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15670 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science%20and%20technology%20in%20Jamaica | Science and technology in Jamaica | The Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) sector is guided by two primary institutions, the National Commission on Science and Technology (NCST) and the Scientific Research Council (SRC). Both are under the direction of the Ministry of Science, Energy, and Technology.
History
Science and technology in Jamaica has a long history. The Institute of Jamaica, founded in 1879, was created by the Governor of Jamaica "For the Encouragement of Literature, Science and Art in Jamaica". Jamaica was among the earliest developing countries to craft a scientific law to guide the use of science and technology for the exploitation of domestic natural resources. It was one of the first countries in the western hemisphere to gain electricity, build a railway and to use research results to boost sugar cane production. In 1960, the Scientific Research Council (SRC) was established, with a mandate to "collect, collate and review information concerning scientific research schemes or programmes relevant to the development of the resources of Jamaica (and) to establish and maintain a scientific information centre for collection and dissemination of scientific and technical information".
Science and technology policy
Since the 1990s, the Jamaican government has set an agenda to push the development of science and technology in Jamaica. Acknowledging the pivotal role of ST&I in national development, the Government of Jamaica formulated a national science and technology policy. The Jamaican Science and Technology Policy (1990) has two missions: 1) to improve science, technology and engineering and 2) to leverage its use to enhance societal needs. The overall goal is to make Jamaica a significant player in the arena of information technology.
In 2009, Jamaica launched Vision 2030, a national development plan that aims to put Jamaica in a position to achieve developed country status by 2030. National Outcome 11 is a "Technology-Enabled Society", to create a more prosperous economy.
Efforts to develop its Science and Technology educative system, through institutions such as The University of Technology, has been successful but it has been difficult to translate the results into domestic technologies, products and services because of national budgetary constraints. Expenditure on research and development (R&D) amounted to just 0.06 per cent of GDP in 2002. For comparison, the world average was 2.044 per cent. In 2018, Jamaica spent just 0.7 per cent. For comparison, the world average was over 2.2 per cent. However, recent improvements in the country's fiscal position, has enabled the government to introduce various policies to boost research expenditure and to encourage innovation. In 2019, the Jamaican government indicated that it would provide funding for research and development as of financial year 2019–20, and that effective from September 2020, it will take research and development spending into account in the calculation of the country's gross domestic product. Concerning counting R&D as a share of GDP, Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke said the move will stimulate greater investment in the sector, which will, in turn, drive innovation.
According to the International Property Rights Index, Jamaica has one of the stronger intellectual property (IP) protection regimes in Latin America and the Caribbean (ranked 4th in 2020). In January 2020, the Jamaican Parliament passed the Patents and Designs Act (the "New Act"). The New Act will enable local industrial designers to secure international protection for their work in multiple jurisdictions by means of a single application, filed in one language, with one set of fees. A more efficient and streamlined patents application process will hope to foster innovation and development. The Hon. Pearnel Charles Jr, who piloted the legislation, stated "It will allow us to raise our standards and to have international compliance in several aspects and safeguard the inventors in our country. Through this Bill, [inventors] will receive much more protection, and hence there will be greater promotion of creativity and efforts to find solutions to our challenges".
Jamaica has successfully operated a SLOWPOKE-2 nuclear reactor of 20 kW capacity since the early 1980s. It's the Caribbean's only nuclear reactor. In late 2020, Jamaica launched its Hazardous Substances Regulatory Authority (HSRA), becoming the first country in the English-speaking Caribbean to establish an independent regulatory body to ensure safety and security in the operation of facilities involving ionizing radiation and nuclear technology in the country, including the 20 kW SLOWPOKE research reactor. Minister of Industry, Investment and Commerce, Audley Shaw stated that Jamaica could now "confidently forge ahead with engaging nuclear science and technology in all aspects of national development and wealth creation strategies".
Jamaica has a moderate ranking on the Global Innovation Index. In 2020, tt was ranked 72nd among the 131 featured economies. In 2021, it was ranked 9th among the 18 economies in Latin America and the Caribbean and 74th out of 132 countries overall. The report highlights E-participation and Government's online service as an area of weakness to greater innovation. Broadband penetration in Jamaica stood at 77.7% in March 2021. Via the National Broadband Initiative, the Jamaican government seeks to provide Internet connection to every household by 2025.
Scientific publications
Caricom scientists have a modest output in terms of scientific research papers. UNESCO reports that between 2011 and 2019, output has fluctuated for most member states. Between 2017 and 2019, Caricom researchers continued to publish mostly in areas related to health sciences with Jamaica contributing over 20% of articles in this field. In terms of research density, Jamaica produced 114 publications per million inhabitants in 2019. Between 2014 and 2016, Jamaica ranked 4th in terms of average of relative citations (1.36). In terms of scientific co-authorship, between 2017 and 2019, Jamaica produced 379 publications in collaboration with the US, 118 with UK, 95 with Canada, 52 with France and 51 with Mexico.
Science activities
Notable activities that are geared towards promoting science and innovation:
The Coding in Schools Programme: Launched in 2021, the aim is promote the teaching and learning of coding in public educational institutions across Jamaica.
STEM Ambassador Programme: Launched in early 2021, the programme allows industry experts to encourage STEM students to achieve academic and career goals through consistent mentorship and interactive support.
The Science Resource Centre & Innovation Laboratory: Opened in 2018, the lab is focused on the nurturing and development of revenue-generating clean technology companies within the region. It's the first facility of its kind within the Caribbean.
The Public Wi-Fi Hotspot Programme: Jamaica has thirteen Wi-Fi-hotspots (as of September 2021), providing free public access to Internet services. Seven new locations are planned by March 2022.
Science and Technology Fairs.
Institutions
There are several institutions involved in undertaking research:
The Medical Association of Jamaica, whose origins date back to 1877, provides a wide range of services including medical education seminars and workshops.
The Institute of Jamaica, founded in 1879 "For the Encouragement of Literature, Science and Art in Jamaica".
The Jamaica Institution of Engineers, founded in the 1940s to promote and encourage the general advancement of engineering.
The University of the West Indies, founded in 1948, has faculties of medical sciences and natural sciences.
The Geological Society of Jamaica, established in 1955, seeks to provide for the professional growth of earth scientists at all levels of expertise and from all sectors
The University of Technology, founded as the Jamaica Institute of Technology in 1958.
The Scientific Research Council, located in Kingston and founded in 1960, coordinates scientific research efforts in Jamaica.
Sugar Industry Research Institute, founded in 1973, aims to research and develop methods to improve agriculture technology as it relates to sugar cane production.
The Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute, founded in 1975, carries out research and development for agriculture in the Caribbean region.
Achievements
In 2021, two Jamaican scientists won the prestigious International Network for Government Science Advice (INGSA) 2020 awards, making Jamaica the first country to take home prizes in the organisation's two award categories in any one year.
Jamaica has produced many internationally awarded scientists. Examples include:
Henry Lowe, honoured by the United States Government for his contributions to the sciences, science education and exemplary public service. Lowe was presented with a proclamation from the United States House of Representatives.
Thomas Lecky, made an honorary Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for meritorious and devoted service to agriculture.
Patricia DeLeon, awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring by Barack Obama.
Geoff Palmer, Knighted by Queen Elizabeth ll for his services to human rights, science and charity. Palmer also became the fourth person to be honoured with the American Society of Brewing Chemists Award of Distinction.
Evan Dale Abel, named by Cell Press as one of the most inspirational Black scientists in the United States.
Cicely Delphine Williams, made a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, awarded the James Spence Gold Medal of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health for the discovery of Kwashiorkor. She was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Ghana, for her "love, care and devotion to sick children".
Manley West, received the Certificate of Merit from the Government of Canada.
Maydianne Andrade, named one of the Brilliant 10 by Popular Science magazine.
Simone Anne Marie Badal-McCreath, awarded the Elsevier Foundation Award for Early Career Scientists in the Developing World for her creation of a lab at the Natural Products Institute to research the anti-cancer properties of natural Jamaican products.
Patricia Daley, announced as one of the United Kingdom's 100 most influential people of African or African Caribbean heritage, in recognition of her contribution to education.
Karen E. Nelson, received the Helmholtz International Fellow Award.
Walt W. Braithwaite, the Walt E. Braithwaite Legacy Award is named in his honour.
Bertram Fraser-Reid received numerous awards worldwide. These include the 1977 Merck, Sharp & Dohme Award from the Chemical Institute of Canada; the Claude S. Hudson Award in carbohydrate chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 1989; recognition as the Senior Distinguished U.S. Scientist by Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1990; the Percy Julian Award from the National Organization of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers in 1991; North Carolina Chemist of the Year by the American Institute of Chemistry in 1995 and the Haworth Memorial Medal and Lectureship from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1995.
Scientific and technological contributions
Notable discoveries and inventions include:
Medicine
The antibiotic Monamycin, discovered in 1959 by Jamaican Kenneth E. Magnus.
Discovery of the child malnutrition syndrome, kwashiorkor. Cicely Williams was the first to recognise and conduct research on kwashiorkor and differentiate it from other dietary deficiencies. She also developed a treatment regime to combat the disease – this saved many lives.
The pioneer of treatments for paediatric sickle cell anaemia. Yvette Francis-McBarnette was the first to use prophylactic antibiotics in the treatment of children with sickle cell.
Canasol, a medicated eye-drop for the treatment of glaucoma. Dr Manley West and Dr Albert Lockhart developed the drug in1985. Canasol reduces the fluid pressure within the eye that is present in late-stage glaucoma. Canasol is still one of the most popular drugs for treating glaucoma.
The JaipurKnee, a budget-friendly prosthetic knee joint. It was listed at number 18 in Time Magazine's “50 Best Inventions of 2009”. Jamaican Joel Sadler co-designed the device as part of a course project in Medical Device Design. The JaipurKnee is made of self-lubricating, oil-filled nylon and is both flexible and stable, even on irregular terrain. The device was further developed by Stanford University in collaboration with the Jaipur Foot Group, a charity that provides prostheses to Indian amputees. The JaipurKnee has since been exported to many countries, impacting the lives of amputees around the world.
The (Ramphal) Cardiac Surgery Simulator. The model is used in the training of many cardiothoracic surgery residents in the United States
Space exploration
The portable 3D non-destructive evaluation (NDE) system. In 2000, Kingston born Robert Rashford co-invented the world's first portable 3D non-destructive evaluation (NDE) system. The NDE system detects flaws in materials used to construct aircraft, spacecraft and industrial pipelines without having to take these materials apart. The system was used in the maintenance of the United States Government's Hubble Space Telescope.
Protective enclosure for use transporting orbital replacement units (orus) within a space craft, invented by Robert Rashford.
Robert Rashford also designed and developed unique spacecraft support systems for the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) Airborne Support Equipment (UASE) at the Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC). At General Electric, he designed and tested a variety of spacecraft for both commercial and military applications. At Bechtel Corporation, he designed a nuclear reactor support structure. He has designed numerous highly complex engineering systems that successfully flew on board NASA's Manned Space Flight Programs.
Astronomy and astrophysics
Kingston born Mercedes Richards conducted pioneer work in the fields of computational astrophysics, stellar astrophysics, exoplanets and the physical dynamics of interacting binary star systems.
Richards was the first astronomer to make images of the gravitational flow of gas between the stars in any interacting binary.
She was the first to image the chromospheres and accretion disks in Algol binaries.
She was the first in astronomy to apply the technique of tomography.
She was the first astrophysicist to make theoretical hydrodynamic simulations of the Algol binary stars.
She was the first astronomer to discover starspots on the cool star in an Algol binary.
She was the first astrophysicist to apply novel distance correlation statistical methods to large astronomical databases.
Aviation/computer science
Invention of the Lingo programming language used in Adobe Director, by John Henry Thompson.The language is used for animation, web design, graphics, sound and video games.
Methods and apparatus for managing mobile content, co-invented by John Henry Thompson.
Walt W. Braithwaite helped transform the field of aerospace design. Prior to the 1970s, the aerospace industry developed new airplane models using manual drafting techniques. Braithwaite led the development of computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) systems for Boeing. Airplane models could now be designed and manufactured digitally.
He also played a critical part in developing the Initial Graphics Exchange Specification (IGES). As the lead engineer responsible for technical direction in developing an information network to integrate computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing, he led development of Boeing's common data format and translators. These were subsequently used as the basis for developing the IGES protocol.
Chemistry
Development of the "armed-disarmed" principle in glycosylation chemistry, by Bertram Fraser-Reid.
Construction of the largest ever synthetic hetero-oligosaccharide without the use of automated methods, by Bertram Fraser-Reid.
Isolation of dibenzyl trisulphide (DTS) from the guinea hen weed and identification of anti-proliferation and/or cytotoxic activity on a wide range of cancer cell lines, by Lawrence and Levy.
Identification of DTS derivatives (e.g. DTS-albumin complexes) for providing anti-proliferation and/or cytotoxic activity on a wide range of cancer cell lines, by Lawrence and Levy.
The development of methods of isolating and/or providing DTS and/or its derivatives in an effective amount for providing an anti-proliferation and/or cytotoxic activity on cancer cell lines, by Lawrence and Levy.
Isolation of chemical compounds from the ball moss plant and identification of anti-cancer activity, by Henry Lowe. Developed into Alpha Prostate, a supplement used in the management of prostate health.
Isolation of eryngial from eryngium foetidum and Identification as an anti-threadworm agent, by Reese, Robinson and Forbes.
Industrial processes
Invention of the Barley Abrasion Process, by Sir Geoff Palmer. He created the process whilst a researcher at the Brewing Research Foundation from 1968 to 1977. The process became an industry standard.
Sir Geoff Palmer was also the first person to utilise the scanning electron microscope to study malt production in detail.
Development of a commercial process to extract quassinoids from Bitterwood, by Yee and Jacobs.
Agricultural science
Disease resistant papaya. Kingston born Dr Paula Tennant manipulated the genetic make-up of the local papaya and created a new bioengineered variety that was resistant to papaya ringspot Virus (PRSV). This variant was named Jamaica Solo Sunrise and helped fortify the papaya sector.
New cattle breeds suited to tropical climates and terrain. Thomas Lecky successfully created a new breed of dairy cattle –‘Jamaica Hope’ which is a combination of the British Jersey (a small, light-feeding cow), the Holstein (a heavy milk producer cow) and the Indian Sahiwal. The Jamaica Hope has a high heat tolerance, high resistance to ticks and tick-borne diseases and can produce much milk, even in the poor pasture land typical of tropical climates. It is extensively exported to other countries in the Caribbean, as well as Latin America. Dr. Lecky followed his Jamaica Hope success with the creation of two other cattle breeds – Jamaica Red and Jamaica Black. Lecky's work impacted on the development of cattle in many tropical countries.
Discovery of a new and distinct variety of the Zingiberaceae family, by Errol McGhie. This has been developed into a nutraceutical.
The Ortanique, a citrus fruit hybrid of the mandarin orange and the tangerine. In 1939, Dr Phillips was recognised by the Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS) as the creator. The fruit is exported to many countries including Panama, London, New Zealand and Australia.
Technology
Patented Compact Design H2 Energy Storage and Generation system.
Patented magnetic gearbox system.
Miscellaneous
Discovery of previously unknown historical human migration patterns by Neil Hanchard and his team. They also identified more than 3 million genetic variants that had not been previously observed which could contribute to making genetic tests more accurate for people with African ancestry.
Development of a new type of polyhexahydrotriazine (PHT). For his contribution, Gavin Jones became the first Jamaican named among Foreign Policy magazine's FP Top 100 Global Thinkers.
See also
List of Jamaicans - Science and medicine
List of Jamaican inventions and discoveries
References
External links
National Commission on Science and Technology | [
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0.785309910774231,
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-0.16697780787944794,
-0.0010511389700695872,
0.11653841286897659,
0.5409767031669617,
0.479373633861... |
15673 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan%20Mayen | Jan Mayen | Jan Mayen () is a Norwegian volcanic island in the Arctic Ocean, with no permanent population. It is long (southwest-northeast) and in area, partly covered by glaciers [an area of around the Beerenberg volcano. It has two parts: larger northeast Nord-Jan and smaller Sør-Jan, linked by a wide isthmus. It lies northeast of Iceland (495 km [305 mi] NE of Kolbeinsey), east of central Greenland and west of the North Cape, Norway. The island is mountainous, the highest summit being the Beerenberg volcano in the north. The isthmus is the location of the two largest lakes of the island, Sørlaguna (South Lagoon), and Nordlaguna (North Lagoon). A third lake is called Ullerenglaguna (Ullereng Lagoon). Jan Mayen was formed by the Jan Mayen hotspot.
Although administered separately, in the ISO 3166-1 standard Jan Mayen and Svalbard are collectively designated as Svalbard and Jan Mayen, with the two-letter country code "SJ".
Natural resources
Jan Mayen Island has one exploitable natural resource, gravel, from the site at Trongskaret. Other than this, economic activity is limited to providing services for employees of Norway's radio communications and meteorological stations located on the island. Jan Mayen has one unpaved airstrip, Jan Mayensfield, which is about long. The coast has no ports or harbours, only offshore anchorages.
There are important fishing resources, and the existence of Jan Mayen establishes a large exclusive economic zone around it. A dispute between Norway and Denmark regarding the fishing exclusion zone between Jan Mayen and Greenland was settled in 1988 granting Denmark the greater area of sovereignty. Geologists suspect significant deposits of petroleum and natural gas lie below Jan Mayen's surrounding seafloors.
Status
Jan Mayen Island is an integral part of the Kingdom of Norway. Since 1995, Jan Mayen has been administered by the County Governor (fylkesmann) of the northern Norwegian county of Nordland, to which it is closest. However, some authority over Jan Mayen has been assigned to the station commander of the Norwegian Defence Logistics Organisation, a branch of the Norwegian Armed Forces.
Society
Demography
The only inhabitants on the island are personnel working for the Norwegian Armed Forces and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. Eighteen people spend the winter on the island, but the population may roughly double (35) during the summer, when heavy maintenance is performed. Personnel serve either six months or one year, and are exchanged twice a year in April and October. The support crew, including mechanics, cooks, and a nurse, are among the military personnel. The military personnel operated a Loran-C base, until it closed at the end of 2015. Both the LORAN transmitter and the meteorological station are located a few kilometres away from the settlement Olonkinbyen (Olonkin Town), where all personnel live.
Transport
Transport to the island is provided by C-130 Hercules military transport planes operated by the Royal Norwegian Air Force that land at Jan Mayensfield's gravel runway. The planes fly in from Bodø Main Air Station eight times a year. Since the airport does not have any instrument landing capabilities, good visibility is required, and it is not uncommon for the planes to have to return to Bodø, two hours away, without landing. For heavy goods, freight ships visit during the summer, but since there are no harbours, the ships must anchor.
Communication
The island has no indigenous population, but is assigned the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code SJ (together with Svalbard). It uses the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) .no (.sj is allocated but not used) and data code JN. Jan Mayen has telephone and internet connection over satellite, using Norwegian telephone numbers (country code 47). Its amateur radio call sign prefix is JX. It has a postal code, NO-8099 JAN MAYEN, but delivery time varies, especially during the winter.
History
Unverified "discoveries" of a terra nullius
Between the fifth and ninth centuries (400–900 AD), numerous communities of monks originating in Ireland (Papar) navigated throughout the north Atlantic in leather boats, exploring and sometimes settling in distant islands where their monastic communities could be separated from close contact with others. Strong indicators exist of their presence in the Faroe Islands and Iceland before the arrival of the Vikings, and medieval Gaelic chronicles such as the famous Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot testify to the extensive interest in exploration at the time. A modern-day trans-Atlantic journey proved the ability of the early navigators to reach all lands of the north Atlantic even further from Ireland than Jan Mayen – and, given favorable winds, at a speed roughly equal to that of modern yachts. Though quite feasible, there is nevertheless no direct physical trace of medieval landings or settlement on Jan Mayen.
The land named Svalbarð ("cold coast") by the Vikings in the early medieval book Landnámabók may have been Jan Mayen (instead of Spitsbergen, renamed Svalbard by the Norwegians in modern times); the distance from Iceland to Svalbarð mentioned in this book is two days' sailing (with favorable winds), consistent with the approximate to Jan Mayen and not with the minimum to Spitsbergen. However much Jan Mayen may have been known in Europe at that time, it was subsequently forgotten for some centuries.
In the 17th century, many claims of the island's rediscovery were made, spurred by the rivalry on the Arctic whaling grounds, and the island received many names. According to Thomas Edge, an early 17th-century whaling captain who was often inaccurate, "William Hudson" discovered the island in 1608 and named it "Hudson's Touches" (or "Tutches"). However, the well-known explorer Henry Hudson could only have come by on his voyage in 1607 (if he had made an illogical detour) and he made no mention of it in his journal.
According to William Scoresby (1820: p.154), referring to the mistaken belief that the Dutch had discovered the island in 1611, Hull whalers discovered the island "about the same time" and named it "Trinity Island". Muller (1874: pp.190–191) took this to mean they had come upon Jan Mayen in 1611 or 1612, which was repeated by many subsequent authors. There were, in fact, no Hull whalers in either of these years, the first Hull whaling expedition having been sent to the island only in 1616 (see below). As with the previous claim made by Edge, there is no cartographical or written proof for this supposed discovery.
During the Golden Age of Dutch exploration and discovery (c. 1590s–1720s)
First verified discoveries: mapping and naming
The first verified discoveries of Jan Mayen, by three separate expeditions, occurred in the summer of 1614, probably within one month of each other. The Dutchman Fopp Gerritsz, whilst in command of a whaling expedition sent out by the Englishman John Clarke, of Dunkirk, claimed (in 1631) to have discovered the island on June 28 and named it "Isabella". In January the Noordsche Compagnie (Northern Company), modelled on the Dutch East India Company, had been established to support Dutch whaling in the Arctic. Two of its ships, financed by merchants from Amsterdam and Enkhuizen, reached Jan Mayen in July 1614. The captains of these ships—Jan Jacobszoon May van Schellinkhout (after whom the island was ultimately named) on the Gouden Cath (Golden Cat), and Jacob de Gouwenaer on the Orangienboom (Orange Tree)—named it Mr. Joris Eylant after the Dutch cartographer Joris Carolus who was on board and mapped the island. The captains acknowledged that a third Dutch ship, the Cleyn Swaentgen (Little Swan) captained by Jan Jansz Kerckhoff and financed by Noordsche Compagnie shareholders from Delft, had already been at the island when they arrived. They had assumed the latter, who named the island Maurits Eylandt (or Mauritius) after Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, would report their discovery to the States General. However, the Delft merchants had decided to keep the discovery secret and returned in 1615 to hunt for their own profit. The ensuing dispute was only settled in 1617, though both companies were allowed to whale at Jan Mayen in the meantime.
In 1615, the English whaler Robert Fotherby went ashore. Apparently thinking he had made a new discovery, he named the island "Sir Thomas Smith's Island" and the volcano "Mount Hakluyt". On a map of c. 1634, Jean Vrolicq renamed the island Île de Richelieu.
Jan Mayen first appeared on Willem Jansz Blaeu's 1620 edition map of Europe, originally published by Cornelis Doedz in 1606. Blaeu, who lived in Amsterdam, named it "Jan Mayen" after captain Jan Jacobszoon May van Schellinkhout of the Amsterdam-financed Gouden Cath. Blaeu made the first detailed map of the island in his famous "Zeespiegel" atlas of 1623, establishing its current name.
Dutch whaling base
From 1615 to 1638, Jan Mayen was used as a whaling base by the Dutch Noordsche Compagnie, which had been given a monopoly on whaling in the Arctic regions by the States General in 1614. Only two ships, one from the Noordsche Compagnie, and the other from the Delft merchants, were off Jan Mayen in 1615. The following year a score of vessels were sent to the island. The Noordsche Compagnie sent eight ships escorted by three warships under Jan Jacobsz. Schrobop; while the Delft merchants sent up five ships under Adriaen Dircksz. Leversteyn, son of one of the above merchants. There were also two ships from Dunkirk sent by John Clarke, as well as a ship each from London and Hull.
Heertje Jansz, master of the Hope, of Enkhuizen, wrote a day-by-day account of the season. The ships took two weeks to reach Jan Mayen, arriving early in June. On 15 June they met the two English ships, which Schrobop allowed to remain, on condition they gave half their catch to the Dutch. The ships from Dunkirk were given the same conditions. By late July the first ship had left with a full cargo of whale oil; the rest left early in August, several filled with oil.
That year 200 men were seasonally living and working on the island at six temporary whaling stations (spread along the northwest coast). During the first decade of whaling, more than ten ships visited Jan Mayen each year, while in the second period (1624 and later) five to ten ships were sent. With the exception of a few ships from Dunkirk, which came to the island in 1617 and were either driven away or forced to give a third of their catch to the Dutch, only the Dutch and merchants from Hull sent up ships to Jan Mayen from 1616 onward. In 1624 ten wooden houses were built in South Bay. About this time the Dutch appear to have abandoned the temporary stations consisting of tents of sail and crude furnaces, replacing them with two semi-permanent stations with wooden storehouses and dwellings and large brick furnaces, one in the above-mentioned South Bay and the other in the North Bay. In 1628 two forts were built to protect the stations. Among the sailors active at Jan Mayen was the later admiral Michiel Adriaensz de Ruyter. In 1633, at the age of 26, he was for the first time listed as an officer aboard de Groene Leeuw (The Green Lion). He again went to Jan Mayen in 1635, aboard the same ship.
In 1632 the Noordsche Compagnie expelled the Danish-employed Basque whalers from Spitsbergen. In revenge, the latter sailed to Jan Mayen, where the Dutch had left for the winter, to plunder the Dutch equipment and burn down the settlements and factories. Captain Outger Jacobsz of Grootebroek was asked to stay the next winter (1633/34) on Jan Mayen with six shipmates to defend the island. While a group with the same task survived the winter on Spitsbergen, all seven on Jan Mayen died of scurvy or trichinosis (from eating raw polar bear meat) combined with the harsh conditions.
During the first phase of whaling the hauls were generally good, some exceptional. For example, Mathijs Jansz. Hoepstock caught 44 whales in Hoepstockbukta in 1619, which produced 2,300 casks of whale oil. During the second phase the hauls were much lower. While 1631 turned out to be a very good season, the following year, due to the weather and ice, only eight whales were caught. In 1633 eleven ships managed to catch just 47 whales; while a meager 42 were caught by the same number in 1635. The bowhead whale was locally hunted to near-extinction around 1640 (approximately 1000 had been killed and processed on the island), at which time Jan Mayen was abandoned and stayed uninhabited for two and a half centuries.
19th and 20th centuries
During the International Polar Year 1882–1883 the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition stayed one year at Jan Mayen. The expedition performed extensive mapping of the area, their maps being of such quality that they were used until the 1950s. The Austrian polar station on Jan Mayen Island was built and equipped in 1882 fully at Count Wilczek's own expense.
Polar bears appear on Jan Mayen, although in diminished numbers compared with earlier times. Between 1900 and 1920, there were a number of Norwegian trappers spending winters on Jan Mayen, hunting Arctic foxes in addition to some polar bears. But the exploitation soon made the profits decline, and the hunting ended. Polar bears in this region of the Arctic are genetically distinguishable from those living elsewhere.
The League of Nations gave Norway jurisdiction over the island, and in 1921 Norway opened the first meteorological station. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute annexed the middle part of the island for Norway in 1922 and the whole island in 1926 when Hallvard Devold was head of the weather observations base on the island. On 27 February 1930, the island was made de jure a part of the Kingdom of Norway.
During World War II, continental Norway was invaded and occupied by Germany in spring 1940. The four-man team on Jan Mayen stayed at their posts and in an act of defiance began sending their weather reports to the United Kingdom instead of Norway. The British codenamed Jan Mayen 'Island X' and attempted to reinforce it with troops to counteract any German attack. The Norwegian patrol boat ran aground on Nansenflua, one of the islands' many uncharted lava reefs and the 68-man crew abandoned ship and joined the Norwegian team on shore. The British expedition commander, prompted by the loss of the gunboat, decided to abandon Jan Mayen until the following spring and radioed for a rescue ship. Within a few days a ship arrived and evacuated the four Norwegians and their would-be reinforcements, after demolishing the weather station to prevent it from falling into German hands. The Germans attempted to land a weather team on the island on 16 November 1940; the German naval trawler carrying the team crashed on the rocks just off Jan Mayen after a patrolling British destroyer had picked them up on radar. The detection was not by chance, as the German plan had been compromised from the beginning with British wireless interceptors of the Radio Security Service following the communications of the Abwehr (the German Intelligence service) concerning the operation, and the destroyer had been waiting. Most of the crew struggled ashore and were taken prisoner by a landing party from the destroyer.
The Allies returned to the island on 10 March 1941, when the Norwegian ship Veslekari, escorted by the patrol boat Honningsvaag, dropped 12 Norwegian weathermen on the island. The team's radio transmissions soon betrayed its presence to the Axis, and German planes from Norway began to bomb and strafe Jan Mayen whenever weather permitted, but did little damage. Soon supplies and reinforcements arrived, and even some anti-aircraft guns, giving the island a garrison of a few dozen weathermen and soldiers. By 1941, Germany had given up hope of evicting the Allies from the island and the constant air raids stopped.
On 7 August 1942, a German Focke-Wulf Fw 200 "Condor", probably on a mission to bomb the station, crashed into the nearby mountainside of Danielssenkrateret in fog, killing its crew of nine. In 1950, the wreck of another German plane with four crew members was discovered on the southwest side of the island. In 1943, the Americans established a radio locating station named Atlantic City in the north to try to locate German radio bases in Greenland.
After the war, the meteorological station was located at Atlantic City, but moved in 1949 to a new location. Radio Jan Mayen also served as an important radio station for ship traffic in the Arctic Ocean. In 1959 NATO started building the LORAN-C network in sites on the Atlantic Ocean; one of the transmitters was to be on Jan Mayen. By 1961 the new military installations, including a new airfield, were operational.
For some time scientists doubted that the Beerenberg volcano would become active, but in 1970 it erupted for about three weeks, adding another of land mass to the island. It also erupted in 1973 and 1985. During an eruption, the sea temperature around the island may increase from just above freezing to about .
Historic stations and huts on the island are Hoyberg, Vera, Olsbu, Puppebu (cabin), Gamlemetten or Gamlestasjonen (the old weather station), Jan Mayen Radio, Helenehytta, Margarethhytta, and Ulla (a cabin at the foot of the Beerenberg).
Environment
Nature reserve
A regulation dating from 2010 renders the island a nature reserve under Norwegian jurisdiction. The aim of this regulation is to ensure the preservation of a pristine Arctic island and the marine life nearby, including the ocean floor. Landings at Jan Mayen can be done by boat. However, this is permitted only at a small part of the island, named Båtvika (Boat Bay). As there is no commercial airline operating at the island, one cannot get there by plane except by chartering one. Permission for landings by a charter plane has to be obtained in advance. Permission to stay on the island has to be obtained in advance, and is generally limited to a few days (or even hours). Putting up a tent or setting up camp is prohibited. There is a separate regulation for the stay of foreigners.
Geography and geology
Jan Mayen consists of two geographically distinct parts. Nord-Jan has a round shape and is dominated by the high Beerenberg volcano with its large ice cap (), which can be divided into twenty individual outlet glaciers. The largest of those is Sørbreen, with an area of and a length of . South-Jan is narrow, comparatively flat and unglaciated. Its highest elevation is Rudolftoppen at . The station and living quarters are located on South-Jan. The island lies at the northern end of the Jan Mayen Microcontinent. The microcontinent was originally part of the Greenland Plate, but now forms part of the Eurasian Plate.
Important Bird Area
The island was identified as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International because it is a breeding site for large numbers of seabirds, supporting populations of northern fulmars (78,000–160,000 pairs), little auks (10,000–100,000 pairs), thick-billed guillemot (74,000–147,000 pairs) and black guillemots (100–1,000 pairs).
Climate
Jan Mayen has a hyperoceanic polar climate with a Köppen classification of ET. The Gulf Stream's powerful influence makes seasonal temperature variations extremely small considering the latitude of the island, with ranges from around in August to in March, but also makes the island extremely cloudy with little sunshine even during the continuous polar day. The deep snow cover prevents any permafrost from developing. As a result of warming, the 1991-2020 temperature normal shows a mean annual temperature warmer than during 1961-1990, pushing the annual temperature above freezing.
See also
Svalbard and Jan Mayen
Svalbard
List of islands of Norway
List of islands of Norway by area
References
Notes
Citations
Bibliography
Ledgard, J. M. (2011) Submergence, Coffee House Press
Umbreit, Andreas (2005) Spitsbergen: Svalbard – Franz Josef Land – Jan Mayen, 3rd ed., Chalfont St. Peter: Bradt Travel Guides,
External links
Jan Mayen. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency.
www.jan-mayen.no
jan.mayen.no
Jan Mayen year round webcam
Jan Mayen at Norwegian Polar Institute
TopoJanMayen – Interactive map of Jan Mayen by the Norwegian Polar Institute
Photographs and information on Jan Mayen
Satellite Radar image of Jan Mayen
Glaciers of Jan Mayen
www.janmayen2011.org - a site about JX5O - international ham radio expedition to Jan Mayen island in 2011
Weather forecasts for Jan Mayen at yr.no (Norwegian Meteorological institute and NRK)
uscg spar 403 1966
Ridge volcanoes
Islands of Norway
Islands of the Arctic Ocean
Integral overseas territories
Seabird colonies
Important Bird Areas of Norwegian overseas territories
1614 in the Dutch Empire
17th century in the Dutch Republic
Maritime history of the Dutch Republic
Mid-Atlantic Ridge
Important Bird Areas of Atlantic islands
Important Bird Areas of Arctic islands | [
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15683 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarvis%20Island | Jarvis Island | Jarvis Island (; formerly known as Bunker Island or Bunker's Shoal) is an uninhabited coral island located in the South Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and the Cook Islands. It is an unincorporated, unorganized territory of the United States, administered by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service of the United States Department of the Interior as part of the National Wildlife Refuge system. Unlike most coral atolls, the lagoon on Jarvis is wholly dry.
Jarvis is one of the Line Islands and for statistical purposes is also grouped as one of the United States Minor Outlying Islands. Jarvis Island is the largest of three U.S. equatorial possessions, which include Baker Island and Howland Island.
Geography and ecology
While a few offshore anchorage spots are marked on maps, Jarvis island has no ports or harbors, and swift currents are a hazard. There is a boat landing area in the middle of the western shoreline near a crumbling day beacon, and another near the southwest corner of the island. The center of Jarvis island is a dried lagoon where deep guano deposits accumulated, which were mined for about 20 years during the nineteenth century. The island has a tropical desert climate, with high daytime temperatures, constant wind, and strong sun. Nights, however, are quite cool. The ground is mostly sandy and reaches 23 feet (7 meters) at its highest point. Because of the island's distance from other large landmasses, the Jarvis Island high point is the 36th most isolated peak in the world. The low-lying coral island has long been noted as hard to sight from small ships and is surrounded by a narrow fringing reef.
Jarvis Island is one of two United States territories that are in the southern hemisphere (the other is American Samoa). Located only south of the equator, Jarvis has no known natural freshwater lens and scant rainfall. This creates a very bleak, flat landscape without any plants larger than shrubs. There is no evidence that the island has ever supported a self-sustaining human population. Its sparse bunch grass, prostrate vines and low-growing shrubs are primarily a nesting, roosting, and foraging habitat for seabirds, shorebirds, and marine wildlife.
Jarvis Island was submerged underwater during the latest interglacial period, roughly 125,000 years ago, when sea levels were higher than today. As the sea level declined, the horseshoe-shaped lagoon was formed in the center of Jarvis Island.
Topographic isolation
Jarvis Island's highest point has a topographic isolation of , with Joe's Hill on Kiritimati being the nearest higher neighbor.
Time zone
Jarvis Island is located in the Samoa Time Zone (UTC -11:00), the same time zone as American Samoa, Kingman Reef, Midway Atoll, and Palmyra Atoll.
