Today is:
August 2
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Today is:
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 Augustis: |
Children's Vision and
Learning Month National Back-to-School Month National Inventors' Month Science / Medicine / Technology Book Month Spinal Muscular Atrophy Awareness Month |
Gambling is Dangerous Day - On this day in 1876, Wild Bill Hickok was shot while
playing poker in Deadwood, South Dakota. Sponsor: Open Horizons.
Signing of the Declaration of Independence - 1776
Touch of Class Day - Celebrates the birthday of Myrna Loy, a movie actress with a lot of
class. She was born near Helena, Montana in 1905. Sponsor: The Life of the Party.
Born on this Day
1754: Pierre Charles L'Enfant (architect, engineer, Revolutionary War
officer: designed the plan for city of Washington D.C.)
1871: John Sloan (artist: South Beach Bathers; co-founder of Ashcan Art)
1891: The composer Arthur Bliss was born in London. Bliss put himself on
the musical map with something called the "Colour Symphony," premiered in 1922
just before the first of his two stays in the States. By his middle age, Bliss was
director of music for the BBC.
1892: Movie studio chief Jack Warner of Warner Brothers
1894: Westbrook Pegler (journalist)
1900: Helen Morgan (singer, actress: Frankie and Johnny, Show Boat,
Applause)
1905: Actress Myrna Loy
1924: Author James Baldwin
1918: Actress Beatrice Straight
1924: Actor Carroll O'Connor
1932: Actor Peter O'Toole
1935: Country singer Hank Cochran
1937: Rock musician Garth Hudson (The Band)
1939: Movie director Wes Craven
1939: Singer Edward Patten (Gladys Knight & The Pips)
1941: Singer Doris Kenner-Jackson (The Shirelles)
1943: Actor Max Wright
1945: Actress Joanna Cassidy
1950: Actress Kathryn Harrold
1951: Singer Andrew Gold
1959: Actress Victoria Jackson
1963: Actress Cynthia Stevenson
1964: Actress Mary-Louise Parker
1968: Rock musician John Stanier (Helmet)
1979: Actor Edward Furlong
1992: Actress Hallie Eisenberg (Pepsi commercials)
0257: Death of St. Stephen I, Pope
0461: Marjorian, Emperor of the West, deposed and killed
0640: Death of Pope Severinus
0686: Death of Pope John V
0939: Defeat of the Normans by Alan Barvek, King of Brittany
1100: William II, "Rufus," King of England, killed in a
hunting accident
1191: The first installment of freed prisoners and ransom money from
Acre arrives from Saladin to the 3rd Crusade
1274: Edward I, King of England, lands at Dover to take his Crown
1307: The Templars are exempted from a tax of King Edward of England by
the Pope
1332: Donald, Earl of Mar, made Regent of Scotland
1358: Paris opened to the Regent of France
1552: Death of St. Basil the Blessed
1552: John Fredrick (the Elector of Saxony) and Philip of Hesse are
released from custody
1589: Assassination of Henry III, King of France
1923: President Harding dies at the Palace Hotel.
1776: The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4th, was
actually signed by members of the Continental Congress.
1791: Samuel Briggs and his son, Samuel Briggs, Jr. became the first
father-son pair to receive a joint patent -- for their nail-making machine.
1823: The New York Mirror and Ladies Literary Gazette was founded on
this day. The weekly newspaper later became the daily New York Mirror.
1824: Fifth Avenue was opened in New York City on this day. It became
one of the most famous thoroughfares in the world, the home of many beautiful, fashionable
stores.
1858: On this day, the first mailboxes were installed along the streets
of Boston and New York City. The idea of mailboxes began in Belgium in 1848.
1876: Frontiersman "Wild Bill" Hickok was shot and killed
while playing poker at a saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. Go to an interesting Wild Bill
Hickok site. TODAY's BONUS HISTORY FACT
1887: Barbed wire was patented by Rowell Hodge this day. TODAY's BONUS HISTORY FACT
1921: Enrico Caruso, Italian operatic tenor, died in Naples.
1922: Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish inventor of the telephone in
1876, died.
1923: The 29th president of the United States, Warren G. Harding, died
in San Francisco.
1934: German President Paul von Hindenburg died, paving the way for
Adolf Hitler's complete takeover.
1939: Albert Einstein signed a letter to President Roosevelt urging
creation of an atomic weapons research program.
1943: A Navy patrol torpedo boat, PT-109, commanded by Lieutenant John
F. Kennedy, sank after being sheared in two by a Japanese destroyer off the Solomon
Islands. (Kennedy was credited with saving members of the crew.)
1944: Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., U.S. Navy pilot and elder brother of John
F. Kennedy, was killed when his plane exploded over the Belgian coast.
1945: President Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime
Minister Clement Attlee concluded the Potsdam conference.
