Anniversaries

Anniversaries

Births: James Kent, organist and composer, 1700; Dr Joseph Priestley, scientist and clergyman, 1733; Charles Grey, second Earl Grey, former prime minister, 1764; Karl Friedrich Schinkel, architect and painter, 1781; Karl Ecker, composer, 1813; Thomas Henry Tizard, oceanographer, 1839; Percival Lowell, astronomer, 1855; Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, novelist, 1884; Henry Hathaway, film director, 1898; George Seferis (Giorgos Stylianou Seferiades), poet and diplomat, 1900. Deaths: John Barbour, poet, 1395; Richard Burbage, actor, 1619; Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, poet and critic, 1711; Sophia Lee, novelist and playwright, 1824; John Frederic Daniell, chemist and inventor, 1845; Felice Orsini, politician and assassin, executed, 1858; Tsar Alexander II of Russia, assassinated 1881; Benjamin Harrison, 23rd US President, 1901; George Earle Buckle, journalist, 1935; Clarence Seward Darrow, lawyer, 1938; Major Frederick George Jackson, Arctic explorer, 1938; Elizabeth Madox Roberts, novelist, 1941; Stephen Vincent Benet, novelist and poet, 1943; Karl Ernst Haushofer, geographer, 1946; Angela Brazil, writer, 1947; Winston Churchill, novelist, 1947; John Middleton Murry, author, 1957; Arthur Stuart Menteth Hutchinson, novelist, 1971. On this day: the Yorkists defeated the Lancastrians at the Battle of Stamford, 1470; the French Huguenots were defeated at the Battle of Jarnac, 1569; as predicted by Halley in 1682, Halley's Comet came to its perihelion, 1758; the planet Uranus was discovered by Sir William Herschel, 1781; standard time was established in the United States, 1884; the St Francis dam near Los Angeles burst, flooding the countryside, and drowning 450 people, 1928; Austria was declared to be part of the German Reich (the Anschluss), and was renamed "Ostmark", 1938; in the Soviet Union, Congress voted to abolish the political monopoly of the Communist party, 1990. Today is the Feast Day of St Ansovinus, St Euphrasia or Eupraxia, St Gerald of Mayo, St Heldrad, St Mochoemoc, St Nicephorus of Constantinople and Saints Roderic and Salomon.