Birds
Jarvis Island once held some of the largest seabird breeding colonies in the tropical ocean, but guano mining and the introduction of rodents have ruined much of the island's native wildlife. Just eight breeding species were recorded in 1982, compared to thirteen in 1996, and fourteen species in 2004. The Polynesian storm petrel had made its return after over 40 years absent from Jarvis Island, and the number of Brown noddies multiplied from just a few birds in 1982 to nearly 10,000. Just twelve Gray-backed terns were recorded in 1982, but by 2004, over 200 nests were found on there. The island, with its surrounding marine waters, has been recognised as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International because it supports colonies of lesser frigatebirds, brown and masked boobies, red-tailed tropicbirds, Polynesian storm petrels, blue noddies and sooty terns, as well as serving as a migratory stopover for bristle-thighed curlews.
History
Discovery
The island's first known sighting by the British on August 21, 1821, by the British ship Eliza Francis (or Eliza Frances) owned by Edward, Thomas and William Jarvis and commanded by Captain Brown. The island was visited by whaling vessels till the 1870s.
The U.S. Exploring Expedition surveyed the island in 1841. In March 1857 the island was claimed for the United States under the Guano Islands Act and formally annexed on February 27, 1858.
Nineteenth-century guano mining
The American Guano Company, which was incorporated in 1857, established claims in respect of Baker Island and Jarvis Island which was recognized under the U.S. Guano Islands Act of 1856. Beginning in 1858, several support structures were built on Jarvis Island, along with a two-story, eight-room "superintendent's house" featuring an observation cupola and wide verandahs. Tram tracks were laid down for bringing mined guano to the western shore. One of the first loads was taken by Samuel Gardner Wilder.
For the following twenty-one years, Jarvis was commercially mined for guano, sent to the United States as fertilizer, but the island was abruptly abandoned in 1879, leaving behind about a dozen buildings and 8,000 tonnes of mined guano.
New Zealand entrepreneurs, including photographer Henry Winkelmann, then made unsuccessful attempts to continue guano extraction on Jarvis, and the two-storey house was sporadically inhabited during the early 1880s. Squire Flockton was left alone on the island as caretaker for several months and committed suicide there in 1883, apparently from gin-fueled despair. His wooden grave marker was a carved plank which could be seen in the island's tiny four-grave cemetery for decades.
John T. Arundel & Co. resumed mining guano from 1886 to 1899. The United Kingdom annexed the island on June 3, 1889. Phosphate and copra entrepreneur John T. Arundel visited the island in 1909 on maiden voyage of the S.S. Ocean Queen and near the beach landing on the western shore members of the crew built a pyramidal day beacon made from slats of wood, which was painted white. The beacon was standing in 1935, and remained until at least 1942.
Wreck of barquentine Amaranth
On August 30, 1913, the barquentine Amaranth (C. W. Nielson, captain) was carrying a cargo of coal from Newcastle, New South Wales, to San Francisco when it wrecked on Jarvis' southern shore. Ruins of ten wooden guano-mining buildings, the two-story house among them, could still be seen by the Amaranth crew, who left Jarvis aboard two lifeboats. One reached Pago Pago, American Samoa, and the other made Apia in Western Samoa. The ship's scattered remains were noted and scavenged for many years, and rounded fragments of coal from the Amaranth'''s hold were still being found on the south beach in the late 1930s.
Millersville (1935–1942)
Jarvis Island was reclaimed by the United States government and colonized from March 26, 1935, onwards, under the American Equatorial Islands Colonization Project (see also Howland Island and Baker Island). President Franklin D. Roosevelt assigned administration of the island to the U.S. Department of the Interior on May 13, 1936. Starting out as a cluster of large, open tents pitched next to the still-standing white wooden day beacon, the Millersville settlement on the island's western shore was named after a bureaucrat with the United States Department of Air Commerce. The settlement grew into a group of shacks built mostly with wreckage from the Amaranth (lumber from which was also used by the young Hawaiian colonists to build surfboards), but later, stone and wood dwellings were built and equipped with refrigeration, radio equipment, and a weather station. A crude aircraft landing area was cleared on the northeast side of the island, and a T-shaped marker which was intended to be seen from the air was made from gathered stones, but no airplane is known to have ever landed there. According to the 1940 U.S. Census, Jarvis Island had a population of three people.
At the beginning of World War II, an Imperial Japanese Navy submarine surfaced off the west coast of the island. Believing that it was a U.S. Navy submarine which had come to fetch them, the four young colonists rushed down the steep western beach in front of Millersville towards the shore. The submarine answered their waves with fire from its deck gun, but no one was hurt in the attack. On February 7, 1942, the USCGC Taney evacuated the colonists, then shelled and burned the dwellings. The roughly cleared landing area on the island's northeast end was later shelled by the Japanese, leaving crater holes.
International Geophysical Year
Jarvis was visited by scientists during the International Geophysical Year from July 1957 until November 1958. In January 1958 all scattered building ruins from both the nineteenth century guano diggings and the 1935–1942 colonization attempt were swept away without a trace by a severe storm which lasted several days and was witnessed by the scientists. When the IGY research project ended the island was abandoned again. By the early 1960s a few sheds, a century of accumulated trash, the scientists' house from the late 1950s and a solid, short lighthouse-like day beacon built two decades before were the only signs of human habitation on Jarvis.
National Wildlife Refuge
On June 27, 1974, Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton created Jarvis Island National Wildlife Refuge which was expanded in 2009 to add submerged lands within of the island. The refuge now includes of land and of water. Along with six other islands, the island was administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of the Pacific Remote Islands National Wildlife Refuge Complex. In January 2009, that entity was upgraded to the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument by President George W. Bush.
A feral cat population, descendants of cats likely brought by colonists in the 1930s, wrought disruption to the island's wildlife and vegetation. These cats were removed through efforts which began in the mid-1960s and lasted until 1990 when they were completely eradicated. Since cats were removed, seabird numbers and diversity have increased.
Nineteenth-century tram track remains can be seen in the dried lagoon bed at the island's center and the late 1930s-era lighthouse-shaped day beacon still stands on the western shore at the site of Millersville.
Public entry to anyone, including U.S. citizens, on Jarvis Island requires a special-use permit and is generally restricted to scientists and educators. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the United States Coast Guard periodically visit Jarvis.
Transportation
There is no airport on the island, nor does the island contain any large terminal or port. There is a day beacon near the middle of the west coast. Some offshore anchorage is available.
Military
As a U.S. territory, the defense of Jarvis Island is the responsibility of the United States. All laws of the United States are applicable on the island.
See also
Howland and Baker islands
List of Guano Island claims
Under a Jarvis Moon'', an 88-minute 2010 documentary
References
External links
Jarvis Island Home Page Website with photos, weather, and more.
Jarvis Island information website Has several photos of the old Millersville settlement, together with more modern photos of the island.
WorldStatesmen Offers brief data on Jarvis island.
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Jarvis Island National Wildlife Refuge The Jarvis Island refuge site.
Pacific islands claimed under the Guano Islands Act
Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument
Former populated places in Oceania
Uninhabited Pacific islands of the United States
Island restoration
Pacific Ocean atolls of the United States
United States Minor Outlying Islands
National Wildlife Refuges in the United States insular areas
Protected areas established in 1974
Coral islands
1889 establishments in the British Empire
Important Bird Areas of United States Minor Outlying Islands
Important Bird Areas of the Line Islands
Seabird colonies | [
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15693 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey | Jersey | Jersey ( , ; ), officially the Bailiwick of Jersey (; Jèrriais: ), is an island country and self-governing Crown Dependency near the coast of north-west France. It is the largest of the Channel Islands and is from the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy. The Bailiwick consists of the main island of Jersey and some surrounding uninhabited islands and rocks including Les Dirouilles, Les Écréhous, Les Minquiers, and Les Pierres de Lecq.
Jersey was part of the Duchy of Normandy, whose dukes became kings of England from 1066. After Normandy was lost by the kings of England in the 13th century, and the ducal title surrendered to France, Jersey remained loyal to the English Crown, though it never became part of the Kingdom of England.
Jersey is a self-governing parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy, with its own financial, legal and judicial systems, and the power of self-determination. The island's relationship with the Crown is different from the other Crown Dependencies; the Lieutenant Governor represents the Queen there. Jersey is not part of the United Kingdom, and has an international identity separate from that of the UK, but the UK is constitutionally responsible for the defence of Jersey.
The island has a large financial services industry, which generates 40% of its GVA. British cultural influence on the island is evident in its use of English as the main language and Pound sterling as its primary currency. Additional British cultural similarities include: driving on the left, access to British television and newspapers, a school curriculum following that of England, and the popularity of British sports, including cricket. The island also has a strong Norman-French culture, such as its ancient Norman language Jèrriais and place names with French or Norman origins. The island has close cultural links with its neighbouring islands in the Bailiwick of Guernsey. Jersey and its people have been described as a nation.
Name
The Channel Islands are mentioned in the Antonine Itinerary as the following: Sarnia, Caesarea, Barsa, Silia and Andium, but Jersey cannot be identified specifically because none corresponds directly to the present names. The name Caesarea has been used as the Latin name for Jersey (also in its French version Césarée) since William Camden's Britannia, and is used in titles of associations and institutions today. The Latin name Caesarea was also applied to the colony of New Jersey as Nova Caesarea.
Andium, Agna and Augia were used in antiquity.
Scholars variously surmise that Jersey and Jèrri derive from jarð (Old Norse for "earth") or jarl (earl), or perhaps the Norse personal name Geirr (thus Geirrsey, "Geirr's Island"). The ending -ey denotes an island (as in Guernsey or Surtsey).
History
Jersey history is influenced by its strategic location between the northern coast of France and the southern coast of England; the island's recorded history extends over a thousand years.
La Cotte de St Brelade is a Palaeolithic site inhabited before rising sea levels transformed Jersey into an island. Jersey was a centre of Neolithic activity, as demonstrated by the concentration of dolmens. Evidence of Bronze Age and early Iron Age settlements can be found in many locations around the island.
Additional archaeological evidence of Roman influence has been found, in particular at Les Landes, the coastal headland site at Le Pinacle, where remains of a primitive structure are attributed to Gallo-Roman temple worship (fanum).
Jersey was part of Neustria with the same Gallo-Frankish population as the continental mainland. Jersey, the whole Channel Islands and the Cotentin peninsula (probably with the Avranchin) came formally under the control of the Duke of Brittany during the Viking invasions, because the king of the Franks was unable to defend them, however they remained in the archbishopric of Rouen. Jersey was invaded by Vikings in the 9th century. In 933 it was annexed to the future Duchy of Normandy, together with the other Channel Islands, Cotentin and Avranchin, by William Longsword, count of Rouen and it became one of the Norman Islands. When William's descendant, William the Conqueror, conquered England in 1066, the Duchy of Normandy and the kingdom of England were governed under one monarch. The Dukes of Normandy owned considerable estates in the island, and Norman families living on their estates established many of the historical Norman-French Jersey family names. King John lost all his territories in mainland Normandy in 1204 to King Philip II Augustus, but retained possession of Jersey and the other Channel Islands.
In the Treaty of Paris (1259), the English king formally surrendered his claim to the duchy of Normandy and ducal title, and since then the islands have been internally self-governing territories of the English crown and latterly the British crown.
On 7 October 1406, 1,000 French men at arms led by Pero Niño invaded Jersey, landing at St Aubin's Bay and defeated the 3,000 defenders but failed to capture the island.
In the late 16th century, islanders travelled across the North Atlantic to participate in the Newfoundland fisheries. In recognition for help given to him during his exile in Jersey in the 1640s, King Charles II of England gave Vice Admiral Sir George Carteret, bailiff and governor, a large grant of land in the American colonies in between the Hudson and Delaware rivers, which he promptly named New Jersey. It is now a state in the United States.
Aware of the military importance of Jersey, the British government had ordered that the bailiwick be heavily fortified. On 6 January 1781, a French invasion force of 2,000 men set out to take over the island, but only half of the force arrived and landed. The Battle of Jersey lasted about half an hour, with the British successfully defending the island. There were about thirty casualties on each side, and the British took 600 French prisoners who were subsequently sent to Great Britain. Both of the army commanders were slain.
Trade laid the foundations of prosperity, aided by neutrality between England and France. The Jersey way of life involved agriculture, milling, fishing, shipbuilding and production of woollen goods. 19th-century improvements in transport links brought tourism to the island.
During the Second World War, some citizens were evacuated to the UK but most remained. Jersey was occupied by Germany from 1 July 1940 until 9 May 1945, when Germany surrendered. During this time the Germans constructed many fortifications using Soviet slave labour. After 1944, supplies from France were interrupted by the D-Day landings, and food on the island became scarce. The SS Vega was sent to the island carrying Red Cross supplies and news of the success of the Allied advance in Europe. During the Nazi occupation, a resistance cell was created by communist activist Norman Le Brocq and the Jersey Communist Party, whose communist ideology of forming a 'United Front' led to the creation of the Jersey Democratic Movement. The Channel Islands were one of the last places in Europe to be liberated. 9 May is celebrated as the island's Liberation Day, where there are celebrations in Liberation Square.
Escalation in a fishing-rights dispute between the Jersey government and French fishers led to an international dispute in May 2021. Royal Navy vessels were deployed to prevent a potential blockade by French ships. Previously in March 2021, fishing vessels from Jersey blocked Saint Helier Marina in protest.
Politics
Jersey is a Crown Dependency and is not part of the United Kingdom – it is officially part of the British Islands. As one of the Crown Dependencies, Jersey is autonomous and self-governing, with its own independent legal, administrative and fiscal systems. Jersey's government has described Jersey as a "self-governing, democratic country with the power of self-determination".
Because Jersey is a dependency of the British Crown, Queen Elizabeth II reigns in Jersey. "The Crown" is defined by the Law Officers of the Crown as the "Crown in right of Jersey". The Queen's representative and adviser in the island is the Lieutenant Governor of Jersey – Sir Stephen Dalton since 13 March 2017. He is a point of contact between Jersey ministers and the UK Government and carries out some functions in relation to immigration control, deportation, naturalisation and the issue of passports.
In 1973, the Royal Commission on the Constitution set out the duties of the Crown as including: ultimate responsibility for the 'good government' of the Crown Dependencies; ratification of island legislation by Order-in-Council (royal assent); international representation, subject to consultation with the island authorities before concluding any agreement which would apply to them; ensuring the islands meet their international obligations; and defence.
Legislature and government
Jersey's unicameral legislature is the States Assembly. It includes 49 elected members: 8 senators (elected on an island-wide basis), 12 Connétables (often called 'constables', heads of parishes) and 29 deputies (representing constituencies), all elected for four-year terms as from the October 2011 elections. Jersey has one of the lowest voter turnouts internationally, with just 33% of the electorate voting in 2005, putting it well below the 77% European average for that year.
From the 2022 elections, the role of Senators will be abolished and the eight senators replaced with an increased number of deputies. The 37 deputies will be elected from nine super constituencies, rather than in individual parishes, as they are now. Although efforts were made the remove the Connétables, they will continue their historic role as States members.
There are also five non-voting members appointed by the Crown: the Bailiff, the Lieutenant Governor of Jersey, the Dean of Jersey, the Attorney General and Solicitor General. The Bailiff is President (presiding officer) of the States Assembly, head of the judiciary and as civic head of the island carries out various ceremonial roles.
The Council of Ministers, consisting of a Chief Minister and nine ministers, makes up the leading body of the Government of Jersey. Each minister may appoint up to two assistant ministers. A Chief Executive is head of the civil service. Some government functions are carried out in the island's parishes.
Law
Jersey is a distinct jurisdiction for the purposes of conflict of laws, separate from the other Channel Islands, England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Jersey law has been influenced by several different legal traditions, in particular Norman customary law, English common law and modern French civil law. Jersey's legal system is therefore described as 'mixed' or 'pluralistic', and sources of law are in French and English languages, although since the 1950s the main working language of the legal system is English.
The principal court is the Royal Court, with appeals to the Jersey Court of Appeal and, ultimately, to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The Bailiff is head of the judiciary; the Bailiff and the Deputy Bailiff are appointed by the Crown. Other members of the island's judiciary are appointed by the Bailiff.
External relations
The external relations of Jersey are overseen by the External Relations Minister of the Government of Jersey. In 2007, the Chief Minister and the UK Lord Chancellor signed an agreement that established a framework for the development of the international identity of Jersey.
Although diplomatic representation is reserved to the Crown, Jersey has been developing its own international identity over recent years. It negotiates directly with foreign governments on various matters, for example Tax information exchange agreements (TIEAs) have been signed directly by the island with several countries. The Government maintains offices (some in partnership with Guernsey) in Caen, London and Brussels.
Jersey is a member of the British-Irish Council, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie.
Jersey Independence has in the past been discussed in the States Assembly. Former External Relations Minister Sir Philip Bailhache has at various times warned that the island may need to go independent. It is not Jersey Government policy to seek independence, but the island is prepared if it needed to do so.
Jersey is a third-party European country to the EU. Since 1 January 2021, Jersey has been part of the UK-EU Trade and Economic Cooperation Agreement for the purposes of goods and fishing. Goods exported from the island into Europe are not subject to tariffs and Jersey is solely responsible for management of its territorial waters, however permits may be granted to EU fishermen who have a history of fishing in the Bailiwick's waters. The management of this permit system has caused tension between the French and Jersey authorities, with the French threatening to cut off Jersey's electricity supply in May 2021. Before the end of the transition period after the UK withdrew from the EU in 2020, Jersey had a special relationship with the EU. It was part of the EU customs union and there was free movement of goods between Jersey and the EU but the single market in financial services and free movement of people did not apply to Jersey. In May 2021, France threatened to cut off Jersey's electricity supply in a fight over post-Brexit fishing rights.
Administrative divisions
Jersey is divided into twelve parishes (which have civil and religious functions). They are all named after their parish church. The Connétable is the head of the parish. They are elected at island general elections and sit ex oficio in the States Assembly.
The parishes have various civil administrative functions, such as roads (managed by the Road Committee) and policing (through the Honorary Police). Each parish is governed through direct democracy at Parish Assemblies, consisting of all eligible voters resident in the parish. The Procureurs du Bien Public are the legal and financial representatives of these parishes.
The parishes of Jersey are further divided into vingtaines (or, in St. Ouen, cueillettes), divisions that are historic. Today they are used chiefly for purposes of local administration and electoral constituency.
Geography
Jersey is an island measuring (or 66,436 vergées), including reclaimed land and intertidal zone. It lies in the English Channel, about from the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy, France, and about south of Great Britain. It is the largest and southernmost of the Channel Islands and part of the British Isles, with a maximum land elevation of 143 m (469 ft) above sea level.
About 24% of the island is built-up. 52% of the land area is dedicated to cultivation and around 18% is the natural environment.
It lies within longitude -2° W and latitude 49° N. It has a coastline that is long and a total area of . It measures roughly from west to east and north to south, which gives it the affectionate name among locals of "nine-by-five".
The island is divided into twelve parishes; the largest is St Ouen and the smallest is St Clement. The island is characterised by a number of valleys which generally run north-to-south, such as Waterworks Valley, Grands Vaux, Mont les Vaux, although a few run in other directions, such as Le Mourier Valley. The highest point on the island is Les Platons at .
There are several smaller island groups that are part of the Bailiwick of Jersey, such as Les Minquiers and Les Écrehous, however unlike the smaller islands of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, none of these are permanently inhabited.
Settlements
The largest settlement is the town of St Helier, including the built-up area of southern St Helier and neighbouring areas such as Georgetown, which also plays host to the island's seat of government. The town is the central business district, hosting a large proportion of the island's retail and employment, such as the finance industry.
Outside of the town, many islanders live in suburban and rural settlements, especially along main roads leading out of town and even the more rural areas of the island have considerable amounts of development (St Ouen, the least densely populated parish still has 270 persons per square kilometre). The south and east coasts from St Aubin to Gorey are largely urbanised. The second smaller urban area is the Les Quennevais area in St Brelade, which is home to a small precinct of shops, schools, a park and a leisure centre.
Most people across Jersey regularly travel from the rural settlements to St Helier and from the town to the rural areas for work and leisure purposes.
Housing costs in Jersey are very high. The Jersey House Price Index has at least doubled between 2002 and 2020. The mix-adjusted house price for Jersey is £567,000, higher than any UK region (UK average: £249,000) including London (average: £497,000; highest of any UK region).
Climate
The climate is an oceanic climate with mild winters and mild to warm summers.
The Atlantic Ocean has a moderating effect on temperature in Jersey, as water has a much greater specific heat capacity than air and tends to heat and cool slowly throughout the year. This has a warming influence on coastal areas in winter and a cooling influence in summer. The highest temperature recorded was 36.0 °C (96.8 °F) on 9 August 2003 and again on 23 July 2019, and the lowest temperature recorded was −10.3 °C (13.5 °F) on 5 January 1894. By comparison, higher temperatures are found in Great Britain, which achieved 38.5 °C (101.3 °F) in Faversham, Kent on 10 August 2003. The impact of the Atlantic Ocean and coastal winds ensure that Jersey is slightly cooler than the southern and central parts of England during the summer months.
Snow falls rarely in Jersey; some years will pass with no snow fall at all.
The terrain consists of a plateau sloping from long sandy bays in the south to rugged cliffs in the north. The plateau is cut by valleys running generally north–south.
The following table contains the official Jersey Airport averages for 1981–2010 for Jersey, being located from St. Helier.
Economy
Jersey's economy is highly developed and services-focused, with a GDP per capita of £45,320 in 2019. It is a mixed market economy, with free market principles and an advanced social security infrastructure. It is based on financial services (40% of GVA in 2012), tourism and hospitality (hotels, restaurants, bars, transport and communications totalling 8.4% of GVA in 2012), retail and wholesale (7% of GVA in 2012), construction (6.2% of GVA in 2012) and agriculture (1.3% of GVA in 2012). 53,460 people were employed in Jersey : 24% in financial and legal services; 16% in wholesale and retail trades; 16% in the public sector; 10% in education, health and other private sector services; 10% in construction and quarrying; 9% in hotels, restaurants and bars.
Thanks to specialisation in a few high-return sectors, at purchasing power parity Jersey has high economic output per capita, substantially ahead of all of the world's large developed economies. Gross national income in 2009 was £3.7 billion (approximately £40,000 per head of population). However, this is not indicative of each individual resident's purchasing power and the actual standard of living in Jersey is comparable to that in the UK outside central London.
Jersey is most notable for being one of the world's largest offshore finance centres. The UK acts as a conduit for financial services between European countries and the island. The growth of this sector however has not been without its controversies as Jersey has been characterised by critics and detractors as a place in which the "leadership has essentially been captured by global finance, and whose members will threaten and intimidate anyone who dissents." In June 2005 the States introduced the Competition (Jersey) Law 2005, a competition law based on those of other jurisdictions, to regulate competition and stimulate economic growth.
Tourism is an important economic sector for the island. Hospitality (hotels, restaurants and bars) made up 4.2% of Jersey's GVA in 2019. It is estimated that the wider contribution of tourism in particular is 8.3% (2017). Travel to Jersey is very seasonal. Accommodation occupancy is much higher in the summer months, especially August, than in the winter months (with a low in November). The majority of visitors to the island arrive by air from the UK.
In 2017, 52% of the Island's area was agricultural land (a decrease since 2009). Major agricultural products are potatoes and dairy produce; agriculture's share of GVA increased 5% in 2009, a fifth successive year of growth. Jersey cattle are a small breed of cow widely known for their rich milk and cream; the quality of their meat is also appreciated on a small scale. The herd total in 2009 was 5,090 animals.
Fisheries and aquaculture make use of Jersey's marine resources to a total value of over £6 million in 2009. Farmers and growers often sell surplus food and flowers in boxes on the roadside, relying on the honesty of customers to drop the correct change into the money box and take what they want.
In the 21st century, diversification of agriculture and amendments in planning strategy have led to farm shops replacing many of the roadside stalls.
Along with Guernsey, Jersey has its own lottery called the Channel Islands Lottery, which was launched in 1975.
On 18 February 2005, Jersey was granted Fairtrade Island status.
Taxation
Jersey is not a tax-free jurisdiction. Taxes are levied on properties (known as 'rates') and a Personal Income Tax, Corporate Income Tax and goods and services tax exist.
Before 2008, Jersey had no value-added tax (VAT). Many companies, such as Amazon and Play.com, took advantage of this and a loophole in European law, known as low-value consignment relief, to establish a tax-free fulfilment industry from Jersey. This loophole was closed by the European Union in 2012, resulting in the loss of hundreds of jobs.
There is a 20% standard rate for Income Tax and a 5% standard rate for GST. The island has a 0% default tax rate for corporations; however, higher rates apply to financial services, utility companies and large corporate retailers.
Jersey is considered to be a tax haven. The island, until March 2019, was on the EU tax haven blacklist, but no longer features.
In January 2021, the chair of the EU Tax Matters Subcommittee, Paul Tang, criticised the list for not including such "renowned tax havens" as Jersey.
In 2020, Tax Justice ranked Jersey as the 16th on the Financial Secrecy Index, below larger countries such as the UK, however still placing at the lower end of the 'extreme danger zone' for offshore secrecy'. The island accounts of 0.46% of the global offshore finance market, making a small player in the total market. In 2020, the Corporate Tax Haven Index ranked Jersey eighth for 2021 with an haven score (a measure of the jurisdiction's systems to be used for corporate tax abuse) of 100 out of 100; however, the island only has 0.51% on the Global Scale Weight ranking.
Transport
The primary mode of transport on the island is the motor vehicle. Jersey has a road network consisting of of roads and there are a total of 124,737 motor vehicles registered on the island as of 2016.
There are no longer any railways on the island, however there used to be two main railway lines, the Jersey Western Railway and the Jersey Eastern Railway. The Western Railway track has been converted to a cycle track.
Public transport in Jersey consists of a bus network currently operated by LibertyBus; there are currently 84 buses which cover 25 public routes, the company also operates local school buses. There is also a taxi network and an electronic bike scheme (EVie).
Jersey has a large network of lanes, some of which are classified as green lanes, which have a 15 mph speed limit and where priority is afforded to pedestrians, cyclists and horse riders.
Jersey has an airport and a number of ports, which are operated by Ports of Jersey.
Currency
Jersey's monetary policy is linked to the Bank of England. The official currency of Jersey is the pound sterling. Jersey issues its own postage stamps, banknotes (including a £1 note which is not issued in the UK) and coins that circulate alongside all other sterling coinage. Jersey currency is not legal tender outside Jersey; however it is "acceptable tender" in the UK and can be surrendered at banks in exchange for UK currency. Due to French tourism, many places accept the euro.
In July 2014, the Jersey Financial Services Commission approved the establishment of the world's first regulated Bitcoin fund, at a time when the digital currency was being accepted by some local businesses.
Demography
Censuses have been undertaken in Jersey since 1821. In the 2011 census, the total resident population was estimated to be 97,857, of whom 34% live in Saint Helier, the island's only town. Approximately half the island's population was born in Jersey; 31% of the population were born elsewhere in the British Isles, 7% in continental Portugal or Madeira, 8% in other European countries and 4% elsewhere.
The people of Jersey are often called Islanders or, in individual terms, Jerseyman or Jerseywoman. Some Jersey-born people identify as British. Jersey and its people have been described as a nation.
Immigration and nationality
Jersey employs a number of population controls on people moving to and from the island. Jersey is part of the Common Travel Area (CTA), a border control-free zone which encompasses the Crown Dependencies, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. This means a passport is not required to travel from Jersey to any of these territories (or vice versa) though the Government recommends all travellers bring photo ID since it may need to be checked by customs or police officers and is generally required by commercial transport providers into the island. Due to the CTA, Jersey-born British citizens in the rest of the CTA and British and Irish citizens in Jersey have the right to access social benefits, access healthcare, access social housing support and to vote in general elections. For non-CTA travel, Jersey maintains its own immigration and border controls (although most travel into the Bailiwick is from the rest of the CTA), however UK immigration legislation may be extended to Jersey (subject to exceptions and adaptations) following consultation with Jersey and with Jersey's consent.
The definition of "United Kingdom" in the British Nationality Act 1981 is interpreted as including the UK and the Islands together. This means that for immigration and nationality purposes, the UK generally treats Jersey as though it were part of the UK. As such, there is no such thing as a 'Jersey passport'. British passports issued in Jersey are full British passports with the same design of and their holders enjoy the same rights as other British citizens. However, they will only be issued to British Jersey residents or Jersey-born British citizens and say "BRITISH PASSPORT BAILIWICK OF JERSEY".
Jersey is constitutionally entitled to restrict immigration by non-Jersey residents, but control of immigration at the point of entry cannot be introduced for British, certain Commonwealth and EEA nationals without change to existing international law.
To control population, Jersey operates a system of registration which restricts the right to live and work in the island according to certain requirements. In order to move to Jersey or work in Jersey, everyone (including Jersey-born people) must be registered and have a registration card. There are a number of statuses:
History of immigration
Historical large-scale immigration was facilitated by the introduction of steamships (from 1823). By 1840, up to 5,000 English people, mostly half-pay officers and their families, had settled in Jersey. In the aftermath of 1848, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Italian and French political refugees came to Jersey. Following Louis Napoléon's coup of 1851, more French proscrits arrived. By the end of the 19th century, well-to-do British families, attracted by the lack of income tax, were settling in Jersey in increasing numbers, establishing St Helier as a predominantly English-speaking town.
Seasonal work in agriculture had depended mostly on Bretons and mainland Normans from the 19th century. The growth of tourism attracted staff from the UK. Following Liberation in 1945, agricultural workers were mostly recruited from the UK – the demands of reconstruction in mainland Normandy and Brittany employed domestic labour.
Until the 1960s, the population had been relatively stable for decades at around 60,000 (excluding the Occupation years). Economic growth spurred immigration and a rise in population, which is, by 2013, about 100,000. From the 1960s Portuguese workers arrived, mostly working initially in seasonal industries in agriculture and tourism.
Immigration has helped give aspects of Jersey a distinct urban character, particularly in and around the parish of St Helier, which contributes much to ongoing debates between development and sustainability throughout the island.
Language
Religion
Religion in Jersey has a complex history, drawn largely from different Christian denominations. In 2015, Jersey's first ever national survey of religion found that two fifths of Jersey people have no religion, with only small handfuls of Jersey people belonging to the non-Christian religions. In total, 54% said they had some form of religion, and 7% were not sure. Of those that specified a denomination of Christianity, equal proportions were 'Catholic' or 'Roman Catholic' (43%) as were 'Anglican' or 'Church of England' (44%). The remaining eighth (13%) gave another Christian denomination.
The established church is the Church of England, from 2015 under the See of Canterbury (previously under the Winchester diocese). In the countryside, Methodism found its traditional stronghold. A substantial minority of Roman Catholics can also be found in Jersey. There are two Catholic private combined primary and secondary schools: De La Salle College in Saint Saviour is an all-boys school, and Beaulieu Convent School in Saint Saviour is an all-girls school; and FCJ primary school in St. Saviour. A Catholic order of Sisters has a presence in school life.
Culture
Until the 19th century, indigenous Jèrriais – a variety of Norman – was the language of the island though French was used for official business. During the 20th century, British cultural influence saw an intense language shift take place and Jersey today is predominantly English-speaking. Jèrriais nonetheless survives; around 2,600 islanders (three percent) are reckoned to be habitual speakers, and some 10,000 (12 percent) in all claim some knowledge of the language, particularly amongst the elderly in rural parishes. There have been efforts to revive Jèrriais in schools, and the highest number of declared Jèrriais speakers is in the capital.
The dialects of Jèrriais differ in phonology and, to a lesser extent, lexis between parishes, with the most marked differences to be heard between those of the west and east. Many place names are in Jèrriais, and French and English place names are also to be found. Anglicisation of the place names increased apace with the migration of English people to the island.
Some Neolithic carvings are the earliest works of artistic character to be found in Jersey. Only fragmentary wall-paintings remain from the rich mediaeval artistic heritage, after the wholesale iconoclasm of the Calvinist Reformation of the 16th century.
The island is particularly famous for the Battle of Flowers, a carnival held annually since 1902. Other festivals include La Fête dé Noué (Christmas festival), La Faîs'sie d'Cidre (cidermaking festival), the Battle of Britain air display, Jersey Live Music Festival, Branchage Film Festival, food festivals, and parish events.
The island's patron saint is Saint Helier.
Media
BBC Radio Jersey provides a radio service, and BBC Channel Islands News with headquarters in Jersey provides a joint television news service with Guernsey. ITV Channel Television is a regional ITV franchise shared with the Bailiwick of Guernsey but with its headquarters in Jersey.
Channel 103 is a commercial radio station. Bailiwick Radio broadcasts two music services, Classics and Hits, online at bailiwickradio.com, Apple & Android apps and on TuneIn. Radio Youth FM is an internet radio station run by young people.
Bailiwick Express is one of Jersey's digital online news sources.
Jersey has only one newspaper, the Jersey Evening Post, which is printed six days a week, and has been in publication since 1890.
Music
The traditional folk music of Jersey was common in country areas until the mid-20th century. It cannot be separated from the musical traditions of continental Europe, and the majority of songs and tunes that have been documented have close parallels or variants, particularly in France. Most of the surviving traditional songs are in French, with a minority in Jèrriais.
In contemporary music, Guru Josh was most notable for his internationally successful debut hit Infinity and its re-releases, reaching number one in numerous European countries. Furthermore, Nerina Pallot has enjoyed international success. Music festivals in Jersey include Jersey Live, Weekender, Rock in the Park, Avanchi presents Jazz in July, the music section of the Jersey Eisteddfod and the Liberation Jersey Music Festival.
Cinema
In 1909, T. J. West established the first cinema in the Royal Hall in St. Helier, which became known as West's Cinema in 1923 (demolished 1977). The first talking picture, The Perfect Alibi, was shown on 30 December 1929 at the Picture House in St. Helier. The Jersey Film Society was founded on 11 December 1947 at the Café Bleu, West's Cinema. The large Art Deco Forum Cinema was opened in 1935 – during the German occupation this was used for German propaganda films.
The Odeon Cinema was opened 2 June 1952 and, was later rebranded in the early 21st century as the Forum cinema. Its owners, however, struggled to meet tough competition from the Cineworld Cinemas group, which opened a 10 screen multiplex on the waterfront centre in St. Helier on reclaimed land in December 2002 and the Odeon closed its doors in late 2008. The Odeon is now a listed building.
Since 1997, Kevin Lewis (formerly of the Cine Centre and the New Forum) has arranged the Jersey Film Festival, a charity event showing the latest and also classic films outdoors in 35 mm on a big screen. The festival is regularly held in Howard Davis Park, St Saviour.
First held in 2008, the Branchage Jersey International Film Festival attracts filmmakers from all over the world.
The 2001 movie The Others was set on the island in 1945 shortly after liberation.
Food and drink
Seafood has traditionally been important to the cuisine of Jersey: mussels (called moules in the island), oysters, lobster and crabs – especially spider crabs – ormers and conger.
Jersey milk being very rich, cream and butter have played a large part in insular cooking. (See Channel Island milk) However, there is no indigenous tradition of cheese making, contrary to the custom of mainland Normandy, but some cheese is produced commercially. Jersey fudge, mostly imported and made with milk from overseas Jersey cattle herds, is a popular food product with tourists.
Jersey Royal potatoes are the local variety of new potato, and the island is famous for its early crop of Chats (small potatoes) from the south-facing côtils (steeply sloping fields). They were originally grown using vraic as a natural fertiliser giving them their own individual taste, only a small portion of those grown in the island still use this method. They are eaten in a variety of ways, often simply boiled and served with butter or when not as fresh fried in butter.
Apples historically were an important crop. Bourdélots are apple dumplings, but the most typical speciality is black butter (lé nièr beurre), a dark spicy spread prepared from apples, cider and spices. Cider used to be an important export. After decline and near-disappearance in the late 20th century, apple production is being increased and promoted. Besides cider, apple brandy is produced. Other production of alcohol drinks includes wine, and in 2013 the first commercial vodkas made from Jersey Royal potatoes were marketed.
Among other traditional dishes are cabbage loaf, Jersey wonders (les mèrvelles), fliottes, bean crock (les pais au fou), nettle (ortchie) soup, vraic buns.
Sport
In its own right Jersey participates in the Commonwealth Games and in the biennial Island Games, which it first hosted in 1997 and more recently in 2015.
In sporting events in which Jersey does not have international representation, when the British Home Nations are competing separately, islanders that do have high athletic skill may choose to compete for any of the Home Nations – there are, however, restrictions on subsequent transfers to represent another Home Nation.