1945: Pietro Mascagni, who composed "Cavalleria Rusticana,"
died in Rome. His one big hit opera had poured from his pen in his twenties. Mascagni died
at the age of 81, his international reputation marred by his support for Italian Fascism.
1964: The Pentagon reported the first of two attacks on US destroyers
by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin.
1968: A major earthquake in the Philippines rocked Manila, killing 307
people.
1974: John Dean, counsel to President Nixon, was sentenced to
one-to-four years in prison for his part in the Watergate cover-up.
1980: 85 people were killed when a bomb exploded at the train station
in Bologna, Italy.
1983: The U.S. House of Representatives voted 338-90 to designate the
third Monday in January a federal holiday in honor of civil rights leader Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.
1984: The U.S. swim team won three more gold medals at the Los Angeles
Olympics through the efforts of Mary T. Meagher, George DiCarlo and the men's 400-meter
medley relay team.
1984: Charles Schultz' award-winning comic strip was picked up by the
Daily Times in Portsmouth, OH on this day. With the addition of that paper, Peanuts,
featuring Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Pigpen, Linus, Peppermint Pattie, Woodstock and the
gang, became the first comic strip to appear in 2,000 newspapers.
1985: 137 people were killed when a Delta Air Lines jumbo jet crashed
while attempting to land at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
1986: Attorney Roy M. Cohn died at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland
of cardiac arrest and complications from AIDS.
1987: The 50-year-old Walt Disney movie classic, "Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs," was re-released. The film was the most popular animated film in
motion picture history. It grossed almost $20 million in its first 2 weeks.
1987: More than a million people gathered in Tehran, calling for the
overthrow of the sheiks of Saudi Arabia, where hundreds of Iranian pilgrims had died in
rioting in the Muslim holy city of Mecca.
1988: Despite previous threats of a veto, President Reagan said he
would reluctantly allow a plant-closing notification bill to become law, accusing
Democrats of "political shenanigans."
1988: U.S. military investigators concluded that "crew
errors" led to the shooting down on July 3rd of an Iranian passenger jet by the USS
Vincennes in the Persian Gulf.
1989: Abortion rights advocates gained a surprising victory in the U.S.
House of Representatives, which voted against including abortion curbs in a spending bill
for the District of Columbia.
1990: Iraq invaded Kuwait, seizing control of the oil-rich emirate.
President Bush condemned the incursion as an act of "naked aggression." The
Iraqis were driven out in Operation Desert Storm.
1991: Secretary of State James A. Baker III met in Jerusalem with a
group of Palestinians, but failed to line up their immediate support for a Middle East
peace conference.
1991: President Bush told a news conference only poor
health would prevent his running for re-election.
1992: The Bush campaign, accused by Bill Clinton of mudslinging,
responded with a vitriolic press release that referred to "sniveling hypocritical
Democrats" (President Bush later disavowed the release).
1992: At the Barcelona Summer Olympics, Jackie Joyner-Kersee of the US
repeated as heptathlon champion.
1993: In a dramatic scene shown on national television, Jessica, a
two-and-a-half-year-old girl at the center of a custody battle, was removed from the
Michigan home of Jan and Roberta DeBoer and turned over to her biological parents, Dan and
Cara Schmidt of Iowa.
1994: Serbia threatened to cut all aid to the Bosnian Serbs if they
didn't approve an international peace plan.
1995: Hurricane Erin came ashore near Vero Beach, Florida; the storm
was blamed for 11 deaths.
1995: China ordered the expulsion of two U.S. Air Force officers it
said were caught spying on military sites.
1996: Wall Street investors, worried about possible interest rate
increases, roared their approval after the government reported that unemployment was
creeping higher, consumer spending had slipped and manufacturing may have stalled.
1997: "Naked Lunch" (based on his experiences as a drug
addict) author William S. Burroughs, the godfather of the "Beat generation,"
died in Kansas City, Missouri, at age 83.
1997: Nigeria's maverick musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, who popularized
the Afro-music beat globally, died of AIDS at age 58.
1998: Cyclist Marco Pantani of Italy won the Tour de France, which had
been marred by a doping scandal.
1998: Ventriloquist Shari Lewis died in Los Angeles at age 65.
1999: Launching another salvo in a war of nerves with rival Taiwan,
China announced it had test-fired a new long-range missile.
1999: A train collision in India claimed 286 lives.
2000: Republicans awarded Texas Governor George W. Bush
their 2000 presidential nomination at the party's convention in Philadelphia
and ratified Dick Cheney as his running mate.
2000: Former President Ford was hospitalized after
suffering one, possibly two, small strokes.
2000: President Clinton postponed the scheduled
execution of Juan Raul Garza, a Texas drug kingpin and murderer (Garza was
executed this past June 19th).
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