Today in History, 11/22

845: The first King of all Brittany, Nominoe defeats the Frankish king Charles the Bald at the Battle of Ballon near Redon.
1718: Off the coast of North Carolina, British pirate Edward Teach (best known as "Blackbeard") is killed in battle with a boarding party led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard.1864: Confederate General John Bell Hood invades Tennessee in an unsuccessful attempt to draw Union General William T. Sherman from Georgia.1890: Charles de Gaulle is born.1898: Wiley Post, aviation pioneer, is born.1906: The SOS distress signal is adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin.
1921: Rodney Dangerfield is born.

1932: Robert Vaughn is born. He is most famous for playing The Man From UNCLE, but he was also in the MST3K episode Teenage Cavemen.

1935: The China Clipper takes off from Alameda, California in an attempt to deliver the first airmail cargo across the Pacific Ocean (the airplane later reached its destination, Manila, and delivered over 110,000 pieces of mail).1940: Terry Gilliam is born.

1943: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek meet in Cairo, Egypt, to discuss ways to defeat Japan.
1943: Billie Jean King is born.1958: Jamie Lee Curtis is born.1960: Bruce Payne is born. He played the blue-lipped bad guy Damodar in that terrible Dungeons & Dragons movie.

1963: In Dallas, Texas, US President John F. Kennedy is killed and Texas Governor John B. Connally is seriously wounded by Lee Harvey Oswald. That same day, US Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as the 36th President of the United States. You can watch the Zapruder film here.1968: The Beatles' White Album is released.
1972: The United States loses its first B-52 Stratofortress of the Vietnam War.
1977: The first three nodes of the ARPAnet are connected, in what would eventually become the Internet.

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, 11/21

1272: Following Henry III of England's death on November 16, his son Prince Edward becomes King of England.
1620: Plymouth Colony settlers sign the Mayflower Compact1783: In Paris, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent, Marquis d'Arlandes, make the first untethered hot air balloon flight.1789: North Carolina ratifies the United States Constitution and is admitted as the 12th U.S. state.
1791: Colonel Napoléon Bonaparte is promoted to full general and appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the French Republic.
1861: Confederate President Jefferson Davis appoints Judah Benjamin Secretary of War.1877: Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.
1894: The Port Arthur Massacre takes place as Port Arthur, Manchuria falls to the Japanese, a decisive victory of the First Sino-Japanese War.
1916: HMHS Britannic sinks in the Aegean Sea after a mine explodes, killing 30 people.1919: Steve Brodie is born. He appeared in the MST3K episodes The Giant Spider Invasion and The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman.
1920: Bloody Sunday occurs during the Anglo-Irish War.
1942: The Alcan Highway is completed.
1944: Harold Ramis is born.

1944: Goldie Hawn is born.1953: Authorities at the British Natural History Museum announce that the "Piltdown Man" skull, held to be one of the most famous fossil skulls in the world, is a hoax.
1964: The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opens to traffic (at the time it was the world's longest suspension bridge).
1965: Björk is born.

1965: Alexander Siddig is born. He played the brash, naive Doctor Julian Bashir on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

1973: President Richard Nixon's attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, reveals the existence of an 18 1/2-minute gap in one of the White House tape recordings related to Watergate.
1980: A fire at the MGM Grand Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas kills 87 people.
1980: Lake Peigneur drains into an underlying salt deposit. A misplaced Texaco oil probe was drilled into the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine, causing water to flow down into the mine, eroding the edges of the hole. The resulting whirlpool sucked the drilling platform, several barges, houses and trees thousands of feet, to the bottom of the dissolving salt deposit.

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, 11/20

1789: New Jersey becomes the first U.S. state to ratify the Bill of Rights.
1820: An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this story).
1925: Robert F. Kennedy is born.1932: Richard Dawson is born.

1939: Dickie Smothers is born.

1943: The Battle of Tarawa begins. United States Marines land on Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands and suffer heavy fire from Japanese shore guns and machine guns.
1947: Joe Walsh is born.