Jersey is an associate member of the International Cricket Council (ICC). The Jersey cricket team plays in the Inter-insular match among others. The Jersey cricket team competed in the World Division 4, held in Tanzania in October 2008, after recently finishing as runners-up and therefore being promoted from the World Division 5 held in Jersey. They also competed in the European Division 2, held in Guernsey during August 2008. The youth cricket teams have been promoted to play in the European Division 1 alongside Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Guernsey. In two tournaments at this level Jersey have finished 6th.
For Horse racing, Les Landes Racecourse can be found at Les Landes in St. Ouen next to the ruins of Grosnez Castle.
The Jersey Football Association supervises football in Jersey. The Jersey Football Combination has nine teams in its top division. Jersey national football team plays in the annual Muratti competition among others.
Rugby union in Jersey comes under the auspices of the Jersey Rugby Association (JRA), which is a member of the Rugby Football Union of England. Jersey Reds compete in the English rugby union system; after four promotions in five seasons, the last three of which were consecutive, they competed in the second-level RFU Championship in 2012–13.
Jersey has two public indoor swimming pools. Swimming in the sea, windsurfing and other marine sports are practised. Jersey Swimming Club have organised an annual swim from Elizabeth Castle to Saint Helier Harbour for over 50 years. A round-island swim is a major challenge that a select number of swimmers have achieved. The Royal Channel Island Yacht Club is based in Jersey.
There is one facility for extreme sports and some facilities for youth sports. Jersey has one un-roofed skateboarding park. Coastal cliffs provide opportunities for rock climbing.
Two professional golfers from Jersey have won the Open Championship seven times between them; Harry Vardon won six times and Ted Ray won once. Vardon and Ray also won the U.S. Open once each. Harry Vardon's brother, Tom Vardon, had wins on various European tours.
An independent body that promotes sports in Jersey and support clubs, 'Jersey Sport' was launched in 2017
Literature
Wace, a Norman poet of the 12th century, is Jersey's earliest known author. Printing arrived in Jersey only in the 1780s, but the island supported a multitude of regular publications in French (and Jèrriais) and English throughout the 19th century, in which poetry, most usually topical and satirical, flourished (see Jèrriais literature). The first Jèrriais book to be published was Rimes et Poésies Jersiaises de divers auteurs réunies et mises en ordre, edited by Abraham Mourant in 1865. Writers born in Jersey include Elinor Glyn, John Lemprière, Philippe Le Sueur Mourant, Robert Pipon Marett and Augustus Asplet Le Gros. Frederick Tennyson and Gerald Durrell were among authors who made Jersey their home. Contemporary authors based in Jersey include Jack Higgins.
Education
Schools
The Government of Jersey provides education through state schools (including a fee-paying option at secondary level) and also supports private schools. The Jersey curriculum follows that of England. It follows the National Curriculum although there are a few differences to adapt for the island, for example all Year 4 students study a six-week Jersey Studies course.
Further and higher education
Jersey has a college of further education and university centre, Highlands College. As well as offering part-time and evening courses, Highlands is also a sixth form provider, working alongside Hautlieu School which offers the only non-fee-paying sixth form, and works collaboratively with a range of organisations including the Open University, University of Plymouth and London South Bank University. In particular students can study at Highlands for the two-year foundation degree in financial services and for a BSc in social sciences, both validated by the University of Plymouth.
The Institute of Law is Jersey's law school, providing a course for students seeking to qualify as Jersey advocates and solicitors. It also provides teaching for students enrolled on the University of London LLB degree programme, via the International Programmes. The Institute of Law also runs a 'double degree' course: students can obtain the LLB from the University of London and a Licence en droit M1 from Toulouse 1 Capitol University; the two combine 4 years of studies in both English and French. The Open University supports students in Jersey, but they pay higher fees than UK students. Private sector higher education providers include the Jersey International Business School.
Environment
Three areas of land are protected for their ecological or geological interest as Sites of Special Interest (SSI). Jersey has four designated Ramsar sites: Les Pierres de Lecq, Les Minquiers, Les Écréhous and Les Dirouilles and the south east coast of Jersey (a large area of intertidal zone).
Jersey is the home of the Jersey Zoo (formerly known as the Durrell Wildlife Park) founded by the naturalist, zookeeper and author Gerald Durrell.
Biodiversity
Four species of small mammal are considered native: the wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus), the Jersey bank vole (Myodes glareolus caesarius), the Lesser white-toothed shrew (Crocidura suaveolens) and the French shrew (Sorex coronatus). Three wild mammals are well-established introductions: the rabbit (introduced in the mediaeval period), the red squirrel and the hedgehog (both introduced in the 19th century). The stoat (Mustela erminea) became extinct in Jersey between 1976 and 2000. The Green lizard (Lacerta bilineata) is a protected species of reptile; Jersey is its only native habitat in the British Isles.
The red-billed chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) became extinct in Jersey around 1900, when changes in farming and grazing practices led to a decline in the coastal slope habitat required by this species. Birds on the Edge, a project between the Government of Jersey, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and National Trust for Jersey, is working to restore Jersey's coastal habitats and reinstate the red-billed chough (and other bird species) to the island
Jersey is the only place in the British Isles where the agile frog (Rana dalmatina) is found. The remaining population of agile frogs on Jersey is very small and is restricted to the south west of the island. The species is the subject of an ongoing programme to save it from extinction in Jersey via a collaboration between the Government of Jersey, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and Jersey Amphibian and Reptile Group (JARG), with support and sponsorship from several other organisations. The programme includes captive breeding and release, public awareness and habitat restoration activities.
Trees generally considered native are the alder (Alnus glutinosa), silver birch (Betula pendula), sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa), hazel (Corylus avellana), hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna), beech (Fagus sylvatica), ash (Fraxinus excelsior), aspen (Populus tremula), wild cherry (Prunus avium), blackthorn (Prunus spinosa), holm oak (Quercus ilex), oak (Quercus robur), sallow (Salix cinerea), elder (Sambucus nigra), elm (Ulmus spp.) and medlar (Mespilus germanica). Among notable introduced species, the cabbage palm (Cordyline australis) has been planted in coastal areas and may be seen in many gardens.
Notable marine species include the ormer, conger, bass, undulate ray, grey mullet, ballan wrasse and garfish. Marine mammals include the bottlenosed dolphin and grey seal.
Historically the island has given its name to a variety of overly-large cabbage, the Jersey cabbage, also known as Jersey kale or cow cabbage.
Japanese Knotweed (Reynoutria japonica) is an invasive species that threatens Jersey's biodiversity. It is easily recognisable and has hollow stems with small white flowers that are produced in late summer. Other non-native species on the island include the Colorado beetle, burnet rose and oak processionary moth.
Public services
Healthcare
Health services on the island are overseen by the Department for Health and Social Care. Jersey does not have a nationalised health service and the service is not part of the National Health Service. Many healthcare treatments are not free at the point of use, however treatment in the Emergency Department is free. For residents, prescriptions and some hospital treatments are free, however GP services cost money.
Emergency services
Emergency services are provided by the States of Jersey Police with the support of the Honorary Police as necessary, States of Jersey Ambulance Service, Jersey Fire and Rescue Service and the Jersey Coastguard. The Jersey Fire and Rescue Service and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution operate an inshore rescue and lifeboat service; Channel Islands Air Search provides rapid response airborne search of the surrounding waters.
The States of Jersey Fire Service was formed in 1938 when the States took over the Saint Helier Fire Brigade, which had been formed in 1901. The first lifeboat was equipped, funded by the States, in 1830. The RNLI established a lifeboat station in 1884. Border security and customs controls are undertaken by the States of Jersey Customs and Immigration Service. Jersey has adopted the 112 emergency number alongside its existing 999 emergency number.
Supply services
Water supplies in Jersey are managed by Jersey Water. Jersey Water supply water from two water treatment works, around 7.2 billion litres in 2018. Water in Jersey is almost exclusively from rainfall-dependent surface water. The water is collected and stored in six reservoirs and there is also a desalination plant that produces up to 10.8 million litres per day (around half of the Island's average daily usage). In 2017, 101 water pollution incidents were reported, an increase of 5% on 2016. Another estimated 515,700 m3 of water is abstracted for domestic purposes from private sources (around 9% of the population).
Electricity in Jersey is provided by a sole supplier, Jersey Electricity, of which the States of Jersey is the majority shareholder. Jersey imports 95 per cent of its power from France. 35% of the imported power derives from hydro-electric sources and 65% from nuclear sources. Jersey Electricity claims the carbon intensity of its electricity supply is 35g CO2 e / kWh compared to 352g CO2 e / kWh in the UK.
Notable people
See also
Footnotes and references
Further reading
Balleine's History of Jersey, Marguerite Syvret and Joan Stevens (1998)
Jersey Through the Centuries, Leslie Sinel, Jersey 1984,
A Biographical Dictionary of Jersey, G.R. Balleine
Archaeology
The Archaeology of the Channel Islands. Vol. 2: The Bailiwick of Jersey by Jacquetta Hawkes (1939)
The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe to the Mycenean Age, 1940, C. F. C. Hawkes
Jersey in Prehistory, Mark Patton, 1987
The Archaeology and Early History of the Channel Islands, Heather Sebire, 2005.
Dolmens of Jersey: A Guide, James Hibbs (1988).
A Guide to The Dolmens of Jersey, Peter Hunt, Société Jersiaise, 1998.
Statements in Stone: Monuments and Society in Neolithic Brittany, Mark Patton, 1993
Hougue Bie, Mark Patton, Warwick Rodwell, Olga Finch, 1999
The Channel Islands, An Archaeological Guide, David Johnston, 1981
The Archaeology of the Channel Islands, Peter Johnston, 1986
Cattle
One Hundred Years of the Royal Jersey Agricultural and Horticultural Society 1833–1933. Compiled from the Society's Records, by H.G. Shepard, Secretary. Eric J. Boston. Jersey Cattle, 1954
Religion
The Channel Islands under Tudor Government, A.J. Eagleston
Reformation and Society in Guernsey, D.M. Ogier
International Politics and the Establishment of Presbyterianism in the Channel Islands: The Coutances Connection, C.S.L. Davies
Religion, History and G.R. Balleine: The Reformation in Jersey, by J. St John Nicolle, The Pilot Magazine
The Reformation in Jersey: The Process of Change over Two centuries, J. St John Nicolle
The Chroniques de Jersey in the light of contemporary documents, BSJ, AJ Eagleston
The Portrait of Richard Mabon, BSJ, Joan Stevens
External links
gov.je Official Government of Jersey website
Visit Jersey Government owned tourism website
Jerripedia Online history and family history encyclopedia
Vote.je Elections in Jersey
Jersey. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency.
Locate Jersey
Jersey, from the BBC News
Jersey Evening Post
Prehistoric Jersey
JerseyShops.co.uk – local retailers
Bailiwick of Jersey
Crown dependencies
English-speaking countries and territories
French-speaking countries and territories
States and territories established in 1204
Islands of the Channel Islands
British Islands
Ramsar sites in Jersey
Island countries
Northern European countries
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15694 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History%20of%20Jersey | History of Jersey | Jersey is the largest of the Channel Islands, an island group in the English Channel near France. Although not geographically part of the archipelago of the British Isles, politically and culturally the islands are generally accepted as such. The Channel Islands are the last remnants of the medieval Duchy of Normandy that held sway in both France and England. The islands remained loyal to the English crown after the return of Normandy to France in 1204 and have enjoyed self-government since.
Jersey is notable for being the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II.
The most widely regarded history of Jersey is Balleine's History of the Island of Jersey, written by G. R. Balleine in 1959, and later adapted by the Société Jersiaise, most notably two of its members Marguerite Syvret and Joan Stevens.
Name of the island
Although Jersey was part of the Roman world, there is a lack of evidence to give a better understanding of the island during the Gallo-Roman and early Middle Ages. The tradition is that the island was called Caesarea by the Romans as laid down in the Antonine Itinerary, however this is disputed by some, who claim Caesarea, Sarnia and Riduna are the Scilly Isles off the southwestern tip of England, nevertheless Sarnia in particular has a large cultural influence as the historic name of Guernsey (for example the national anthem of Guernsey is Sarnia chérie). Andium however is also mentioned on the list and this name is very often attributed to Jersey. Therefore, it is possible another island, such as the Minquiers were in fact Caesarea and Jersey Andium.
The name is claimed to be the source of the modern name Jersey, -ey being a Norse signification of an island, and Jer- possibly being a contraction of Caesar, similar to Cherbourg, therefore the island meaning Caesar's island. Another claim for the origin of the name is as Geirr's Island from the Norse name Geirr or as the grassy isle from the Frisian gers.:16 The Roman name for the Channel Islands was I. Lenuri (Lenur Islands)
Some claim that the pre-Roman name for the island was Augia (alternatively Andium), and it was given by this name by King Childebert of France to Archbishop Samson of Dol in 550 CE. In the past the island's name has various variations of its spelling, such as Gersey, Jarzé, Gerzai and Gersui (including re-latinisations such as Gersoium and Grisogium) Andium has considerable popularity as the former name for Jersey, being for example the name of the island's social housing corporation.
Origins of other place names on the island
L'Etacq is of Norse origin, a derivative of L'Estack, from the Norse stakkr, meaning high rock. This word also gives name to various places called Etacquerel.:16
Prehistory
The earliest evidence of human activity in Jersey dates to about 250,000 years ago in the Middle Paleolithic (before Jersey became an island) when bands of Neanderthal nomadic hunters used the caves at La Cotte de St Brelade as a base for hunting mammoth and woolly rhinoceros.
Due to rising sea levels, Jersey has been an island for approximately 6,000 years. The geology of the Channel Islands, has its origins in the Hercynian mountain building period, which also accounts for the hills of Brittany and the moors of Devon and Cornwall. At its current extremes it measures east to west and north to south. Evidence of Ice Age period engravings dating from at least 12,000 BC has been found, showing occupation by Homo sapiens.
Evidence also exists of settled communities in the Neolithic period, which is marked by the building of the ritual burial sites known as dolmens. The number, size, and visible locations of these megalithic monuments (especially La Hougue Bie) have suggested that social organisation over a wide area, including surrounding coasts, was required for the construction. Archaeological evidence also shows that trading links with Brittany and the south coast of England existed during this time.
Hoards
Evidence of occupation and wealth has been discovered in the form of hoards. In 1889, during construction of a house in Saint Helier, a 746-gram gold torc of Irish origin was unearthed. A Bronze Age hoard consisting of 110 implements, mostly spears and swords, was discovered in Saint Lawrence in 1976 – probably a smith's stock. Hoards of coins were discovered at La Marquanderie, in Saint Brelade, Le Câtel, in Trinity, and Le Câtillon, in Grouville (1957).
In June 2012, two metal detectorists announced that they had uncovered what could be Europe's largest hoard of Iron Age Celtic coins, 70,000 late Iron Age and Roman coins. The hoard is thought to have belonged to a Curiosolitae tribe fleeing Julius Caesar's armies around 50 to 60 BC.
In October 2012, another metal detectorist reported an earlier Bronze Age find, the Trinity Hoard.
Early history
Prior to Normandy
Although there is no evidence of a Roman occupation of Jersey, historians consider that it is entirely feasible it was occupied by the Romans. Various Roman archeological artefacts have been found on the island, such as coins discovered on the north coast at Ile Agois. There are several sites attributed to the Romans on the island, such as Caesar's fort at Mont Orgeuil. Roman influence has been found, in particular at , the coastal headland site at Le Pinacle, where remains of a primitive structure are attributed to Gallo-Roman temple worship (fanum).
When Augustus Caesar divided Gaul into four provinces, Jersey was part of the province headquartered at Lyons. Roman influence has a strong grounding in the development of Jersey culture, bringing vernacular Latin to the isle, which would later develop into Standard French and Jèrriais (and influence English).
During the migration of the Britons from Britain to Brittany (c. 5th – 6th century AD), specifically during the invasion led by St Samson, Bishop of Dol, it is believed the Channel Islands came to be settled by them. There are numerous references to the habitation of Jersey by Breton people. This likely brought Christianity to the island. Various saints such as the Celts Samson of Dol and Branwalator (Brelade) were active in the region. Tradition has it that Saint Helier from Tongeren in modern-day Belgium first brought Christianity to the island in the 6th century; part of the walls of the Fishermen's Chapel dates from this period and Charlemagne sent his emissary to the island (at that time called Angia, also spelt Agna) in 803. A chapel built around 911 now forms part of the nave of the Parish Church of St Clement.
Duchy of Normandy
From 873, Jersey was affected by the conquests by the Normans of the western coast of France (the Channel Islands were territory of the Kingdom of France at this time). During the reign of Charles III the Simple, the territory of modern Normandy was yielded to Rollo, the leader of the Normans, with the title of the "Duke of Normandy". While the Duchy was held in fief to the French Crown, the Crown only had limited rights in the province.
In around 933, Duke William I (William Longsword), seized Jersey, which until then had been politically linked to Brittany, and it is likely that the pre-Norman form of government and way of life was replaced at this point. The island adopted the Norman law system, still the basis of Jersey law today. During Norman rule, the island redeveloped after the devastation brought by the Vikings and developed agriculture. Immigration from the Norman mainland at this time first brought the modern Norman cultural influences found in the island today.:19
A key part of the early administrative structure of Jersey was the fief. Alongside the parish, the fief provided a basic framework for rural life; the system began with the Norman system and largely remained similar to it. In Jersey, the dues, services and rents owed by tenants were extensive and often onerous. Jersey peasants retained a degree of freedom lost elsewhere, probably due to the insignificance of the island in the Duchy. More is known of the origins of the fief than of the parishes and early documents show that Jersey was thoroughly feudalised (the majority of the residents were tenants holding land from Seigneurs). The fief of St Ouen, the most senior fief in Jersey's feudal structure, was by 1135 in the hands of the de Carteret family. They held extensive lands in Carteret as well, but these were lost by them after King John's loss of Normandy, so they decided to settle on the island. Between the 12th and 20th centuries, there were an estimated 245 fiefs in Jersey, though not all simultaneously.
In 1066, the Duke William the Conqueror defeated Harold Godwinson at Hastings to become the King of England; however, he continued to rule his French possessions, including Jersey, as a separate entity, as fealty was owed to the King of France. This initial association of Jersey with England did not last long, as William split his possessions between his sons: Robert Curthose became Duke of Normandy and William Rufus gained the English Crown. William Rufus' son Henry I recaptured Normandy for England in 1106. The island was then part of the English King's realm (though still part of Normandy and France). Around 1142, it is recorded that Jersey was under the control of the Count of Anjou, who administered Normandy for the Duke.
The island remained part of the Duchy of Normandy until 1204, when King Philip II Augustus of France conquered the duchy from King John of England; thanks to Pierre de Préaux, a governor of Rouen who possessed the isles, who decided to support King John, the islands remained in the personal possession of the English king and were described as being a Peculiar of the Crown.
According to the Rolls of the Norman Exchequer, in 1180 Jersey was divided for administrative purposes into three ministeria: , and (possibly containing four parishes each). Gorroic is an old spelling for Gorey, containing St Martin, St Saviour, Grouville and St Clement; Groceio could derive from de Gruchy, and contains St John, Trinity, St Lawrence and St Helier; and Crapoudoit, likely referring to the stream of St Peter's Valley, contains the remainder of the parishes in the West. This was a time of building or extending churches with most parish churches in the island being built/rebuilt in a Norman style chosen by the abbey or priory to which each church had been granted. St Mary and St Martin being given to Cerisy Abbey. By Norman times, the parish boundaries were firmly fixed and remain largely unchanged since. It was likely set in place due to the tithe system under Charlemagne, where each property must contribute to the church, so each property would have had to be established within a parish. The parish system is much more important in Jersey than in England or post-Napoleon France.:15
Origins of self-government
It is said, in tradition, that the island's autonomy derives from the Constitutions of King John, however this is disputed. Until King James II, successive English monarchs have then granted to Jersey by charter its certain privileges, likely to ensure the island's continued loyalty, accounting for its advantageous position at the boundary of the European continent. In the Treaty of Paris (1259), the King of France gave up claim to the Channel Islands. The claim was based upon his position as feudal overlord of the Duke of Normandy. The King of England gave up claim to mainland Normandy and therefore the Channel Islands were split from the rest of Normandy. The Channel Islands were never absorbed into the Kingdom of England and the island has had self-government since.
The Channel Islands ceased to be a peaceful backwater, now being located on the edge of the territory of the King of England, and became a potential flashpoint on the international stage between England and France. Therefore, the Warden, de Suligny, constructed a castle at Gorey, known as Mont Orgueil, to serve as a royal fortress and military base. This was needed as the Island had few defences and had previously been suppressed by a fleet commanded by a French exile, Eustace the Monk working with the English King until in 1212 he changed sides and raided the Channel Islands on behalf of the French King.
The administration of the island was handled by an insular government. The King appointed a Warden (later "Capitain" or "Governor", now the Lieutenant-Governor of Jersey), a position largely occupied with the defence of the island. From 1415 until the second half of the 15th century, the islands were governed by a Lord (or Lady). Despite the end to Norman rule, the churches of the island were permitted to continue to be under the Diocese of Coutances for another 300 years to appease islanders, however at times of war the liberties of the clergy were often restricted.
The existing Norman customs and laws were allowed to continue and there was no attempt to introduce English law. The formerly split administrative system was replaced with a centralised legal system, of which the head was the King of England rather than the Duke of Normandy. The law was conducted through 12 jurats, constables () and a bailiff (). These titles have different meanings and duties to those in England. Any oppression by a bailiff or a warden was to be resolved locally or failing that, by appeal to the King who appointed commissioners to report on disputes.
The role of the jurats when the King's court was mobile would have been preparatory work for the visit of the Justices in Eyre. It is unknown for how long the position of the jurats has existed, with some claiming the position dates to time immemorial. After the cessation of the visits of the Justices in Eyre (and with the frequent absence of the Warden), the Bailiff and jurats took on a much wider role, from jury to justice.:28
Due to the island's strategic importance to the English crown, the islanders were able to negotiate, over a number of centuries, the right to retain privileges and improve on certain benefits, such as trade rights, from the King.
In 1541, the Privy Council, which had recently given a seat to Calais, intended to give two seats in Parliament to Jersey. Seymour, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Island, wrote to the Jurats, instructing them to send two Burgesses for the isle. However, no further steps seemed to have been taken since the letter did not arrive in front of the States Assembly until the day the elected persons were required to arrive in London.:70
Late Middle Ages
Under the wardenships of Philippe d'Aubigny (1212-1224, 1232–1234), the island was attacked by Eustace the Monk, a pirate, while the warden was fighting for the King in the Barons' war. In 1217, Louis, the son of Philip II of France, ordered after the Treaty of Lambeth, that the supporters of Eustace should return the islands to England. The same year, Eustace was beheaded after being captured at Sandwich. An inquest was held into the loyalty of the Jersey landowners, and as a result only the de Carterets remained of the important Norman families. The old aristocracy gave way to a new one, with landowners drawn from royal officials, who soon came to think of themselves as islanders rather than Englishmen. This saw the firm establishment of the feudal system in Jersey, with fiefs headed by Seigneurs.:30
During the Hundred Years' War, the island was attacked many times resulting in the formal creation of the Island Militia in 1337, which was compulsory for the next 600 years for all men of military age. In March 1338, a French force landed on Jersey, intent on capturing the island. Although the island was overrun, Mont Orgueil remained in English hands. The French remained until September, when they sailed off to conquer Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark. In 1339, the French returned, allegedly with 8,000 men in 17 Genoese galleys and 35 French ships. Again, they failed to take the castle and, after causing damage, withdrew.
It was 1348 when the Black Death reached the Island, ravaging the population. The change in England to a written language in "English" was not taken up in Jersey, where Norman-French continued until the 20th century. In July 1373, Bertrand du Guesclin overran Jersey and besieged Mont Orgueil. His troops succeeded in breaching the outer defences, forcing the garrison back to the keep. The garrison came to an agreement that they would surrender if not relieved by Michaelmas and du Guesclin sailed back to Brittany, leaving a small force to carry on the siege. An English relief fleet arrived in time.
On 7 October 1406, 1,000 French men at arms led by Pero Niño, a Castilian nobleman turned corsair, invaded Jersey, landing at St Aubin's Bay and defeated the 3,000 defenders but failed to capture the island. They landed in St Aubin's Bay (at the islet where Elizabeth Castle now stands) at night, then the next morning advanced across the beach towards the town, but lost the battle. The next day they moved towards Mont Orgueil. An agreement was reached with the invaders that the island would pay a hefty ransom and they left on 9 October.
The rise of Joan of Arc during the early 15th century inspired France to evict the English from mainland France, with the exception of Calais, putting Jersey back in the front line. During the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453), the French did not succeed in capturing Jersey. However, during the War of the Roses (1455-1487), Margaret of Anjou, queen consort of England, made a secret deal with Pierre de Brézé to gain French support for the Lancastrians, leading to the French capturing Mont Orgeuil in the summer of 1461. In 1462, de Brézé issued ordinances outlining the role of the bailiff and the jurats. Jersey was occupied by French forces until 1468 when Yorkist forces and local militia recaptured the castle.
It may well be during this occupation that the island saw the establishment of the States. Comte Maulevrier, who had led the invasion of the island, ordered the holding of an Assize in the island. Maulevrier confirmed the place of existing institutions, however created the requirement for Jurats to be chosen by Bailiffs, Jurats, Rectors and Constables.
In 1496, King Henry VII obtained a Papal bull to transfer the islands from the Bishop of Coutcances to Salisbury (and later to Winchester), although for nearly 50 years after, due to the proximity of the isles to Coutances, the Bishop continued to act as the de facto bishop of the islands.:67
In 1540, there was an outbreak of plague on the island, and the Lieutenant Governor, Robert Raymond, ordered the closure of all markets, fairs and public assemblies.:70
The Reformation
During the 16th century, ideas of the reformation of the church coupled with the split with the Catholic Faith by Henry VIII of England, resulted in the islanders adopting the Protestant religion, in 1569 the churches moved under the control of the Diocese of Winchester. During the reign of Edward VI, the Government issued a new prayer book, which was translated into French, however did not arrive in the island until the throne had changed hands to Queen Mary, who led the restoration of Catholicism in England. However, Jersey did not have any death sentences issued for Catholicism, due to the island being kept out of the limelight by its Governor Poulet. The island did not become Catholic, with numerous anti-Papists still in position.:79
During the reign of Elizabeth I, Calvinism took hold in Jersey due to the immigration of French Huguenot refuges. This meant that life became very austere: laws were strictly enforced, punishment for wrong doers was severe, but education was improved - a school was started in every parish and support was given for Jersey boys to attend Oxford. Each elder knew every family within his vigntaine, 'whether they have household prayers morning and evening, say grace after meals and live in peace and concord.' The excommunication of Elizabeth by the Pope increased the military threat to the island and the increasing use of gunpowder on the battlefield meant that the fortifications on the island had to be adapted. A new fortress was built to defend St Aubin's Bay, the new Elizabeth Castle was named after the queen by Sir Walter Raleigh when he was governor. The island militia was reorganised on a parish basis and each parish had two cannon which were usually housed in the church - one of the St Peter cannon can still be seen at the bottom of Beaumont Hill.
Development of international trade
During the Elizabethan Era, Europeans began to explore and establish colonies in the Americas. The Jèrriais were no exception to this. Jersey was a notable trading port, on the route linking the Netherlands to Spain and between England and France. A number of locals were colonialists to Newfoundland from its discovery by Europeans in 1497. By 1591, Jerseymen were sailing small boats across the Atlantic in the spring and not returning to the island until the autumn ploughing. In 1611, St Brelade's Church was allowed to hold Communion early, such that the travellers could communicate before sailing from St Aubin. Southampton was also an important port for the Jersey people, with a number of them settling and taking important roles in the town.
One of the favourable trade deals with England was the ability to import wool (England needing an export market but was at war with most of Europe). The production of knitwear in the island reached such a scale that it threatened the island's ability to produce its own food, so laws were passed regulating who could knit with whom and when. The name jersey being synonymous for a sweater, shows its importance.
17th century
Governorship of John Peyton
James VI of Scotland became King of England, and hence of Jersey, after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. The Governor of the time, Sir Walter Ralegh, was tried and imprisoned for conspiring against the King after the death of Elizabeth and replaced with Sir John Peyton. Peyton strongly disliked Presbyterianism, including Calvinism, and attempted to abolish the religion in Jersey. The king initially allowed the island's to continue under their present faith system. However, Calvinism was increasingly unpopular among islanders, which aided Peyton's caused. When St Peter's rectory became vacant in 1613, Peyton appointed Elie Messervy to the position. The Colloquy called a Synod to meet to discuss, however Peyton banned the meeting. Both sides sent parties to Westminster - the Colloquy sending George Poulet, the Bailiff - however a compromise was found locally, with Messervy agreeing to continue using the Huguenot prayer book.Peyton was also against democracy in the form of the States and the freedoms of the Courts in Jersey. In 1615, Jean Hérault was appointed Bailiff, having been promised the role by Letters Patent in 1611. Peyton appealed against the decision, claiming it was his jurisdiction to appoint the Bailiff, but the King's orders triumph that of his Governor's. Hérault strongly believed in the importance and high position of the role of Bailiff, claiming it to be higher than that of the Governor. He ordered his name to be placed before the Governor's in church prayers and was the first Bailiff to wear red robes (in the style of English judges). To back his claims, he cited that in the Norman administrative tradition, the Bailiffs had "noone above them except the Duke". He frequently reported neglect of duty by Peyton, such as the reduction in the guard at Elizabeth Castle. This dispute led to one of the most major turning points in Jersey's constitutional history, as the powers of the Governor were clearly demarcated as military only, while civil and justice affairs were entirely in the jurisdiction of the Bailiff.
In 1617, the Royal Commissioners Sir Edward Conway and Sir William Bird visited the island. This led to the recommendation that the island should have a Dean. The appointment was David Bandinel, the Italian Rector of St Brelade's, taking office in 1620. This was not popular with the States, with some Rectors stating they would not recognise the position of the Dean. He took office nonetheless and, by order of the King, Anglicanism was hence effectively established as the state religion of the island. The Book of Discipline lost its validity and the prayer book was changed to a translated version of the Book of Common Prayer, and all future Ministers had to be appointed from then on by a Bishop. Bandinel enforced these changes, including removing the Rector of St Mary from office for speaking against the prayer book, however the order that Communion should be taken kneeling was not.
Aside from religion, the Commissioners also ordered that the island's garrisons be increased and for better training for the militia. They did not recognise the Bailiff as being the island's true Governor, ordering that the States must receive permission from the Governor before being permitted to meet, however did also affirm the precedence of the Bailiff in the civil administrative spheres.
The Wars of the Three Kingdoms
During the 1640s, England, Ireland and Scotland were embroiled in the War of the Three Kingdoms. The civil war also divided Jersey, and while the sympathy of islanders lay with Parliament, the de Carterets (see Sir George Carteret and Sir Philippe de Carteret II) held the island for the king. The island fell to the Parliamentarians in 1651, with Elizabeth Castle being captured on 15 December.
The Prince of Wales, the future Charles II visited the island in 1646 and again in October 1649 following the trial and execution of his father, Charles I. In the Royal Square in St. Helier on 17 February 1649, Charles was publicly proclaimed king after his father's death (following the first public proclamation in Edinburgh on 5 February 1649). Parliamentarian forces eventually captured the island in 1651 and Elizabeth Castle seven weeks later. In recognition for all the help given to him during his exile, Charles II gave George Carteret, Bailiff and governor, a large grant of land in the American colonies, which he promptly named New Jersey, now part of the United States of America. Furthermore, Charles II presented to the island a royal mace as a 'perpetual remembrance of [the Bailiffs'] fiedelity'; since then, it has always been carried before the Bailiff at sittings of the Royal Court and the States (even during the Occupation).
The Commonwealth
The Puritan Col. James Heane was appointed Governor of Jersey in 1651. There were complaints from islanders about the new resident soldiers. Despite the fact that Heane had prohibited looting, many soldiers stole things from islanders and secularised a number of holy buildings, for example burning all the pews in St Helier's church. Many soldiers attending services at the island's churches disrespected services because they could not understand them, as Jersey services were in the local French language. Printed slips were brought from England which Jerseymen were required to sign, swearing allegiance to the 'Republic of England ... without King or House of Lords'.
Reign of William of Orange
In 1689, William of Orange became the King of England; and England, as a Dutch ally, went to war against the French. Although due to the scale of the war, the island did not come into much focus, it was at this time the Privilege of Neutrality which had long been enjoyed by the islands was lost. William had banned all trade with France, a proclamation which applied to Jersey as well, however due to corruption in the higher levels of Jersey's government, namely the Lieutenant-Governor himself Edward Harris, a large smuggling trade thrived, operating from the bailiwick. Smugglers would be alerted by a fire set by French mercahnts on the Écrehous reef, a part of Jersey's bailiwick, to which Jersey boats, under the approval of the Lieutenant-Governor, would travel to conduct illegal trade. Despite attempts from parish authorities to stop the boats, being that the reef was part of Jersey and that these boats had permission from the government to travel to the islets, no action could be taken.
During William's wars with France, Jersey was on the whole at peace, with the notable exception of 1692, when Louis XIV permitted an army to gather at La Hougue on the Cotenin. James II himself also went to the Contenin, however Jersey's allegiance was now against the Stuarts. However, in a naval battle in 1692, the French fleet at La Hougue were destroyed. Although the threat of foreign powers was numb during this period, on island tensions were high. The Governors and Bailiffs were generally absent - the Governor Henry Lumley never visited the island at all during his time in office and after the death of Sir Edouard de Carteret, no bailiff was appointed for five years. The eventual successor Charles de Carteret faced large opposition, especially from his own tenants in St. Ouen. A group of jurats complained to the Privy Council that de Carteret was absent and not well accustomed to the law and culture of the island. Charles attempted to oppose this by blocking sittings of the Jurats in court, claiming they could not sit since they were related to the plaintiff or defendant (which they most often were since everyone in Jersey was somehow related to one another). With Charles ended the male line of de Carteret seigneurs.
In 1680, the States voted in favour of requesting the island's first dedicated prison be constructed in town in order to be nearer the Royal Court (previously prisoners had been held at Mont Orgueil, the King's tenants in the east being required to guard them). The building arching over Charing Cross (at the time the entrance to town from the west) was completed by 1699, where the prison would remain until its 1811 relocation to the present site of the General Hospital (on Gloucester Street, not at Westmount).
Towards the end of the 17th century, Jersey strengthened its links with the Americas when many islanders emigrated to New England and north east Canada. The Jersey merchants built up a thriving business empire in the Newfoundland and Gaspé fisheries. Companies such as Robins and the Le Boutilliers set up thriving businesses.
The perquages are a series of routes that offered sanctuary to malefactors to leave the island. All except St Ouen and St Martin lead to the south coast. For example, St Mary, St John and St Lawrence leave via St Peter's Valley and Beaumont (today a cycle track leading to the south coast).
18th century
Public unrest
By the 1720s, a discrepancy in coinage values between Jersey and France was threatening economic stability. The States of Jersey therefore resolved to devalue the liard to six to the sou. The legislation to that effect implemented in 1729 caused popular riots that shook the establishment. The devaluation was therefore cancelled.
In the 1730s, there was sporadic violence against the collectors of Crown tithes, especially in St Ouen, St Brelade and Trinity.
By 1750, the Bailiffship had de facto become a hereditary position in the de Carteret family. Earl Granville held the post at this time, but neither he nor his son never visited the island. Therefore, the Lieutenant Bailiff Charles Lempière (in office 1750–1781), appointed that year, became the de facto Bailiff. During his time in office, the Governor and his Lieutenants were also absent, so Lempière effectively had full control over the island. Lempière was a Parliamentarian, but by temperament was autocratic. His family had significant power with a number of high-ranking roles in the island. Lempière issued ordinances through his court and quashed protest through the same.:195 Democratic representation was not present in the island's political system, with only wealthier men able to vote for Connétables, with those men filling the roles with their relatives. Furthermore, the feudal economic mode was still in practice, with the island divided into hundreds of fiefs and the tithe system still in practice. Islanders were still required to pay rentes to their Seigneurs, which themselves were corrupted by the Seigneurs and miller and biker allies.
