Post by farmgal on Dec 28, 2012 23:27:18 GMT -5
December 28 is the 363nd day of this leap year in the Gregorian calendar.
There are 3 days remaining until the end of the year.
Days left until next elections:
daysuntil.com/Election-Day/index.html
Senators up for reelection in 2014
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_2014
U.S. Debt Clock: www.usdebtclock.org/
1732 First known ad for "Poor Richard's Almanack" (Pennsylvania Gazette) Most people bought almanacs because they were like mini encyclopedias. They contained pieces of information about everyday life that were useful. The almanacs cost two shillings per dozen. However, because many people bought an almanac (one in ten!), there were large profits. In addition to the fact that almanacs were common, people also bought Benjamin Franklin's almanac because he was a very popular person. Franklin also spread the word by advertising for the almanac in his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Richard%27s_Almanack
1781 British post troops on John's Island. British troops commanded by Major James Henry Craig are posted at John's Island, just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, on this day in 1781. Craig had evacuated his troops from Wilmington, North Carolina, a little over a month earlier on November 14. The Patriots planned to remove Craig and his men from the island with troops led by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Light Horse Harry Lee and his famed cavalry from Fort Ninety-Six in the South Carolina backcountry. Lee aborted the attack when a column led by Major James Hamilton arrived too late and was unable to cross the Wapoo River, which was only fordable once or twice a month.
The same logistical difficulties that kept American forces from reaching the island helped to keep its African population among the purest bearers of Gullah culture and language in North America. The islands of the South Carolina coast could only be reached by water until the 1950s. Thus Gullah, a Creole of Elizabethan English and languages of the African slave coast, survived there comparatively undisturbed.
On the same day that nature defied the military science of the age, General George Washington wrote the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, reiterating his feelings of undeserving honor at having been made a member of Dr. Benjamin Franklin's esteemed intellectual society, and thanking the society for commending him on the Continental Army's and Navy's recent contributions to the advancement of science. Washington was careful to also note the contributions of the Patriots' allies to their efforts.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%27s_Island
1793 Thomas Paine is arrested in France for treason. Though the charges against him were never detailed, he had been tried in absentia on December 26 and convicted. Before moving to France, Paine was an instrumental figure in the American Revolution as the author of Common Sense, writings used by George Washington to inspire the American troops. Paine moved to Paris to become involved with the French Revolution, but the chaotic political climate turned against him, and he was arrested and jailed for crimes against the country.
When he first arrived in Paris, Paine was heartily welcomed and granted honorary citizenship by leaders of the revolution who enjoyed his antiroyalty book The Rights of Man. However, before long, he ran afoul of his new hosts. Paine was strictly opposed to the death penalty under all circumstances and he vocally opposed the French revolutionaries who were sending hundreds to the guillotine. He also began writing a provocative new book, The Age of Reason, which promoted the controversial notion that God did not influence the actions of people and that science and rationality would prevail over religion and superstition. Although Paine realized that sentiment was turning against him in the autumn of 1793, he remained in France because he believed he was helping the people.
After he was arrested, Paine was taken to Luxembourg Prison. The jail was formerly a palace and unlike any other detainment center in the world. He was treated to a large room with two windows and was locked inside only at night. His meals were catered from outside, and servants were permitted, though Paine did not take advantage of that particular luxury. While in prison, he continued to work on The Age of Reason.
Paine's imprisonment in France caused a general uproar in America and future President James Monroe used all of his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794. Ironically, it wasn't long before Paine came to be despised in the United States, as well. After The Age of Reason was published, he was called an anti-Christ, and his reputation was ruined. Thomas Paine died a poor man in 1809 in New York.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine
1832 John C. Calhoun becomes the first Vice President of the United States to resign. President Andrew Jackson was for the Tariff of 1828 and caused Calhoun to be opposed to Jackson, which led to Calhoun's resignation in 1832. Because he could not do anything about Jackson's views toward tariffs, which benifitted only industrial North and hurt slaveholding South, Calhoun resigned.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Calhoun
1832 In Missouri, St. Louis Academy (founded in 1818) was chartered as St. Louis University. It was the first Catholic university established in the U.S. west of the Allegheny Mountains.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_University
1835 Osceola leads his Seminole warriors in Florida into the Second Seminole War against the United States Army.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osceola
1838 Greensborough Female College chartered in North Carolina, under the Methodist Church. In 1920 its name was changed to Greensboro College.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_College
1846 Iowa is admitted as the 29th U.S. state.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa#History
1867 United States claims Midway Atoll, the first territory annexed outside Continental limits.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_Atoll
1869 America's first Labor Day The Knights of Labor, a labor union of tailors in Philadelphia, hold the first Labor Day ceremonies in American history. The Knights of Labor was established as a secret society of Pennsylvanian tailors earlier in the year and later grew into a national body that played an important role in the labor movement of the late 19th century.
The first annual observance of Labor Day was organized by the American Federation of Labor in 1884, which resolved in a convention in Chicago that "the first Monday in September be set aside as a laborer's national holiday." In 1887, Oregon became the first state to designate Labor Day a holiday, and in 1894 Congress designated the first Monday in September a legal holiday for all federal employees and the residents of the District of Columbia.
1869 William Finley Semple of Mt. Vernon, Ohio patented chewing gum. William Finley Semple patented chewing gum made of "the combination of rubber with other articles adapted to the formation of an acceptable chewing gum", but he never commercially produced gum. That was done by Thomas Adams of Staten Island, N.Y. He was experimenting to vulcanize chicle for use as a rubber substitute, but without success. Yet, like Adams, he knew that chicle could be chewed. He boiled a small batch of chicle in his kitchen to create a chewing gum. Testing sales at a local store, he found people liked his gum. He had orginated the first chicle-based chewing gum.
1877 John Stevens, Wisconsin, applies for a patent on his flour rolling mill. In 1877 John Stevens of Neenah, Wisconsin submited a patent application for the flour rolling mill calling it the grain-crushing mill. Stevens's innovation boosted flour production, efficiency by 70% and produced flour of a superior quality at a high price.
1886 The first U.S. patent for a commercially successful dishwasher was issued to Josephine Garis Cochrane (No. 355,139). Developed over a number of years, her hand-operated machine provided "a continuous stream of either soap-suds or clear hot water" which was "supplied to a crate holding the racks or cages containing the dishes while the crate is rotated so as to bring the greater portion thereof under the action of the water." The company she founded to market the dishwasher to hotels and restaurants was purchased in the 1920's by the Hobart Corporation. They introduced the "KitchenAid" brand name that is known today (1949). The first U.S. patent for a dishwasher was issued 14 May 1850 to Joel Houghton.