1947: The Princess Elizabeth marries Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey in London.1959: Bo Derek is born. She never really did anything for me - I keep expecting to peel off her face and start munching a rat. But she has starred in some of the classic bad movies of all time, like Tarzan the Ape Man and Bolero.1959: Sean Young is born.1962: In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ends the quarantine of the Caribbean nation.
1969: The Cleveland Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
1975: Francisco Franco, Caudillo of Spain dies after 36 years in power.

1984: SETI is founded.
1985: Microsoft Windows 1.0 is released.

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, 11/19

1600: King Charles I of England is born.
1794: The United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain sign Jay's Treaty, which attempts to clear up some of the lingering problems left over from the American Revolutionary War.
1805: Ferdinand de Lesseps is born. He was a French engineer who built the Suez Canal, a task previously thought impossible. It was his attempt at building a canal in Panama that would ultimately break him.1863: President Abraham Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address at the military cemetery dedication ceremony at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.1924: William Russel is born. He played Ian Chesterton, the square-jawed, two-fisted chemistry teacher companion of the first Doctor on Doctor Who. Here's a quick trailer for one of my favorite early episodes, The Web Planet.

1905: Tommy Dorsey, big band leader, is born.

1916: Samuel Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn establish Goldwyn Pictures (the company later became one of the most successful independent filmmakers).
1920: Gene Tierney is born.1936: Dick Cavett is born. Here's John Cleese on The Dick Cavett Show in 1979.

1938: Ted Turner is born.1942: During the Battle of Stalingrad, Soviet Union forces under General Georgy Zhukov launch the Operation Uranus counterattacks at Stalingrad, turning the tide of the battle in the USSR's favor.
1950: General Dwight D. Eisenhower becomes supreme commander of NATO-Europe
1953: Robert Beltran is born. He played the lunkheaded first officer on Star Trek: Voyager.1955: National Review publishes its first issue.
1959: The Ford Motor Company announces the discontinuation of the unpopular Edsel.1961: Meg Ryan is born. I always get her mixed up with Melanie Griffith.1962: Jodie Foster is born. Is she a lesbian? Isn't she? It doesn't matter - I love her all the same.1963: Terry Farrell is born. She played the dreamy symbiote Jadzia Dax on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.1985: In Geneva, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev meet for the first time.
1990: Pop group Milli Vanilli are stripped of their Grammy Award because the duo did not sing at all on the Girl You Know It’s True album. Session musicians had provided all the vocals.

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, 11/18

1307: According to legend, William Tell shoots an apple off of his son's head.
1421: A seawall at the Zuiderzee dike breaks, flooding 72 villages and killing about 10,000 people in the Netherlands.
1493: Christopher Columbus first sights what is now Puerto Rico.
1626: St. Peter's Basilica in Rome is consecrated.

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1686: Charles Francois Felix operates on King Louis XIV of France's anal fistula after practicing the surgery on several peasants. Have I mentioned recently how glad I am to live in the modern age?
1865: Mark Twain's story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County is published in the New York Saturday Press.
1883: American and Canadian railroads institute five standard continental time zones, ending the confusion of thousands of local times.
1903: The Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty is signed by the United States and Panama, giving the Americans exclusive rights over the Panama Canal Zone.
1923: Alan B. Shepard, Jr, the first American in space, is born.1926: George Bernard Shaw refuses to accept the money for his Nobel Prize, saying, "I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."
1928: Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks is released. This is considered to be Mickey's official birthday.

1929: Off the south coast of Newfoundland in the Atlantic Ocean, a Richter magnitude 7.2 submarine earthquake, centered on Grand Banks, breaks 12 submarine transatlantic telegraph cables and triggers a tsunami that destroys many south coast communities in the Burin Peninsula, Newfoundland area.
1955: Carter Burwell is born. He has done the soundtrack for most of the Coen brothers' movies.1966: U.S. Roman Catholic bishops do away with the rule against eating meat on Fridays.
1968: Owen Wilson is born. He played Hansel in Zoolander.