This led to a series of riots in 1769, which have been termed 'the Jersey Revolution'. Nicholas Fiott, a merchant settled in Jersey, had a number of personal squabbles with Lempière which soon morphed into public disunity. During the Seven Years' War, a number of prisoners were kept on the island and suffered "disgraceful" mistreatment. Fiott himself was imprisoned for objecting to being tried by Jurats with whom he had personal quarrels. A petition was sent to the Privy Council demanding his release by principaux (men with the right to attend Parish Assemblies) and he was released.:195-7
Between 1767 and 1769, the island suffered food supply shortages due to corruption from the ruling classes, which led to insurrection from the populace. In 1768, there had been a shortage of wheat in England and France, and the Lempières used the situation to take advantage of islanders. In June 1769, hundreds of women descended on St Helier's harbour to directly prevent ships carrying wheat from sailing.
On 28 September 1769, men from the northern parishes marched into town and rioted (the Corn Riots), including breaking into the Royal Court in a threatening manner. The protestors demands included reductions in the price of wheat and tithes, as well as the abolition of the (the feudal right of the Seigneur to every twelfth sheaf of corn), the banishment of all aliens and the complete withdrawal of charges against Fiott. The new Acts were proclaimed that Saturday.:197-8
The States met at Elizabeth Castle, a meeting place of better safety, and decided to send a party to report to the King. The report claimed that the mob had ordered the removal of the King's Laws from the statute books, which the council saw as anarchy against royal power, and ordered the removal of the Acts and a reward of £100 for information that could lead to the arrest of the rioters. The council also sent five companies of Royal Scots to restore order, commanded by Colonel Bentinck. They found however another side to the story and invited those with grievances to set it down in writing. Moyse Corbet, a former army officer, read a petiton at the Town Hall demanding reforms, which he took to England to present to the Bailiff, the Government, Parliament and the King. Charles William Le Geyt did similar for the country parishes. Le Geyt had the States and the Royal Court behind him.:198-9
Reform and religion
Large political reforms were issued by the Crown in 1771. This represents the Crown's attempt to separate the judiciary from the legislature. After the petitions of Le Geyt, the English authorities instructed that peace and reform should be brought to the island. Bentinck became Lieutenant Governor and introduced important reforms. He secured amnesty for the rioters and Fiott was allowed to return home. The Royal Court was no longer a lawmaking body and all legislative power was vested in the States. Farming outwith Crown revenues was forbidden, with the Receiver paid a fixed salary to prevent corruption. The Code of 1771 laid down for the first time in one place the extant laws of Jersey.:199
The Chamber of Commerce founded 24 February 1768 is the oldest English-speaking Chamber of Commerce.
The late 18th century was the first time political parties in some form came into existence on the island. Jean Dumaresq was an early Liberal who called for democratic reforms (that the States should be democratically elected Deputies and should have vested in them executive power). His supporters were known as ("maggots", initially an insult from his opponents, which the reclaimed as their own term) and his opponents as the (supporters of the Lieutenant Baliff Charles Lempière). Dumaresq is quoted as saying "we shall make these Seigneurs bite the dust". In 1776, he was elected as Connétable for St Peter.:200
Methodism arrived in Jersey in 1774, brought by fishermen returning from Newfoundland. Conflict with the authorities ensued when men refused to attend militia drill when that coincided with chapel meetings. The Royal Court attempted to proscribe Methodist meetings, but King George III refused to countenance such interference with liberty of religion. The first Methodist minister in Jersey was appointed in 1783, and John Wesley preached in Jersey in August 1789, his words being interpreted into the vernacular for the benefit of those from the country parishes. The first building constructed specifically for Methodist worship was erected in St. Ouen in 1809.
Battle of Jersey
The 18th century was a period of political tension between Britain and France, as the two nations clashed all over the world as their ambitions grew. Because of its position, Jersey was more or less on a continuous war footing.
During the American Wars of Independence, two attempted invasions of the island were made. In 1779, the Prince of Orange William V was prevented from landing at St Ouen's Bay; on 6 January 1781, a force led by Baron de Rullecourt captured St Helier in a daring dawn raid, but was defeated by a British army led by Major Francis Peirson in the Battle of Jersey. A short-lived peace was followed by the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars which, when they had ended, had changed Jersey forever. In 1799–1800, over 6000 Russian troops under the command of Charles du Houx de Vioménil were quartered in Jersey after an evacuation of Holland.
After the Battle
The end of war with France and America saw the growth of trade between Jersey and the New World, especially Canada and Newfoundland. By 1763, around a third of the fish being exported from Conception Bay was carried by Jersey vessels. In the 1780s, a number of Jersey families setttled permanently, such as the de Quettevilles in Forteau, Labrador. The first printing press was introduced to Jersey in 1784.
Anti-seigneurial attitudes remained in Jersey, despite the reforms of 1771. In 1785, an anti-seigneurial document containing 36 articles was included in St Ouen's Parish Assembly minutes. It included demands for reform such as the abolition of services and an end to the seizure of goods following bankruptcy. These demands were paralleled in St Helier and St John and by an article in , the only newspaper at the time. These demands formed the basis for a sustained anti-feudal struggle during the next century.
19th century
The 19th century saw massive changes in Jersey society. A large influx of immigrants from England made Jersey a more connected island than ever before, and brought with it cultural changes and the desire for political reform. During this period, the States reformed to become more representative of the population and the Jersey culture became more anglicised and less religious. The island also grew economically and the built-up areas of the island expanded, especially St Helier, with the development of public transport on the island.
Pre-Victoria
The pre-existing road network was an intricate network of roads and lanes. During the nineteenth century, many parishes took on the administration of more and more of these lanes. The network was criticised at the time for being subpar. A common Jèrriais saying is , which means 'as old as the roads'. In the early 19th century, the military roads were constructed (on occasion at gunpoint in the face of opposition from landowners) by the governor, General George Don, to link coastal fortifications with the town harbour. Much of the opposition to the plans came from islanders, who thought the country's best defence was its convoluted network of narrow lanes. The new road system was met with considerable opposition, particularly due to its expense. The St Helier Parish Assembly forbade the completion of the Trinity main road within its boundaries. The new network allowed greater communication between disparate parts of the island. These had an unexpected effect on agriculture once peace restored reliable trade links. Farmers in previously isolated valleys were able to swiftly transport crops grown in the island's microclimate to waiting ships and then on to the markets of London and Paris ahead of the competition. In conjunction with the later introduction of steamships and the development of the French and British railway systems, Jersey's agriculture was no longer as isolated as before.
The early 19th century was a period of growth of trade for Jersey. In the wake of the Napoleonic wars after the defeat of France in 1815, the Channel Islands lost their strategic value, as points of conflict between the British and foreign powers moved to the North Sea. The UK had a need to reduce its forces to cut spending, but the Channel Islands defence costs reached £500,000 pa, even in peacetime. The utility of possessing the islands came into question. John Ramsay McCulloch described the advantages the islands provided to the UK as "neither very obvious nor material". However, in 1845, the Duke of Wellington strongly defended the islands in the Memorandum on the Defence of the United Kingdom.
An English Custom House was established in the island in 1810. A key turning point in Jersey history was the introduction of steamships. Previous to that, travel to the island was long and unpredictable. In the mid-1820s, the post office switched to steam as well. The first paddle steamer to visit Jersey was the Medina on 11 June 1823. In 1824, two shipping companies were established, each operating weekly steamship services to England.
This brought thousands of passengers to the country. By 1840, there were 5,000 English residents, who some say did not mix well or interact deeply with the native Jèrriais. The number of English-speaking soldiers stationed in the island and the number of retired officers and English-speaking labourers who came to the islands in the 1820s led to the island gradually moving towards an English-speaking culture in town. This new immigration had a large impact on local architecture, with a number of mainland Georgian-style houses and terraces erected on the main roads out of St Helier. The town also expanded with many new streets, such as Burrard Street, first developed in 1812. In 1831, street lighting was first used. In 1843 it was agreed to erect street names. The rapid growth of St. Helier was one of the most significant changes in the landscape of Jersey during the 19th century. The town developed from a small settlement by the coast to encompassing most of the parish and spreading out into St. Clement and St. Saviour.
An important growth for St Helier in the early 19th century was the construction of the harbour. Previously, ships coming into the town had only a small jetty at the site now called the English Harbour and the French Harbour. The Chamber of Commerce urged the States to build a new harbour, but the States refused, so the Chamber took it into their own hands and paid to upgrade the harbour in 1790. A new breakwater was constructed to shelter the jetty and harbours. In 1814, the merchants constructed the roads now known as Commercial Buildings and Le Quai des Marchands to connect the harbours to the town and in 1832 construction was finished on the Esplanade and its sea wall. A rapid expansion in shipping led the States in 1837 to order the construction of two new piers: the Victoria and Albert Piers.
A new island politics
The post-Napoleonic War period was a divisive period politically for the island. In 1821, there was an election for Jurat. The St Laurentine Laurelites (conservatives, the eventual name for the ) attacked the Inn in their village where Rose men (the progressive descendants of the ) were holding a meeting. They damaged the building and injured both the innkeeper and his wife. On election day in St Martin, the a number of Rose voters were attacked, after which most Rose men refrained from voting. Although the Rose candidate won overall, he faced a number of lawsuits over claims of voter fraud, so in the end the Laurel candidate George Bertram took office.:232
At this time, the national administration system, despite reform, still resembled a feudal system of governance. They also remained dominated by judicial and legislative overlap. In the nineteenth century, the growth of the town shifted economic power from the country parishes to St Helier, where also resided a large English population. During this century, Jersey's power structure shifted from the English Crown to the Jersey States, establishing Jersey as a near-independent state, however ultimate authority over the island shifted from the Crown to the British Parliament, aligning with the shift in the UK's politics towards a purely ceremonial monarch. The Privy Council put pressure of the island to reform its institutions, in the belief these reforms should align the country with a more English model of government and law. In 1883, John Stuart Blackie recounted an Englishman's comment that only one thing was needed to make Jersey perfect, and that was "a full participation in the benefits of English law". However, the Lieutenant Governor at the time stated that the absence of English law was what had brought Jerseymen such prosperity.
Many locals blamed this push for reform on the island's new immigrants, who were unaccustomed to the island's distinct political and legal systems (although a major part of the mainstream reformer movement was in fact made of Jerseymen). Many English who had moved to the island discovered an alien environment, with unfamiliar laws (in a foreign language they could not understand) and no recourse to access the local power to counter them. The reformers of English heritage mostly came from the middle classes, and sought to further their own rights, not necessarily those of the working class. These Englishmen formed a pressure group known as the Civil Assembly of St Helier. This group was effectively split into two, one organised around Abraham Le Cras' hard-code English reformism and the other, a larger looser corpus of English reformists. The former was never representative of a significant proportion of the English community. One thing both shared however was a belief that the English systems were far superior to the historic Norman-based structures.
Abraham Le Cras was an outspoken new resident - though with Jersey heritage - opposed to Jersey's self-government. He not only thought Jersey should be integrated into England fully, but disputed the right of the States to even make its own laws. He is noted as saying, 'the States have no more power to make laws for Jersey than I have'. In 1840 he won a court case challenging the States' ability to naturalise people as citizens. The Privy Council determined that the long-standing precedent of the States doing so had been invalidated since Jersey had been ruled under civil law since 1771. In 1846, he persuaded the MP for Bath to push for a Parliamentary Committee to enquire into the law of Jersey, however HM Government instead promised a Royal Commission. The Commission advised the abolition of the Royal Court run by the Jurats and the replacement of it with three Crown-appointed judges and the introduction of a paid police force. Le Cras left the island to live in England in 1850.
In 1852, the island experienced somewhat of a constitutional crisis when the Privy Council issued three Orders in Council: establishing a police court, a petty debts court and a paid police force for St Helier. This sparked controversy locally, with claims that the move threatened Jersey's independence. Both parties united against the move and around 7000 islanders signing a petition. By 1854, the council had agreed to revoke the Orders, on the condition that the States passed most of the council's requirements. In 1856, further constitutional reform brought deputies into the States for the first time, with one deputy from each country parish and three from town.
The threats to Jersey's autonomy continued. In the 1860s, there was raised a threat of an intervention in the island's government by the British Parliament itself, in order to impose change on the island's structures.
A cultural turn
Nonconformity challenged traditional Jersey society from within; it had always been a part of Jersey life, and non-conformists such as the Methodists had generally been tolerated during peacetime. This isn't to say there weren't some tensions between the Established Church and non-conformists, but these were generally exceptional. Most country people had at least one non-conformist within their own family, so the othering of non-conformists never took much hold. However, non-conformists were often unable to fully participate in country life as the church played a central role in the secular parish, and were notably absent from honorary roles within the parish. The Established Church had to reassess itself and reform and the parish structure altered itself to become a more civil-focused organisation, preserving itself while allowing its community more religious freedom.
The 19th century marked a turning point for Jersey's linguistic landscape. Previously, the country had been cut off from England and had many more links with its French neighbours, so the native Jèrriais language, a , dominated over the English language. However mass immigration, compounded with reduced links with the Norman mainland due to the French wars, saw Jersey anglicise en masse, altering linguistic tendencies and bringing values and social structures from Victorian England. The incoming Englishmen did not have any inclination to give up their language and adopt the local tongue, which was oft viewed as a corruption of Standard French, and English became seen as the language of commercial success and intellectual achievements. On top of this, the Channel Islands remained rather unique in being a British territory in which English was not the dominant language (unlike in the Celtic regions, which had suffered linguistic persecution, not enjoying Jersey's relative independence), rather stacking the odds against Jèrriais. That is not to say that English was entirely foreign to the local population; the Jersey gentry had also a good, though not fluent, knowledge of English, having mostly been educated in that language, but the peasantry remained largely ignorant of English, in fact for native Jerseymen, the influence of English culture only became a threat when imposed on them by external agitators, such as Abraham Le Cras.
With the improvements in military technology, new military techniques were needed to defend the island. It was suggested that measures should be taken to anglicise the Channel Island natives, including encouraging the use of English. It was suggested that, although the islands had proven themselves loyal to the British sovereign, that this was out of hereditary impression, rather than affinity towards the English people, and that anglicisation would not only encourage loyalty and congeniality between the nations, but also provide economic prosperity and improved "general happiness". In 1846, through a lens of growing nationalism in the UK, there was concern against sending young islanders to France for education, where they might bring French principles, friendships and views of policy and government to the British Islands.
The Jersey gentry adopted this policy of anglicisation due to social and economic benefits it would bring. Anglophiles such as John Le Couteur strove to introduce England to Jersey. In 1856, the Jersey Times, an English language newspaper, was established in Jersey. The use of the English language in the States was first suggested by Rev. Abraham Le Sueur of Grouville in 1880.
Victorian Era
Queen Victoria was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom in the right of Jersey in 1837. The first notable event of the Victorian era for Jersey was the change in currency. The livre tournois had been used as the legal currency for centuries, however it had been abolished during the French Revolutionary period. Although the coins were no longer minted, they remained the legal currency in Jersey until 1837, when dwindling supplies and consequent difficulties in trade and payment obliged the adoption of the pound sterling as legal tender. Keen to prevent a repeat of the Six-sou Revolt, the authorities wanted to ensure a fair exchange rate; 520 sous would be the equivalent of one Pound sterling. Jersey issued its first coins in 1841, including the 1/13 shilling coin, which was closer in value to the old sou than the English penny.
In the 1840s, the Rose leader Pierre Le Sueur was elected as Connétable of St Helier. From 1845, he orchestrated the construction of a complete sewer system for the town. He remained in office for 15 years and on his death an obelisk was erected in the Broad Street square.
The population of Jersey rose rapidly, from 47,544 in 1841 to 56,078 20 years later, despite a 20% mortality rate amongst new born children. Life expectancy was 35 years. Both immigration and emigration increased. In 1851, the English immigrant population numbered around 12,000, compared with a total island population of 57,000 people. In St Helier, they constituted 7,000 of the parish's 30,000 residents. As with in England, the English community in Jersey was not coherent, but divided by social class. At the top of the social ladder were those of independent means, who chose to retire in the island: they did not participate much in the local lifestyle or politics, instead creating a mini-English social life for themselves. While at the bottom, there was the English-born working class, who often lacked basic rights such as accessing welfare.
In 1852, the French author and poet Victor Hugo arrived to seek refuge in Jersey, as had many other revolutionaries and socialists from the Continent, facing exile from France and Belgium. If any of these proscrits died on the island, they were buried in Macpela cemetery in Sion, St John. In 1855, these refugees republished in their weekly paper an open letter from a number of French socialists living in London, which stated 'You have sacrificed your dignity as a Queen, your fastidiousness as a woman, your pride as an aristocrat, even your honour.' The Lieutenant-Governor banished the three editors two days later. Although Hugo had disapproved of the letter, he joined a protest against the expulsion, and hence too was exiled from the island. He and his family left for Guernsey.
The Theatre Royal was built, as were Victoria College in 1852 and exhibited 34 items at The Great Exhibition in 1851, the world's first ever Pillar box was installed in 1852 and a paid police force was created in 1854.
This century saw Jersey develop a public transport network. Towards the end of the last century, omnibuses came into use for the first time in the island. Two railways, the Jersey Western Railway in 1870, and the Jersey Eastern Railway in 1874, were opened. The western railway from to La Corbière and the eastern railway from to Gorey Pier. The two railways were never connected.
Jersey was the fourth-largest shipbuilding area in the 19th-century British Isles, building over 900 vessels around the island. Shipbuilding declined with the coming of iron ships and steam. A number of banks on Jersey, guarantors of an industry both onshore and off, failed in 1873 and 1886, even causing strife and discord in far-flung societies. The population fell slightly in the twenty years to 1881.
In the late 19th century, as the former thriving cider and wool industries declined, island farmers benefited from the development of two luxury products - Jersey cattle and Jersey Royal potatoes. The former was the product of careful and selective breeding programmes; the latter was a total fluke.
The anarchist philosopher, Peter Kropotkin, who visited the Channel Islands in 1890, 1896, and 1903, described the agriculture of Jersey in The Conquest of Bread.
The 19th century also saw the rise of tourism as an important industry (linked with the improvement in passenger ships) which reached its climax in the period from the end of the Second World War to the 1980s.
20th century
Elementary education became obligatory in 1899, and free in 1907. Queen Victoria died in 1901, and Edward VII was proclaimed as King in the Royal Square. His coronation a year later was marked by the first Battle of Flowers. The years before the First World War saw the foundation of the Jersey Eisteddfod by the Dean of Jersey, Samuel Falle. The first aeroplanes arrived in Jersey in 1912.
In 1914, the British garrison was withdrawn at the start of the First World War and the militia were mobilised. Jersey men served in the British and French armed forces. Numbers of German prisoners of war were interned in Jersey. The influenza epidemic of 1918 added to the toll of war.
In 1919, imperial measurements replaced, for the most part, the traditional Jersey system of weights and measures; women aged over 30 were given the vote; and the endowments of the ancient grammar schools were repurposed as scholarships for Victoria College.
In 1921, the visit of King George V was the occasion for the design of the parish crests.
In 1923, the British government asked Jersey to contribute an annual sum towards the costs of the Empire. The States of Jersey refused and offered instead a one-off contribution to war costs. After negotiations, Jersey's one-off contribution was accepted.
The first motor car had arrived in 1899 and buses started running on the island in the 1920s, and by the 1930s, competition from motor buses had rendered the railways unprofitable, with final closure coming in 1935 after a fire disaster (except for the later German reintroduction of rail during the military occupation). Jersey Airport was opened in 1937 to replace the use of the beach of Saint Aubin's bay as an airstrip at low tide, and the railways could not cope with the competition.
English was first permitted in debates in the States of Jersey in 1901, and the first legislation to be drawn up primarily in English was the Income Tax Law of 1928.
Occupation 1940-1945
Following the withdrawal of defences by the British government and German bombardment, Jersey was occupied by German troops between 1940 and 1945. The Channel Islands were the only British soil occupied by German troops in World War II. This period of occupation had about 8,000 islanders evacuated, 1,200 islanders deported to camps in Germany, and over 300 islanders sentenced to the prison and concentration camps of mainland Europe. Twenty died as a result. The islanders endured near-starvation in the winter of 1944–45, after the Channel Islands had been cut off from German-occupied Europe by Allied forces advancing from the Normandy beachheads, avoided only by the arrival of the Red Cross supply ship Vega in December 1944. Liberation Day - 9 May is marked as a public holiday.
Post-Liberation
After five years of occupation, the people of Jersey began to rebuild the island. In 1944, a group of exiled islanders, called Nos Iles, set out what the Channel Islands would need after the war. Examples include better education, development of the economy, especially tourism, and greater cooperation between the islands. They also emphasised the need for efficient land management.
Some Jersey men were enlisted in national service in occupied Germany. The UK donated more than £4 million to clear Jersey's occupation debt, as well as sending gifts of essential items. There were over 50,000 mines to be cleared. Sir Edward Grasett was sworn in as Lieutenant Governor in August 1945.
The 1945 census showed that 44,382 people were resident in the island (an increase of 4000 since Liberation). By the next year, there were 50,749, and the majority lived in St Helier. Many returned to their pre-war homes to find them in a state of dereliction and were given grants to repair the damage.
Many islanders called for the reform and modernisation of the States: a poll by the JEP showed that only 88 of the 1,784 surveyed thought Rectors should stay in the States and a vast majority wanted the legislature and judiciary separated. The Jersey Democratic Movement campaigned for either the incorporation of the island as a county of England or at least the abolition of the States. The other political party to emerge during this period was the Progressive Party, consisting of some present States members, who opposed the JDM. In the 1945 Deputies' election, the Progressives won a landslide victory, giving a mandate for change.
The franchise was extended to all British adults, previously voting rights in Jersey had only been to men and women over 30 according to property ownership. The largest reform came in the form of the 1948 States reform. Jurats were no longer States members and were to be elected by an Electoral College. It also introduced a retirement age for Jurats of 70. In all cases, the Bailiff shall be the judge of the law, and the Jurats the "judge of fact". The Jurats' role in the States was replaced by 12 senators, four of whom would retire every three years. The Church also lost most of its representation in the States, with the role of Rector being abolished and the number of Deputies increased to 28.
The island adopted free, universal secondary education and a social security system. The bill for the social security system was passed in May 1950. A paid police force to cover the whole island was established to work alongside the honorary police. Divorce was legalised in 1949. In 1952, a state secondary school for boys was opened at Hautlieu and a girls' secondary was opened at Rouge Bouillon. Ten years later these would combine to form a single co-ed grammar school at Hautlieu, and two other schools: one for boys (d'Hautrée) and another for girls (at the Rouge Bouillon site) were opened. Later the two St Helier schools were combined into one comprehensive school and two other comprehensives were opened at Les Quennevais and Le Rocquier. Highlands College was purchased by the States in 1973 to provide further education.:280
There was an expansion of housing to deal with growing population and to improve the quality of existing housing. There was also a slum clearance programme involving States-funded homes (either for social housing or sale) and States-funded mortgages. By 1948, since the end of the war, two estates had been built: Grasett Park and Princess Place. A sum of £52,000 was agreed to build more houses on land already owned by the States.
The population saw growth from wealthy immigrants looking for lower taxes and seasonal essential workers from the Continent and mainland. Jersey was particularly attractive to retired civil servants in former British colonies as these obtained independence throughout the 20th century. This created a need for new infrastructure. Street lighting began to spread to the country parishes and a new sewage farm was built at Bellozane. Mains drainage was extended beyond St Helier and new water production facilities were constructed.:281 The island saw a growth in tourism and the reopening of the Battle of Flowers parade (for the first time since World War I) as well as new cinemas and the International Road Race.
The military establishments of the island were handed over by the British Government to the Island and Jersey's Militia abolished. For the first time since Edward III, there was no permanent military presence on the island. The arsenals, forts are castles were converted to museums and housing (or in the case of Fort Regent, into the main leisure centre for town). There was a dispute over the ownership of Jersey's islets - the Minquiers and the Ecréhous - between the UK and France. The International Court of Justice ruled in favour of British ownership of the reefs.
Between 1945 and the Queen's coronation in 1952, there were outbreaks of polio and tuberculosis and the opening of the Jersey Maternity hospital and St John Ambulance headquarters. Agriculture was hit by a series of foot-and-mouth outbreaks.
The first senatorial election was brief. Each Senator was elected for either nine, six or three years depending on where they came in the polling list. Philip Le Feuvre topped the poll and was elected for nine years. On 8 December 1945 at the Deputies' election, Ivy Forster of the Progressive Party became the first woman to ever be elected to the States. Other notable successful candidates include John Le Marquand Jr. (whose father has recently been returned as Senator) and Cyril Le Marquand.
The event which has had the most far-reaching effect on Jersey in modern times is the growth of the finance industry in the island from the 1960s onwards.:287 With the release of the Paradise Papers, it was learned that two non-U.S. subsidiaries of Apple were domiciled in Jersey for one year (2015).
See also
History of the British Isles
Duchy of Normandy
Other Histories of the Channel Islands
German occupation of the Channel Islands
Archaeology of the Channel Islands
Maritime history of the Channel Islands
List of English monarchs
List of British monarchs
Related articles for Jersey
Lieutenant Governor of Jersey
Culture of Jersey
Politics of Jersey
Demographics of Jersey (contains historical figures)
References
Print
Balleine's History of Jersey, Marguerite Syvret and Joan Stevens (1998)
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15695 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography%20of%20Jersey | Geography of Jersey | Jersey (Jèrriais: Jèrri) is the largest of the Channel Islands, an island archipelago in the St. Malo bight in the western English Channel. It has a total area of 120 square kilometres (45 sq mi) and is part of the British Isles archipelago. It lies 22 km (12 nmi; 14 mi) from the Cotenin Peninsula in Normandy, France and about 161 km (87 nmi; 100 mi) from the south coast of Great Britain. Jersey lies within longitude -2° W and latitude 49° N.
It has a coastline of 70 kilometres and no land connections to any other territories. Jersey claims a territorial sea of and an exclusive fishing zone of and shares maritime borders with the Bailiwick of Guernsey to the north and France to the south and east.
Jersey is the main island of the Bailiwick of Jersey, which also consists of islet groups known as Les Écréhous, Les Minquiers, Les Dirouilles and Les Pierres de Lecq.
It is a highly densely populated territory, being the 13th most densely populated country or territory. About 30% of the population of the island is concentrated in the parish of Saint Helier, which contains the main town of the island.
Climate
Jersey has a generally mild, temperature and oceanic climate. The mean daily air temperature for 2019 was 12.79 °C - the eighth warmest year since 1894. The record warmest year was 2014, with a mean daily air temperature of 13.34 °C.
There are very few extreme weather events in Jersey, however there are regular heatwaves and storm periods. This can lead to disruption across the island. For example, in February 2020, Storm Ciara led to the closure of a number of roads (especially Victoria Avenue).
Physical geography
Besides the main island, the bailiwick includes other islets and reefs with no permanent population: Les Écréhous, Les Minquiers, Les Pierres de Lecq, Les Dirouilles.
The highest point in the island is Les Platons on the north coast, at . Parts of the parish of St Clement in the south were previously below sea-level but the construction of a seawall and infilling of low land has probably left only a few pockets of land below mean sea level. The terrain is generally low-lying on the south coast, with some rocky headlands, rising gradually to rugged cliffs along the north coast. On the west coast there are sand dunes. Small valleys run north to south across the island. Very large tidal variation exposes large expanses of sand and rock to the southeast at low tide.
Snow falls rarely in Jersey; some years will pass with no snow fall at all.
Natural resources
The main natural resource on this island is arable land. 66% of the island's land is used as such, and the remaining 34% is used for other purposes.
There are two laws that govern agricultural land in Jersey: Agricultural Land (Control of Sales and Leases) (Jersey) Law 1947 and Protection of Agricultural Land (Jersey) Law 1964. Temporary changes of land use can be granted by the Land Controls scheme, which means land over 2 vergées (0.36 ha) can be used for an alternative purpose, however permanent changes require planning permission.
The Channel Islands are located in an area with a large tidal range. The development of tidal energy in the archipelago has long been suggested. Studies suggest the primary sites for tidal energy development would be located in the Bailiwick of Guernsey, especially in the Alderney Race, which could potentially produce up to 5.10 GW of energy.
Environment
Jersey is facing localised impacts due to anthropogenic climate change. The island is party to the Kyoto Protocol but does not have an emissions cap. In 2017, Jersey has emissions of around 400 ktCO2 eq., a decrease of around 350 ktCO2 eq since the peak in 1998. Under a 3 °C rise in temperature, Jersey may have four to five times the number of hot days in summer and a 45% decrease in summer rainfall.
Climate change could have impacts on Jersey's economy. Climate change will increase soil temperatures, shifting growing seasons more to winter seasons, impacting the current husbandry practices. Being at the boundary of two marine regions, Jersey's waters could see a change in fish species. A rise in temperature could be beneficial to the island's tourist industry, with more annual warm days and less rainfall in the summer attracting longer and more frequent stays from travellers.
In May 2019, the States Assembly declared the island was undergoing a climate emergency. This commits the island to carbon neutrality by 2030. On 31 Dec 2019, the Government of Jersey published the Carbon Neutral Strategy which aims to meet the island's carbon neutrality target. Plans of the Carbon Neutral Strategy include:
A "people-powered" approach, possibly incorporating the parish and community governance as well as a Citizens' Assembly
The introduction of a new Sustainable Transport Policy, including 1.55 million GBP in cycling, walking, bus travel and transition to electric vehicles
In order to adapt to the effects of sea level rise on the island, the Government has prepared a Shoreline Management Plan.
Human geography
Jersey has a population of 107,800 and a population density of roughly 917 people per square kilometre. The population is spread out throughout Jersey's twelve parishes, with population concentrated in the seven southern parishes.
Outside of the town, the land is largely separated into small closes, dissimilar to the larger fields found on Great Britain or the European continent. This land division structure has a long history in the island. In 1815, Quayle stated "no country is more strongly enclosed than Jersey".
Settlements
The settlement geography of Jersey has always been dispersed across the island, though with a much smaller population in the past. In the 19th century, Jersey had no tendency towards village or centralised settlement, except in the growing town of St. Helier. On the 1795 Richmond Map, the land appears "excessively divided" into small closes and even around the parish churches, the houses are no denser than elsewhere.
Jersey can be defined as an urban island. The 2011 Island Plan defines the island's built-up areas as three main entities. The island effectively operates as a single conurbation, consisting of an urban core, suburbs and exurban rural communities.
The largest settlement is the town of St Helier, which also plays host to the island's seat of government. The town consists of the built-up area of southern St Helier, including First Tower, and some adjoining parts of St Saviour and St Clement, such as Georgetown. The town is the central business district, hosting a large proportion of the island's retail and employment, such as the finance industry.
The primary suburban areas of St Helier consist of the Five Oaks area in St Saviour, and developments along the coast, primarily along main roads to east and west of the town. The south and east coasts from St Aubin to Gorey are largely urbanised, with only small gaps in their development, such as the Royal Golf Course in Grouville.
Outside of the town, many islanders live in rural and village settlements and even the more rural areas of the island have considerable amounts of development (even St Ouen, the least densely populated parish still has 270 persons per square kilometre). The most notable exurban development is the Les Quennevais area, which is home to a small precinct of shops, a park and a leisure centre. Many people in these communities regularly travel to St Helier for work and leisure purposes.
Most of the villages are the namesake settlement of their parish, for example St John's Village in St John, however some are not, such as Maufant Village on the border of St Saviour and St Martin. Another semantic term used for smaller settlements are (different in meaning from the term with the same name meaning 'Town') such as in St. Lawrence.
Housing costs in Jersey are very high. The Jersey House Price Index has at least doubled between 2002 and 2020. The mix-adjusted house price for Jersey is £567,000, higher than any UK region (UK average: £249,000) including London (average: £497,000; highest of any UK region).
Planning and development control
Land use is tightly controlled in Jersey, especially due to the high density population. The Planning Team of the Customer and Local Services Department manages planning applications, but approval is granted by the Planning Committee, made of States Members.
The governing development plan for the island is the Island Plan, last published in 2011 and voted on by the States Assembly. The plan decides the overall vision for development on the island as well as issuing baseline planning guidance. The current Island Plan was issued in 2011 and revised in 2014. In 2021, the Island Plan is under review, with a bridging Island Plan expected to be in place from 2022.
The Revised 2011 Island Plan is centred of three simple concepts of countryside protection, the wise use of resources and urban regeneration. It aims to meet most development needs in the existing built-up areas, especially the town of St Helier.
Jersey has a single national park known as the Coastal National Park, formed of a number of separate areas. The park includes St Ouen's Bay, Gorey Common, the north and south-west coast and certain valleys such as St Catherine's Woods. It also includes the offshore reefs part of the Bailiwick. In the national park, most forms of development are not permitted.
Jersey has a green belt policy known as the Green Zone. This consists of most rural areas on the island except the national park. There is a general presumption against development in the zone. According to the plan the policy has "vigourous" public support.
Political geography
The Bailiwick of Jersey is a British Crown Dependency. It is self-governing with its own legislature, the States Assembly, and government. It is sovereign territory of the Crown and not part of the United Kingdom, however the UK is internationally responsible for Jersey. The Jersey government is "with some important caveats, content with their relationship with the Ministry of Justice".:para 13
Jersey is part of the British-Irish Council, which is formed of the national governments of each of the countries and dependencies in the British Isles. Jersey is neither a member of the United Nations nor the European Union.
The island is divided into twelve administrative regions, known as parishes, the largest of which is St Ouen and the smallest of which is St Clement.
Economic geography
Jersey has a highly developed economy driven by international financial and legal services, which accounted for 40.5% of total GVA in 2010. Its gross national income per capita is among the highest in the world. The island has been criticised by some as a tax haven as it attracts deposits from customers outside the island seeking lower taxes. However, the Jersey financial sector disputes this claim. Other important sectors to the Jersey economy include construction, retail and wholesale, agriculture and tourism.
References
External links
Jersey Meteorological Department
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15696 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography%20of%20Jersey | Demography of Jersey | Jersey is the most populated of the crown dependencies and of the Channel Islands. The Demographic statistics of the island includes population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
The population of Jersey has grown in each census record since 1931 (although those did not include records during the Occupation by Nazi Germany).
History
The resident population of Jersey has been increasing during the last 60 years. The resident population increased by 9,100 between 2010 and 2011. The estimated 2020 growth rate is 0.72%.
Pre-census data, there are a number of estimates for Jersey's population. It was around 2,000 in 4000-3000 BC; 6,000 in 1050; 10,000 in 1331; and between 10,000 and 20,000 in the 16th and 17th centuries.
From the 16th to 19th centuries, Jersey was home to a number of French religious refugees, possibly up to 4,000 at a time. In the first half of the 19th century, tax advantages and a better climate saw a boom in Jersey's population. This also needed a large immigrant population, with significant movement from Scotland and Ireland.
Before 1851 and 1921, Jersey's population fell significantly, but the number of French people rose by more than 3,000. These were mostly agricultural workers (not replacing the British migrants).
From 1821, Jersey conducted an annual census (figures to the right). In 1951, the population was 55,244. It has grown every decade since then, and the rate of growth now is very high (1% per year in 2019). This is due to the growth of the finance industry and tourism.
Population
In 2011, the total resident population of Jersey was 97,857. The latest estimate is 107,800 in 2019, although the CIA World Factbook estimates it as 101,073 (this may be due to a different estimate).
Geographic distribution
Jersey is divided into twelve parishes. The most populous parish is St Helier, with 34% of the island's population. In 1798, around 6,000 people lived in St. Helier, or one-fifth of the island's population at the time.
Age structure
In 2011, there were 64,353 people of working age (16 to 64 for men, and 16 to 59 for women; 66% of the population). The dependency ratio for Jersey was 52% (similar to 2011); the dependency ratio is around the same value as that in 1931, however was higher (60%) in 1971, and lower (47%) in 1991.
Place of birth
Half of the population of Jersey was born on the island, with the majority of the remainder from elsewhere in the British Islands. 7% of the population was born in Portugal, including Madeira, the largest overseas place of birth. In 1981, only 3% of the population was born in Portugal and 5% elsewhere.
Of the category 'Other European country', the primary countries were France and Romania and for 'Elsewhere in the world', the primary countries were South Africa and India.
Statistics
The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.
Birth rate
11.0 births/1,000 population (2005)
Death rate
8.5 deaths/1,000 population (2005)
Net immigration rate
2.81 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2000 est.)