1900 Carry Nation attacks a Kansas saloon Convinced that her righteous campaign against alcohol justified her aggressive tactics, Carry Nation attacks a saloon in Wichita, Kansas, shattering a large mirror behind the bar and throwing rocks at a titillating painting of Cleopatra bathing.
Carry Nation's lifelong battle against alcohol reflected a larger reformist spirit that swept through the nation in the early 20th century and led to laws against everything from child labor to impure food and drugs. But Nation's hatred of alcohol was also a deeply personal struggle--in 1867, she married an Ohio physician who had a serious alcohol problem. Despite Nation's efforts to reform him, her husband's drinking problem eventually destroyed their marriage and he died shortly after they split.
Nation remarried, this time to a Texas minister. She and her new husband moved in 1889 to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, at a time when much of the state was emerging from its wild frontier days. Convinced that drinking was the root cause of all social evil, Nation decided to close down the saloons in Medicine Lodge and other Kansas cities by traveling throughout the state and preaching her temperance message. Nation soon found that her inspiring speeches against "demon rum" had little effect on the wilder citizens of Kansas, though, so she decided to take more aggressive action. Claiming she was inspired by powerful "visions," in 1900 she began a series of well-publicized attacks on Kansas saloons using her favorite weapon of moral righteousness--her trusty hatchet.
At six feet tall and 175 pounds, the hatchet-wielding Nation was an intimidating sight. She relished chopping up barrels of whiskey, destroying expensive bar fixtures, and berating the stunned bar owners and patrons for their evil habits. The sale of alcohol was already illegal in Kansas but the law was largely ignored, so Nation reasoned that it was the responsibility of law-abiding citizens to destroy not only the alcohol but also the saloons that sold it. Local law enforcement, however, did not usually agree, and Nation was frequently jailed for her disturbances.
Although Nation's campaign of saloon vandalism won her national fame, the immediate results were disappointing. She managed to pressure Kansas into enforcing its prohibition laws more aggressively, but when she died in 1911, most of the country still sanctioned the sale of alcohol. Ironically, by the time the U.S. adopted prohibition in 1920, Nation was largely forgotten--but the hatchet-wielding Kansas reformer unquestionably helped lay the foundation for America's "noble experiment."
1902 First indoor pro football game, Syracuse beats Philadelphia 6-0
1912 The first municipally owned streetcars take to the streets in San Francisco, California. The first World Series of pro football, actually a five-team tournament, was played among a team made up of players from both the Athletics and the Phillies, but simply named New York; the New York Knickerbockers; the Syracuse AC; the Warlow AC; and the Orange (New Jersey) AC at New York's original Madison Square Garden. New York and Syracuse played the first indoor football game before 3,000. Syracuse, with Glen (Pop) Warner at guard, won 6-0 and went on to win the tournament.
1923 George Bernard Shaw's "St Joan" premieres in New York NY. The canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920 reawakened within Shaw ideas for a chronicle play about her. In the resulting masterpiece, "Saint Joan," the Maid is treated not only as a Catholic saint and martyr but as a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius. Acclaim for Saint Joan led to the awarding of the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature to Shaw (he refused the award).
1924 Temperatures throughout Iowa hovered near 24 degrees below zero F.
1925 George/Ira Gershwin's musical "Tip-Toes" premieres in New York NY. The Gershwin brothers had a very successful year in 1925, culminating in an extremely busy December for George. On December 3, he was soloist for the premiere of his Concerto in F; on the twenty-eighth, Tip-Toes opened on Broadway; on the twenty-ninth, Paul Whiteman led a performance of his 135th Street (originally Blue Monday) to a cheering reception; and on the thirtieth, Song of the Flame opened on Broadway, with a score that George had contributed.
1928 Last recording of Ma Rainey, "Mother of the Blues" is made. Ma Rainey didn't have a voice that was strong or beautiful as her protege Bessie Smith, but she had a deep feeling for the sad songs she performed. Rainey made 92 recordings for Paramount in her career. She was accompanied by greats like Louie Armstrong, Lovie Austen, Buster Bailey, Georgia Tom Dorsey, Tommy Ladnier, and Don Redmon.
1928 Louis Armstrong makes 78rpm recording of "West End Blues" He returned to Chicago in 1925 and began recording under his own name with his famous Hot Five and Hot Seven with such hits as "Potato Head Blues", "Muggles," and "West End Blues", the music of which set the standard and the agenda for jazz for many years to come. Armstrong's trumpet introduction to "West End Blues" remains one of the most famous and influential improvisations in jazz history.
1941 Request made for creation of construction battalions. Rear Admiral Ben Moreell requests authority from the Bureau of Navigation to create a contingent of construction units able to build everything from airfields to roads under battlefield conditions. These units would be known as the "Seabees"—for the first letters of Construction Battalion.
The men chosen for the battalions were not ordinary inductees or volunteers—they all had construction-work backgrounds. The first batch of recruits who made the cut had helped build the Boulder Dam, national highways, and urban skyscrapers; had dug subway tunnels; and had worked in mines and quarries. Some had experience building ocean liners and aircraft carriers. Approximately 325,000 men, from 60 different trades, ages 18 to 60, would go on to serve with the Seabees by the end of the war. The officers given the authority to command these men were also an elite crew, derived from the Civil Engineer Corps. Of the more than 11,000 officers in the Corps all together, almost 8,000 would serve with the construction units.
Although the Seabees were technically supposed to be support units, they were also trained as infantrymen, and they often found themselves in combat with the enemy in the course of their construction projects. They were sent to war theaters as far flung as the Azores, North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the beaches of Normandy.
Some of the Seabees' feats became legendary. They constructed huge airfields and support facilities for the B29 Superfortress bombers on Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, as well as the ports needed to bring in the supplies for the bombing of Japan. The Seabees also suffered significant casualties in the process of providing innovative new pontoons to help the Allies land on the beaches of Sicily. During D-Day, the Seabees' demolition unit was among the first ashore. Their mission: to destroy the steel and concrete barriers the Germans had constructed as obstacles to invasion.
The Seabees' motto was "We Build, We Fight."
1943 World War II - After eight days of brutal house-to-house fighting, the Battle of Ortona concludes with the victory of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division over the German 1st Parachute Division and the capture of the Italian town of Ortona.