1975: Big Papi is born.1978: In Guyana, Jim Jones leads his Peoples Temple cult in a mass murder-suicide that claims 918 lives in all, 909 of them at Jonestown itself, including over 270 children. Congressman Leo J. Ryan is assassinated by members of Peoples Temple shortly beforehand.1985: The comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, created by Bill Waterson, first appears in 30 newspapers across the U.S.
1985: Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann's playing career comes to an end when a sack by the Giants' Lawrence Taylor snaps Theismann's legs. The video's pretty icky, so you can watch it here.


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, 11/17

1282: John Balliol becomes King of Scotland.
1558: Queen Mary I of England dies and is succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth I of England.
1603: English explorer, writer and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh goes on trial for treason.
1800: The United States Congress holds its first session in Washington, D.C.
1820: Captain Nathaniel Palmer becomes the first American to see Antarctica (the Palmer Peninsula was later named after him).
1855: David Livingstone becomes the first European to see Victoria Falls in what is now present-day Zambia-Zimbabwe.
1869: In Egypt, the Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea, is inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony.
1871: The National Rifle Association is granted a charter by the state of New York.
1916: Shelby Foote is born.
1925: Rock Hudson is born.
1938: Gordon Lightfoot is born.
1942: Matin Scorsese is born.
1944: Danny DeVito is born.
1944: Lorne Michaels is born.
1951: Stephen Root is born.
1966: Daisy Fuentes is born.
1970: The Soviet Union lands Lunokhod 1 on Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) on the Moon. This is the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another world and was released by the orbiting Luna 17 spacecraft.
1973: In Orlando, Florida, US President Richard Nixon tells 400 Associated Press managing editors "I am not a crook".

Today in History 11/16

1532: Francisco Pizarro and his men capture Inca Emperor Atahualpa.
1776: Hessian mercenaries capture Fort Washington from the Patriots.
1776: The United Provinces (The Netherlands) recognize the independence of the United States.
1849: A Russian court sentences Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group; his sentence is later commuted to hard labor.
1907: Oklahoma is admitted as the 46th state.
1908: Burgess Meridith is born. He is best known for playing The Penguin in the old Batman TV show, but he was also in one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, Time Enough At Last.

1914: The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States officially opens.
1928: Clu Gulager is born. He's been a staple of B-movies for years. He was in Return of the Living Dead and the MST3K episodes San Francisco International and Master Ninja I.

1933: The United States and the Soviet Union establish diplomatic relations. President Roosevelt sends a telegram to Soviet leader Maxim Litvinov, expressing hope that United States-Soviet relations would "forever remain normal and friendly."
1938: LSD is first synthesized by Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland.
1940: In occupied Poland, the Nazis close off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world.
1945: In Operation Paperclip, the United States Army secretly admits 88 German scientists and engineers to help in the development of rocket technology.
1950: David Leisure is born. He is best known as Joe Isuzu.

1950: John Swartzwelder is born. He is one of the most prolific Simpsons writers.
1951: Miguel Sandoval is born. He played Mr. Escobar in Get Shorty.
1959: The Sound of Music opens on Broadway.
1973: NASA launches Skylab 4 with a crew of three astronauts from Cape Canaveral, Florida for an 84-day mission.
1973: Richard Nixon signs the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act into law, authorizing the construction of the Alaska Pipeline.

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, 11/15

1515: Thomas Cardinal Wolsey is invested as a Cardinal
1708: William Pitt, aka Pitt the Elder, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is born.1777: After 16 months of debate the Continental Congress approves the Articles of Confederation.
1791: The first U.S Catholic college, Georgetown University, opens its doors.
1806: Lieutenant Zebulon Pike sees a distant mountain peak while near the Colorado foothills of the Rocky Mountains (it was later named Pikes Peak).1906: Curtis LeMay is born.1926: The NBC radio network opens with 24 stations.
1928: CW McCall is born. He did the truckin' anthems Convoy and Wolf Creek Pass.