Sex ratio
Infant mortality
4 deaths/1,000 live births (2005)
Life expectancy at birth
total population:
78.48 years
male:
76.07 years
female:
81.07 years (2000 est.)
Average age at death
Men 72
Women 79
Total fertility rate
1.56 children born/woman (2000 est.)
Nationality
noun:
Jerseyman, Jerseywoman
adjective:
Jersey
Ethnic groups
British and Norman-French descent. Portuguese and Polish minorities.
Religions
Anglican, Roman Catholic, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian.
Languages
See Languages of Jersey
English (official), French (official), Jèrriais (official: though only spoken by a few native elderly in rural areas, used as a first language by around 1,900 people).
Portuguese commonly spoken by migrant workers and is sometimes found in written form, e.g. government informational signs.
Literacy
82% of children in state schools achieve their reading targets – the UK average is 90%.
See also
List of people from Jersey
References
Jersey society
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15697 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Jersey | Politics of Jersey | The Bailiwick of Jersey is a British Crown dependency, unitary state and parliamentary representative democracy and constitutional monarchy. The current monarch and head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, while the Chief Minister Senator John Le Fondré is the head of government.
Legislative and executive power is vested in the States of Jersey, which is composed of the Assembly of States members (States Assembly, French: Assemblé des États). Elected States members appoint the Council of Ministers (including the Chief Minister and other Ministers), which is the decision-making body of the island's government, the Government of Jersey. Other powers are exercised by the Connétable and Parish Assembly in each of the twelve parishes.
As one of the Crown dependencies, Jersey is sovereign territory of the Crown but is not part of the United Kingdom. Jersey can be best described as "neither a colony nor a conquest, but a peculiar and immediate dependency of the Crown." The island is part of the British Islands, a political term encompassing the United Kingdom and the Crown Dependencies. This island is for the most part self-governing, with its own independent legal, administrative and fiscal systems.
The link between the island and the monarchy, rather than through Parliament, has led to an effectively independent political development on the island. In medieval times, the island was treated as a possession of the King by the English government, rather than part of the English state.
History
The political history of Jersey is a long standing one. In terms of its political geography, the island was initially part of the Duchy of Normandy for administrative purposes. The island came under the rule of the King of England, when in 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England. However, Jersey remained a part of Normandy, which was administered separately from what would become the island's parent state.
In 1204, Jersey became English, when King John lost mainland Normandy to France. The Channel Islands remained loyal to the English crown due to the loyalties of its Seigneurs.
The existing Norman customs and laws were allowed to continue and there was no attempt to introduce English law. The formerly split administrative system was replaced with a centralised legal system (the basis of the "States"), of which the head was the King of England rather than the Duke of Normandy.
The King allowed the Channel Islands to continue governance separate from his Kingdom and issued "The Constitutions of King John" - legislative power was vested in 12 jurats, the twelve "senior men" of the island. Along with the Bailiff, they would form the Royal Court, which determined all civil and criminal causes (except treason). In medieval times, the island was treated as a possession of the King by the English government, rather than part of the English state.
The role of the jurats when the King's court was mobile would have been preparatory work for the visit of the Justices in Eyre. It is unknown for how long the position of the jurats has existed, with some claiming the position dates to time immemorial. After the cessation of the visits of the Justices in Eyre (and with the frequent absence of the Warden), the Bailiff and jurats took on a much wider role, from jury to justice.:28
Despite this establishment of self-governance, Jersey was still under the rule of the English monarchy. The King appointed a Warden (later to become Governor, and Lieutenant Governor). In 1253, the Warden appointed a Bailiff to aid in the island's governance.
Initially, the Royal Court was both the law-making and law enforcing body for the island. Laws would be made by an Order of the Privy Council after a petition from the Royal Court. The Royal Court created an assembly, known as the States of Jersey, to advise the court on legislative matters, formed of three estates (modelled on the French system), the Jurats, the Rectors and the Connétables, each representing one of the estates: the Crown, the Church and the people, respectively.
The French captured Mont Orgueil between 1461 and 1468. It may well be during this occupation that the island saw the establishment of the States. Comte Maulevrier, who had led the invasion of the island, ordered the holding of an Assize in the island. Maulevrier confirmed the place of existing institutions, however created the requirement for Jurats to be chosen by Bailiffs, Jurats, Rectors and Constables.
The earliest extant Act of the States dates from 1524. The States are mentioned in a document of 1497 regarding the endowments of the grammar schools; by 1526 attendance by members at the assembly was evidently a requirement, as in that year the Rector of St Mary was fined for failure to attend.
In 1541, the Privy Council, which had recently given a seat to Calais, intended to give two seats in Parliament to Jersey. Seymour, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Island, wrote to the Jurats, instructing them to send two Burgesses for the isle. However, no further steps seemed to have been taken since the letter did not arrive in front of the States Assembly until the day the elected persons were required to arrive in London.:70
The Royal Court retained legislative functions until 1771. However, an Order-in-Council declared that only the States should hold legislative power. The Royal Court and the States both legislated until with the fixing in 1771 of the Code des Lois it was established that the States had a legislative monopoly.
The late 18th century was the first time political parties in some form came into existence on the island. Jean Dumaresq was an early Liberal who called for democratic reforms (that the States should be democratically elected Deputies and should have vested in them executive power). His supporters were known as Magots ("maggots", initially an insult from his opponents, which the Magots reclaimed as their own term) and his opponents as the Charlots (supporters of the Lieutenant Baliff Charles Lempière). Dumaresq is quoted as saying "we shall make these Seigneurs bite the dust". In 1776, he was elected as Connétable for St Peter.:200
In 1856, democratic reform (albeit restricted democracy) began to come to the island's system. Although the Connétables were a form of democratic representation, this reform brought in 14 Deputies to represent islanders: 3 from St Helier and one from every other parish.
After liberation, in 1948 several reforms to the island's political system were introduced. Rectors and Jurats ceased to be States Members. The number of Deputies was increased and 12 Senators were introduced. The Church continued to have a seat in the States, through the Dean of Jersey, although this was a voteless seat.
Constitution
Jersey has an unwritten constitution arising from the Treaty of Paris (1259). This peculiar political position has often been to the benefit of islanders. Until the 19th century, the island was generally able to be exempt from the harsher parts of Westminster legislation, while being included in favourable policies, such as protectionist economic policies. Over time, there have been calls for reforms to Jersey's constitution, such as the 2000 Clothier report.
Jersey has never been part of the United Kingdom or its predecessors, however it has been a dependency of the monarch of each of these states at their time of existence. The government in Westminster has played an important role in Jersey's lawmaking and political landscape. Since the island is linked with the monarch, not the UK Parliament, there is dispute over the competency of Parliament to legislate for the island without the States' consent. The Crown retains residual responsibility for the "good government" of the island and the UK Government has a "non-interventionist policy" to supervising the Bailiwick.
International relations
The 1973 Kilbrandon Report stated that "In international law the United Kingdom Government is responsible for the Islands' international relations" and "also responsible for the defence of the Islands". The United Kingdom is responsible for Jersey's international relations as an aspect of the island's status as a Crown dependency. It is now normal practice for the UK to consult the Jersey government and seek their consent before entering into treaty obligations affecting the island.
Since 2000, Jersey's "external personality" has developed, recognised in the preamble to the States of Jersey Law 2005 which refers to "an increasing need for Jersey to participate in matters of international affairs". In 2007, the Chief Minister of Jersey and the UK government agreed an "International Identity Framework", setting out the modern relationship between the United Kingdom and Jersey. The United Kingdom now issues "Letters of Entrustment" to the Jersey government, which delegate power to Jersey to negotiate international agreements on its own behalf and sign treaties in Jersey's own name rather than through the United Kingdom. This development was "strongly supported" by the House of Commons Justice Committee in its March 2010 report on the Crown Dependencies. In January 2011 Senator Freddie Cohen was appointed as Assistant Chief Minister with responsibility for UK and International Relations (in effect, Jersey's first Foreign Minister).
Jersey was neither a Member State nor an Associate Member of European Union. It did, however, have a relationship with the EU governed by Protocol 3 to the UK's Treaty of Accession in 1972.
In relation to the Council of Europe, Jersey – as a territory the United Kingdom is responsible for in international law– has been bound by the European Convention on Human Rights since the UK acceded to the treaty in 1951. The Human Rights (Jersey) Law 2000 makes Convention rights part of Jersey law and is based closely on the United Kingdom's Human Rights Act 1998.
During the 1980s, the question of Jersey making an annual contribution towards the United Kingdom's costs of defence and international representation undertaken on behalf of Jersey was raised. In 1987, the States of Jersey made an interim payment of £8 million while the matter was discussed. The outcome of debates within the island was that the contribution should take the form of maintaining a Territorial Army unit in Jersey. The Jersey Field Squadron (Militia), attached to the Royal Monmouthshire Royal Engineers (Militia), deploys individuals on operations in support of British Forces.
The Crown
As a Crown dependency, the head of state of Jersey is the British monarch and Jersey is a self-governing possession of the Crown. The present monarch, whose traditional title in the Channel Islands is the Duke of Normandy is Queen Elizabeth II.
"The Crown" is defined by the Law Officers of the Crown as the "Crown in right of Jersey". The Queen's representative and adviser in the island is the Lieutenant Governor of Jersey, appointed for a five year term. He is a point of contact between Jersey ministers and the United Kingdom government and carries out executive functions in relation to immigration control, deportation, naturalisation and the issue of passports. Since 2017, the incumbent Lieutenant Governor has been Sir Stephen Dalton.
The Crown (not the government or parliament of Jersey) appoints the Lieutenant Governor, the Bailiff, Deputy Bailiff, Attorney General and Solicitor General. In practice, the process of appointment involves a panel in Jersey which select a preferred candidate whose name is communicated to the UK Ministry of Justice for approval before a formal recommendation is made to the Queen.
Legislature
The parliamentary body responsible for adopting legislation and scrutinising the Council of Ministers is the States Assembly. Forty-Nine elected members (8 Senators, 29 Deputies and 12 Connétables) sit in the unicameral assembly. There are also five non-elected, non-voting members appointed by the Crown (the Bailiff, the Lieutenant Governor, the Dean of Jersey, the Attorney General and the Solicitor General).
Elections for Senators and Deputies occur at fixed four-yearly intervals, historically in October. From 2018, elections will be held in May every fourth year.
At a local level, the Connétables (or 'constables') are elected for four years. Other posts in parish municipalities vary in length from one to three years and elections take place at a Parish Assembly on a majority basis. It has been some time since parties contested elections at this level, other than for the position of Connétable who uniquely has a role in both the national assembly and in local government.
Decisions in the States are taken by majority vote of the elected members present and voting. The States of Jersey Law 2005 removed the Bailiff's a casting vote and the Lieutenant Governor's power of veto. Although formally organised party politics plays no role in the States of Jersey assembly, members often vote together in two main blocs – a minority of members, holding broadly progressive views and critical of the Council of Ministers versus a majority of members, of conservative ideology, who support the Council of Ministers.
Scrutiny panels of backbench members of the assembly have been established to examine (i) economic affairs, (ii) environment, (iii) corporate services, (iv) education and home affairs and (v) health, social security and housing. The real utility of the panels is said to be "that of independent critique which holds ministers to account and constructively engages with policy which is deficient".
According to constitutional convention United Kingdom legislation may be extended to Jersey by Order in Council at the request of the Island's government. Whether an Act of the United Kingdom Parliament may expressly apply to the Island as regards matters of self-government, or whether this historic power is now in abeyance, is a matter of legal debate. The States of Jersey Law 2005 established that no United Kingdom Act or Order in Council may apply to the Bailiwick without being referred to the States of Jersey.
Executive
Previously, both executive and legislative powers were vested in a single body: the States of Jersey. A committee system managed government affairs and policy, with committees formed of States members. A report of a review committee chaired by Sir Cecil Clothier criticised this system of government, finding it incapable of developing high-level strategy, efficient policy coordination or effective political leadership.
The States of Jersey Law 2005 introduced a ministerial system of government. Executive powers are now vested in the Council of Ministers - formed of the Chief Minister and other Ministers (all elected directly by the States). The Council is the leading decision-making body of the wider Government of Jersey.
The Chief Minister is elected from among the elected members of the States. Ministers are then proposed both by the Chief Minister and any other elected member, the final decision being made by the States assembly.
The overall direction of government as agreed by the Council of Ministers is published periodically as a "strategic plan", the current one being the Common Strategic Policy 2018 to 2022. These plans are debated and approved by the States Assembly and translated into action by a series of business plans for each department.
Cabinet collective responsibility among members of the Council of Ministers is a feature of the 2015 Code of Conduct for Ministers. However, ministers retain the right to present their own policy to the States in their capacity as a member of the assembly in domains not concerning Council policy.
In recent years, former Chief Executive Charlie Parker introduced a number of reforms to the government's administrative structure. Moving away from a system whereby each Minister heads a single department, the One Government structure focuses on more efficient governmental organisation. As of 2022, the Government departments are:
Office of the Chief Executive
Customer and Local Services
Children, Young People, Education and Skills
Health and Community Services
Infrastructure, Housing and Environment
Justice and Home Affairs
Strategic Policy, Planning and Performance
Treasury and Exchequer
Economy
Chief Operating Office
Political parties
Since the 1950s, politics in Jersey has been dominanted by independent representatives. Historically, the island had two parties: the conservative Roses (Charlots) and the progressive Laurels (Magot). Due to the 2022 electoral reform, Jersey may be moving towards a politics dominated by parties. As of February 2022, there are four political parties in Jersey, which hold around a third of the States:
Jersey Alliance (centre-right, party of government)
Jersey Liberal Conservatives (centre-right)
Reform Jersey (social democratic)
Progress Party (centrist)
Criticism
Jersey's political system has often been criticised over the centuries, both within and without the island. The 'Jersey Way' is a term used in critiques to describe a political culture that enforces conformity, ignores perversion of the course of justice and suppresses political dissent. The Tax Justice Network states the Jersey Way allows for the island's political system to be abused by financial services sector companies.
The Tax Justice Network criticises the political system for its absence of judicial independence (due to 'close relations between the legal and financial services' and 'the intimate relations between legal professionals who grew up together'); lack of second chamber in its parliament (for scrutiny purposes); no political parties; no formaised government and opposition and the lack of a wide range of independent news sources, or research capabilities.
Criticism of the political system is no modern development. In the nineteenth century, Abraham Le Cras was an outspoken new resident of the island. A retired colonel, Le Cras was opposed to Jersey's historic self-government and represented a group of people who not only thought Jersey should be integrated into England fully, but disputed the right of the States to even make its own laws. He is noted as saying 'The States have no more power to make laws for Jersey than I have'. In 1840 he won a court case challenging the States' ability to naturalise people as citizens. The Privy Council determined that the long-standing precedent of the States doing so had been invalidated since Jersey had been ruled under civil law since 1771. In 1846, he persuaded the MP for Bath to push for a Parliamentary Committee to enquire into the law of Jersey, however HM Government instead promised a Royal Commission. The Commission advised the abolition of the Royal Court run by the Jurats and the replacement of it with three Crown-appointed judges and the introduction of a paid police force. Le Cras left the island to live in England in 1850.
Local government
Jersey is divided into twelve administrative districts known as parishes. All have access to the sea and are named after the saints to whom their ancient parish churches are dedicated.
The parishes of Jersey are further divided into vingtaines (or, in St. Ouen, cueillettes), divisions which are historic and nowadays mostly used for purposes of electoral constituency in municipal elections. These elections are held to elect the members of the Parish municipality. Each parish has an Honorary Police force of elected, unpaid civilians who exercise police and prosecution powers.
Jersey politicians
Separation debate
The separation issue came up in the House of Commons in a debate on Jersey's constitution in 1969. According to Sir Cyril Black, Member of Parliament for Wimbledon, Jersey was on the verge of declaring independence from the British Government after the Queen's speech stated HM Government would examine the relationships with the Channel Islands. Jersey opposed its inclusion in the Royal Commission on the Constitution and the complete lack of consultation surrounding it. The Home Secretary later stated that there was no intention to change the relationship.
The question of Jersey's independence has been discussed from time to time in the States Assembly. In 1999, a member of the government said that 'Independence is an option open to the Island if the circumstances should justify this' but the government 'does not believe independence is appropriate in the present circumstances and does not see the circumstances arising in the foreseeable future when it would be appropriate'. In 2000, Senator Paul Le Claire called for a referendum on independence, a proposal which failed to win any significant support.
The Policy and Resources Committee of the States of Jersey established the Constitutional Review Group in July 2005, chaired by Sir Philip Bailhache, with terms of reference 'to conduct a review and evaluation of the potential advantages and disadvantages for Jersey in seeking independence from the United Kingdom or other incremental change in the constitutional relationship, while retaining the Queen as Head of State'.
Proposals for Jersey independence have subsequently been discussed at an international conference held in Jersey, organised by the Jersey and Guernsey Law Review. The former Bailiff, Sir Philip Bailhache has called for changes to the Channel Islands' relationship with the United Kingdom government, arguing that 'at the very least, we should be ready for independence if we are placed in a position where that course was the only sensible option'.
In October 2012 the Council of Ministers issued a "Common policy for external relations" that set out a number of principles for the conduct of external relations in accordance with existing undertakings and agreements. This document noted that Jersey "is a self-governing, democratic country with the power of self-determination" and "that it is not Government policy to seek independence from the United Kingdom, but rather to ensure that Jersey is prepared if it were in the best interests of Islanders to do so". On the basis of the established principles the Council of Ministers decided to "ensure that Jersey is prepared for external change that may affect the Island's formal relationship with the United Kingdom and/or European Union".
Constitutional Review Group report
The Group's Second Interim Report was presented to the States by the Council of Ministers in June 2008. The report made a number of recommendations about Jersey independence, including the benefits and costs of independence and the social and cultural consequences. The island would need to be recognised as a sovereign state on a country by country basis. The report concluded that 'Jersey is equipped to face the challenges of independence' but 'whether those steps should be taken is not within the remit of this paper'.
At present the island is protected by the British Armed Forces. Upon independence the island would need to develop its own capacity to entirely handle defensive and security affairs. It established that Jersey could seek membership of a defensive alliance (e.g. NATO); negotiate a defence agreement with a sovereign state (e.g. the UK) - San Marino, for example have a defence agreement with Italy that cost 700,000 USD in 2000/01 - or establish an independent defence force (in a similar manner to Antingua and Barbuda, which spends around £2.5 million). Furthermore, it is unlikely that any major European power would allow the island to be invaded, but the island could not feasibly protect itself from a major external threat without securing defensive agreements.
Independence would require the establishment of a Foreign Affairs Department within the Government of Jersey, or other similar steps. At present, the island's international affairs are formally governed by the UK Government. The report recommended the island join 'essential' global organisations, such as the UN and IMF; the Commonwealth and the WTO. At the time, independence would have brought an end to Jersey's relationship with the EU, which was mediated through the UK's accession treaty protocol 3. The report suggests a minimum requirement of the establishment of three overseas missions: London, New York and Brussels (the Government has an office in London and shares an office in Brussels already), to provide contact with major organisations such as the Commonwealth, UN and EU, as well as the UK, US and EU, and also to allow use of them for tourism and trade-related purposes.
Consideration would need to be given to the questions of the internal organisation of Jersey's constitution, as well as citizenship and passports. The report assumes the Queen would continue to be the Head of State, appointing a Governor General on the advice of the British Government. The report recommended the need for a codified constitution, which should contain a basic human rights statement. The current States Assembly could be replaced by a States Parliament, which would need to replace the checks and balances provided by the Privy Council.
Political pressure groups
Jersey, as a polity predominated by independents has always had a number of pressure groups. Many ad-hoc lobby groups form in response to a single issue and then dissolve once the concerns have been dealt with. However, there are a number of pressure groups actively working to influence government decisions on a number of issues. For example, in 2012 the National Trust engaged in pressure campaign against development of the Plemont headland. The Trust was supported by the majority of the islands senior politicians, including the Chief Minister, but a proposition made in the States of Jersey for the States to compulsorily purchase the headland and sell it to the Trust was defeated in a vote on 13 December 2012. The outcome of the vote was 24 in favour of acquisition, 25 against, with one absent and one declaring an interest.
Interest Groups
The following groups are funded by their members.
Royal Jersey Agricultural and Horticultural Society
Institute of Directors, Jersey branch
Jersey Chamber of Commerce
Progress Jersey
Jersey Youth Reform Team
Jersey Rights Association
Same Difference
Save Jersey's Heritage
Société Jersiaise
Alliance Française, Jersey branch
Attac, Jersey Branch
National Trust for Jersey
Quangos
The following groups are, at least, partially funded by government. Appointments are made by the States Assembly.
Jersey Finance
Community Relations Trust
Jersey Overseas Aid
Jersey Consumer Council
Jersey Legal Information Board
Jersey Development Company (formerly Jersey Waterfront Enterprise Board)
See also
Law of Jersey
References
Bibliography
Balleine's History of Jersey, Marguerite Syvret and Joan Stevens (1998)
The Constitution of Jersey, Roy Le Herissier
Constitutional History of Jersey, F. de L. Bois, 1972
External links
States of Jersey Assembly
States of Jersey government
States of Jersey Scrutiny | [
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15698 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy%20of%20Jersey | Economy of Jersey | The economy of Jersey is a highly developed social market economy. It is largely driven by international financial services and legal services, which accounted for 39.5% of total GVA in 2019, a 4% increase on 2018. Jersey is considered to be an offshore financial centre. Jersey has the preconditions to be a microstate, but it is a self-governing Crown dependency of the UK. It is considered to be a corportate tax haven by many organisations.
Other sectors include construction, retail, agriculture, tourism and telecommunications. Before the Second World War, Jersey's economy was dominated by agriculture, however after liberation, tourism to the island became popular. More recently, the finance industry recognised worth in operating in Jersey, which has now become the island's dominant industry.
In 2017, Jersey's GDP per capita was one of the highest in the world at $55,324. In 2019, the island's economy, as measured by GVA, grew by 2.1% in real terms to £4.97 billion. In December 2020, there were 1,350 people actively seeking work.
History
Agriculture
Until the 19th century, cider was the largest agricultural export with up to a quarter of the agricultural land given over to orchards. In 1839 for example, of cider were exported from Jersey to England alone, but by 1870 exports from Jersey had slumped to . Beer had replaced cider as a fashionable drink in the main export markets, and even the home market had switched to beer as the population became more urban. Potatoes overtook cider as the most important crop in Jersey in the 1840s. Small-scale cider production on farms for domestic consumption, particularly by seasonal workers from Brittany and mainland Normandy, was maintained, but by the mid-20th century production dwindled until only eight farms were producing cider for their own consumption in 1983. The number of orchards had been reduced to such a level that the destruction of trees in the Great Storm of 1987 demonstrated how close the Islands had come to losing many of its traditional cider apple varieties. A concerted effort was made to identify and preserve surviving varieties and new orchards were planted. As part of diversification, farmers have moved into commercial cider production, and the cider tradition is celebrated and marketed as a heritage experience.
Textiles
The knitting of woollen garments was a thriving industry for Jersey during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Ship building
Jersey was the 4th largest ship building area in the 19th century British Isles. See History of Jersey.
Historical exchange rates
Jersey pounds per US dollar - 0.55 (2005), 0.6981 (January 2002), 0.6944 (2001), 0.6596 (2000), 0.6180 (1999), 0.6037 (1998), 0.6106 (1997); the Jersey pound is at par with the British pound.
Government spending and economic management
Jersey is fiscally independent from the UK. UK public money is not ordinarily spent in the island, and Jersey residents do not pay tax or national insurance contributions to HMRC. As the UK is responsible for Jersey's defence and international representation, the cost of Jersey to the British taxpayer could be seen at around £55 million, though this is a notional cost; it's unlikely that, if Jersey were independent, that money would be saved on costs to the armed forces. The States make, upon agreement with Westminster, a contribution to the costs of its relationship in the form of a territorial army on the island.
Taxation
Jersey does not have inheritance, wealth, corporate or capital gains tax.
Personal Tax
Until the 20th century, the States relied on indirect taxation to finance the administration of Jersey. The levying of impôts (duties) different from those of the United Kingdom was granted by Charles II and remained in the hands of the Assembly of Governor, Bailiff and Jurats until 1921 when that body's tax raising powers were transferred to the Assembly of the States, leaving the Assembly of Governor, Bailiff and Jurats to serve simply as licensing bench for the sale of alcohol (this fiscal reform also stripped the Lieutenant-Governor of most of his effective remaining administrative functions).
The first income tax in Jersey was introduced in 1928. Income tax has been levied at a flat rate of 20% set by the occupying Germans during the Second World War. Jersey's tax is not entirely regressive, however. Exemption thresholds apply to those on lower incomes and tax reliefs exist for married couples, single parents, child day care and children. Residents living in Jersey under the high value residency scheme are charged 20% on the first £725,000 and 1% on anything over that amount.
Until February 2020, married women in Jersey did not have control over their own tax affairs. Since 1928, married couples were required to file tax receipts under their spouse's name, married women's earning were considered part of their spouses' earnings and male permission was required for women to be treated separately or to discuss her financial affairs with the tax office. For couples in same-sex marriages, the older partner was required to give permission for the younger. In 2020, a vote in the States Assembly (40 pour, 2 abstentions) to reform the law to give both marriage partners equal rights over the couple's tax affairs passed to come into force from 2021.
Goods and services tax
Historically, no value added tax (VAT) was levied in Jersey, with the result that luxury goods have often been cheaper than in the UK or in France. This provided an incentive for tourism from neighbouring countries.
The States of Jersey introduced a goods and services tax (GST) in 2008. It was originally set at 3%, but rose to 5% on 1 June 2011 as part of the 2011 States budget. To try to prevent islanders living below the poverty line, the States of Jersey introduced an Income Support service in January 2008.
Although this is a form of VAT, there are a number of significant differences between the European VAT and Jersey's GST. It is charged at a much lower rate than UK or French VAT, so Jersey can still act as a low-tax shopping jurisdiction on certain items. However there are far fewer exemptions to GST policy. For example, no VAT is charged on female sanitary products (the so-called 'tampon tax') in the UK while GST still applies in Jersey.
Some items are GST zero-rated, e.g. exports, housing, prescriptions, while others are exempt from the tax, e.g. financial services, insurance, postal services and supplies by charities. Imported goods below £135 are also exempt from the charge.
Corporation Tax
Jersey has a corporate income tax. The standard rate for all corporations is 0%, however Jersey is not a corporate-tax free jurisdiction. A 10% tax applies for regulated financial services companies and a 20% maximum tax rate applies for larger corporate retailers and utility and property income companies.
On 5 June 2021, global finance ministers, including the UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak, at the G7 agreed to set a new global minimum tax rate of 15% (although all G7 countries have higher tax rates) and to ensure that major corporations, such as Amazon and Microsoft, pay taxes in the countries where they operate, not those where they have headquarters. It will affect the island and take a number of years to implement, meaning Jersey's "zero-ten" tax policy will no longer be possible. On 16 May, Chief Minister John Le Fondré had criticised the move led by Joe Biden. He said in an interview with the i newspaper that the US should look "closer to home before involving themselves in the tax policies of others", citing Delaware's tax regime. Former Senator Ben Shenton said the zero-ten system was nearing its "sell-by" date and the zero percent rate was reinforcing Jersey's image as a tax haven.
Welfare state
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government introduced Co-Funded Payroll to support businesses.
Tax haven
Many have criticised Jersey's tax policies and labelled the island as a tax haven, although some, including the Government of Jersey, do not recognise that label.
Despite the island's small size, it is recognised as a large offshore finance centre. Jersey Finance estimates that Jersey trusts control £1 trillion in assets. According to the Tax Justice Network, Jersey suffers from the "Finance Curse", a term used to described to illustrate a low-tax jurisdictions over-reliance on the finance sector (which accounts for over 50% of the island's GVA and directly accounts for 25% of the island's jobs) and a lack of a viable alternative development strategy. Even in the modern day, Jersey continues to encourage high-wealth individuals to settle in the island to take advantage of lower tax rates.
Jersey has a long history of tax avoidance, being one of the first offshore financial services markets. Jersey has a long history of low-tax and duty-free economic activity. Jersey's situation between France and England meant that Jerseyman took up smuggling of goods into French and English ports. For example, Jean Martel of St Brelade, organised brandy and textile smuggling into both sides of the Channel. In the 1920s, high net worth individuals from Britain would emigrate to the island (or simply shift their wealth there) for tax purposes.
In 2020, the Tax Justice Network, a UK tax advocacy group, placed Jersey 7th in its list of "The top 10 countries that have done the most to proliferate corporate tax avoidance and break down the global corporate tax system" and 16th in its Financial Secrecy Index. below larger countries such as the UK, however still placing at the lower end of the 'extreme danger zone' for offshore secrecy'. The island accounts of 0.46 per cent of the global offshore finance market, making a small player in the total market. A large proportion of the financial services conducted in Jersey are tax-driven, meaning they are booked there without the requirement of adding value.
Tax Research UK classes Jersey as a tax haven. It too claims Jersey is a tax haven, citing its "half-hearted commitment to transparency". Jersey's finance industry featured in a BBC Panorama documentary, titled "Tax me if you can", first broadcast on 2 February 2009.
It is arguable that the people who benefit from Jersey's new tax structure are the owners of the large businesses that are separate or support the financial service based businesses. This is because they do not have to pay any corporation tax but will still benefit from the island's business.
In 2020, the Corporate Tax Heaven Index ranked Jersey 8th for 2021 with an haven score (a measure of the jurisdiction's systems to be used for corporate tax abuse) of 100 out of 100, however only has 0.51% on the Global Scale Weight ranking.
As of 2020, the European Union does not consider Jersey to be a tax haven ("non-cooperative jurisdictions for tax purposes"). Jersey cooperates with the EU and implements all its commitments. When the list was established in 2017, Jersey was initially on its "grey list" (Annex II), however was removed from the list entirely in March 2019. One of the mitigation measures Jersey put in place was the "Economic Substance Law" in 2019. Under the law, companies within its scope must be directed and managed, conduct Core Income Generating Activities ("the key essential and valuable activities that generate the income of the company and these activities must be carried out in Jersey") and have adequate employees, expenditure and physical assets in Jersey. The chair of the EU Tax Matters Subcommittee Paul Tang has however criticised the list for not including "renowned tax havens" such as Jersey. In January 2021, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to include on the blacklist of countries those that use a 0% corporate tax regime, which includes Jersey. However, the final decision still rests with the EU's Economic and Financial Affairs Council. Robert Palmer, director of Tax Justice UK, said, "post-Brexit the UK tax havens have lost their protector within the corridors of Brussels".
Furthermore, in 2017 the OECD ranked Jersey as a 'compliant' country in terms of tax transparency in its Global Transparency Barometer.
The Netherlands however does consider Jersey to be a tax haven. Jersey was placed on their tax avoidance "blacklist" in 2019. The list includes any jurisdiction with a corporate tax rate below 9%. As a result, companies registered in Jersey must pay 20.5% tax on interest and royalties received from the Netherlands from 2021.
However former Chief Minister Terry Le Sueur, has countered these criticisms, saying that "Jersey [is] among cooperative finance centres". Jersey has tax information exchange agreements with 40 countries, double taxation agreements with a number of other countries (with more "ready for signing"). Jersey Finance, the body representing the finance industry in Jersey, does not consider Jersey a tax haven, but does recognise ongoing tax evasion and avoidance.
In September 2013 the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, said it was not fair any longer to refer to any of the overseas territories or Crown dependencies as tax havens, as they have taken action to make sure that they have fair and open tax systems. Its information privacy law also provides exemptions that other European countries do not, for example in the way Trusts do not have to disclose as much information to Benficiaries about use of their personal data as is normally required under such laws.
A report by Capital Economics Ltd., comissioned by Jersey Finance found that the island is a conduit for around £500 billion of foreign investment in the UK. That report found Jersey is a net economic benefit to the UK, supporting between 250,000 and 575,563 jobs in the UK. 50 per cent of the foreign investment into the UK originates outside the London time zone, so the report argues that, without Jersey, the investment may go to other international finance centres, rather than staying in the British Islands. A survey in the report found that 85 percent of Jersey's financial services business would leave the sterling zone entiely without Jersey.
VAT
The absence of VAT also led to the growth of a fulfilment industry, whereby low-value luxury items, such as videos, lingerie and contact lenses were exported in a manner avoiding VAT on arrival, thus undercutting local prices on the same products. A number of companies, including off-island companies Tesco, HMV and Amazon and on-island companies Play.com and Blahdvd, operated this model.
In 2005 the States of Jersey announced limits on licences granted to non-resident companies trading in this way. Low-value consignment relief provided the mechanism for VAT-free imports from the Channel Islands to the UK. In April 2012, the UK closed this loophole, leading to the closure of many island businesses and the loss of a number of jobs on the island.
The Social Security department introduced a Back to Work programme to deal with the job losses and Jersey Post had to suffer significant cut-backs in response to a reduction in fulfilment. The States appealed against the UK decision, but this failed. As a result of the new rule, the UK tax authorities reported a 200% rise in import VAT from the Channel Islands, estimated at £95 million per year.
Sectors
Financial and legal services
Jersey-based financial organisations provide services to customers worldwide. In December 2020, it was reported that there were 13,510 jobs within this sector. The finance sector profits were about £1.18 billion in 2015.
Jersey is one of the top worldwide offshore financial centers It has been criticised for its tax practices, with many calling the island a tax haven. It attracts deposits from customers outside of the island, seeking the advantages such places offer, like reduced tax burdens. In 2020, Tax Justice ranked Jersey as the 16th on the Financial Secrecy Index, below larger countries such as the UK, however still placing at the lower end of the 'extreme danger zone' for offshore secrecy'.
However The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU) have all endorsed Jersey as a top international finance centre. In 2017’s OECD Rating, Jersey scored top marks from the OECD on tax transparency, receiving a "fully compliant" rating and as recently as 2019 The European Council of Finance Ministers (ECOFIN) have formally confirmed Jersey a Co-operative Jurisdiction. In addition, a MONEYVAL Assessment by the Council of Europe rated Jersey compliant or largely compliant in 48 of their 49 assessment areas, the highest score amongst all states assessed.
In the fourth quarter of 2020, the total value of banking deposits held in Jersey decreased from £137.8bn to £131.6bn while the net asset value of regulated funds under administration increased by £12.6bn to £378.1bn. There were 33,626 live companies on Jersey's register.
Jersey shares The International Stock Exchange (TISE) with Guernsey, where it is based.
Construction
Construction represented 7% of GVA during 2019. In June 2020 it was reported that 5,970 people were employed full-time in the construction and quarrying sector.
St Helier has a lot of ongoing construction projects. The reclamation of land opened in the 1980s new land for development in the town centre. This has led to development projects such as the Jersey International Finance Centre, Horizon and the new St Helier Waterfront project.
The GVA of the construction sector declined by 1% between 2018 and 2019.
Retail and wholesale
As of June 2020 there were 6,940 jobs within Jersey's wholesale and retail trades. Retail and wholesale declined by 1% between 2018 and 2019.
Jersey has a large range of local and national shops. SandpiperCI Limited operate a chain of stores in Jersey, their franchises include well-known names, such as Morrisons, Marks & Spencer, Iceland, and Costa Coffee.
A number of online retailers, and fulfillment houses operate from the Channel Islands, including Jersey, supplying a variety of low-value goods such as CDs, DVDs, video games, and gadgets. Residents of the EU were choosing to order goods from Jersey, so as to benefit from a tax relief known as Low-value consignment relief (LVCR). UK residents, in particular, were taking advantage of this situation.
A local company, play.com grew substantially during the time that LVCR applied to Jersey. Notably, Amazon UK also took advantage of this by dispatching some low-value items from Jersey.
In April 2012 the UK Government made law changes to prevent the Channel Islands continued exploitation of LVCR, meaning that UK residents would have to pay the full VAT amount on items imported from the Channel Islands. Some goods are still sold and distributed from Jersey, despite these changes.
Agriculture
In 2017, 33,301 vergées were dedicated to agriculture, with each holding having an average area of 78 vergées. Since 2006, there has been a reduction in the number of smaller holding areas, as have the number of larger holdings (64 in 2006 to 53 in 2017).
The Rural Support Scheme was introduced in 2017 to replace the Single Area Payment. 75% of agricultural areas by surface area are subject to RSS.