1944 Maurice Richard becomes the first player to score 8 points in one game of NHL ice hockey.
1944 Former Washington 3rd baseman Buddy Lewis wins Distinguished Flying Cross. Former Washington 3B Buddy Lewis won the Distinguished Flying Cross for precision flying over the Burma War Theater. In the years before World War II, Lewis hit over .300 three times and scored 100 or more runs four times, with a high of 122 in 1938. He led the AL in triples (16) in 1939. In 1940 he moved to right field, allowing longtime Senator shortstop Cecil Travis, who was slowing down, to move to third. After returning from the service, he hit .333 at the end of the 1945 season and .292 in 1946.
1945 The United States Congress officially recognizes the Pledge of Allegiance.
1944 Leonard Bernstein's musical "On the Town" premieres in New York NY. The year of "On the Town's" premiere is significant of course; America was in the midst of the Second World War. The musical's central characters - Gabey, Chip and Ozzie are three sailors on 24-hour shore leave in New York, painting the town red with their romantic pursuits and misadventures.
1948 The DC-3 airliner NC16002 disappears 50 miles south of Miami, Florida.
1958 "Greatest Game Ever Played" - Baltimore Colts defeat the New York Giants in the first ever National Football League sudden death overtime game at New York's Yankee Stadium.
1967 Muriel Siebert is 1st women to own a seat on New York Stock Exchange.
1973 The Endangered Species Act is passed in the United States.
1978 With the crew investigating a problem with the landing gear, United Airlines Flight 173 runs out of fuel and crashes in Portland, Oregon, killing 10. As a result, United Airlines instituted the industry's first crew resource management program
2000 U.S. retail giant Montgomery Ward announces it is going out of business after 128 years.
2009 43 people die in a suicide bombing in Karachi, Pakistan, where Shia Muslims were observing the Day of Ashura.
Births
1797 Charles Hodge, Philadelphia. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary at 21, and the next year began teaching there. A year after that he was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry. At age 27 he founded The Biblical Repertory, later called Princeton Review. In his whole career he took out only two years from his professorship at Princeton to study in Paris, Halle, and Berlin (1826-28). His greatest exegetical work, Commentary on Romans, was published in 1835; and between 1871-73 (at age 73-75) he published his three-volume, 2,260 page Systematic Theology. When he died, June 19, 1878, his son Archibald succeeded him at Princeton. (d 1878)
1801 James Barnes (d 1869) railroad executive and a Union Army general in the American Civil War.
1809 John Stough Bobbs (d 1870) American physician who performed the first U.S. gallstone operation in Indianapolis, Indiana, becoming known as "the father of cholecystotomy". The surgery was reported, 19-20 May 1868, to the Indiana State Medical Society of which he was president of the surgery section. Bobbs was a commissioner of the state's first hospital, the Indiana Hospital for the Insane. He was the state's first and most vocal advocate for a medical school, and he was founded the Indiana Medical college in 1869 (which was incorporated into the Indiana University School of Medicine in 1908). Earlier, he had served as state senator (1856-60). He was a civilian brigade surgeon during the Civil War
1822 William Booth Taliaferro (d 1898), United States Army officer, a lawyer, legislator, and Confederate general in the American Civil War. Taliaferro served in under General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson for the first part of the war, then spent the second half preparing coastal defenses in the lower South.
Taliaferro attended William and Mary College and Harvard Law School. He practiced law in Virginia before volunteering during the Mexican War, where he rose to the rank of major. Before the Civil War, he served in the Virginia legislature and the state militia. He was at Harper's Ferry in 1859 when John Brown made his raid on the arsenal in an attempt to stir up a slave insurrection.
Taliaferro became a colonel in the Confederate Army when the war began. He fought in western Virginia in 1861, then served under Jackson in 1862. His relationship with Jackson was rocky at first, as he became involved in a dispute between Jackson and General William Loring. Taliaferro signed a petition circulated by Loring that protested Jackson's placement of troops at Romney, Virginia. Taliaferro fought alongside Jackson during the 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign, and he impressed his commander later in the summer at the Battle of Cedar Mountain. Jackson gave him permanent command of Jackson's old division for the Second Battle of Bull Run in late August, but a wound kept Taliaferro from seeing action.
Shortly after the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Taliaferro was transferred to Charleston. He helped General Pierre G. T. Beauregard fortify the city, for which Beauregard gave him an enthusiastic commendation. Taliaferro's work made Charleston impenetrable for the Union; it did not fall until the end of the war. He helped evacuate Savannah, Georgia, before William T. Sherman's army captured the city in 1864. Taliaferro ended the war fighting with General Joseph Johnston's army at Bentonville, North Carolina. He spent the years after the war practicing law and serving in the Virginia legislature and as a county judge before his death in 1898.
1823 Thomas Alexander Scott (d 1881) American businessman. He was the 4th president of what was the largest corporation in the world, the Pennsylvania Railroad, during the middle of the 19th century. In connection with his railroad interests, he also took a leading role in crafting what eventually became the Compromise of 1877, which marked the end of Reconstruction following the Civil War.
1827 Robert Latimer McCook (d 1862) general in the Union Army during the American Civil War who was killed by Confederate partisans in Alabama.
1833 Charles Miller Shelley (d 1907) brigadier general in the Confederate States Army and a postbellum U.S. Representative from Alabama.
1847 Samuel A. Ward, American music publisher, composed the tune Materna, to which we sing today the patriotic hymn, "America, The Beautiful." (d 1903)
1856 Woodrow Wilson, (Thomas Woodrow Wilson )(d 1924) 28th President of the United States. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913. With Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft dividing the Republican Party vote, Wilson was elected President as a Democrat in 1912. He is the only U.S. President to hold a Ph.D. degree, which he obtained from Johns Hopkins University.
1873 William Draper Harkins (d 1951) American nuclear chemist who was one of the first to investigate the structure and fusion reactions of the nucleus. In 1920, Harkins predicted the existence of the neutron, subsequently discovered by Chadwick's experiment. He made pioneering studies of nuclear reactions with Wilson cloud chambers. In the early 1930's, (with M.D. Kamen) he built a cyclotron. Harkins demonstrated that in neutron bombardment reactions the first step in neutron capture is the formation of an "excited nucleus" of measurable lifetime, which subsequently splits into fragments. He also suggested that subatomic energy might provide enough energy to power the Sun over its lifetime
1879 William Lendrum "Billy" Mitchell (d 1936) United States Army general who is regarded as the father of the U.S. Air Force. He is one of the most famous and most controversial figures in the history of American airpower.
