of the Revenue Act of 1861 (3% of all incomes over US $800; rescinded in 1872).
1861: The United States Army abolishes flogging.
1862: Joseph Merrick "The Elephant Man" is born. Modern smart people say that he suffered from Type I Neurofibromatosis.
1884: The cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty is laid on Bedloe's Island (now called Liberty Island) in New York Harbor.1925: Plaid Cymru is formed with the aim of disseminating knowledge of the Welsh language, which is in danger of dying out.
1906: John Houston is born. His movies are a laundry list of the greatest movies ever made: The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen and The Man Who Would be King, among others. We can forgive his appearance as The Lawgiver in Battle for the Planet of the Apes because, hey, a guy's gotta pay rent.

1914: In Cleveland, Ohio, the first electric traffic light is installed.
1930: Neil Armstrong is born.1935: John Saxon is born. Now here's an actor's actor! People of my generation will remember him best as Lt. Thompson (aka the heroine's father) in Nightmare on Elm Street but he's been in more low-budget slasher, exploitation, sci-fi or Italian Dawn of the Dead knockoffs than Keith (but not David) Carradine.

1941: Bob Clark is born. He directed an extremely, uh, varied roster of films: the proto-slashers Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things and Black Christmas, the epic Porky's trilogy, A Christmas Story, and Turk 182.1944: Polish insurgents liberate a German labor camp in Warsaw, freeing 348 Jewish prisoners.
1946: Loni Anderson is born.
1957: American Bandstand, debuts on the ABC television network.
1961: Tawney Kitaen is born. She was last seen causing David Coverdale to violate traffic laws (shame!) in the video for "Here I Go Again."
1962: Nelson Mandela is jailed. He would not be released until 1990.
1962: Marilyn Monroe is found dead of an apparent suicide.
1966: The album "Revolver" is released by The Beatles.
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.

Today in History, 8/4

70: The destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans.
1265: At the Battle of Evesham, the army of Prince Edward (the future Edward I of England) defeats the forces of rebellious barons led by Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester; killing de Montfort and many of his allies. (This is sometimes considered the end of the age of chivalry in England.)
1693: Dom Perignon invents Champagne.
1704: During the War of the Spanish Succession, Gibralter is captured by the Engish.
1789: In France members of the National Constituent Assembly take an oath to end feudalism and abandon their privileges.
1790: A newly passed tariff act creates the Revenue Cutter Service (the forerunner of the United States Coast Guard).
1792: Percy Bysshe Shelley is born.1821: Atkinson & Alexander publish the Saturday Evening Post for the first time as a weekly newspaper.
1892: The family of Lizzie Borden is murdered in the Fall River, Massachusetts home.
1902: Louis Armstrong is born.

1902: The Greenwich foot tunnel under the River Thames opens.1912: Raul Wallenberg is born. He was a Swedish diplomat who used his diplomatic immunity to smuggle Jews out of Nazi-controlled Europe during WWII. He wound up getting murdered by the Soviets in Lubyanka Prison in 1947.1914: Germany invades Belgium; in response, the United Kingdom declares war on Germany and World War I really gets rolling.
1942: Don S. Davis is born. He played Scully's Dad on The X-Files.1944: A tip from a Dutch informer leads the Gestapo to a sealed-off area in an Amsterdam warehouse where they find Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family.
1961: Lauren Tom is born. She's, like, a real actor (she was in The Joy Luck Club) but I know her best as Minh Souphanousinphone on King of the Hill.

1969: At the apartment of French intermediary Jean Sainteny in Paris, U.S. representative Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Xuan Thuy begin secret peace negotiations. The negotiations will eventually fail.
1977: President Jimmy Carter signs legislation creating the United States Department of Energy.

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.

Today in History, 8/3

1492: Christopher Columbus sets sail from Palos de la Frontera, Spain.
1527: First known letter was sent from North America by John Rut while at St. John's, Newfoundland.
1678: Robert LaSalle builds the Le Griffon, the first known ship built in America.1803: Joseph Paxton is born. He is best known for having designed the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851.1811: Elisha Graves Otis is born. he is best known for having invented that safety device that prevents modern elevators from being such death traps.1852: First Boat Race between Yale and Harvard, the first American intercollegiate athletic event. Harvard won.
1900: Firestone Tire & Rubber Company founded.
1900: Ernie Pyle, war correspondent, is born.1923: Warren G. Harding is succeeded by Vice President Calvin Coolidge as the 30th President of the United States.
1926: Tony Bennett is born.