There has been a reduction in the total number of agricultural workers since 2007.
The total value of all export crops has increased since 2013. In 2017, it is £42.5 million. The primary exported crops are potatoes (£31.6m), narcissus flowers (£891k), courgettes (£184k) and cauliflowers (£22k). The number of Jersey Royal potatoes cultivated has increased by 18% between 2007 and 2017.
The total area dedicated to glasshouses from 2013 to 2017 has reduced from 275.8k m2 to 174.3k m2.
The Jersey breed of dairy cattle is known worldwide. In 2017, there were 4,842 cattle in Jersey. The gross sales value of the milk delivered to Jersey Dairy in 2017-18 was £13.9 million. Milk products go to the UK and other EU countries.
Tourism and hospitality
Hospitality (hotels, restaurants and bars) made up 4.2% of Jersey's GVA in 2019. It is estimated that the wider contribution of tourism in particular is 8.3% (2017). Tourism is important for Jersey's taxation, making £12.5 million in GST (15% of the total). However, total spend is much higher, around £250 million. This creates 6,470 jobs.
Most tourist attractions are operated by private companies and nonprofit organisations, including companies owned, or funded by the States of Jersey. Elizabeth Castle, for example, is controlled by Jersey Heritage. Some other attractions are owned by the National Trust for Jersey. One notable attraction is Jersey Zoo in Trinity, a wildlife park founded by conservationist Gerald Durrell.
Transport, storage and communication
This sector accounted for 3.5% of GVA during 2019. In December 2020, this sector had 1,950 private sector jobs in transport and storage and 1,810 private sector jobs in information and communications.
Most of the telecoms infrastructure is owned by Jersey Telecom.
In December 2020, there were 154,300 vehicles registered in Jersey.
In 2008, most goods imported and exported were transported by Huelin-Renouf, Condor Logistics, and other smaller operators, via either Saint Helier harbour, or Jersey Airport.
During the period 1984 to 1994, British Channel Island Ferries were responsible for much shipping to and from the United Kingdom.
Genuine Jersey
Genuine Jersey is a brand icon found on products made locally within the island. The brand was launched in 2001 by local businessmen who wanted to differentiate their products from imported goods and is now particularly visible island-based brand that supports local businesses and promotes island products broadly to locals and visitors. Jersey holds an enviable positions amongst island jurisdictions for its internationally famous products such as Jersey milk and the Jersey Royal potato. The use of the word "Jersey" in the name of these products helps to connect place with product branding and to build the recognition of the island brand. The Genuine Jersey organisation has various links with the Government of Jersey and the organisation exists in a public-private sphere in Jersey's small island political and commercial landscape. In restaurants, Genuine Jersey dishes can have 20% non-local ingredients. Contemporary green politics allows the Genuine Jersey brand to align itself with environmental goals in the modern age of buying local.
Cost of living
Jersey has a high cost of living, due to transport costs and a lack of competition. In January 2021, Numbeo, an online cost-of-living index, reported that Jersey was the "world's 'most expensive place to live'."
Inflation
In Jersey, inflation is based on the All Items Retail Prices Index (RPI). In March 2020, this stood at 182.1, where June 2000 is 100. The largest increases in RPI were in housing, household services, leisure services. Underlying inflation, as measured by the annual change in RPI(Y), increased by 2.3% over the twelve months to March 2020.
Historically, the highest RPI change was in September 2008 at 6.4% and the lowest was in September 2009 at -0.6%.
Seasonal workers
The workforce in Jersey tends to increase during the summer months, with around 3,500 more people employed in the summer of 2008 than in the winter of 2007. These seasonal workers are mostly employed in agriculture, hotels, restaurants and bars.
International economic relationships
Jersey has long been part of the UK's customs area. When the UK was part of the European Union, Jersey was part of the European Union Customs Union. In 2018, Jersey became part of a customs union with the United Kingdom. Therefore, there are no tariffs between the territories and a common external tariff on places outside the customs union. However Jersey retains the ability to impose specific prohibitions and restrictions at its border and retain autonomy in customs systems and fiscal matters.
Most of Jersey's physical linkages are with southern Great Britain, rather than the geographically nearer northern France. Almost all freight capacity is UK-related, not EU-related. Despite this, the finance industry means Jersey has economic (particularly financial) linkages with countries all over the world, particularly with emerging markets. In 2014, Jersey had a global trade surplus of £600 million (18% of national output), but a trade deficit with the UK of £500 million.
See also
Channel Islands Lottery
References
Jersey in Figures, 2005, States of Jersey
External links
Jersey Treasury and Resources
Jersey Finance
Jersey Development Company
Jersey | [
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15699 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications%20in%20Jersey | Telecommunications in Jersey | The services of communication in Jersey comprise Internet, telephone, broadcasting and postal services, which allow islanders to contact people and receive information from outwith the island.
Internet
As of 2018, three companies provide fixed-line services to the island -
Jersey Telecom (JT), who operate island's fixed-line network;
Sure, whose services are based on wholesale access to JT's infrastructure; and
Newtel, who focus on business customers and also use JT's infrastructure.
As all services are based on JT's infrastructure, there is limited competition. Nevertheless, islanders enjoy average fixed broadband download speedswhich outstrip the UK and other small countries. As of 2021, Jersey has the highest broadband speeds of any country in the world, with an average rate of 274.27 Mbps, compared with Liechtenstein, which only had speeds of 211.26 Mbps, and the global average of just 9.10 Mbps.
JT has dominance over the broadband sector, with 68% broadband market share in 2015, however this is declining relative to the competition. In terms of value for money on high-speed internet services, Jersey broadband consumers pay lower prices than nations like Bermuda, but higher prices than in the UK or the Isle of Man, but for lower-speed services islanders pay far lower prices than other small islands (and less than UK consumers).
Internet connectivity to the rest of the world is provided by undersea cables linked to Guernsey, the UK and France. In 2016, a ship - believed to be the King Arthur owned by Mediterranea di Navigazione - dragging its anchor on the seabed in the English Channel cut the three main internet cables to Jersey and Guersey. As a result, all communications traffic had to travel via cables to France.
Mobile telephones
Jersey is part of the UK's National Telephone Numbering Plan, which means the island shares the UK's international dialling code +44.
4G license operators in the island are obligated to provide a 2 Mbps download speed to 95% of the island population 90% of the time. In 2016, the island had 95% 4G coverage and higher average mobile data speeds than (7 major cities in) the UK.
In 2020, JT retains the majority mobile market share of 52%, compared with 24% for Airtel-Vodafone and 23% for Sure, the island's other mobile operators. In 2020, there were 124,262 mobile subscriptions, of which 2,845 were mobile only.
Mobile data prices are lower in Jersey than other similarly-sized countries, such as Bermuda and Malta, but slightly higher than the major operators in the UK. In 2020, the following mobile usage statistics were recorded: 202.0 million mobile minutes, 48.3 million SMS messages and 9.56 million GB of data used.
Landline telephones
Jersey is part of the UK's National Telephone Numbering Plan, which means the island shares the UK's international dialling code +44. Landline telephone numbers have the area code (0)1534.
Postal service
Future
The Government of Jersey has a telecommunications development strategy called A telecoms strategy for Jersey.
Telephony
Addressing
Jersey is incorporated into the UK National Telephone Numbering Plan, using the following area codes:
JT Global (formerly Jersey Telecom):
+44 1534 for land-lines
+44 7797 for mobiles
Sure (Batelco):
+44 7700 for mobiles
Airtel-Vodafone:
+44 7829 for mobiles
Fixed line
Fixed PSTN lines in use; approx 57,700 (2009).
Mobile cellular
JT Group Limited
Sure
Airtel-Vodafone
With over 120 mobile phone masts, in 2012, spread across its area, the island has a phone mast density almost five times that of the United Kingdom as a whole but similar to any urban area.
Telephony system and infrastructure
Domestic
Jersey Telecom:
System X supplied by Marconi Communications.
Marconi Softswitch and UTStarcom SoftSwitch.
Connectivity
4 submarine communication cables.
2 microwave links.
Mass media
Radio
Digital DAB+ broadcasts started in Jersey on 1 August 2021.
Radio broadcast stations
BBC Radio Jersey 88·8MHz FM, 1026kHz MW AM, and bbc.co.uk/jersey.
Channel 103 103·7 MHz FM and channel103.com.
Radio Lions, a closed-circuit hospital radio station launched by the Jersey Lions Club in 1975.
Radio Force 7, a former Saint-Malo radio station, pioneered bilingual broadcasting aimed at the Channel Islands from January 1988 to the early 1990s.
Contact 94. Former radio station (5 September 1988 to 29 November 1991) broadcasting to the island from Normandy.
Radio receiver adoption and usage
Not available
Television
Television broadcast stations
ITV Channel Television.
Sub Opt from BBC One of Spotlight Channel Islands.
Cable television
Newtel Solutions
Satellite television
BSkyB
Television set adoption and usage
Not available
Internet service providers (ISPs)
JT Group Limited which owns most of the telecommunications infrastructure in Jersey
Newtel Solutions
Sure
Airtel-Vodafone (3G data only)
See also
Frémont Point Transmitter
References
External links
A History of Radio and Television Relay Services in Jersey | [
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15700 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport%20in%20Jersey | Transport in Jersey | Transport in Jersey is primarily through the motor vehicle. The island, which is the largest of the Channel Islands has 124,737 registered vehicles (2016). The island is committed to combatting climate change, having declared a climate emergency, and policy is focused on reducing dependence on the car. The island has a cycle network and bus service. The primary modes of transport for leaving the island are by air or sea.
Road transport
Road transport is the primary form of both private and public transport in Jersey.
Highways
Vehicles in Jersey drive on the left side of the road. The island has a default speed limit of 40 miles per hour (64 km/h) with slower limits on certain stretches of road, such as 20/30 mph (32/48 km/h) in built up areas and 15 mph (24 km/h) on roads designated as green lanes.
The island is home to longest dual carriageway in the Channel Islands, consisting of Victoria Avenue (A2), and the Esplanade/Route de la Liberation (A1). Roads in Jersey are often named in French or Jèrriais, except in St Helier, where they are often named in English.
Public highways are state-owned and managed by public highways authorities. Main roads are maintained by the Government of Jersey and funded through general taxation. By-roads (chemins vinciaux) are managed by the relevant parish through a Roads Committee. Roads Inspectors are elected to report on roads in their vingtaine.
Roads in Jersey are classified using two systems. The first is the signposted system for classifying main roads, consisting of an "A", "B" and "C" system as used in Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man. These are often signed on directional signs, however some are inaccurate.
The second is a system used privately by the Government of Jersey to classify both main roads and by-roads. The system consists of Class 1, 2 and 3 roads (main roads) and Class 4 roads (by-roads). Class 1 roads include Victoria Avenue.
A Visite du Branchage is an inspection of roads to ensure property owners have complied with the laws against vegetation encroaching on the highway.
History
Until the 19th century, Jersey's highway system were narrow and muddy tracks connecting homes and fields to the churches, mills and beaches. Around the turn of the 18th century, the number of roads are described as "[holding] no Proportion with the Bigness [of the island]". The sides of the road, unlike in England had "great Bulwarks of Earth ... from 6 to 8, and sometimes 10 Foot high". At the time there were three types of road: , which, including the banks, were 16 feet wide; , which were 12 feet wide; and , which served only carriages on horseback.
In the early 19th century, the military roads were constructed (on occasion at gunpoint in the face of opposition from landowners) by the governor, General George Don, to link coastal fortifications with St. Helier harbour. These had an unexpected effect on agriculture once peace restored reliable trade links. Farmers in previously isolated valleys were able to swiftly transport crops grown in the island's microclimate to waiting ships and then on to the markets of London and Paris ahead of the competition. In conjunction with the later introduction of steamships and the development of the French and British railway systems, Jersey's agriculture was no longer as isolated as before.
A-roads
A1 St Helier to St Aubin road: La Route de la Liberation, Esplanade, La Route de Saint Aubin, La Route de la Haule
A2 St Helier to Bel Royal road: Victoria Avenue
A3 St Helier to Gorey road: Don Road, Georgetown Road, Bagot Road, Longueville Road, La Rue à Don
A4 St Clement to Gorey coast road
A5 St Clement to Gorey inner road
A6 St Helier to St Martin road: Mont Millais, Bagatelle Road, La Grande Route de Saint Martin
A7 St Helier to St Saviour road: La Motte Street, St Saviour's Road, St Saviour's Hill
A8 St Helier to Trinity road: Trinity Road, Le Mont de la Trinité, La Route de la Trinité, La Rue des Croix, La Route d'Ebenezer
A9 St Helier to St John road: Queens Road, La Grande Route de Saint Jean, La Route des Issues
A10 St Lawrence main road: La Grande Route de Saint Laurent
A11 St Peter's valley road: La Vallée de Saint Pierre
A12 Beaumont to St Ouen road: La Route de Beaumont, La Grande Route de Saint Pierre, La Grande Route de Saint Ouen
A13 St Aubin to Red Houses road: La Mont les Vaux, La Grande Route de Saint Brelade, La Route des Genets, La Route Orange
A14: Rouge Bouillon
A15: St Clement's Road
A16: Commercial Buildings
A17: La Route du Fort
Driving laws
Driving laws in Jersey are the United Kingdom Highway Code, supplemented by the Jersey Highway Code.
Visitors wishing to drive must possess a Certificate of Insurance or an International Green Card, a valid Driving Licence or International Driving Permit (UK International Driving Permits are not valid). Photocopies are not acceptable. A nationality plate must be displayed on the back of visiting vehicles.
It is an offence to hold a mobile phone whilst driving a moving vehicle. It is not an offence to use a hands-free system. Where fitted, all passengers inside a vehicle must wear a seat belt at all times, regardless of whether they are sitting in the front or the rear.
Drink-driving is illegal in Jersey. Police use breathalyser tests during spot checks and a person is guilty if there is over 35 microgrammes of alcohol per 100 ml breath.
The penalties for drinking and driving in Jersey are up to £2,000 fine or 6 months in prison for the first offence plus unlimited disqualification of driving licence. It is an offence to drive whilst under the influence of drugs. Since July 2014 it has also been illegal to smoke in any vehicle carrying passengers under the age of 18.
Traffic calming
Over the years, a number of traffic calming schemes have been introduced around the island to get motorists to slow down. In 2016, a report in the JEP outlined a number of traffic calming schemes that were under consideration around the island.
Car sharing
Jersey has a shared electric car operator, EVie, that provides islandwide self-service electric car hire.
Cycling
Jersey has infrastructure dedicated to cyclists. Cycle infrastructure has been improving in the previous decade under the Sustainable Transport Policy.
The best developed cycle route is the route from St Helier to Corbière. The route consists of segregated cycle paths and shared pedestrian-cycle paths, including the St Aubin's Bay promenade and the Railway Walk. The connection from West Park to Havre des Pas was completed an upgraded after a ministerial decision in 2011. A branch of this route connects to St Peter's Village via Les Quennevais.
There is a segregated cycle-pedestrian path along St Peter's Valley, which connects pedestrians and cyclists from the green lane network in St Mary to roads near the St Aubin's Bay Promenade cycle route. It was opened in 2016.
Jersey has a network of signposted cycle routes. There are fifteen routes in total, such as route 1, which forms a loop around the island. Most of the routes are on quieter lanes and dedicated paths, however some of these routes are on busy main road with no dedicated infrastructure.
The Eastern Cycle Route network is a proposed network of cycle-safe routes in the eastern parishes of St Clement and Grouville. The first section from Gorey to La Ville-ès-Renauds in Grouville was opened in 2011.
There is a dedicated network of Green Lanes across the island, which have a 15 mph speed limit and where priority is afforded to cyclists.
Jersey has a shared electric bike operator, EVie, that provides islandwide self-service electric bike hire.
Companies
EVie
Buses
Buses started running on the island in the 1920s, and by the 1930s, competition from motor buses had rendered the railways unprofitable, with final closure coming in 1935 after a fire disaster (except for the later German reintroduction of rail during the military occupation).
Buses are operated by CT Plus Jersey, a local subsidiary of HCT Group. Bus service routes radiate from the Liberation Station in St Helier.
In 2012, it was announced that CT Plus would take over the operation of the bus service, commencing on 2 January 2013, ending 10 years of Connex service in Jersey. This new service is called LibertyBus.
Parking
Public parking in Jersey is controlled by time restrictions and payment.
A single-yellow line along the side of the carriageway indicates a "No waiting" restriction. There are no double-yellow lines in Jersey. Parking on yellow lines is liable to a fine.
Some on-street and off-street parking is paid parking. Payments operate using either Paycards or PayByPhone and is indicated with the Paycard Symbol. Paycards are a form of voucher payment. Paycards are purchased from various stores around the island and can be used by scratching the time of arrival on the relevant number of units.
Certain car parks, such as the Waterfront, Sand Street and Ports of Jersey Car Parks use automatic number plate recognition or ticket technology with a pay upon exit system.
Some parking is free to use however is time-restricted and a Jersey parking disc must be displayed showing time of arrival.
There are four main residents’ and business parking zones within St Helier.
Air transport
There is a single airport on the island, Jersey Airport, located in St Peter. It has one runway and one terminal building and has direct flights throughout the year to many United Kingdom and International destinations, including nine daily flights to London.
Before the present airport opened in 1937, air transport was through seaplanes, which landed at West Park in St Helier. The first aeroplane to land in Jersey was the Sanchez Besa in August 1912. The first passenger flight was recorded as taking place 147 years earlier through air balloon.
Rail transport
Historically there were public railway services in the island, provided by two railway companies:
The Jersey Railway (closed in 1936)
The Jersey Eastern Railway (closed in 1929).
The mostly coastal lines operated out of St Helier and ran across the southern part of the island, reaching Gorey Harbour in the east and la Corbière in the west. There were two stations in St Helier: (JR) and (JER).
After closure, most of the infrastructure was removed and today little evidence remains of these railways. A small number of former station buildings are still standing, including St Helier Weighbridge, which is now in use as the Liberty Wharf shopping centre, and St Aubin railway station, which is used today as the Parish Hall of Saint Brélade. Part of the former Jersey Railway line from St Aubin to Corbière has been converted into a rail trail for cyclists and walkers.
During the German military occupation 1940–1945, light railways were re-established by the Germans for the purpose of supplying coastal fortifications. A one-metre gauge line was laid down following the route of the former Jersey Railway from Saint Helier to La Corbière, with a branch line connecting the stone quarry at Ronez in Saint John. A 60 cm line ran along the west coast, and another was laid out heading east from Saint Helier to Gorey. The first line was opened in July 1942, the ceremony being disrupted by passively resisting Jersey spectators. The German railway infrastructure was dismantled after the Liberation in 1945.
Two railways operate at the Pallot Heritage Steam Museum; a standard gauge heritage steam railway, and a narrow gauge pleasure line operated by steam-outline diesel motive power.
Sea transport
History
An important growth for St Helier in the early 19th century was the construction of the harbour. Previously, ships coming into the town had only a small jetty at the site now called the English Harbour and the French Harbour. The Chamber of Commerce urged the States to build a new harbour, but the States refused, so the Chamber took it into their own hands and repaired and upgraded the harbour in 1790. A new breakwater was constructed to shelter the jetty and harbours. In 1814, the merchants constructed the roads now known as Commercial Buildings and Le Quai des Marchands to connect the harbours to the town and in 1832 construction was finished on the Esplanade and its sea wall. A rapid expansion in shipping led the States in 1837 to order the construction of two new piers: the Victoria and Albert Piers.
Seaports and harbours
Saint Helier is the island's main port, others include Gorey, Saint Aubin, La Rocque, and Bonne Nuit. It is distant from Granville, Manche, from Southampton, from Poole, and from St Malo.
On 20 August 2013, Huelin-Renouf, which had operated a "lift-on lift-off" container service for 80 years between the Port of Southampton and the Port of Jersey, ceased trading. Senator Alan Maclean, a Jersey politician had previously tried to save the 90-odd jobs furnished by the company to no avail. On 20 September, it was announced that Channel Island Lines would continue this service, and would purchase the MV Huelin Dispatch from Associated British Ports who in turn had purchased them from the receiver in the bankruptcy. The new operator was to be funded by Rockayne Limited, a closely held association of Jersey businesspeople. Channel Island Lines closed in 2020.
Passenger-only access to France is provided by Manche-Iles Express ferry service, to either Barneville-Carteret, Granville or Dielette.
A service to St Malo was provided by Compagnie Corsaire, but is now operated by its sister service, Condor Ferries, which runs MV Commodore Goodwill, a large ro-ro vessel to Portsmouth, and has multiple ro-ro connections to Poole and St Malo.
Poole - Guernsey - Jersey (seasonal service normally operated by Condor Liberation)
Portsmouth - Guernsey - Jersey (Commodore Clipper, Commodore Goodwill. Commodore Goodwill service is extended to St Malo at the weekends)
Saint-Malo - Jersey - Guernsey (Condor Rapide)
Companies
Condor Ferries freight and passenger services: Commodore Goodwill.
Manche Îles Express
See also
Bailiwick of Jersey
List of shipwrecks in the Channel Islands
References
External links
Jersey on SABRE Road Wiki
Ports and harbours of Jersey
.Jersey
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15704 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston%20Atoll | Johnston Atoll | Johnston Atoll is an unincorporated territory of the United States, currently administered by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Johnston Atoll is a National Wildlife Refuge and part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. It is closed to public entry, and limited access for management needs is only granted by Letter of Authorization from the United States Air Force and a Special Use Permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
For nearly 70 years, the isolated atoll was under the control of the U.S. military. During that time, it was variously used as a naval refueling depot, an airbase, a testing site for nuclear and biological weapons, a secret missile base, and a site for the storage and disposal of chemical weapons and Agent Orange. Those activities left the area environmentally contaminated, and monitoring continues.
The island is home to thriving communities of nesting seabirds and has significant marine biodiversity. USFWS teams carry out environmental monitoring and maintenance to protect the native wildlife.
Geography
With the exception of USFWS activity, Johnston Atoll is a deserted atoll in the North Pacific Ocean, located about southwest of the island of Hawaiʻi, and is grouped as one of the United States Minor Outlying Islands. The atoll, which is located on a coral reef platform, has four islands. Johnston Island and Sand Island are both enlarged natural features, while Akau (North) and Hikina (East) are two artificial islands formed by coral dredging. By 1964, dredge and fill operations had increased the size of Johnston Island to from its original , increased the size of Sand Island from , and added the two new islands, North and East, of respectively.
The four islands compose a total land area of . Due to the atoll's tilt, much of the reef on the southeast portion has subsided. But even though it does not have an encircling reef crest, the reef crest on the northwest portion of the atoll does provide for a shallow lagoon, with depths ranging from .
The climate is tropical but generally dry. Northeast trade winds are consistent and there is little seasonal temperature variation. With elevation ranging from sea level to at Summit Peak, the islands contain some low-growing vegetation and palm trees on mostly flat terrain, and no natural fresh water resources.
Climate
It is a dry atoll with less than of annual rainfall.
Wildlife
About 300 species of fish have been recorded from the reefs and inshore waters of the atoll. It is also visited by green turtles and Hawaiian monk seals. The possibility of humpback whales using the waters as a breeding ground has been suggested, albeit in small numbers and with irregular occurrences so far. Many other cetaceans possibly migrate through the area, but the species being most notably confirmed is Cuvier's beaked whales.
Birds
Seabird species recorded as breeding on the atoll include Bulwer's petrel, wedge-tailed shearwater, Christmas shearwater, white-tailed tropicbird, red-tailed tropicbird, brown booby, red-footed booby, masked booby, great frigatebird, spectacled tern, sooty tern, brown noddy, black noddy, and white tern. It is the world's largest colony of red-tailed tropicbirds, with 10,800 nests in 2020. It is visited by migratory shorebirds, including the Pacific golden plover, wandering tattler, bristle-thighed curlew, ruddy turnstone and sanderling. The island, with its surrounding marine waters, has been recognised as an Important Bird Area by BirdLife International for its seabird colonies.
Flora
The first list of plants catalogued on Johnston Atoll was published in 1931 in Vascular Plants of Johnston and Wake Islands based on collections of the Tanager Expedition on in 1923. Three species were described Lepturus repens, Boerhavia diffusa, and Tribulus cistoides. In 1930's when the island was used for aviation activities for the war, Pluchea odorata was introduced from Honolulu.
History
Early history
The first Western record of the atoll was on September 2, 1796, when the Boston-based American brig Sally accidentally grounded on a shoal near the islands. The ship's captain, Joseph Pierpont, published his experience in several American newspapers the following year giving an accurate position of Johnston and Sand Island along with part of the reef, but did not name or lay claim to the area. The islands were not officially named until Captain Charles J. Johnston of the Royal Naval ship sighted them on December 14, 1807. The ship's journal recorded: "on the 14th [December 1808] made a new discovery, viz. two very low islands, in lat. 16° 52′ N. long. 190° 26′ E., having a dangerous reef to the east of them, and the whole not exceeding four miles in extent".
In 1856, the United States enacted the Guano Islands Act, which allowed citizens of the United States to take possession of islands containing guano deposits. Under this act, William Parker and R. F. Ryan chartered the schooner Palestine specifically to find Johnston Atoll. They located guano on the atoll in March 1858 and proceeded to claim the island as U.S. territory. In June of the same year, S. C. Allen, sailing on the Kalama under a commission from King Kamehameha IV of Hawaii, landed on Johnston Atoll, removed the American flag, and claimed the atoll for the Kingdom of Hawaii. Allen named the atoll "Kalama" and the nearby smaller island "Cornwallis."
Returning on July 27, 1858, the captain of the Palestine again hoisted the American flag and tried to acquire the island in the name of the United States. The same day, the "derelict and abandoned" atoll was declared part of the domain of Kamehameha IV. On its July visit, however, the Palestine left two crew members on the island to gather phosphate. Later that year, Kamehameha revoked the lease granted to Allen when he learned the atoll had been claimed previously by the United States. However, this did not prevent the Hawaiian Territory from making use of the atoll or asserting ownership.
By 1890, the atoll's guano deposits had been almost entirely depleted (mined out) by U.S. interests operating under the Guano Islands Act. In 1892, made a survey and map of the island, hoping that it might be suitable as a telegraph cable station. On January 16, 1893, the Hawaiian Legation at London reported a diplomatic conference over this temporary occupation of the island. However, the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown on January 17, 1893. When Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1898, during the Spanish–American War, the name of Johnston Island was omitted from the list of Hawaiian Islands. On September 11, 1909, Johnston was leased by the Territory of Hawaii to a private citizen for fifteen years. A board shed was built on the southeast side of the larger island, and a small tramline run up onto the slope of the low hill, to facilitate the removal of guano. Apparently neither the quantity nor the quality of the guano was sufficient to pay for gathering it, so that the project was soon abandoned.
National Wildlife Refuge since 1926
The Tanager Expedition was a joint expedition, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Bishop Museum of Hawaii, which visited the Atoll in 1923. The expedition to the atoll consisted of two teams accompanied by destroyer convoys, with the first departing Honolulu on July 7, 1923 aboard the , which conducted the first survey of Johnston Island in the 20th century. Aerial survey and mapping flights over Johnston were conducted with a Douglas DT-2 floatplane carried on her fantail, which was hoisted into the water for takeoff. From July 10–22, 1923, the atoll was recorded in a pioneering aerial photography project. The left Honolulu on July 16 and joined up with the Whippoorwill to complete the survey and then traveled to Wake Island to complete surveys there. Tents were pitched on the southwest beach of fine white sand, and a rather thorough biological survey was made of the island. Hundreds of sea birds, of a dozen kinds, were the principal inhabitants, together with lizards, insects, and hermit crabs. The reefs and shallow water abounded with fish and other marine life.
On June 29, 1926, by , President Calvin Coolidge established Johnston Island Reservation as a federal bird refuge and placed it under the control of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as a "refuge and breeding ground for native birds." Johnston Atoll was added to the United States National Wildlife Refuge system in 1926, and renamed the Johnston Island National Wildlife Refuge in 1940. The Johnston Atoll National Wildlife Refuge was established to protect the tropical ecosystem and the wildlife that it harbors.
However, the Department of Agriculture had no ships, and the United States Navy was interested in the atoll for strategic reasons, so with on December 29, 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt placed the islands under the "control and jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Navy for administrative purposes", but subject to use as a refuge and breeding ground for native birds, under the United States Department of the Interior.
On February 14, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt issued to create naval defense areas in the central Pacific territories. The proclamation established "Johnston Island Naval Defensive Sea Area" which encompassed the territorial waters between the extreme high-water marks and the three-mile marine boundaries surrounding the atoll. "Johnston Island Naval Airspace Reservation" was also established to restrict access to the airspace over the naval defense sea area. Only U.S. government ships and aircraft were permitted to enter the naval defense areas at Johnston unless authorized by the Secretary of the Navy.
In 1990, two full-time U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service personnel, a Refuge Manager and a biologist, were stationed on Johnston Atoll to handle the increase in biological, contaminant, and resource conflict activities.
After the military mission on the island ended in 2004, the Atoll was administered by the Pacific Remote Islands National Wildlife Refuge Complex. The outer islets and water rights were managed cooperatively by the Fish and Wildlife Service, with some of the actual Johnston Island land mass remaining under control of the United States Air Force (USAF) for environmental remediation and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for plutonium cleanup purposes. However, on January 6, 2009, under authority of section 2 of the Antiquities Act, the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument was established by President George W. Bush to administer and protect Johnston Island along with six other Pacific islands. The national monument includes Johnston Atoll National Wildlife Refuge within its boundaries and contains of land and over of water area. The Administration of President Barack Obama in 2014 extended the protected area to encompass the entire Exclusive Economic Zone, by banning all commercial fishing activities. Under a 2017 review of all national monuments extended since 1996, then-Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke recommended to permit fishing outside the 12-mile limit.
Military control 1934–2004
On December 29, 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt with transferred control of Johnston Atoll to the United States Navy under the 14th Naval District, Pearl Harbor, in order to establish an air station, and also to the Department of the Interior to administer the bird refuge. In 1948, the USAF assumed control of the Atoll.
During the Operation Hardtack nuclear test series from April 22 to August 19, 1958, administration of Johnston Atoll was assigned to the Commander of Joint Task Force 7. After the tests were completed, the island reverted to the command of the US Air Force.
From 1963 to 1970, the Navy's Joint Task force 8 and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) held joint operational control of the island during high-altitude nuclear testing operations.
In 1970, operational control was handed back to the Air Force until July 1973, when Defense Special Weapons Agency was given host-management responsibility by the Secretary of Defense. Over the years, sequential descendant organizations have been the Defense Atomic Support Agency (DASA) from 1959 to 1971, the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA) from 1971 to 1996, and the Defense Special Weapons Agency (DSWA) from 1996 to 1998. In 1998, Defense Special Weapons Agency, and selected elements of the Office of Secretary of Defense were combined to form the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). In 1999, host-management responsibility transferred from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency once again to the Air Force until the Air Force mission ended in 2004 and the base was closed.
Sand Island seaplane base
In 1935, personnel from the US Navy's Patrol Wing Two carried out some minor construction to develop the atoll for seaplane operation. In 1936, the Navy began the first of many changes to enlarge the atoll's land area. They erected some buildings and a boat landing on Sand Island and blasted coral to clear a seaplane landing. Several seaplanes made flights from Hawaii to Johnston, such as that of a squadron of six aircraft in November, 1935.
In November 1939, further work was commenced on Sand Island by civilian contractors to allow the operation of one squadron of patrol planes with tender support. Part of the lagoon was dredged and the excavated material was used to make a parking area connected by a causeway to Sand Island. Three seaplane landings were cleared, one by and two cross-landings each by and dredged to a depth of . Sand Island had barracks built for 400 men, a mess hall, underground hospital, radio station, water tanks and a steel control tower. In December 1943 an additional of parking was added to the seaplane base.
On May 26, 1942, a United States Navy Consolidated PBY-5 Catalina wrecked at Johnston Atoll. The Catalina pilot made a normal power landing and immediately applied throttle for take-off. At a speed of about fifty knots the plane swerved to the left and then continued into a violent waterloop. The hull of the plane was broken open and the Catalina sank immediately.
After the war on March 27, 1949, a PBY-6A Catalina had to make a forced landing during flight from Kwajalein to Johnston Island. The plane was damaged beyond repair and the crew of 11 was rescued nine hours later by a Navy ship which sank the plane by gunfire.
During 1958, a proposed support agreement for Navy Seaplane operations at Johnston Island was under discussion though it was never completed because a requirement for the operation failed to materialize.
Airfield
By September 1941, construction of an airfield on Johnston Island commenced. A by runway was built together with two 400-man barracks, two mess halls, a cold-storage building, an underground hospital, a fresh-water plant, shop buildings, and fuel storage. The runway was complete by December 7, 1941, though in December 1943 the 99th Naval Construction Battalion arrived at the atoll and proceeded to lengthen the runway to . The runway was subsequently lengthened and improved as the island was enlarged.
During World War II Johnston Atoll was used as a refueling base for submarines, and also as an aircraft refueling stop for American bombers transiting the Pacific Ocean, including the Boeing B-29 Enola Gay. By 1944, the atoll was one of the busiest air transport terminals in the Pacific. Air Transport Command aeromedical evacuation planes stopped at Johnston en route to Hawaii. Following V-J Day on August 14, 1945, Johnston Atoll saw the flow of men and aircraft that had been coming from the mainland into the Pacific turn around. By 1947, over 1,300 B-29 and B-24 bombers had passed through the Marianas, Kwajalein, Johnston Island, and Oahu en route to Mather Field and civilian life.
Following World War II, Johnston Atoll Airport was used commercially by Continental Air Micronesia, touching down between Honolulu and Majuro. When an aircraft landed it was surrounded by armed soldiers and the passengers were not allowed to leave the aircraft. Aloha Airlines also made weekly scheduled flights to the island carrying civilian and military personnel; in the 1990s there were flights almost daily, and some days saw up to three arrivals. Just before movement of the chemical munitions to Johnston Atoll, the Surgeon General, Public Health Service, reviewed the shipment and the Johnston Atoll storage plans. His recommendations caused the Secretary of Defense in December 1970 to issue instructions suspending missile launches and all non-essential aircraft flights. As a result, Air Micronesia service was immediately discontinued, and missile firings were terminated with the exception of two 1975 satellite launches deemed critical to the island's mission.
There were many times when the runway was needed for emergency landings for both civil and military aircraft. When the runway was decommissioned, it could no longer be used as a potential emergency landing place when planning flight routes across the Pacific Ocean. As of 2003, the airfield at Johnston Atoll consisted of an unmaintained closed single asphalt/concrete runway 5/23, a parallel taxiway, and a large paved ramp along the southeast side of the runway.
World War II 1941–1945
In February 1941 Johnston Atoll was designated as a Naval Defensive Sea Area and Airspace Reservation. On the day the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, was out of her home port of Pearl Harbor, to make a simulated bombardment at Johnston Island. Japan's strike at Pearl Harbor occurred as the ship was unloading marines, civilians and stores on the atoll. On December 15, 1941, the atoll was shelled outside the reef by a Japanese submarine, which had been part of the attack on Pearl Harbor eight days earlier. Several buildings including the power station were hit, but no personnel were injured. Additional Japanese shelling occurred on December 22 and 23, 1941. On all occasions, Johnston Atoll's coastal artillery guns returned fire, driving off the sub.
In July 1942, the civilian contractors at the atoll were replaced by 500 men from the 5th and 10th Naval Construction Battalions, who expanded the fuel storage and water production at the base and built additional facilities. The 5th Battalion departed in January 1943. In December 1943 the 99th Naval Construction Battalion arrived at the atoll and proceeded to lengthen the runway to and add an additional of parking to the seaplane base.
Coast Guard mission 1957–1992
On January 25, 1957, the Department of Treasury was granted a 5-year permit for the United States Coast Guard (USCG) to operate and maintain a Long Range Aid to Navigation (LORAN) transmitting station on Johnston Atoll. Two years later in December 1959, the Secretary of Defense approved the Secretary of the Treasury's request to use Sand Island for U.S. Coast Guard LORAN A and C station sites. The USCG was granted permission to install a LORAN A and C station on Sand Island to be staffed by U.S. Coast Guard personnel through June 30, 1992. The permit for a LORAN station to operate on Johnston Island was terminated in 1962. On November 1, 1957, a new United States Coast Guard LORAN-A station was commissioned. By 1958, the Coast Guard LORAN Station at Johnston Island began transmitting on a 24-hour basis, thus establishing a new LORAN rate in the Central Pacific. The new rate between Johnston Island and French Frigate Shoals gave a higher order of accuracy for fixing positions in the steamship lanes from Oahu, Hawaii, to Midway Island. In the past, this was impossible in some areas along this important shipping route. The original U.S. Coast Guard LORAN-A Station on Johnston Island ceased operations on June 30, 1961 when the new station on nearby Sand Island began transmitting using a larger 180 foot antenna.