Mitchell served in France during the First World War and, by the conflict's end, commanded all American air combat units in that country. After the war, he was appointed deputy director of the Air Service and began advocating increased investment in air power, believing that this would prove vital in future wars. He argued particularly for the ability of bombers to sink battleships and organized a series of bombing runs against stationary ships designed to test the idea.
1894 Alfred Sherwood Romer (d 1973) U.S. paleontologist who studied the evolution of early vertebrates in biological terms of comparative anatomy and embryology. He researched muscle and limb evolution, the development and evolutionary history of cartilage and bone, and the structure and function of the nervous system. Further, he traced the basic structural and functional changes that took place during the evolution of fishes to primitive terrestrial vertebrates and from these to modern vertebrates. He linked the form and function of animals to their environment. Romer was one of the first vertebrate palaeontologists to defend the idea of continental drift, having found striking similarities between Permian reptiles in western Texas and in Czechoslovakia
1896 Roger Huntington Sessions (d 1985) American composer, critic and teacher of music.
1898 Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby (d 1957) Swedish-U.S. meteorologist who first explained the large-scale motions of the atmosphere in terms of fluid mechanics. His work contributed to developing meteorology as a science. Rossby first theorized about the existence of the jet stream in 1939, and that it governs the easterly movement of most weather. U.S. Army Air Corps pilots flying B-29 bombing missions across the Pacific Ocean during World War II proved the jet stream's existence. The pilots found that when they flew from east to west, they experienced slower arrival times and fuel shortage problems. When flying from west to east, however, they found the opposite to be true. Rossby created mathematical models (Rossby equations) for computerized weather prediction (1950).
1902 Mortimer Jerome Adler (d 2001) American philosopher, educator, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for the longest stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California. He worked for Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, and Adler's own Institute for Philosophical Research.
1903 Earl Kenneth Hines, known as Earl "Fatha" Hines, (d 1983) was "one of a small number of pianists whose playing shaped the history of jazz".
1903 John von Neumann (d 1957) Hungarian-born American mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics (of explosions), and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians in modern history. The mathematician Jean Dieudonné called von Neumann "the last of the great mathematicians", while Peter Lax described him as possessing the most "fearsome technical prowess" and "scintillating intellect" of the century. Even in Budapest, in the time that produced geniuses like Theodore von Kármán (b. 1881), Leó Szilárd (b. 1898), Eugene Wigner (b. 1902), and Edward Teller (b. 1908), his brilliance stood out.
Von Neumann was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics, in the development of functional analysis, a principal member of the Manhattan Project and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (as one of the few originally appointed), and a key figure in the development of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata and the universal constructor. Along with Teller and Stanisław Ulam, von Neumann worked out key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb.
1905 Clifford Charles Arquette (d 1974) actor and comedian, famous for his role as "Charley Weaver".
1911 Sam Levenson (d 1980) American humorist, writer, television host and journalist.
1921 Johnny Otis John Alexander Veliotes American blues and rhythm and blues pianist, composer, vibraphonist, drummer, singer, bandleader and impresario.
1929 Maarten Schmidt Dutch-born American astronomer who in 1963 discovered quasars (quasi-stellar objects). The hydrogen spectrum of these starlike objects shows a huge redshift, which indicates they are more distant than normal stars, travelling away at greater speed, and are among the oldest objects observed. In turn, this indicates they existed only when the universe was very young, and provides evidence against the steady state theory of Fred Hoyle. Schmidt is currently seeking to find the redshift above which there are no quasars, and he also studies x-ray and gamma ray sources
1929 Owen Frederick Bieber American labor union activist. He was president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) from 1983 to 1995.
1939 Philip Frederick Anschutz American entrepreneur. Anschutz bought out his father's drilling company in 1961, and earned large returns in Wyoming. He then diversified his portfolio by investing in stocks, real estate, and railroads. He then began investing in entertainment companies, co-founding Major League Soccer as well as multiple teams, including the LA Galaxy, Chicago Fire, Houston Dynamo, San Jose Earthquakes, New York / New Jersey Metro Stars, and the Kansas City Wizards. In addition, Anschutz owns stakes in the LA Lakers, LA Kings, and venues including the Staples Center, The O2 Arena (London), and the Home Depot Center. Anschutz also invests in family films such as The Chronicles of Narnia. Forbes ranks him the 34th richest person in the U.S. with an estimated net worth of $7 billion as of October 2010.
1944 John Hardy "Johnny" Isakson Republican junior United States Senator from Georgia since 2005. Previously, he represented Georgia's 6th Congressional district in the House from 1999 to 2005.
1944 Kary Banks Mullis Nobel Prize winning American biochemist, author, and lecturer. In recognition of his improvement of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, he shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Smith and earned the Japan Prize in the same year. The process was first described by Kjell Kleppe and 1968 Nobel laureate H. Gobind Khorana, and allows the amplification of specific DNA sequences. The improvements made by Mullis allowed PCR to become a central technique in biochemistry and molecular biology, described by The New York Times as "highly original and significant, virtually dividing biology into the two epochs of before P.C.R. and after P.C.R."
Mullis has been criticized in The New York Times for, after winning the Nobel prize, promoting ideas in areas he has no expertise, and has promoted AIDS denialism, Climate change denial and his belief in astrology.
1946 Timothy Peter "Tim" Johnson senior U.S. Senator from South Dakota, serving since 1997. He is a member of the Democratic Party. He previously served as the U.S. Representative for South Dakota's At-large congressional district from 1987 to 1997, and in the state legislature from 1979 to 1986.
1954 Denzel Hayes Washington, Jr. American actor, screenwriter, director and film producer. He has garnered much critical acclaim for his work in film since the 1990s, including for his portrayals of real-life figures, such as Steve Biko, Malcolm X, Rubin Carter, Melvin B. Tolson, Frank Lucas, and Herman Boone. Washington has been awarded two Golden Globe awards, a Tony Award and two Academy Awards for his work. He is notable for winning the Best Supporting Actor for Glory in 1990; and the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2002 for his role in the film Training Day.
2002 Kelsey Shelton Smith-Briggs (d 2005) child abuse victim. She died at the home of her biological mother Raye Dawn Smith, and her stepfather Michael Lee Porter. Her death was ruled a homicide. Kelsey had been "closely" observed by the Oklahoma Department of Human Services from January 2005 up to and including the day of her death.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelsey_Smith-Briggs
Deaths
1897 Rev. William Corby, CSC (b 1833) priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross. Corby is perhaps best known for his giving general absolution to the Irish Brigade on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, which was dramatized in the film Gettysburg. Fr. Corby also served twice as President of the University of Notre Dame. The school's Corby Hall is named for him, and a statue of him similar to that at Gettysburg stands outside this building on the Notre Dame campus.
