- 1780: British Major John André is hanged as a spy.
The British army officer had met secretly with American General Benedict Arnold to arrange the surrender of the fort at West Point. He was captured near Tarrytown, New York, in civilian clothes with the plans hidden in his boot, tried by a board of American officers, and executed at Tappan at age 30. Arnold escaped to the British side. - 1836: Charles Darwin returns to England aboard HMS Beagle.
The ship docked at Falmouth after a voyage of nearly five years that took him around the world, including to the Galápagos Islands. The specimens and observations he gathered led to his theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859. - 1869: Mahatma Gandhi is born.
Born in Porbandar, India, he became the leader of the Indian independence movement against British rule and is respected around the world for his doctrine of nonviolent protest to achieve political and social change. India marks his birthday as a national holiday. - 1879: Poet Wallace Stevens is born.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, he worked as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut, while writing poetry that explores how imagination and perception shape reality. His first collection, Harmonium, appeared in 1923, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. - 1919: President Woodrow Wilson suffers a massive stroke.
It struck at the White House days after he cut short a national tour to build support for the League of Nations. The stroke left him paralyzed on his left side and partially blind in his right eye, and the seriousness of his condition was kept from the public for the rest of his term. - 1935: Emperor Haile Selassie orders Ethiopia to mobilize for war.
He called the country to arms as Italian forces moved across the frontier. Benito Mussolini’s full invasion followed the next day, beginning the Italo-Ethiopian War, and Italy captured the capital, Addis Ababa, in May 1936. - 1937: The Parsley Massacre begins in the Dominican Republic.
In a speech in the border town of Dajabón, dictator Rafael Trujillo falsely claimed that Haitians were attacking and robbing Dominicans, and announced that the killing had already begun. Over the next several days his soldiers killed thousands of Haitians living along the border, with estimates ranging from about 9,000 to more than 20,000. The name comes from accounts that soldiers made people say “perejil,” the Spanish word for parsley, and killed those whose pronunciation marked them as Haitian. - 1954: Elvis Presley plays the Grand Ole Opry for the only time.
He was 19 and had just released his first single. The Nashville audience gave him a tepid response, but he found a much warmer welcome two weeks later on the rival Louisiana Hayride radio show, where he became a regular. - 1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai premieres.
The British-American war film had its world premiere in London. Directed by David Lean and starring Alec Guinness and William Holden, it tells the story of British prisoners of war forced to build a railway bridge for their Japanese captors. It won seven Academy Awards, including best picture. - 1959: The Twilight Zone debuts on CBS.
Created, largely written, and hosted by Rod Serling, the science-fiction anthology series was known for its surprise endings and the moral lessons built into its stories. It was hugely popular, ran for five seasons, and remains one of the most influential shows in television history. - 1964: A London art supplier stops selling mummy brown paint.
C. Roberson & Co. had made the pigment, also known as Egyptian brown or caput mortuum, from white pitch, myrrh, and the ground-up remains of Egyptian mummies. Its rich color came from the materials used in embalming. The firm reportedly ended sales because it had run out of mummies. - 1967: Thurgood Marshall joins the U.S. Supreme Court.
He was sworn in as an associate justice, becoming the first African American to serve on the court. Nominated by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the lawyer and civil rights activist had won the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. He served until 1991. - 1985: Actor Rock Hudson dies at 59.
The star of Giant and Pillow Talk died of AIDS-related complications at his home in Beverly Hills. He was the first major Hollywood celebrity known to have died of the disease, and his announcement of his diagnosis that summer changed how the country talked about AIDS. - 2005: Playwright August Wilson dies at 60.
He was best known for a cycle of ten plays, one for each decade of the 20th century, about Black American life, most of them set in his native Pittsburgh. Two of them, Fences and The Piano Lesson, won the Pulitzer Prize. - 2016: Vin Scully calls his final Dodgers game.
The sports broadcaster signed off at age 88 after a Dodgers game in San Francisco, ending a career of nearly 67 years with the team that began in 1950, when the Dodgers still played in Brooklyn. - 2017: Tom Petty dies at 66.
The singer and songwriter came out of the new-wave era of the late 1970s with a roots-driven guitar rock sound, and with the Heartbreakers and on his own produced a long run of hit singles and albums, including “American Girl” and “Free Fallin’.” He died in the Los Angeles area a week after finishing the band’s 40th-anniversary tour.
Born on This Day
- 1832: Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, British anthropologist
Regarded as a founder of cultural anthropology. - 1852: Sir William Ramsay, British chemist
Won the 1904 Nobel Prize for discovering the noble gases. - 1932: Maury Wills, American baseball player
The Dodgers shortstop stole a then-record 104 bases in 1962. - 1948: Donna Karan, American fashion designer
Founder of the DKNY label.
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