The LORAN-C station was disestablished on July 1, 1992, and all Coast Guard personnel, electronic equipment, and property departed the atoll that month. Buildings on Sand Island were transferred to other activities. LORAN whip antennas on Johnston and Sand Islands were removed, and the 625-foot LORAN tower and antenna were demolished on December 3, 1992. The LORAN A and C station and buildings on Sand Island were then dismantled and removed.
National nuclear weapon test site 1958–1963
Successes
Between 1958 and 1975, Johnston Atoll was used as an American national nuclear test site for atmospheric and extremely high-altitude nuclear explosions in outer space. In 1958, Johnston Atoll was the location of the two "Hardtack I" nuclear tests firings. One conducted August 1, 1958 was codenamed "Hardtack Teak" and one conducted August 12, 1958 was codenamed "Orange." Both tests detonated 3.8-megaton hydrogen bombs launched to high altitudes by rockets from Johnston Atoll.
Johnston Island was also used as the launch site of 124 sounding rockets going up as high as . These carried scientific instruments and telemetry equipment, either in support of the nuclear bomb tests, or in experimental antisatellite technology.
Eight PGM-17 Thor missiles deployed by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) were launched from Johnston Island in 1962 as part of "Operation Fishbowl," a part of "Operation Dominic" nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific. The first launch in "Operation Fishbowl" was a successful research and development launch with no warhead. In the end, "Operation Fishbowl" produced four successful high-altitude detonations: "Starfish Prime," "Checkmate," "Bluegill Triple Prime," and "Kingfish." In addition, it produced one atmospheric nuclear explosion, "Tightrope."
On July 9, 1962, "Starfish Prime" had a 1.4-megaton explosion, using a W49 warhead at an altitude of about . It created a very brief fireball visible over a wide area, plus bright artificial auroras visible in Hawaii for several minutes. "Starfish Prime" also produced an electromagnetic pulse that disrupted some electric power and communication systems in Hawaii. It pumped enough radiation into the Van Allen belts to destroy or damage seven satellites in orbit.
The final Fishbowl launch that used a Thor missile carried the "Kingfish" 400-kiloton warhead up to its detonation altitude. Although it was officially one of the Operation Fishbowl tests, it is sometimes not listed among high-altitude nuclear tests because of its lower detonation altitude. "Tightrope" was the final test of Operation Fishbowl and detonated on November 3, 1962. It launched on a nuclear-armed Nike-Hercules missile and was detonated at a lower altitude than the other tests:
"At Johnston Island, there was an intense white flash. Even with high-density goggles, the burst was too bright to view, even for a few seconds. A distinct thermal pulse was felt on bare skin. A yellow-orange disc was formed, and transformed itself into a purple doughnut. A glowing purple cloud was faintly visible for a few minutes." The nuclear yield was reported in most official documents as "less than 20 kilotons." One report by the U.S. government reported the yield of the "Tightrope" test as 10 kilotons. Seven sounding rockets were launched from Johnston Island in support of the Tightrope test, and this was the final American nuclear atmospheric test.
Failures
The "Fishbowl" series included four failures, all of which were deliberately disrupted by range safety officers when the missiles' systems failed during launch and were aborted. The second launch of the Fishbowl series, "Bluegill", carried an active warhead. Bluegill was "lost" by a defective range safety tracking radar and had to be destroyed 10 minutes after liftoff even though it probably ascended successfully. The subsequent nuclear weapon launch failures from Johnston Atoll caused serious contamination to the island and surrounding areas with weapons-grade plutonium and americium that remains an issue to this day.
The failure of the "Bluegill" launch created in effect a dirty bomb but did not release the nuclear warhead's plutonium debris onto Johnston Atoll as the missile fell into the ocean south of the island and was not recovered. However, the "Starfish", "Bluegill Prime", and "Bluegill Double Prime" test launch failures in 1962 scattered radioactive debris over Johnston Island contaminating it, the lagoon, and Sand Island with plutonium for decades.
"Starfish", a high altitude Thor launched nuclear test scheduled for June 20, 1962, was the first to contaminate the atoll. The rocket with the 1.45-megaton Starfish device (W49 warhead and the MK-4 re-entry vehicle) on its nose was launched that evening, but the Thor missile engine cut out only 59 seconds after launch. The range safety officer sent a destruct signal 65 seconds after launch, and the missile was destroyed at approximately altitude. The warhead high explosive detonated in 1-point safe fashion, destroying the warhead without producing nuclear yield. Large pieces of the plutonium contaminated missile, including pieces of the warhead, booster rocket, engine, re-entry vehicle and missile parts, fell back on Johnston Island. More wreckage along with plutonium contamination was found on nearby Sand Island.
"Bluegill Prime," the second attempt to launch the payload which failed last time was scheduled for 23:15 (local) on July 25, 1962. It too was a genuine disaster and caused the most serious plutonium contamination on the island. The Thor missile was carrying one pod, two re-entry vehicles and the W50 nuclear warhead. The missile engine malfunctioned immediately after ignition, and the range safety officer fired the destruct system while the missile was still on the launch pad. The Johnston Island launch complex was demolished in the subsequent explosions and fire which burned through the night. The launch emplacement and portions of the island were contaminated with radioactive plutonium spread by the explosion, fire and wind-blown smoke.
Afterward, the Johnston Island launch complex was heavily damaged and contaminated with plutonium. Missile launches and nuclear testing halted until the radioactive debris was dumped and soils were recovered and the launch emplacement rebuilt. Three months of repairs, decontamination, and rebuilding the LE1 as well as the backup pad LE2 were necessary before tests could resume. In an effort to continue with the testing program, U.S. troops were sent in to do a rapid cleanup. The troops scrubbed down the revetments and launch pad, carted away debris and removed the top layer of coral around the contaminated launch pad. The plutonium-contaminated rubbish was dumped in the lagoon, polluting the surrounding marine environment. More than 550 drums of contaminated material were dumped in the ocean off Johnston from 1964 to 1965. At the time of the Bluegill Prime disaster, the top fill around the launch pad was scraped by a bulldozer and grader. It was then dumped into the lagoon to make a ramp, so the rest of the debris could be loaded onto landing craft to be dumped out into the ocean. An estimated 10 percent of the plutonium from the test device was in the fill used to make the ramp. Then the ramp was covered and placed into a landfill on the island during 1962 dredging to extend the island. The lagoon was again dredged in 1963–1964 and used to expand Johnston Island from to recontaminating additional portions of the island.
On October 15, 1962 the "Bluegill Double Prime" test also misfired. During the test, the rocket was destroyed at a height of 109,000 feet after it malfunctioned 90 seconds into the flight. U.S. Defense Department officials confirm that when the rocket was destroyed, it contributed to the radioactive pollution on the island.
In 1963, the U.S. Senate ratified the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which contained a provision known as "Safeguard C". Safeguard C was the basis for maintaining Johnston Atoll as a "ready to test" above-ground nuclear testing site should atmospheric nuclear testing ever be deemed to be necessary again. In 1993, Congress appropriated no funds for the Johnston Atoll "Safeguard C" mission, bringing it to an end.
Anti-satellite mission 1962–1975
Program 437 turned the PGM-17 Thor into an operational anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon system, a capability that was kept top secret even after it was deployed. The Program 437 mission was approved for development by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on November 20, 1962 and based at the Atoll. Program 437 used modified Thor missiles that had been returned from deployment in Great Britain and was the second deployed U.S. operational nuclear anti-satellite operation. Eighteen more suborbital Thor launches took place from Johnston Island during the 1964–1975 period in support of Program 437. In 1965–1966 four Program 437 Thors were launched with 'Alternate Payloads' for satellite inspection. This was evidently an elaboration of the system to allow visual verification of the target before destroying it. These flights may have been related to the late 1960s Program 922, a non-nuclear version of Thor with infrared homing and a high-explosive warhead. Thors were kept positioned and active near the two Johnston Island launch pads after 1964. However, partly because of the Vietnam War, in October 1970 the Department of Defense had transferred Program 437 to standby status as an economic measure. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks led to Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that prohibited 'interference with national means of verification', which meant that ASAT's were not allowed, by treaty, to attack Russian spy satellites. Thors were removed from Johnston Atoll and were stored in mothballed war-reserve condition at Vandenberg Air Force Base from 1970 until the anti-satellite mission of Johnston Island facilities was ceased on August 10, 1974, and the program was officially discontinued on April 1, 1975, when any possibility of restoring the ASAT program was finally terminated. Eighteen Thor launches in support of the Program 437 Alternate Payload (AP) mission took place from Johnston Atoll's Launch emplacements.
Baker–Nunn satellite tracking camera station
The Space Detection and Tracking System or SPADATS was operated by North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) along with the U.S. Air Force Spacetrack system, The Navy Space Surveillance System and Canadian Forces Air Defense Command Satellite Tracking Unit. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory also operated a dozen 3.5 ton Baker-Nunn Camera systems (none at Johnston) for cataloging of man-made satellites. The U.S. Air Force had ten Baker-Nunn camera stations around the world mostly from 1960 to 1977 with a phase-out beginning in 1964.
The Baker-Nunn space camera station was constructed on Sand Island and was functioning by 1965. USAF 18th Surveillance Squadron operated the Baker-Nunn camera at a station built along the causeway on Sand Island until 1975 when a contract to operate the four remaining Air Force stations was awarded to Bendix Field Engineering Corporation. In about 1977, the camera at Sand Island was moved to Daegu, South Korea. Baker-Nunn were rendered obsolete with the Initial Operational Capability of 3 GEODSS optical tracking sites at Daegu, Korea; Mount Haleakala, Maui and White Sands Missile Range. A fourth site was operational in 1985 at Diego Garcia and a proposed fifth site in Portugal was cancelled. The Daegu, Korea site was closed due to encroaching city lights. GEODSS tracked satellites at night, though the MIT Lincoln Laboratory test site, co-located with Site 1 at White Sands did track asteroids in daytime as proof of concept in the early 1980s.
Johnston Island Recovery Operations Center
Satellite and Missile Observation System Project (SAMOS-E) or "E-6" was a relatively short-lived series of United States visual reconnaissance satellites in the early 1960s. SAMOS was also known by the unclassified terms Program 101 and Program 201. The Air Force program was used as a cover for the initial development of the Central Intelligence Agency's Key Hole (including Corona and Gambit) reconnaissance satellites systems. Imaging was performed with film cameras and television surveillance from polar low Earth orbits with film canisters returning via capsule and parachute with mid-air retrieval. SAMOS was first launched in 1960, but not operational until 1963 with all of the missions being launched from Vandenberg AFB.
During the early months of the SAMOS program it was essential not only to hide the Corona and GAMBIT technical efforts under a screen of SAMOS activity, but also to make the orbital vehicle portions of the two systems resemble one another in outward appearance. Thus, some of the configuration details of SAMOS were decided less by engineering logic than by the need to camouflage GAMBIT and thus, in theory, a GAMBIT could be launched without alerting many people to its real nature.
Problems relative to tracking networks, communications, and recovery were resolved with the decision in late February 1961 to use Johnston Island as the film capsule descent and recovery zone for the program.
On July 10, 1961 work was initiated on four buildings of the Johnston Island Recovery Operations Center for the National Reconnaissance Office. Men from the Johnston Atoll facility would recover the parachuting film canister capsules with a radar equipped JC-130 aircraft by capturing them in the air with a specialized recovery apparatus.
The recovery center was also responsible for collecting the radioactive scientific data pods dropped from missiles following launch and nuclear detonation.
Biological warfare test site 1965–68
The atoll was subject to large-scale bioweapons testing over four years starting in 1965. The American strategic tests of bioweapons were as expensive and elaborate as the tests of the first hydrogen bombs at Eniwetok Atoll. They involved enough ships to have made the world's fifth-largest independent navy. One experiment involved a number of barges loaded with hundreds of rhesus monkeys. It is estimated that one jet with bioweapon spray "would probably be more efficient at causing human deaths than a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb."
In the lead up to biological warfare testing in the Pacific under Project 112 and Project SHAD, a new virus was discovered during the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program by teams from the Smithsonian's Division of Birds aboard a United States Army tugboat involved in the program. Initially, the name of that effort was to be called the Pacific Ornithological Observation Project but this was changed for obvious reasons. First isolated in 1964 the tick-borne virus was discovered in Ornithodoros capensis ticks, found in a nest of common noddy (Anous stolidus) at Sand Island, Johnston Atoll. It was designated Johnston Atoll Virus and is related to influenza.
In February, March, and April 1965 Johnston Atoll was used to launch biological attacks against U.S. Army and Navy vessels south-west of Johnston island in vulnerability, defense and decontamination tests conducted by the Deseret Test Center during Project SHAD under Project 112. Test DTC 64-4 (Deseret Test Center) was originally called "RED BEVA" (Biological EVAluation) though the name was later changed to "Shady Grove", likely for operational security reasons. The biological agents released during this test included Francisella tularensis (formerly called Pasteurella tularensis) (Agent UL), the causative agent of tularemia; Coxiella burnetii (Agent OU), causative agent of Q fever; and Bacillus globigii (Agent BG). During Project SHAD, Bacillus globigii was used to simulate biological warfare agents (such as anthrax), because it was then considered a contaminant with little health consequence to humans; however, it is now considered a human pathogen. Ships equipped with the E-2 multi-head disseminator and A-4C aircraft equipped with Aero 14B spray tanks released live pathogenic agents in nine aerial and four surface trials in phase B of the test series from February 12 to March 15, 1965 and in four aerial trials in phase D of the test series from March 22 to April 3, 1965.
According to Project SHAD veteran Jack Alderson who commanded the Army tugs, area three at Johnston Atoll was located at the most downwind part of the island and consisted of an collapsible Nissen hut to be used for weapons preparation and some communications.
Chemical weapon storage 1971–2001
In 1970, Congress redefined the island's military mission as the storage and destruction of chemical weapons. The United States Army leased on the Atoll to store chemical weapons held in Okinawa, Japan. Johnston Atoll became a chemical weapons storage site in 1971 holding about 6.6 percent of the U.S. military chemical weapon arsenal. The chemical weapons were brought from Okinawa under Operation Red Hat with the re-deployment of the 267th Chemical Company and consisted of rockets, mines, artillery projectiles, and bulk 1-ton containers filled with Sarin, Agent VX, vomiting agent, and blister agent such as mustard gas. Chemical weapons from West Germany and World War II era weapons from the Solomon Islands were also stored on the island after 1990. Chemical agents were stored in the high security Red Hat Storage Area (RHSA) which included hardened igloos in the weapon storage area, the Red Hat building (#850), two Red Hat hazardous waste warehouses (#851 and #852), an open storage area, and security entrances and guard towers.
Some of the other weapons stored at the site were shipped from U.S. stockpiles in West Germany in 1990. These shipments followed a 1986 agreement between the U.S. and West Germany to move the munitions. Merchant ships carrying the munitions left West Germany under Operation Golden Python and Operation Steel Box in October 1990 and arrived at Johnston Island November 6, 1990. Although the ships were unloaded within nine days, the unpacking and storing of munitions continued into 1991. The remainder of the chemical weapons was a small number of World War II era weapons shipped from the Solomon Islands.
Agent Orange storage 1972–1977
Agent Orange was brought to Johnston Atoll from South Vietnam and Gulfport, Mississippi in 1972 under Operation Pacer IVY and stored on the northwest corner of the island known as the Herbicide Orange Storage site but dubbed the "Agent Orange Yard". The Agent Orange was eventually destroyed during Operation Pacer HO on the Dutch incineration ship MT Vulcanus in the Summer of 1977. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that 1,800,000 gallons of Herbicide Orange were stored at Johnston Atoll and that an additional 480,000 gallons stored at Gulfport, Mississippi was brought to Johnston Atoll for destruction. Leaking barrels during the storage and spills during re-drumming operations contaminated both the storage area and the lagoon with herbicide residue and its toxic contaminant 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin.
Chemical weapon demilitarization mission 1990–2000
The Army's Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System (JACADS) was the first full-scale chemical weapons disposal facility. Built to incinerate chemical munitions on the island, planning started in 1981, construction began in 1985, and was completed five years later. Following completion of construction and facility characterization, JACADS began operational verification testing (OVT) in June 1990. From 1990 until 1993, the Army conducted four planned periods of Operational Verification Testing (OVT), required by Public Law 100–456. OVT was completed in March 1993, having demonstrated that the reverse assembly incineration technology was effective and that JACADS operations met all environmental parameters. The OVT process enabled the Army to gain critical insight into the factors that establish a safe and effective rate of destruction for all munitions and agent types. Transition to full-scale operations started in May 1993, but the facility did not begin full-scale operations until August 1993.
All of the chemical weapons once stored on Johnston Island were demilitarized and the agents incinerated at JACADS, with the process completed in year 2000, followed by the destruction of legacy hazardous waste material associated with chemical weapon storage and cleanup. JACADS was demolished by 2003 and the island was stripped of its remaining infrastructure and environmentally remediated.
Closure and remaining structures
In 2003, structures and facilities, including those used in JACADS, were removed, and the runway was marked closed. The last flight out for official personnel was June 15, 2004. After this date, the base was completely deserted, with the only structures left standing being the Joint Operations Center (JOC) building at the east end of the runway, chemical bunkers in the weapon storage area, and at least one Quonset hut.
Built in 1964, the JOC is a four-floor concrete and steel administration building for the island that has no windows and was built to withstand a category IV tropical cyclone as well as atmospheric nuclear tests. The building remains standing but was gutted entirely in 2004, during an asbestos abatement project. All doors of the JOC except one have been welded shut. The ground floor has a side building attached which served as a facility for decontamination that contained three long snaking corridors and 55 shower heads one could walk through during decontamination.
Rows of bunkers in the Red Hat Storage Area remain intact; however, an agreement was established between the U.S. Army and EPA Region IX on August 21, 2003, that the Munitions Demilitarization Building (MDB) at JACADS would be demolished and the bunkers in the RHSA used for disposal of construction rubble and debris. After placement of the debris inside the bunkers, they were secured and the entries blocked with a concrete block barrier (a.k.a. King Tut Block) to prevent access to the bunker interior.
Contamination and cleanup
Over the years, leaks of Agent Orange as well as chemical weapon leaks in the weapon storage area occurred where caustic chemicals such as sodium hydroxide were used to mitigate toxic agents during cleanup. Larger spills of nerve and mustard agent within the MCD at JACADS also took place. Small releases of chemical weapon components from JACADS were cited by the EPA. Multiple studies of the Johnston Atoll environment and ecology have been conducted and the atoll is likely the most studied island in the Pacific.
Studies at the atoll on the impact of PCB contamination in reef damselfish (Abudefduf sordidus) demonstrated that embryonic abnormalities could be used as a metric for comparing contaminated and uncontaminated areas. Some PCB contamination in the lagoon was traced to Coast Guard disposal practices of PCB-laden electrical transformers.
In 1962, plutonium pollution following three failed nuclear missile launches was heaviest near the destroyed launch emplacement, in the lagoon offshore of the launch pad, and near Sand Island. The contaminated launch site was stripped, the debris gathered and buried in the island's 1962 expansion. A comprehensive radiological survey was completed in 1980 to record transuranic contamination remaining from the 1962 THOR missile aborts. The Air Force also initiated research on methods to remove dioxin contamination from soil resulting from leakage of the stored herbicide Agent Orange. Since then, U.S. defense authorities have surveyed the island in a series of studies.
Contaminated structures were dismantled and isolated within the former THOR (Tactical Helicopter Offensive Response) Launch Emplacement No. 1 (LE-1) as a start for the cleanup program. About 45,000 tons of soil contaminated with radioactive isotopes was collected and placed into a fenced area covering on the north of the island. The area was known as the Radiological Control Area, and heavily contaminated with highly radioactive Plutonium. The Pluto Yard is on the site of the LE1 where the 1962 missile explosion occurred and also where a highly contaminated loading ramp was buried that was made for loading plutonium contaminated debris onto small boats that was dumped at sea. Remediation included a plutonium "mining" operation called the Johnston Atoll Plutonium Contaminated Soil Cleanup Project. The collected radioactive soil and other debris was buried in a landfill created within the former LE-1 area from June 2002 through November 11, 2002. Remediation at the Radiation Control Area included the construction of a 61-centimeter-thick cap of coral sealing the landfill. Permanent markers were placed at each corner of the landfill to identify the landfill area.
After closing
The atoll was placed up for auction via the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) in 2005 before it was withdrawn. The stripped Johnston Island was briefly offered for sale with several deed restrictions in 2005 as a "residence or vacation getaway," with potential usage for "eco-tourism" by the GSA's Office of Real Property Utilization and Disposal. The proposed sale included the unique postal zip code 96558, formerly assigned to the Armed Forces in the Pacific. The proposed sale did not include running water, electricity, or activation of the closed runway. The details of the offering were outlined on GSA's website and in a newsletter of the Center for Land Use Interpretation as unusual real estate listing # 6384, Johnston Island.
On August 22, 2006, Johnston Island was struck by Hurricane Ioke. The eastern eye-wall passed directly over the atoll, with winds exceeding . Twelve people were on the island when the hurricane struck, part of a crew sent to the island to deliver a USAF contractor who sampled groundwater contamination levels. All 12 survived and one wrote a first hand account of taking shelter from the storm in the JOC building.
On December 9, 2007, the United States Coast Guard swept the runway at Johnston Island of debris and used the runway in the removal and rescue of an ill Taiwanese fisherman to Oahu, Hawaii. The fisherman was transferred from the Taiwanese fishing vessel Sheng Yi Tsai No. 166 to the Coast Guard buoy tender Kukui on December 6, 2007. The fisherman was transported to the island, and then picked up by a Coast Guard HC-130 Hercules rescue plane from Kodiak, Alaska.
Since the base was closed, the atoll has been visited by many vessels crossing the Pacific, as the deserted atoll has a strong lure due to the activities once performed there. Visitors have blogged about stopping there during a trip, or have posted photos of their visits.
In 2010, a Fish and Wildlife survey team identified a swarm of Anoplolepis ants that had invaded the Johnston Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. The crazy ants threatened vital seabird colonies, and needed to be eradicated. The "Crazy Ant Strike Team" project was led by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who achieved a 99% reduction in ant numbers by 2013. The team camped in a bunker that was previously used as a fallout shelter and office. Full eradication of the species from the atoll was achieved in 2021.
Demographics
Johnston Atoll has never had any indigenous inhabitants, although during the late part of the 20th century, there were averages of about 300 American military personnel and 1,000 civilian contractors present at any given time. Today it is uninhabited except for a handful of workers with the Crazy Ant Strike Team project, who live on the island for six months at a time with little outside contact.
The primary means of transportation to this island was the airport, which had a paved military runway, or alternatively by ship via a pier and ship channel through the atoll's coral reef system. The islands were wired with 13 outgoing and 10 incoming commercial telephone lines, a 60-channel submarine cable, 22 DSN circuits by satellite, an Autodin with standard remote terminal, a digital telephone switch, the Military Affiliated Radio System (MARS station), a UHF/VHF air-ground radio, and a link to the Pacific Consolidated Telecommunications Network (PCTN) satellite. Amateur radio operators occasionally transmitted from the island, using the KH3 call-sign prefix. The United States Undersea Cable Corporation was awarded contracts to lay underwater cable in the Pacific. A cable known as "Wet Wash C" was laid in 1966 between Makua, Oahu, Hawaii and the Johnston Island Air Force Base. surveyed the route and laid of cable and 45 repeaters. These cables were manufactured by the Simplex Wire and Cable Company with the repeaters being supplied by Felten and Guilleaume. In 1993 a satellite communication ground station was added to augment the atoll's communications capability.
Johnston Atoll's economic activity was limited to providing services to American military and contractor personnel residing on the island. The island was regularly resupplied by ship or barge, and all foodstuffs and manufactured goods were imported. The base had six 2.5-megawatt electrical generators using diesel engines. The runway was also available to commercial airlines for emergency landings (a fairly common event), and for many years it was a regular stop on Continental Micronesia airline's "island hopper" service between Hawaii and the Marshall Islands.
There were no official license plates issued for use on Johnston Atoll. U.S. government vehicles were issued U.S. government license plates and private vehicles retained the plates from which they were registered. According to reputable license plate collectors, a number of Johnston Atoll license plates were created as souvenirs, and have even been sold online to collectors, but they were not officially issued.
Areas
Launch facilities
See also
List of Guano Island claims
References
External links
Video from 1923 USS Tanager Expedition Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Multi-Agency Education Project of the University of Hawaii
"Cleaning up Johnston Atoll" (2005), Plutonium contamination on the Island.
Johnston Island Memories Site – the personal website of an AFRTS serviceman stationed there in 1975 to 1976
Coast Guard Medevac from Johnston Island – photo from December 2007 medevac operation
JACADS – Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System – history of nuclear testing, and JACADS Sarin and VX nerve agent disposal
CyberSarge – Pictorial evidence of chemical weapons disposal
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Johnston Island National Wildlife Refuge – Contains additional information on wildlife and clean-up efforts
Mark in the Pacific (archive version) – website about the end of Johnston Atoll
Flickr: Laysan at Johnston Island – Photographs of stop-over on abandoned Johnston Atoll in 2012
Pacific Ocean atolls of the United States
United States Minor Outlying Islands
American nuclear test sites
Bird sanctuaries of the United States
Former populated places in Oceania
Geography of Micronesia
Islands of Oceania
Pacific islands claimed under the Guano Islands Act
National Wildlife Refuges in the United States insular areas
Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument
Protected areas established in 2009
Uninhabited Pacific islands of the United States
Important Bird Areas of United States Minor Outlying Islands
Important Bird Areas of Oceania
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15716 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography%20of%20Jordan | Geography of Jordan | Jordan is situated geographically in Southwest Asia, south of Syria, west of Iraq, northwest of Saudi Arabia, east of Palestine and the West Bank. The area is also referred to as the Middle or Near East. The territory of Jordan now covers about .
Between 1950 and the Six-Day War in 1967, although not widely recognized, Jordan claimed and administered an additional encompassing the West Bank; in 1988 and with continuing Israeli occupation, King Hussein relinquished Jordan's claim to the West Bank in favor of the Palestinians.
Jordan is landlocked except at its southern extremity, where nearly of shoreline along the Gulf of Aqaba provide access to the Red Sea.
Geographic coordinates:
Boundaries
Except for small sections of the borders with Israel and Syria, Jordan's international boundaries do not follow well-defined natural features of the terrain. The country's boundaries were established by various international agreements and with the exception of the border with Israel, none was in dispute in early 1989.
Jordan's boundaries with Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia do not have the special significance that the border with Israel does; these borders have not always hampered tribal nomads in their movements, yet for a few groups borders did separate them from traditional grazing areas and delimited by a series of agreements between the United Kingdom and the government of what eventually became Saudi Arabia) was first formally defined in the Hadda Agreement of 1925.
In 1965 Jordan and Saudi Arabia concluded an agreement that realigned and delimited the boundary. Jordan gained 19 kilometers of land on the Gulf of Aqaba and 6,000 square kilometers of territory in the interior, and 7,000 square kilometers of Jordanian-administered, landlocked territory was ceded to Saudi Arabia. The new boundary enabled Jordan to expand its port facilities and established a zone in which the two parties agreed to share petroleum revenues equally if oil were discovered. The agreement also protected the pasturage and watering rights of nomadic tribes inside the exchanged territories.
Topography
The country consists mainly of a plateau between and meters high, divided into ridges by valleys and gorges, and a few mountainous areas. West of the plateau, land descents form the East Bank of the Jordan Rift Valley. The valley is part of the north-south Great Rift Valley, and its successive depressions are Lake Tiberias (Sea of Galilee; its bottom is about ), Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea (its bottom is about ), Arabah, and the Gulf of Aqaba at the Red Sea. Jordan's western border follows the bottom of the rift. Although an earthquake-prone region, no severe shocks had been recorded for several centuries.
By far the greatest part of the East Bank is desert, displaying the land forms and other features associated with great aridity. Most of this land is part of the Syrian Desert and northern Arabian Desert. There are broad expanses of sand and dunes, particularly in the south and southeast, together with salt flats. Occasional jumbles of sandstone hills or low mountains support only meager and stunted vegetation that thrives for a short period after the scanty winter rains. These areas support little life and are the least populated regions of Jordan.
The drainage network is coarse and incised. In many areas the relief provides no eventual outlet to the sea, so that sedimentary deposits accumulate in basins where moisture evaporates or is absorbed in the ground. Toward the depression in the western part of the East Bank, the desert rises gradually into the Jordanian Highlands—a steppe country of high, deeply cut limestone plateaus with an average elevation of about 900 meters. Occasional summits in this region reach 1,200 meters in the northern part and exceed 1,700 meters in the southern part; the highest peak is Jabal Ramm at 1,754 meters (though the highest peak in all of Jordan is Jabal Umm al Dami at 1854 meters. It is located in a remote part of southern Jordan). These highlands are an area of long-settled villages.
The western edge of this plateau country forms an escarpment along the eastern side of the Jordan River-Dead Sea depression and its continuation south of the Dead Sea. Most of the wadis that provide drainage from the plateau country into the depression carry water only during the short season of winter rains. Sharply incised with deep, canyon-like walls, whether flowing or dry the wadis can be formidable obstacles to travel.
The Jordan River is short, but from its mountain headwaters (approximately 160 kilometers north of the river's mouth at the Dead Sea) the riverbed drops from an elevation of about 3,000 meters above sea level to more than 400 meters below sea level. Before reaching Jordanian territory the river forms the Sea of Galilee, the surface of which is 212 meters below sea level. The Jordan River's principal tributary is the Yarmouk River. Near the junction of the two rivers, the Yarmouk forms the boundary between Israel on the northwest, Syria on the northeast, and Jordan on the south. The Zarqa River, the second main tributary of the Jordan River, flows and empties entirely within the East Bank.
A 380-kilometer-long rift valley runs from the Yarmouk River in the north to Al Aqaba in the south. The northern part, from the Yarmouk River to the Dead Sea, is commonly known as the Jordan Valley. It is divided into eastern and western parts by the Jordan River. Bordered by a steep escarpment on both the eastern and the western side, the valley reaches a maximum width of twenty-two kilometers at some points. The valley is properly known as Al Ghawr or Al Ghor (the depression, or valley).
The Rift Valley on the southern side of the Dead Sea is known as the Southern Ghawr and the Wadi al Jayb (popularly known as the Wadi al Arabah). The Southern Ghawr runs from Wadi al Hammah, on the south side of the Dead Sea, to Ghawr Faya, about twenty-five kilometers south of the Dead Sea. Wadi al Jayb is 180 kilometers long, from the southern shore of the Dead Sea to Al Aqaba in the south. The valley floor varies in level. In the south, it reaches its lowest level at the Dead Sea (more than 400 meters below sea level), rising in the north to just above sea level. Evaporation from the sea is extreme due to year-round high temperatures. The water contains about 250 grams of dissolved salts per liter at the surface and reaches the saturation point at 110 meters.
The Dead Sea occupies the deepest depression on the land surface of the earth. The depth of the depression is accentuated by the surrounding mountains and highlands that rise to elevations of 800 to 1,200 meters above sea level. The sea's greatest depth is about 430 meters, and it thus reaches a point more than 825 meters below sea level. A drop in the level of the sea has caused the former Lisan Peninsula to become a land bridge dividing the sea into separate northern and southern basins.
Climate
The major characteristic of the climate is the contrast between a relatively rainy season from November to April and very dry weather for the rest of the year. With hot, dry, uniform summers and cool, variable winters during which practically all of the precipitation occurs, the country has a Mediterranean-style climate.
In general, the farther inland from the Mediterranean Sea a given part of the country lies, the greater are the seasonal contrasts in temperature and the less rainfall. Atmospheric pressures during the summer months are relatively uniform, whereas the winter months bring a succession of marked low pressure areas and accompanying cold fronts. These cyclonic disturbances generally move eastward from over the Mediterranean Sea several times a month and result in sporadic precipitation.
Most of the East Bank receives less than of rain a year and may be classified as a dry desert or steppe region. Where the ground rises to form the highlands east of the Jordan Valley, precipitation increases to around in the south and or more in the north. The Jordan Valley, lying in the lee of high ground on the West Bank, forms a narrow climatic zone that annually receives up to of rain in the northern reaches; rain dwindles to less than at the head of the Dead Sea.
The country's long summer reaches a peak during August. January is usually the coolest month. The fairly wide ranges of temperature during a twenty-four-hour period are greatest during the summer months and have a tendency to increase with higher elevation and distance from the Mediterranean seacoast. Daytime temperatures during the summer months frequently exceed and average about . In contrast, the winter months—November to April—bring moderately cool and sometimes cold weather, averaging about . Except in the rift depression, frost is fairly common during the winter, it may take the form of snow at the higher elevations of the north western highlands. Usually it snows a couple of times a year in western Amman.
For a month or so before and after the summer dry season, hot, dry air from the desert, drawn by low pressure, produces strong winds from the south or southeast that sometimes reach gale force. Known in the Middle East by various names, including the khamsin, this dry, sirocco-style wind is usually accompanied by great dust clouds. Its onset is heralded by a hazy sky, a falling barometer, and a drop in relative humidity to about 10 percent. Within a few hours there may be a to rise in temperature. These windstorms ordinarily last a day or so, cause much discomfort, and destroy crops by desiccating them.
The shamal, another wind of some significance, comes from the north or northwest, generally at intervals between June and September. Remarkably steady during daytime hours but becoming a breeze at night, the shamal may blow for as long as nine days out of ten and then repeat the process. It originates as a dry continental mass of polar air that is warmed as it passes over the Eurasian landmass. The dryness allows intense heating of the Earth's surface by the sun, resulting in high daytime temperatures that moderate after sunset.
Area and boundaries
Area:
total: 89,342 km²
land: 88,802 km²
water: 540 km²
Land boundaries:
total: 1,744 km
border countries:
Iraq 179 km, Israel 307 km, Saudi Arabia 731 km, Syria 379 km, West Bank 148 km
Coastline: 26 km
note:
Jordan also borders the Dead Sea, for
Maritime claims:
territorial sea:
Elevation extremes:
lowest point: Dead Sea −408 m
highest point: Jabal Umm ad Dami 1,854 m
Resources and land use
Natural resources: phosphates, potash, oil shale
Land use:
arable land:
2.41%
permanent crops:
0.97%
other:
96.62% (2012)
Irrigated land:
788.6 km² (2004)
Total renewable water resources:
0.94 km3 (2011)
Freshwater withdrawal (domestic/industrial/agricultural):
total:
0.94 km3/yr (31%/4%/65%)
per capita:
166 m3/yr (2005)
Environmental concerns
Droughts; occasional minor earthquakes in areas close to the Jordan Rift Valley
Environment – current issues:
limited natural fresh water resources and water stress; deforestation; overgrazing; soil erosion; desertification
Environment – international agreements:
party to:
Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Ozone Layer Protection, Wetlands
See also
Winston's Hiccup
Borders of Jordan
References | [
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15717 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics%20of%20Jordan | Demographics of Jordan | Jordan has a population of around 11 million inhabitants as of 2021. Jordanians () are the citizens of Jordan. Some 98% percent of Jordanians are Arabs, while the remaining 2% are other ethnic minorities. Around 2.9 million were non-citizens, a figure including refugees, legal and illegal immigrants. Jordan's annual population growth rate stood at 2.05% in 2017, with an average of three children per woman. There were 1,977,534 households in Jordan in 2015, with an average of 4.8 persons per household.
The official language is Arabic, while English is the second most widely spoken language by Jordanians. It is also widely used in commerce and government. In 2016, about 84% of Jordan's population live in urban towns and cities. Many Jordanians and people of Jordanian descent live across the world, mainly in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries, United States, Canada and Turkey.