1918 George Henry White (b 1852) Republican U.S. Congressman from North Carolina between 1897 and 1901. He is considered the last African American Congressman of the Reconstruction era, although his election came twenty years after the era's "official" end. By the time of his election, Reconstruction had long since been overturned throughout almost all of the South, making it impossible for blacks to be elected to federal office. However, in North Carolina, "fusion politics" between the Populist and Republican parties led to a brief period of Republican and African American political success from 1894-1900. After White left office, no other black American would serve in Congress until Oscar De Priest was elected in 1928; no other black American would be elected to Congress from the South until after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s; Barbara Jordan of Texas and Andrew Young of Georgia were elected in 1972, and Harold Ford, Sr. of Memphis, Tennessee was elected in 1974.
1945 Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (b 1871) American novelist and journalist. He pioneered the naturalist school and is known for portraying characters whose value lies not in their moral code, but in their persistence against all obstacles, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency.
1946 Carrie Minetta Jacobs-Bond (August 11, 1862 – December 28, 1946) was an American singer, pianist, and songwriter who composed some 175[1] pieces of popular sheet music from the 1890s through the early 1940s. She is perhaps best remembered for writing the parlor song "I Love You Truly", becoming the first woman to sell one million copies of a song. An enduring favorite as a wedding song, it first appeared in her 1901 collection Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose, along with "Just Awearyin' for You", which was also widely recorded.Jacobs-Bond's song with the highest number of sales immediately after release was "A Perfect Day" in 1910. A 2009 August 29 NPR documentary on Jacobs-Bond emphasized "I Love You Truly" together with "Just Awearyin' for You" and "A Perfect Day" as her three great hits. Jacobs-Bond was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.
1952 James Fletcher Hamilton Henderson, Jr. (b 1897) American pianist, bandleader, arranger and composer, important in the development of big band jazz and swing music. His was one of the most prolific black orchestras and his influence was vast. He was often known as "Smack" Henderson.
1961 Edith Bolling Galt Wilson (b 1872), second wife of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, was First Lady of the United States from 1915 to 1921. She has been labeled "the Secret President" and "the first woman to run the government" for the role she played when her husband suffered prolonged and disabling illness after a stroke in October 1919. Some even refer to her as "the first female president of the United States."
1963 Abbott Joseph Liebling (b 1904) American journalist who was closely associated with The New Yorker from 1935 until his death.
1967 Katharine Dexter McCormick (b 1875) U.S. biologist, suffragist, philanthropist and, after her husband's death, heir to a substantial part of the McCormick fortune. She is well remembered today for funding most of the research necessary to develop the first birth control pill.
1970 Lucius Mendel Rivers (b 1905) Democratic U.S. Representative from South Carolina, representing the Charleston based 1st congressional district for nearly thirty years. He was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee during the period of the Vietnam War when the United States escalated its involvement in the conflict.
1971 Max Steiner (b 1888) Austrian composer of music for theatre productions and films. He later became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Trained by the great classical music composers Brahms and Mahler, he was one of the first composers who primarily wrote music for motion pictures, and as such is often referred to as "the father of film music". Along with such composers as Franz Waxman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman and Miklós Rózsa, Steiner played a major part in creating the tradition of writing music for films.
1976 Katharine Edgar Byron (b 1903), democrat, U.S. Congresswoman who represented the 6th congressional district of Maryland from May 27, 1941 to January 3, 1943. She was the first woman elected to Congress from Maryland.
1976 Freddie King (b 1934), thought to have born as Frederick Christian, originally recording as Freddy King, and nicknamed "the Texas Cannonball", African-American blues guitarist and singer. He is often mentioned as one of "the Three Kings" of electric blues guitar, along with Albert King and B.B. King.
1978 Harry Winston (b 1896) renowned American jeweler. He donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958 after owning it for a decade, and traded the Portuguese Diamond to the Smithsonian in 1963. His name is now legendary and is associated with the finest level of jewelery.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Winston
1983 Dennis Carl Wilson (b 1944) American rock and roll musician best known as a founding member and the drummer of The Beach Boys. He was a member of the group from its formation until his death in 1983.
1984 David Samuel "Sam" Peckinpah (b 1925) American filmmaker and screenwriter who achieved prominence following the release of the Western epic The Wild Bunch (1969). He was known for the innovative and explicit depiction of action and violence, as well as his revisionist approach to the Western genre.
1992 Salvatore Anthony Maglie (b 1917) Major League Baseball pitcher for the New York Giants, Cleveland Indians, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Yankees, and St. Louis Cardinals from 1945 to 1958. Maglie was known as "Sal the Barber," because he gave close shaves—that is, pitched inside to hitters. Coincidentally, he also sported a five o'clock shadow look. He also had the distinction of being one of the few players to play for all three New York City baseball teams. Maglie won 119 games and lost 62, with an earned run average of 3.15, over his career.
1992 Mort Greene, lyricist, writer, television producer, (b 1912) Wrote 'Tulsa'? Or 'The Velvet Touch'? Or 'Call Out the Marines'? Greene arrived in Hollywood in 1931, and was soon writing the words for every kind of movie song, principally for RKO. In 1942 alone, he and his composer Harry Revel wrote songs for eight films: Republic's Moonlight Masquerade, Paramount's Beyond the Blue Horizon, and RKO's The Big Street, Here We Go Again, Call Out The Marines, Four Jacks and a Jill, Sing Your Worries Away and The Mayor of 44th Street. For the last-named they wrote 'When There's a Breeze on Lake Louise', which was nominated for an Academy Award - but stood no chance with Irving Berlin's 'White Christmas' in the running.
1993 William Lawrence Shirer (b 1904) American journalist, war correspondent, and historian, who wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich a history of Nazi Germany read and cited in scholarly works for more than 50 years. Originally a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Shirer was the first reporter hired by Edward R. Murrow for what would become a team of journalists for CBS radio. Shirer became known for his broadcasts from Berlin, from the rise of the Nazi dictatorship through the first year of World War II. With Murrow, Shirer organized the first broadcast world news roundup, a format still followed by news broadcasts. Shirer's other books include Berlin Diary (published in 1941), The Collapse of the Third Republic which drew on his experience living and working in France from 1925 to 1933, and his three-volume autobiography, "Twentieth Century Journey."
1999 Clayton Moore (b 1914) American actor best known for playing the fictional western character Lone Ranger from 1949–1951 and 1954-1957 on the television series of the same name.