1936: Jesse Owens wins the 100 meter dash by defeating Ralph Metcalfe at Berlin Olympics.1940: Martin Sheen is born.1941: Martha Stewart is born.

1943: Gen. George S. Patton slaps a private at an army hospital in Sicily, accusing him of cowardice.
1948: Whittaker Chambers accuses Alger Hiss of being a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union.1949: The National Basketball Association is founded in the United States.
1950: John Landis is born.

1958: The nuclear submarine USS Nautilus travels beneath the Arctic ice cap.1972: The U.S. Senate ratifies the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
1981: In the United States, Air traffic controllers affiliated with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization walk off the job. President Ronald Reagan ultimately responds by firing those who ignore his order to return to work.

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.

Today in History, 8/2

338 BC: A Macedonian army led by Philip II defeats the combined forces of Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaeronea, securing Macedonian hegemony in Greece and the Aegean.
1610: Henry Hudson sails into what it is now known as Hudson Bay, thinking he had made it through the Northwest Passage and reached the Pacific Ocean.
1776: Delegates to the Continental Congress begin signing the United States Declaration of Independence.
1870: The Tower Subway, the world's first underground tube railway, opens in London.
1905: Myrna Loy is born. She was just gorgeous as Nora Charles in The Thin Man movies.1924: Carroll O'Connor is born.

1931: Albert Einstein urges all scientists to refuse military work.
1932: Peter O'Toole is born. Here he is in The Man of La Mancha. It's kind of over modulated, so be prepared to dive for that volume knob.

1937: The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 is passed, essentially rendering marijuana and all its by-products illegal.
1939: Wes Craven is born. He directed the horror classic Nightmare on Elm Street.

1939: Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd write a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to begin the Manhattan project to develop a nuclear weapon.
1943: Max Wright is born. His specialty is playing nebbishy characters, most prominently as the Tanner family patriarch in ALF.
1943: PT-109 is rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri and sinks. Lt. John F. Kennedy, future US President, saves all but two of his crew.1945: The Potsdam Conference, in which the Allied Powers discuss the future of defeated Germany, concludes.1953: Butch Patrick is born. He played Eddie Munster in The Munsters.1957: Mojo Nixon is born.

1959: Victoria Jackson is born.1959: Apollonia is born. Many a young man wore out the heads on his parents' VCR trying to pause the crucial moments of her role in Purple Rain.1964: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident takes place in which North Vietnamese gunboats fire on the U.S. destroyers USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy.1970: Kevin Smith is born.

1977: Edward Furlong is born. He played the young John Connor in Terminator 2. He suffered the ultimate injustice during the casting of Terminator 3: the producers wanted the character to be a drugged-up loser in his mid-twenties and Edward Furlong just happened to be that in real life. He was passed over for the role.1990: Iraq invades Kuwait.

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.

Today in History, 8/1

33 BC: Octavian (later known as Augustus) enters Alexandria, Egypt, bringing it under the control of the Roman Republic.
1492: Ferdinand and Isabella drive the Jews out of Spain.
1619: The first African slaves arrive in Jamestown, Virginia.
1774: The element oxygen is discovered for the third (and last) time.
1779: Francis Scott Key is born.1790: The first US census is completed showing a population of nearly 4 million people.
1800: The Act of Union 1800 is passed in which merges the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
1819: Herman Melville is born.1834: Slavery is abolished in the British Empire.
1837: Mother Jones, labor activist, is born.1876: Colorado is admitted as the 38th U.S. state.
1902: The United States buys the rights to the Panama Canal from France.
1914: Germany declares war on Russia. This is usually considered the official kickoff date for World War I.
1933: Dom DeLuise is born.1941: The first Jeep is produced.
1942: Jerry Garcia is born.

1944: Anne Frank makes the last entry in her diary.
1944: The Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupation breaks out in Warsaw, Poland.
1953: Robert Cray, bluesman, is born.

1957: The United States and Canada form the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD).
1958: Michael Penn is born.

1966: Charles Whitman kills 15 people at The University of Texas at Austin before being killed by the police.
1966: Purges of intellectuals and imperialists becomes official People's Republic of China policy at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
1981: MTV begins broadcasting in the United States and airs its first video, "Video Killed The Radio Star" by the Buggles.


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.