Anniversaries

Births: Jacopo Tatti Sansovino, Florentine sculptor, 1486; Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1489; Christoph Willibald Gluck, composer, 1714; Theodor Hildebrand, painter, 1804; Gustav Flugel, organist and composer, 1812; Herman Hesse, poet and novelist, 1877.

Deaths: Henry the Fowler, King of Germany, 936; Nostradamus (Michel de Nostre-Dame), astrologer, 1566; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosopher and writer, 1778; Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann, physician and founder of homeopathy, 1843; Sir Robert Peel, statesman, 1850; Frederick James Furnivall, philologist, 1910; Joseph Chamberlain, statesman, 1914; Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, actor-manager, 1917; Amelia Earhart, aviator, disappeared in the Pacific 1937; Ernest Miller Hemingway, novelist, committed suicide 1961; Betty Grable (Elizabeth Ruth Grable), actress, 1973; Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, novelist and lepidopterist, 1977.

On this day: Oliver Cromwell defeated the Royalist troops at the Battle of Marston Moor, 1644; the Seven Days' Battles (American Civil War) ended, 1862; the first elevated railway was opened in New York City, 1866; James Abram Garfield, 20th US president, was shot by Charles Jules Guiteau at Washington, 1881 (he died 19 September 1881); Count Zeppelin's airship made its first trial flight, 1900; the London dock strike began, 1923; the Vichy government was set up in France, 1940; in the US, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, 1964; the Erskine Bridge over the river Clyde in Scotland was opened, 1971.

Today is the Feast Day of St Monegundis, St Otto of Bamberg and Saints Processus and Martinian.