2001 Samuel Abraham Goldblith (b 1919) American food scientist. While involved in World War II, he studied malnutrition, and later was involved in food research important for space exploration.
2003 Rear Admiral Benjamin Thurman Hacker (b 1935) U.S. Navy officer, who became the first Naval Flight Officer (NFO) to achieve Flag rank.
2004 Jerome Bernard "Jerry" Orbach (b 1935) American actor and singer, well known for his starring role as Detective Lennie Briscoe in the Law & Order television series and as the voice of Lumière in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, as well as for being a noted musical theatre star; most notably Chuck Baxter in the original production of Promises, Promises (for which he won a Tony Award), Julian Marsh in 42nd Street, and Billy Flynn in the original production of Chicago.
2004 Susan Sontag (b 1933) American author, literary theorist, and political activist; her published works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.
Christian Feast Day:
Abel (Coptic Church)
Feast of the Holy Innocents or Childermas. In Spain and Latin American countries the festival is celebrated with pranks (inocentadas), similar to April Fools' Day. (Roman Catholic Church, Church of England, Lutheran Church)
The fourth day of Christmas. (Western Christianity)
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There are 3 days remaining until the end of the year.
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Senators up for reelection in 2014
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1781 British post troops on John's Island. British troops commanded by Major James Henry Craig are posted at John's Island, just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, on this day in 1781. Craig had evacuated his troops from Wilmington, North Carolina, a little over a month earlier on November 14. The Patriots planned to remove Craig and his men from the island with troops led by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Light Horse Harry Lee and his famed cavalry from Fort Ninety-Six in the South Carolina backcountry. Lee aborted the attack when a column led by Major James Hamilton arrived too late and was unable to cross the Wapoo River, which was only fordable once or twice a month.
The same logistical difficulties that kept American forces from reaching the island helped to keep its African population among the purest bearers of Gullah culture and language in North America. The islands of the South Carolina coast could only be reached by water until the 1950s. Thus Gullah, a Creole of Elizabethan English and languages of the African slave coast, survived there comparatively undisturbed.
On the same day that nature defied the military science of the age, General George Washington wrote the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, reiterating his feelings of undeserving honor at having been made a member of Dr. Benjamin Franklin's esteemed intellectual society, and thanking the society for commending him on the Continental Army's and Navy's recent contributions to the advancement of science. Washington was careful to also note the contributions of the Patriots' allies to their efforts.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%27s_Island
1793 Thomas Paine is arrested in France for treason. Though the charges against him were never detailed, he had been tried in absentia on December 26 and convicted. Before moving to France, Paine was an instrumental figure in the American Revolution as the author of Common Sense, writings used by George Washington to inspire the American troops. Paine moved to Paris to become involved with the French Revolution, but the chaotic political climate turned against him, and he was arrested and jailed for crimes against the country.
When he first arrived in Paris, Paine was heartily welcomed and granted honorary citizenship by leaders of the revolution who enjoyed his antiroyalty book The Rights of Man. However, before long, he ran afoul of his new hosts. Paine was strictly opposed to the death penalty under all circumstances and he vocally opposed the French revolutionaries who were sending hundreds to the guillotine. He also began writing a provocative new book, The Age of Reason, which promoted the controversial notion that God did not influence the actions of people and that science and rationality would prevail over religion and superstition. Although Paine realized that sentiment was turning against him in the autumn of 1793, he remained in France because he believed he was helping the people.
After he was arrested, Paine was taken to Luxembourg Prison. The jail was formerly a palace and unlike any other detainment center in the world. He was treated to a large room with two windows and was locked inside only at night. His meals were catered from outside, and servants were permitted, though Paine did not take advantage of that particular luxury. While in prison, he continued to work on The Age of Reason.
Paine's imprisonment in France caused a general uproar in America and future President James Monroe used all of his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794. Ironically, it wasn't long before Paine came to be despised in the United States, as well. After The Age of Reason was published, he was called an anti-Christ, and his reputation was ruined. Thomas Paine died a poor man in 1809 in New York.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Calhoun
1832 In Missouri, St. Louis Academy (founded in 1818) was chartered as St. Louis University. It was the first Catholic university established in the U.S. west of the Allegheny Mountains.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_University
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osceola
1838 Greensborough Female College chartered in North Carolina, under the Methodist Church. In 1920 its name was changed to Greensboro College.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_College
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa#History
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_Atoll
1869 America's first Labor Day The Knights of Labor, a labor union of tailors in Philadelphia, hold the first Labor Day ceremonies in American history. The Knights of Labor was established as a secret society of Pennsylvanian tailors earlier in the year and later grew into a national body that played an important role in the labor movement of the late 19th century.
The first annual observance of Labor Day was organized by the American Federation of Labor in 1884, which resolved in a convention in Chicago that "the first Monday in September be set aside as a laborer's national holiday." In 1887, Oregon became the first state to designate Labor Day a holiday, and in 1894 Congress designated the first Monday in September a legal holiday for all federal employees and the residents of the District of Columbia.
1877 John Stevens, Wisconsin, applies for a patent on his flour rolling mill. In 1877 John Stevens of Neenah, Wisconsin submited a patent application for the flour rolling mill calling it the grain-crushing mill. Stevens's innovation boosted flour production, efficiency by 70% and produced flour of a superior quality at a high price.
1900 Carry Nation attacks a Kansas saloon Convinced that her righteous campaign against alcohol justified her aggressive tactics, Carry Nation attacks a saloon in Wichita, Kansas, shattering a large mirror behind the bar and throwing rocks at a titillating painting of Cleopatra bathing.
Carry Nation's lifelong battle against alcohol reflected a larger reformist spirit that swept through the nation in the early 20th century and led to laws against everything from child labor to impure food and drugs. But Nation's hatred of alcohol was also a deeply personal struggle--in 1867, she married an Ohio physician who had a serious alcohol problem. Despite Nation's efforts to reform him, her husband's drinking problem eventually destroyed their marriage and he died shortly after they split.
Nation remarried, this time to a Texas minister. She and her new husband moved in 1889 to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, at a time when much of the state was emerging from its wild frontier days. Convinced that drinking was the root cause of all social evil, Nation decided to close down the saloons in Medicine Lodge and other Kansas cities by traveling throughout the state and preaching her temperance message. Nation soon found that her inspiring speeches against "demon rum" had little effect on the wilder citizens of Kansas, though, so she decided to take more aggressive action. Claiming she was inspired by powerful "visions," in 1900 she began a series of well-publicized attacks on Kansas saloons using her favorite weapon of moral righteousness--her trusty hatchet.
