Birthdays
1754 Capt.William Bligh
1828 Leo Tolstoy,War and Peace
1877 Frank Chance, he was part of the iconic double-play trio "Tinker to Evers to Chance."
1890 Colonel Sanders, KFC Founder
1941 Otis Redding,Soul Singer
1946 - Billy Preston
1952 Dave Stewart, One half of Eurythmics, in partnership with Annie Lennox.
1960 Hugh Grant
1966 Adam Sandler
Events
1776 Congress officially renames the country as the United States of America (from the United Colonies)
1817 Alexander Twilight, likely the first African American to graduate from a US college, receives a BA degree from Middlebury College
1841 Great Lakes steamer "Erie" sinks off Silver Creek, NY, killing 300
1850 California is admitted as the thirty-first state of the Union
1898 Ottawa Football Club reorganizes into the Rough Riders
1901 Cornerstone is laid on the New York Stock Exchange building(probably a copy of Dante's Inferno
1908 Orville Wright makes the first hour-long airplane flight, lasting 62 minutes and 15 seconds at Fort Myer, Virginia
1914 First fully mechanized unit in the British Army is created, the Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade
1919 The hydrofoil designed by Alexander Graham Bell, his wife Mabel Bell, and F.W. Casey Baldwin sets a new water speed record of 114 km/h on Bras d'Or, Nova Scotia
1926 National Broadcasting Company (NBC) founded by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA)
1932 Steamboat SS Observation explodes in New York City's East River, killing 71 people
1945 First "bug" in a computer program is discovered by a team of engineers, including Grace Hopper, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when a real-life moth is removed with tweezers from a relay and taped into the logbook
1949 Joe Theismann, American NFL quarterback
1956 Elvis Presley's first appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show"
1972 Connection found between Mammoth Cave Ridge and Flint cave systems in Kentucky, joining 144 miles of passages, making it the world's longest known cave system (later mapped at 420 miles)
1972 Soviet Union beats the United States 51-50 in the most controversial game in international basketball history; with the US leading 50-49, the final 3 seconds are replayed three times until the Soviets finally win. See Michigan Game last week
1993 Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization exchange letters of mutual recognition
2001 "Band of Brothers," based on the book by Stephen E. Ambrose and created by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, premieres as the most expensive miniseries ever made