1929: Ed Asner is born.1932: Petula Clark is born. She sang Downtown and A Sign of the Times.

1937: Yaphet Kotto is born. He was in Homicide: Life on the Streets and Alien and he played Kanaga in Live and Let Die. 1939: In Washington, D.C., US President Franklin D. Roosevelt lays the cornerstone of the Jefferson Memorial.1940: Sam Waterston is born.

1942: The Battle of Guadalcanal ends in a decisive Allied victory.
1945: Bob Gunton is born. He is best known as the wicked warden in The Shawshank Redemption, but he also played the mad scientist who creates a race of super-smart cannibalistic bats because "that's what science does - it makes things better" in Bats.1949: Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte are executed for assassinating Mahatma Gandhi.
1951: Beverly D'Angelo is born.1959: Four members of the Herbert Clutter Family are murdered at their farm outside Holcomb, Kansas. Truman Capote would write his book In Cold Blood about the case.
1960: The Polaris missile, a submarine-launched, two-stage solid-fuel nuclear-armed ballistic missile, is tested for the first time.

1969: The Soviet submarine K-19 collides with the American submarine USS Gato in the Barents Sea.
1971: Intel releases world's first commercial single-chip microprocessor, the 4004. It could handle 93,000 intruuctions per second. By way of comparison, the piece of junk I'm writng this on does something like 9,726,000,000 intstructions per second.
1979: A package from the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski begins smoking in the cargo hold of a flight from Chicago to Washington, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing.

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, 11/14

1533: Conquistadors from Spain under the leadership of Francisco Pizarro arrive in Cajamarca, Inca empire
1765: Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat, is born.1862: Abraham Lincoln approves General Ambrose Burnside's plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, leading to the Battle of Fredericksburg. It didn't work and the Union Army of the Potomac got a good shellacking.1840: Claude Monet is born.1889: Pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochrane) begins a successful attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in seventy-two days.1889: Jawaharlal Nehru, First Prime Minister of India, is born. The Nehru Jacket is named for him. I've always wanted a Nehru Jacket so I could become the hippie guru I was meant to be. 1907: William Steig, author of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and dozens of other children's books is born.
1908: Joseph McCarthy is born.1910: Aviator Eugene Ely performs the first take off from a ship in Hampton Roads, Virginia. He took off from a makeshift deck on the USS Birmingham in a Curtiss pusher.1916: Sherwood Schwartz, creator of Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch, is born.

1921: Brian Keith, from Hardcastle & McCormick, is born.

1922: The BBC begins radio service in the United Kingdom.
1927: McLean Stevenson, who played Lt. Col. Henry Blake on MASH, is born.

1929: Jimmy Piersall is born. He was a baseball player with some pretty serious bi-polar disorder issues and his life was chronicled in the not-very-historically-accurate movie Fear Strikes Out.1940: In England, the city of Coventry is heavily bombed by German Luftwaffe bombers. Coventry Cathedral is almost completely destroyed.
1947: P.J. O'Rourke is born.1948: Charles, Prince of Wales is born.1957: The Apalachin Meeting outside Binghamton, New York is raided by law enforcement, and many high level Mafia figures are arrested.
1959: Paul McGann is born. He played the eighth Doctor in the thankfully aborted American version of Doctor Who.1964: Patrick Warburton is born. He is most famous for playing David Puddy on Seinfeld, but he also provides the voice of the homicidal bodyguard Brock Samson on The Venture Bros.

1972: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 1,000 (1,003.16) for the first time.
1979: US President Jimmy Carter issues Executive order 12170, freezing all Iranian assets in the United States in response to the hostage crisis.
1990: After German reunification, the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Poland sign a treaty confirming the Oder-Neisse line as the border between Germany and Poland.

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.