At six feet tall and 175 pounds, the hatchet-wielding Nation was an intimidating sight. She relished chopping up barrels of whiskey, destroying expensive bar fixtures, and berating the stunned bar owners and patrons for their evil habits. The sale of alcohol was already illegal in Kansas but the law was largely ignored, so Nation reasoned that it was the responsibility of law-abiding citizens to destroy not only the alcohol but also the saloons that sold it. Local law enforcement, however, did not usually agree, and Nation was frequently jailed for her disturbances.
Although Nation's campaign of saloon vandalism won her national fame, the immediate results were disappointing. She managed to pressure Kansas into enforcing its prohibition laws more aggressively, but when she died in 1911, most of the country still sanctioned the sale of alcohol. Ironically, by the time the U.S. adopted prohibition in 1920, Nation was largely forgotten--but the hatchet-wielding Kansas reformer unquestionably helped lay the foundation for America's "noble experiment."
1902 First indoor pro football game, Syracuse beats Philadelphia 6-0
1912 The first municipally owned streetcars take to the streets in San Francisco, California. The first World Series of pro football, actually a five-team tournament, was played among a team made up of players from both the Athletics and the Phillies, but simply named New York; the New York Knickerbockers; the Syracuse AC; the Warlow AC; and the Orange (New Jersey) AC at New York's original Madison Square Garden. New York and Syracuse played the first indoor football game before 3,000. Syracuse, with Glen (Pop) Warner at guard, won 6-0 and went on to win the tournament.
1923 George Bernard Shaw's "St Joan" premieres in New York NY. The canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920 reawakened within Shaw ideas for a chronicle play about her. In the resulting masterpiece, "Saint Joan," the Maid is treated not only as a Catholic saint and martyr but as a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius. Acclaim for Saint Joan led to the awarding of the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature to Shaw (he refused the award).
1924 Temperatures throughout Iowa hovered near 24 degrees below zero F.
1928 Last recording of Ma Rainey, "Mother of the Blues" is made. Ma Rainey didn't have a voice that was strong or beautiful as her protege Bessie Smith, but she had a deep feeling for the sad songs she performed. Rainey made 92 recordings for Paramount in her career. She was accompanied by greats like Louie Armstrong, Lovie Austen, Buster Bailey, Georgia Tom Dorsey, Tommy Ladnier, and Don Redmon.
1928 Louis Armstrong makes 78rpm recording of "West End Blues" He returned to Chicago in 1925 and began recording under his own name with his famous Hot Five and Hot Seven with such hits as "Potato Head Blues", "Muggles," and "West End Blues", the music of which set the standard and the agenda for jazz for many years to come. Armstrong's trumpet introduction to "West End Blues" remains one of the most famous and influential improvisations in jazz history.
1941 Request made for creation of construction battalions. Rear Admiral Ben Moreell requests authority from the Bureau of Navigation to create a contingent of construction units able to build everything from airfields to roads under battlefield conditions. These units would be known as the "Seabees"—for the first letters of Construction Battalion.
The men chosen for the battalions were not ordinary inductees or volunteers—they all had construction-work backgrounds. The first batch of recruits who made the cut had helped build the Boulder Dam, national highways, and urban skyscrapers; had dug subway tunnels; and had worked in mines and quarries. Some had experience building ocean liners and aircraft carriers. Approximately 325,000 men, from 60 different trades, ages 18 to 60, would go on to serve with the Seabees by the end of the war. The officers given the authority to command these men were also an elite crew, derived from the Civil Engineer Corps. Of the more than 11,000 officers in the Corps all together, almost 8,000 would serve with the construction units.
Although the Seabees were technically supposed to be support units, they were also trained as infantrymen, and they often found themselves in combat with the enemy in the course of their construction projects. They were sent to war theaters as far flung as the Azores, North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the beaches of Normandy.
Some of the Seabees' feats became legendary. They constructed huge airfields and support facilities for the B29 Superfortress bombers on Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, as well as the ports needed to bring in the supplies for the bombing of Japan. The Seabees also suffered significant casualties in the process of providing innovative new pontoons to help the Allies land on the beaches of Sicily. During D-Day, the Seabees' demolition unit was among the first ashore. Their mission: to destroy the steel and concrete barriers the Germans had constructed as obstacles to invasion.
The Seabees' motto was "We Build, We Fight."
1943 World War II - After eight days of brutal house-to-house fighting, the Battle of Ortona concludes with the victory of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division over the German 1st Parachute Division and the capture of the Italian town of Ortona.
1944 Maurice Richard becomes the first player to score 8 points in one game of NHL ice hockey.
1945 The United States Congress officially recognizes the Pledge of Allegiance.
1948 The DC-3 airliner NC16002 disappears 50 miles south of Miami, Florida.
1958 "Greatest Game Ever Played" - Baltimore Colts defeat the New York Giants in the first ever National Football League sudden death overtime game at New York's Yankee Stadium.
1967 Muriel Siebert is 1st women to own a seat on New York Stock Exchange.
1973 The Endangered Species Act is passed in the United States.
1978 With the crew investigating a problem with the landing gear, United Airlines Flight 173 runs out of fuel and crashes in Portland, Oregon, killing 10. As a result, United Airlines instituted the industry's first crew resource management program
2000 U.S. retail giant Montgomery Ward announces it is going out of business after 128 years.
2009 43 people die in a suicide bombing in Karachi, Pakistan, where Shia Muslims were observing the Day of Ashura.
Births
Taliaferro attended William and Mary College and Harvard Law School. He practiced law in Virginia before volunteering during the Mexican War, where he rose to the rank of major. Before the Civil War, he served in the Virginia legislature and the state militia. He was at Harper's Ferry in 1859 when John Brown made his raid on the arsenal in an attempt to stir up a slave insurrection.
Taliaferro became a colonel in the Confederate Army when the war began. He fought in western Virginia in 1861, then served under Jackson in 1862. His relationship with Jackson was rocky at first, as he became involved in a dispute between Jackson and General William Loring. Taliaferro signed a petition circulated by Loring that protested Jackson's placement of troops at Romney, Virginia. Taliaferro fought alongside Jackson during the 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign, and he impressed his commander later in the summer at the Battle of Cedar Mountain. Jackson gave him permanent command of Jackson's old division for the Second Battle of Bull Run in late August, but a wound kept Taliaferro from seeing action.
Shortly after the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Taliaferro was transferred to Charleston. He helped General Pierre G. T. Beauregard fortify the city, for which Beauregard gave him an enthusiastic commendation. Taliaferro's work made Charleston impenetrable for the Union; it did not fall until the end of the war. He helped evacuate Savannah, Georgia, before William T. Sherman's army captured the city in 1864. Taliaferro ended the war fighting with General Joseph Johnston's army at Bentonville, North Carolina. He spent the years after the war practicing law and serving in the Virginia legislature and as a county judge before his death in 1898.
1823 Thomas Alexander Scott (d 1881) American businessman. He was the 4th president of what was the largest corporation in the world, the Pennsylvania Railroad, during the middle of the 19th century. In connection with his railroad interests, he also took a leading role in crafting what eventually became the Compromise of 1877, which marked the end of Reconstruction following the Civil War.
1827 Robert Latimer McCook (d 1862) general in the Union Army during the American Civil War who was killed by Confederate partisans in Alabama.
Mitchell served in France during the First World War and, by the conflict's end, commanded all American air combat units in that country. After the war, he was appointed deputy director of the Air Service and began advocating increased investment in air power, believing that this would prove vital in future wars. He argued particularly for the ability of bombers to sink battleships and organized a series of bombing runs against stationary ships designed to test the idea.
1896 Roger Huntington Sessions (d 1985) American composer, critic and teacher of music.
1902 Mortimer Jerome Adler (d 2001) American philosopher, educator, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for the longest stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California. He worked for Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, and Adler's own Institute for Philosophical Research.
Von Neumann was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics, in the development of functional analysis, a principal member of the Manhattan Project and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (as one of the few originally appointed), and a key figure in the development of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata and the universal constructor. Along with Teller and Stanisław Ulam, von Neumann worked out key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb.
1929 Owen Frederick Bieber American labor union activist. He was president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) from 1983 to 1995.
1939 Philip Frederick Anschutz American entrepreneur. Anschutz bought out his father's drilling company in 1961, and earned large returns in Wyoming. He then diversified his portfolio by investing in stocks, real estate, and railroads. He then began investing in entertainment companies, co-founding Major League Soccer as well as multiple teams, including the LA Galaxy, Chicago Fire, Houston Dynamo, San Jose Earthquakes, New York / New Jersey Metro Stars, and the Kansas City Wizards. In addition, Anschutz owns stakes in the LA Lakers, LA Kings, and venues including the Staples Center, The O2 Arena (London), and the Home Depot Center. Anschutz also invests in family films such as The Chronicles of Narnia. Forbes ranks him the 34th richest person in the U.S. with an estimated net worth of $7 billion as of October 2010.
Mullis has been criticized in The New York Times for, after winning the Nobel prize, promoting ideas in areas he has no expertise, and has promoted AIDS denialism, Climate change denial and his belief in astrology.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelsey_Smith-Briggs
Deaths
1952 James Fletcher Hamilton Henderson, Jr. (b 1897) American pianist, bandleader, arranger and composer, important in the development of big band jazz and swing music. His was one of the most prolific black orchestras and his influence was vast. He was often known as "Smack" Henderson.
1961 Edith Bolling Galt Wilson (b 1872), second wife of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, was First Lady of the United States from 1915 to 1921. She has been labeled "the Secret President" and "the first woman to run the government" for the role she played when her husband suffered prolonged and disabling illness after a stroke in October 1919. Some even refer to her as "the first female president of the United States."
1963 Abbott Joseph Liebling (b 1904) American journalist who was closely associated with The New Yorker from 1935 until his death.
1967 Katharine Dexter McCormick (b 1875) U.S. biologist, suffragist, philanthropist and, after her husband's death, heir to a substantial part of the McCormick fortune. She is well remembered today for funding most of the research necessary to develop the first birth control pill.
1970 Lucius Mendel Rivers (b 1905) Democratic U.S. Representative from South Carolina, representing the Charleston based 1st congressional district for nearly thirty years. He was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee during the period of the Vietnam War when the United States escalated its involvement in the conflict.
1971 Max Steiner (b 1888) Austrian composer of music for theatre productions and films. He later became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Trained by the great classical music composers Brahms and Mahler, he was one of the first composers who primarily wrote music for motion pictures, and as such is often referred to as "the father of film music". Along with such composers as Franz Waxman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman and Miklós Rózsa, Steiner played a major part in creating the tradition of writing music for films.
1976 Katharine Edgar Byron (b 1903), democrat, U.S. Congresswoman who represented the 6th congressional district of Maryland from May 27, 1941 to January 3, 1943. She was the first woman elected to Congress from Maryland.
1978 Harry Winston (b 1896) renowned American jeweler. He donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958 after owning it for a decade, and traded the Portuguese Diamond to the Smithsonian in 1963. His name is now legendary and is associated with the finest level of jewelery.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Winston
1983 Dennis Carl Wilson (b 1944) American rock and roll musician best known as a founding member and the drummer of The Beach Boys. He was a member of the group from its formation until his death in 1983.
1984 David Samuel "Sam" Peckinpah (b 1925) American filmmaker and screenwriter who achieved prominence following the release of the Western epic The Wild Bunch (1969). He was known for the innovative and explicit depiction of action and violence, as well as his revisionist approach to the Western genre.
1992 Mort Greene, lyricist, writer, television producer, (b 1912) Wrote 'Tulsa'? Or 'The Velvet Touch'? Or 'Call Out the Marines'? Greene arrived in Hollywood in 1931, and was soon writing the words for every kind of movie song, principally for RKO. In 1942 alone, he and his composer Harry Revel wrote songs for eight films: Republic's Moonlight Masquerade, Paramount's Beyond the Blue Horizon, and RKO's The Big Street, Here We Go Again, Call Out The Marines, Four Jacks and a Jill, Sing Your Worries Away and The Mayor of 44th Street. For the last-named they wrote 'When There's a Breeze on Lake Louise', which was nominated for an Academy Award - but stood no chance with Irving Berlin's 'White Christmas' in the running.
2001 Samuel Abraham Goldblith (b 1919) American food scientist. While involved in World War II, he studied malnutrition, and later was involved in food research important for space exploration.
2004 Susan Sontag (b 1933) American author, literary theorist, and political activist; her published works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.
Christian Feast Day:
Abel (Coptic Church)
Feast of the Holy Innocents or Childermas. In Spain and Latin American countries the festival is celebrated with pranks (inocentadas), similar to April Fools' Day. (Roman Catholic Church, Church of England, Lutheran Church)
The fourth day of Christmas. (Western Christianity)
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