In 2016, Jordan was named as the largest refugee hosting country per capita in the world, followed by Turkey, Pakistan and Lebanon. The kingdom of Jordan hosts refugees mainly from Palestine, Syria, Iraq and many other countries. There are also hundreds of thousands of workers from Egypt, Indonesia and South Asia, who work as domestic and construction workers.
Definition
The territory of Jordan can be defined by the history of its creation after the end of World War I, the League of Nations and redrawing of the borders of the Eastern Mediterranean littoral. The ensuing decisions, most notably the Sykes–Picot Agreement, which created the Mandatory Palestine. In September 1922, Transjordan was formally identified as a subdivision of the Mandate Palestine after the League of Nations approved the British Transjordan memorandum which stated that the Mandate east of the Jordan River would be excluded from all the provisions dealing with Jewish settlement west of the Jordan River.
Ethnic and religious groups
Arab
Arab Jordanians are either descended from families and clans who were living in the cities and towns in Transjordan prior to the 1948 war, most notably in the governorates of Jerash, Ajlun, Balqa, Irbid, Madaba, Al Karak, Aqaba, Amman and some other towns in the country, or from the Palestinian families who sought refuge in Jordan in different times in the 20th century, mostly during and after the wars of 1948 and 1967. Many Christians are natives especially in towns such as Fuhies, Madaba, Al Karak, Ajlun, or have Bedouin origins, and a significant number came in 1948 and 1967 mainly from Jerusalem, Jaffa, Lydda, Bethlehem, and other Palestinian cities. Along to some other Arab ethnicities, mostly from Syria and Iraq.
Druze
The Druze people are believed to constitute about 0.5% of the total population of Jordan, which is around 32,000. The Druze, who refer to themselves as al-Muwahhideen, or "believers in one God," are concentrated in the rural, mountainous areas west and north of Amman. Even though the faith originally developed out of Ismaili Islam, Druze do not identify as Muslims, and they do not accept the five pillars of Islam.
Bedouins Arabs
The other group of Jordanians is descended from Bedouins (of which, less than 1% live a nomadic lifestyle). Bedouin settlements are concentrated in the wasteland south and east of the country.
Armenians
There were an estimated 5,000 Armenians living within the country in 2009. An estimated 4,500 of these are members of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and predominantly speak the Western dialect of the Armenian language. This population makes up the majority of non-Arab Christians in the country.
Assyrians
There is an Assyrian refugee population in Jordan. Many Assyrians have arrived in Jordan as refugees since the invasion of Iraq, making up a large part of the Iraqi refugees.
Circassians
By the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman Authorities directed the Circassian immigrants to settle in Jordan. The Circassians are Sunni Muslims and are estimated to number 20,000 to 80,000 people.
Chechens
There are about 10,000 Chechens estimated to reside in Jordan.
Refugees
Jordan is a home to 2,175,491 registered Palestine refugees. Out of those 2,175,491 refugees, 634,182 have not been given Jordanian citizenship. Jordan also hosts around 1.4 million Syrian refugees who fled to the country due to the Syrian Civil War since 2011. About 31,163 Yemenis and 22,700 Libyan refugees live in Jordan as of January 2015. There are thousands of Lebanese refugees who came to Jordan when civil strife and war and the 2006 war broke out in their native country. Up to 1 million Iraqis came to Jordan following the Iraq War in 2003. In 2015, their number was 130,911. About 2,500 Iraqi Mandaean refugees have been resettled in Jordan.
Religion
Health and education
Jordan prides itself on its health services, some of the best in the region. Qualified medics, favourable investment climate and Jordan's stability have contributed to the success of this sector.
Jordan has a very advanced education system. The school education system comprises 2 years of pre-school education, 10 years of compulsory basic education, and two years of secondary academic or vocational education, after which the students sit for the General Certificate of Secondary Education Exam (Tawjihi). Scholars may attend either private or public schools.
Access to higher education is open to holders of the General Secondary Education Certificate, who can then choose between private Community Colleges, public Community Colleges or universities (public and private). The credit-hour system, which entitles students to select courses according to a study plan, is implemented at universities. The number of public universities has reached (10), besides (17) universities that are private, and (51) community colleges. Numbers of universities accompanied by significant increase in number of students enrolled to study in these universities, where the number of enrolled students in both public and private universities is estimated at nearly (236) thousand; (28) thousand out of the total are from Arab or foreign nationalities.
Source: UN World Population Prospects
Statistics
The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.
Total population
10,331,557 (According to the Population Clock as of September 30, 2021).
Gender ratio
at birth: 1.06 male(s)/female
0-14 years: 1.05 male(s)/female
15-24 years: 1.05 male(s)/female
25-54 years: 1 male(s)/female
55-64 years: 0.95 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 0.89 male(s)/female
total population: 1.02 male(s)/female (2016 est.)
Age structure
0-14 years: 34.68% (male 1,827,554/female 1,726,691)
15-24 years: 20.07% (male 1,103,042/female 953,704)
25-54 years: 37.36% (male 2,073,211/female 1,755,290)
55-64 years: 4.44% (male 236,435/female 218,469)
65 years and over: 3.45% (male 174,470/female 179,203) (2017 est.)
Structure of the population
Structure of the population (01.10.2004) (Census)
Structure of the population (31.12.2013) (Estimates) (Excluding foreigners, including registered Palestinian):
refugees. :
Median age
total: 22.5 years
male: 22.9 years
female: 22 years (2017 est.)
Population growth rate
2.05% (2017 est.)
Birth rate
23.9 births/1,000 population (2017 est.)
Births and deaths
Death rate
3.4 deaths/1,000 population (2017 est.)
Net migration rate
0 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2017 est.)
Urbanization
urban population: 84.1% of total population (2017)
rate of urbanization: 1.26% annual rate of change (2015-20 est.)
Maternal mortality rate
58 deaths/100,000 live births (2015 est.)
Life expectancy at birth
total population: 80.18 years
male: 78.82 years
female: 81.61 years (2012 est.)
total population: 74.8 years
male: 73.4 years
female: 76.3 years (2017 est.)
Total fertility rate
3.19 children born/woman (2017 est.)
Fertility Rate (The Demographic Health Survey)
Fertility Rate (TFR) (Wanted Fertility Rate) and CBR (Crude Birth Rate):
Fertility Rate (TFR) (Wanted Fertility Rate) by nationality
Health expenditures
7.5% of GDP (2014)
Physicians density
2.65 physicians/1,000 population (2014)
Hospital bed density
1.8 beds/1,000 population (2012)
Obesity - adult prevalence rate
35.5% (2016)
Children under the age of 5 years underweight
3% (2012)
Literacy rate
15–24 years (in 2015):
Total: 99.23%
Male: 99.11%
Female: 99.37%
15 years and older (in 2015):
Total: 98.01%
Male: 98.51%
Female: 97.49%
UN estimates
Public attitudes
One World Values Survey reported 51.4% of Jordanians responded that they would prefer not to have neighbors of a different race.
See also
Demographics of the Middle East
Bibliography
References | [
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1.0370217561721802,
0.5144770741462708,
0.7213050723075867,
-0.27002692222595215,
-0.6821491122245789,
-0.5956146121025085,
-0.4325699806213379,
-0.2744898200035095,
0.1969186067581... |
15718 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics%20of%20Jordan | Politics of Jordan | The politics of Jordan takes place in a framework of a parliamentary monarchy, whereby the Prime Minister of Jordan is head of government, and of a multi-party system. Jordan is a constitutional monarchy based on the constitution promulgated on January 8, 1952. The king exercises his power through the government he appoints which is responsible before the Parliament.
King Abdullah II of Jordan has been sovereign since the death of his father, King Hussein, in 1999. Bisher Al-Khasawneh has been Prime Minister since 7 October 2020.
Executive branch
|King
|Abdullah II of Jordan
|
|7 February 1999
|-
|Prime Minister
|Bisher Al-Khasawneh
|Independent
|7 October 2020
|}
The Constitution of Jordan vests executive authority in the king and in his cabinet. The king signs and executes or vetoes all laws. The king may also suspend or dissolve parliament, and shorten or lengthen the term of session. A veto by the king may be overridden by a two-thirds vote of both houses of parliament at his discretion, most recently in November 2009. The king appoints and may dismiss all judges by decree, approves amendments to the constitution after passing by both parliaments, declares war and acts as the supreme leader of the armed forces. Cabinet decisions, court judgments, and the national currency are issued in his name. The Cabinet, led by a prime minister, was formerly appointed by the king, but following the 2011 Jordanian protests, King Abdullah agreed to a prime minister selected by and responsible to the Chamber of Deputies on matters of general policy, including the composition of cabinet. A two-thirds vote of "no confidence" by the Chamber can force the cabinet to resign.
Legislative branch
Legislative power rests in the bicameral National Assembly. The National Assembly (Majlis al-Umma) has two chambers. The Chamber of Deputies (Majlis al-Nuwaab) has 130 members, elected for a four-year terms in single-seat constituencies with 15 seats reserved for women by a special electoral college, nine for Christians and three for Chechens/Circassians. While the Chamber of Deputies is elected by the people, its main legislative abilities are limited to approving, rejecting, or amending legislation with little power to initiate laws. The Assembly of Senators (Majlis al-Aayan) has 65 members appointed by the King for a four-year term. The Assembly of Senators is responsible to the Chamber of Deputies and can be removed by a "vote of no confidence".
Political factions or blocs in the Jordanian parliament change with each parliamentary election and typically involve one of the following affiliations; a democratic Marxist/Socialist faction, a mainstream liberal faction, a moderate-pragmatic faction, a mainstream conservative faction, and an extreme conservative faction (such as the Islamic Action Front).
The Jordanian Chamber of Deputies is known for brawls between its members, including acts of violence and the use of weapons. In September 2013 Representative Talal al-Sharif tried to shoot one of his colleagues with an assault rifle while at the parliamentary premises.
Judicial branch
The judiciary is completely independent from the other two branches of the government. The constitution provides for three categories of courts—civil (in this case meaning "regular"), religious, and special. Regular courts consist of both civil and criminal varieties at the first level—First Instance or Conciliation Courts, second level—Appelette or Appeals Courts, and the Cassation Court which is the highest judicial authority in the kingdom. There are two types of religious courts: Sharia courts which enforce the provisions of Islamic law and civil status, and tribunals of other religious communities officially recognized in Jordan.
Political conditions
King Hussein ruled Jordan from 1953 to 1999, surviving a number of challenges to his rule, drawing on the loyalty of his military, and serving as a symbol of unity and stability for both the Jordanians and Palestinian communities in Jordan. King Hussein ended martial law in 1989 and ended suspension on political parties that was initiated following the loss of the West Bank to Israel and in order to preserve the status quo in Jordan. In 1989 and 1993, Jordan held free and fair parliamentary elections. Controversial changes in the election law led Islamist parties to boycott the 1997, 2011 and 2013 elections.
King Abdullah II succeeded his father Hussein following the latter's death in February 1999. Abdullah moved quickly to reaffirm Jordan's peace treaty with Israel and its relations with the United States. Abdullah, during the first year in power, refocused the government's agenda on economic reform.
Jordan's continuing structural economic difficulties, burgeoning population, and more open political environment led to the emergence of a variety of political parties. Moving toward greater independence, Jordan's parliament has investigated corruption charges against several regime figures and has become the major forum in which differing political views, including those of political Islamists, are expressed.
On February 1, 2011, it was announced that King Abdullah had dismissed his government. This has been interpreted as a pre-emptive move in the context of the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution and unfolding events in nearby Egypt.
Decentralization
King Abdullah II and the Jordanian Government began the process of decentralization, with the Madaba governorate as the pilot project, on the regional level dividing the nation into three regions: North, Central, and South. The Greater Amman Municipality will be excluded from the plan but it will set up a similar decentralization process. Each region will have an elected council that will handle the political, social, legal, and economic affairs of its area. This decentralization process is part of Jordan's Democratization Program.
Corruption
Jordan ranked 47th out of 180 nations in the Corruption Perceptions Index. The Constitution of Jordan states that no member of Parliament can have any financial or business dealings with the government and no member of the royal family can be in the government. However, corruption remains a problem in Jordan despite progress. Corruption cases are examined by the Anti-Corruption Commission and then referred to the judiciary for legal action. Corruption in Jordan takes the form of nepotism, favouritism, and bribery.
2018 Protests
The 2018 Jordanian protests started as a general strike organized by more than 30 trade unions on 30 May 2018 after the government of Hani Mulki submitted a new tax law to Parliament. The bill followed IMF-backed measures to tackle Jordan's growing public debt.
The day following the strike on 31 May, the government raised fuel and electricity prices responding to an increase in international oil prices, which led to more public discontent. On 1 June King Abdullah intervened and ordered the freeze of the price hikes.
The protests continued for four days until Mulki submitted his resignation to the King on 4 June, and Omar Razzaz, his education minister, became Prime Minister. Protests only ceased after Razzaz announced his intention of withdrawing the new tax bill.
Administrative divisions
Administratively, Jordan is divided into twelve governorates (muhafazat, singular—muhafazah), each headed by a governor appointed by the king. They are the sole authorities for all government departments and development projects in their respective areas:
Ajlun
Aqaba
Balqa
Karak
Mafraq
Amman
Tafilah
Zarqa
Irbid
Jerash
Ma'an
Madaba
International organization participation
ABEDA, ACC, AFESD, AL, AMF, CAEU, CCC, CTBTO, EBRD, ESCWA, FAO, G-77, IAEA, IBRD, ICAO, ICC, ICC, ICFTU, ICRM, IDA, IDB, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, ILO, IMF, IMO, Intelsat, Interpol, IOC, IOM (observer), ISO (correspondent), ITU, NAM, OIC, OPCW, OSCE (partner), PCA, UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNIDO, UNMIBH, UNMIK, UNMOP, UNMOT, UNOMIG, UNRWA, UNTAET, UNWTO, UPU, WFTU, WHO, WIPO, WMO, WTO, WTrO
References
External links
Constitution of Jordan | [
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0.2425057... |
15719 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy%20of%20Jordan | Economy of Jordan | The economy of Jordan is classified as an emerging market economy. Jordan's GDP per capita rose by 351% in the 1970s, declined 30% in the 1980s, and rose 36% in the 1990s. After King Abdullah II's accession to the throne in 1999, liberal economic policies were introduced. Jordan's economy had been growing at an annual rate of 8% between 1999 and 2008. However, growth has slowed to 2% after the Arab Spring in 2011. The substantial increase of the population, coupled with slowed economic growth and rising public debt led to a worsening of poverty and unemployment in the country. As of 2019, Jordan has a GDP of US$44.4 billion, ranking it 89th worldwide.
Jordan has Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with the United States, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, the European Union, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Turkey and Syria. More FTA's are planned with Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, the GCC, Lebanon, and Pakistan. Jordan is a member of the Greater Arab Free Trade Agreement, the Euro-Mediterranean free trade area, the Agadir Agreement, and also enjoys advanced status with the EU.
Jordan's economic resource base centers on phosphates, potash, and their fertilizer derivatives; tourism; overseas remittances; and foreign aid. These are its principal sources of hard currency earnings. Lacking coal reserves, hydroelectric power, large tracts of forest or commercially viable oil deposits, Jordan relies on natural gas for 93% of its domestic energy needs. Jordan used to depend on Iraq for oil until the American-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Jordan also has a plethora of industrial zones producing goods in the textile, aerospace, defense, ICT, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic sectors. Jordan is an emerging knowledge economy.
The main obstacles to Jordan's economy are scarce water supplies, complete reliance on oil imports for energy, and regional instability. Just over 10% of its land is arable and the water supply is limited. Rainfall is low and highly variable, and much of Jordan's available ground water is not renewable.
In the last few years Jordan's economic growth has slowed, averaging around 2%. Jordan's total foreign debt in 2011 was $19 billion, representing 60% of its GDP. In 2016, the debt reached $35.1 billion representing 93.4% of its GDP. This substantial increase is attributed to effects of regional instability causing: decrease in tourist activity; decreased foreign investments; increased military expenditure; attacks on Egyptian pipeline supplying the Kingdom with gas; the collapse of trade with Iraq and Syria; expenses from hosting Syrian refugees and accumulated interests from loans. According to the World Bank, Syrian refugees have cost Jordan more than $2.5 billion a year, amounting to 6% of the GDP and 25% of the government's annual revenue. With the presence of Syrian refugees in Jordan, wage growth went considerably down as a result of competition for jobs between refugees and Jordan citizens. The downturn that began in 2011, continued to 2018. The country's top five contributing sectors to GDP, government services, finance, manufacturing, transport, and tourism and hospitality were badly impacted by the Syrian civil war. Foreign aid covers only a small part of these costs, 63% of the total costs are covered by Jordan. An austerity programme was adopted by the government which aims to reduce Jordan's debt-to-GDP ratio to 77% by 2021. The programme succeeded in preventing the debt from rising above 95% in 2018.
Currency
The Central Bank of Jordan commenced operations in 1964 and is the sole issuer of Jordanian currency, the Jordanian dinar, which is pegged to the US dollar. The following chart of trend of gross domestic product of Jordan at market prices by the International Monetary Fund with figures in millions of Jordanian dinars.
For purchasing power parity comparisons, the Jordanian dinar is exchanged per US dollar at 0.359.
Jordan's population is 6,342,948 and mean wages were $4.19 per man-hour in 2009.
Economic overview
Jordan is classified by the World Bank as an "upper middle income country." According to the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, Jordan has the third freest economy in the Middle East and North Africa, behind only Bahrain and Qatar, and the 32nd freest in the world. Jordan ranked as having the 35th best infrastructure in the world, according to the World Economic Forum's Index of Economic Competitiveness. The Kingdom scored higher than many of its peers in the Persian Gulf and Europe like Kuwait, Israel. and Ireland. The 2010 AOF Index of Globalization ranked Jordan as the most globalized country in the Middle East and North Africa region. Jordan's banking sector is classified as "highly developed" by the IMF along with the GCC economies and Lebanon.
The official currency in Jordan is the Jordanian dinar and divides into 100 qirsh (also called piastres) or 1000 fils. Since 23 October 1995, the dinar has been officially pegged to the IMF's special drawing rights (SDRs). In practice, it is fixed at 1 US$ = 0.709 dinar, which translates to approximately 1 dinar = 1.41044 dollars. The Central Bank buys US dollars at 0.708 dinar, and sell US dollars at 0.7125 dinar, Exchangers buys US dollars at 0.708 and sell US dollars at 0.709.
The Jordanian market is considered one of the most developed Arab market outside the Persian Gulf states. Jordan ranked 18th on the 2012 Global Retail Development Index which lists the 30 most attractive retail markets in the world. Jordan was ranked as the 19th most expensive country in the world to live in 2010 and the most expensive Arab country to live in.
Jordan has been a member of the World Trade Organization since 2000. In the 2009 Global Enabling Trade Report, Jordan ranked 4th in the Arab World behind the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar. The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States that went into effect in December 2001 would phase out duties on nearly all goods and services by 2010.
Remittances to Jordan
The flows of remittance to Jordan had experienced rapid growth rates, particularly during the end of the 1970s and 1980s, where Jordan had started exporting high skilled labour to the Persian Gulf States. The money that migrants send home, remittances, represents today an important source of external funding for many developing countries, including Jordan. According to the World Bank data on remittances, with about US$3000 million in 2010, Jordan ranks at 10th place among all developing countries. Jordan has ranked constantly among the top 20 remittances-recipient countries over the last decade. In addition, the Arab Monetary Fund (AMF) statistics in 2010 indicate that Jordan was the third biggest recipient of remittances among Arab countries after Egypt and Lebanon. The host countries that have absorbed most of the Jordanian expatriates are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab of Emirates (UAE), where the available recorded number of the Jordanian expatriates, working abroad, indicates that about 90% of these migrants are working in Persian Gulf countries.
The proportion of skilled workers in Jordan is among the highest in the region. Many of the world's major software and hardware IT companies are present in Jordan. The presence of such firms underlines Jordan's attractiveness as a stable base with high-calibre human resources from which to serve the wider region. According to a report published in January 2012 by the founder of venture capital firm Finaventures, Rachid Sefraoui, Amman is one of the top 10 best cities in the world to launch a tech start-up.
Jordan has high unemployment rates, 11.9% in the fourth quarter of 2010 but some estimate it to be as high as a quarter of the working-age population. An estimated 13.3% of citizens live under the poverty line. Since the mid-1970s, migrants' remittances are Jordan's most important source of foreign exchange, and a decisive factor in the country's economic development and the rising standard of living of the population.
Agriculture in Jordan constituted almost 40% of GNP in the early 1950s; on the eve of the June 1967 War, it was 17%. By the mid-1980s, agriculture's share of GNP in Jordan was only about 6%.
Jordan hosts SOFEX, the world's fastest growing and region's only special operations and homeland security exhibition and conference. Jordan is a regional and international provider of advanced military goods and services. The KADDB Industrial Park, specialized in defense manufacturing, was opened in September 2009 in Mafraq. By 2015, the park is expected to provide around 15,000 job opportunities whereas the investment volume is expected to reach JD500 million. A report by Strategic Foresight Group has calculated the opportunity cost of conflict for the Middle East from 1991 to 2010 at $12 trillion. Jordan's share in this is almost $84 billion.
Jordan has a 138% mobile phone penetration rate and a 63% internet penetration rate. 41.6% of all mobile phones in Jordan are smartphones, compared with 40% in the United States and 26% in the United Kingdom. 97% of Jordanian households own at least one television set while 90% have satellite reception.
Furthermore, 61% of Jordanian households own at least one personal computer or laptop.
According to an investment survey, Jordan ranked as the 9th best outsourcing destination worldwide. Amman is one of the top 10 cities in the world to launch a tech start-up in 2012 and is becoming referred to as the "Silicon Valley of the Middle East".
Jordan has hosted the World Economic Forum on the Middle East and North Africa six times and plans to hold it again at the Dead Sea for the seventh time in 2013. Amman also hosts the Mercedes Benz Fashion Week semiannually and is the only city in the region to hold such a prestigious event that is usually held by the likes of New York, Paris, and Milan.
Standard of living
Jordan is one of the most liberal countries in the Middle East allowing a debate to consider introducing a secular government. In the 2010 Human Development Index, Jordan was placed in the "high human development" bracket and came 7th among Arab countries, after the Persian Gulf states and Lebanon. The 2010 Quality of Life Index prepared by International Living magazine ranked Jordan second in the MENA with 55.0 points after Palestine.
Decades of political stability and security and strict law enforcement make Jordan one of the top 10 countries worldwide in security. In the 2010 Newsweek "World's Best Countries" list, Jordan ranked 53rd worldwide, and 3rd among Arab countries after Kuwait and the UAE. Jordan is also among the top ten countries whose citizens feel safest walking the streets at night.
As of 2011, 63% of working Jordanians are insured with the Social Security Corporation, as well as 120,000 foreigners, with plans to include the rest of Jordanian workers both inside and outside the kingdom as well as students, housewives, business owners, and the unemployed. Only 1.6% of Jordanians make less than $2 a day, one of the lowest in the developing world according to the Human Poverty Index.
In the 2010 Gallup Global Wellbeing Survey, 30% of Jordanians described their financial situation as "thriving", surpassed most of the Arab countries with the exception of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In 2008, the Jordanian government launched the "Decent Housing for a Decent Living" project aimed at building 120,000 affordable housing units within the next 5 years, plus an additional 100,000 housing units if the need arises.
Main indicators
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2017.
Industries
Agriculture, forestry, and fishing
Despite increases in production, the agriculture sector's share of the economy has declined steadily to just 2.4 percent of gross domestic product by 2004. About 4 percent of Jordan's labor force worked in the agricultural sector in 2002. The most profitable segment of Jordan's agriculture is fruit and vegetable production (including tomatoes, cucumbers, citrus fruit, and bananas) in the Jordan Valley. The rest of crop production, especially cereal production, remains volatile because of the lack of consistent rainfall. Fishing and forestry are negligible in terms of the overall domestic economy. The fishing industry is evenly divided between live capture and aquaculture; the live weight catch totaled just over 1,000 metric tons in 2002. The forestry industry is even smaller in economic terms; approximately 240,000 total cubic meters of roundwood were removed in 2002, the vast majority for fuelwood.
Mining and minerals
Potash and phosphates are among the country's main economic exports. In 2003 approximately 2 million tons of potash salt production translated into US$192 million in export earnings, making it the second most lucrative exported good. Potash production totaled 1.9 million tons in 2004 and 1.8 million tons in 2005. In 2004 approximately 6.75 million tons of phosphate rock production generated US$135 million in export earnings, placing it fourth on Jordan's principal export list. With production totaling 6.4 million tons in 2005, Jordan was the world's third largest producer of raw phosphates. In addition to these two major minerals, smaller quantities of unrefined salt, copper ore, gypsum, manganese ore, and the mineral precursors to the production of ceramics (glass sand, clays, and feldspar) are also mined.
Industry and manufacturing
The industrial sector, which includes mining, manufacturing, construction, and power, accounted for approximately 26 percent of gross domestic product in 2004 (including manufacturing, 16.2 percent; construction, 4.6 percent; and mining, 3.1 percent). More than 21 percent of the country's labor force was reported to be employed in this sector in 2002. The main industrial products are potash, phosphates, pharmaceuticals, cement, clothes, and fertilizers. The most promising segment of this sector is construction. In the past several years, demand has increased rapidly for housing and offices of foreign enterprises based in Jordan to better access the Iraqi market. The manufacturing sector has grown as well (to nearly 20 percent of GDP by 2005), in large part as a result of the United States–Jordan Free Trade Agreement (ratified in 2001 by the U.S. Senate); the agreement has led to the establishment of approximately 13 Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZs) throughout the country. The QIZs, which provide duty-free access to the U.S. market, produce mostly light industrial products, especially ready-made garments. By 2004 the QIZs accounted for nearly US$1.1 billion in exports according to the Jordanian government.
Jordan's free trade agreement (FTA) with the US – the first in the Arab world – has already made the US one of Jordan's most significant markets. By 2010, it would have barrier-free export access in almost all sectors. A number of trade agreements with countries in the Middle Eastern and North African regions and beyond should also reap increasing benefits, not in the least the Agadir Agreement, which is seen as a precursor to an FTA with the EU. Jordan also recently signed an FTA with Canada. Furthermore, Jordan's plethora of industrial zones offering tax incentives, low utility costs and improved infrastructure links are helping incubate new developments. The relatively high skills level is also a key factor in promoting investment and stimulating the economy, particularly in value-added sectors. Despite the fact that Jordan has few natural resources it does benefit from abundant reserves of potash and phosphates, which are widely used in the production of fertilisers. Exports by these industries are expected to have a combined worth of $1bn in 2008. Other important industries include pharmaceuticals, which exported around $435m in 2006 and $260m in the first half of 2008 alone, as well as textiles, which were worth $1.19bn in 2007. Although the value of Jordan's industrial sector is high, the kingdom faces a number of challenges. Because the country is dependent on importing raw materials, it is vulnerable to price volatility. Shortages in water and power also make consistent development difficult. Despite these challenges, Jordan's economic openness and long-standing fertiliser and pharmaceutical industries should continue to provide a solid source of foreign currency.
Jordan has a plethora of industrial zones and special economic zones aimed at increasing exports and making Jordan an industrial giant. The Mafraq SEZ is focused on industry and logistics hoping to become the regional logistics hub with air, road, and rail links to neighboring countries and eventually Europe and the Persian Gulf. The Ma'an SEZ is primarily industrial focusing on satisfying domestic demand and reducing reliance on imports. With a national rail system under construction, Jordan expects trade to grow significantly and Jordan will mostly become the trade hub of the Levant and even the Middle East region as a whole due to its geography and natural resources.
Telecoms and IT
Telecommunications is a billion-dollar industry with estimates showing that core markets of fixed-line, mobile and data service generate annual revenue of around JD836.5m ($1.18bn) per year, which is equivalent to 13.5% of GDP. Jordan's IT sector is the most developed and competitive in the region due to the 2001 telecom liberalization. Market share of the mobile sector, the most competitive telecoms market, is currently fairly evenly divided between the three operators, with Zain, owned by MTC Kuwait, maintaining the largest share (39%), followed by France Telecom's brand Orange (36%) and Umniah (25%), which is 96% owned by Bahrain's Batelco. End of year figures for 2007 show that the market trend is towards greater parity, with Zain's share falling in the space of a year from 47% in 2006 and the other two operators picking up subscribers. The increased competition has led to pricing that is more favourable to consumers. Mobile penetration is currently around 80%.
Ambitious subsequent national strategies were formulated already since Y 2000 as a private sector initiative directly led by his majesty the king of Jordan. Information technology association in Jordan (int@j ) was established to kick off a private sector process that would focus on preparing Jordan for the new economy through IT and shall reflect the national objectives towards automation and modernization in co-operation with the ministry of information technology in Jordan the (MOICT). The latest strategy will take the sector through to 2011, aims to bring Jordan to precise objectives. The ICT sector currently accounts for over a 14% (indirect) of the kingdom's GDP. This figure includes foreign investment and total domestic revenue from the sector. Employment growth in the sector was progressive and reached up to 60.000 (indirect ) by 2008. The government is working to address employment issues and education related to sector by developing ICT training and opportunities to increase the overall penetration of ICT in Jordanian society. The policy outlines a number of objectives for the country to reach within the next three years, including almost doubling the size of the sector to $3bn, and pushing internet user penetration up to 50%.
The early founder of Int@j and its first chairman of the board is Karim Kawar and early activists who drove the national strategic objectives and helped formulate an action plan through the developing pillars were Marwan Juma Jordan's minister of ICT, Doha Abdelkhaleq on labour and education. Humam Mufti on advocacy and Nashat Masri on Capital and finance amongst others.
Such an infrastructure made Jordan a suitable location for IT startups that operate in the fields of web development, mobile application development, online services, and investment in IT businesses.
The IT industry in Jordan in the year 2000 and beyond got a very big boost after the Gulf War of 1991. This boost came from a large influx of immigrants from the Gulf countries to Jordan, mostly from Jordanian expatriates from Kuwait, totaling few hundred thousands. This large wave impacted Jordan in many ways, and one of them was on its IT industry.
Energy
Energy remains perhaps the biggest challenge for continued growth for Jordan's economy. Spurred by the surge in the price of oil to more than $145 a barrel at its peak, the Jordanian government has responded with an ambitious plan for the sector. The country's lack of domestic resources is being addressed via a $14bn investment programme in the sector. The programme aims to reduce reliance on imported products from the current level of 96%, with renewables meeting 10% of energy demand by 2020 and nuclear energy meeting 60% of energy needs by 2035. The government also announced in 2007 that it would scale back subsidies in several areas, including energy, where there have historically been regressive subsidies for fuel and electricity. In another new step, the government is opening up the sector to competition, and intends to offer all the planned new energy projects to international tender.
Unlike most of its neighbors, Jordan has no significant petroleum resources of its own and is heavily dependent on oil imports to fulfill its domestic energy needs. In 2002 proved oil reserves totaled only . Jordan produced only in 2004 but consumed an estimated . According to U.S. government figures, oil imports had reached about in 2004. The Iraq invasion of 2003 disrupted Jordan's primary oil supply route from its eastern neighbor, which under Saddam Hussein had provided the kingdom with highly discounted crude oil via overland truck routes. Since late 2003, an alternative supply route by tanker through the Al Aqabah port has been established; Saudi Arabia is now Jordan's primary source of imported oil; Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are secondary sources. Although not so heavily discounted as Iraqi crude oil, supplies from Saudi Arabia and the UAE are subsidized to some extent.
In the face of continued high oil costs, interest has increased in the possibility of exploiting Jordan's vast oil shale resources, which are estimated to total approximately 40 billion tons, 4 billion tons of which are believed to be recoverable. Jordan's oil shale resources could produce of oil, enabling production of about . The oil shale in Jordan has the fourth largest in the world which currently, there are several companies who are negotiating with the Jordanian government about exploiting the oil shale like Royal Dutch Shell, Petrobras and Eesti Energia.
Natural gas is increasingly being used to fulfill the country's domestic energy needs, especially with regard to electricity generation. Jordan was estimated to have only modest natural gas reserves (about 6 billion cubic meters in 2002), but new estimates suggest a much higher total. In 2003 the country produced and consumed an estimated 390 million cubic meters of natural gas. The primary source is located in the eastern portion of the country at the Risha gas field. Until the early 2010s, the country imported the bulk of its natural gas via the Arab Gas Pipeline that stretches from the Al Arish terminal in Egypt underwater to Al Aqabah and then to northern Jordan, where it links to two major power stations. This Egypt–Jordan pipeline supplied Jordan with approximately 1 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year. Gas supplies from Egypt were halted in 2013 due to insurgent activities in the Sinai and domestic gas shortages in Egypt. In light of this, a liquified natural gas terminal was built in the Port of Aqaba to facilitate gas imports. In 2017, a low-capacity gas pipeline from Israel was completed which supplies the Arab Potash factories near the Dead Sea. As of 2018, a large capacity pipeline from Israel is under construction in northern Jordan which is expected to begin operating by 2020 and will supply the kingdom with 3 BCM of gas per year, thereby satisfying most of Jordan's natural gas consumption needs.
The state-owned National Electric Power Company (NEPCO) produces most of Jordan's electricity (94%). Since mid-2000, privatization efforts have been undertaken to increase independent power generation facilities; a Belgian firm was set to begin operations at a new power plant near Amman with an estimated capacity of 450 megawatts. Power plants at Az Zarqa (400 megawatts) and Al Aqabah (650 MW) are Jordan's other primary electricity providers. As a whole, the country consumed nearly 8 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2003 while producing only 7.5 billion kWh of electricity. Electricity production in 2004 rose to 8.7 billion kWh, but production must continue to increase in order to meet demand, which the government estimates would continue to grow by about 5% per year. About 99 percent of the population is reported to have access to electricity.
Transport
The transportation sector on average contributes some 10% to Jordan's GDP, with transportation and communications accounting for $2.14bn in 2007. Well aware of the sector's importance to the country's service and industry-oriented economy, in 2008 the government formulated a new national transport strategy with the aim to improve, modernise and further privatise the sector. With no imminent solution to the ongoing security crisis in Iraq in sight, prospects for the Jordanian transport sector as a whole look bright. The country will arguably remain one of the major transit points for both goods and people destined for Iraq, while the number of tourists visiting Jordan is set to continue to increase. The main events to follow in the near future are the relocation of Aqaba's main port, a national railway system, and the construction of a new terminal at QAIA. Volatility in fuel prices is almost certainly going to have negative effects on operational costs and as such may hamper the sector's average annual growth of around 6%. However, uncertain fuel prices also offer a great deal of incentive to boost private investments in alternative modes of transport such as public buses and improved trains.
Media and Advertising
Although the state remains a major influence, Jordan's media sector has seen significant privatisation and liberalisation efforts in recent years. Based on official rack rates, research firm Ipsos estimated that the advertisement sector spent some $280m towards publicity in Jordan's media, 80% of which was spent on newspapers, followed by TV, radio and magazines. The biggest event of 2007 was the cancelled launch of ATV, the kingdom's first private broadcaster. As a result, the state-owned Jordan TV (JTV) remains the country's sole broadcaster. In recent years, Jordan has also seen a spectacular rise in the number of blogs, websites and news portals as sources of news information. The increasing diversification of Jordan's media is a good sign and should boost advertising revenues and private initiatives.
Recording growth of 30%, 2007 turned out to be yet another outstanding year for Jordan's advertising industry. Following nearly a decade of double-digit growth, however, most publicity specialists expect to see a relative slowdown in 2008. Unlike 2007, no major campaigns were planned for the first part of 2008. Additionally, the Jordanian advertising had some catching up to do with the rest of the region in terms of average expenditure per capita. As the sector matures, it is only normal for growth figures to gradually decrease. Since 2000 total ad spend increased from $77m to $280m in 2007, an increase of 260%. The Jordanian telecoms sector was the biggest ad spender in 2007, accounting for around 20% of the market, followed by the banking and finance sector (12%), services industry (11%), real estate (8%) and the automotive sector (5%). In the next year, particularly if there is a downturn, it would become increasingly important for the sector to develop good vocational training and to begin to take advantage of new media markets.
Services
Services accounted for more than 70 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2004. The sector employed nearly 75 percent of the labor force in 2002.
The banking sector is widely regarded as advanced in both regional and international terms. In 2007, total profits of the 15 listed banks rose 14.89% to JD640m ($909m). Jordan's strong growth of 6% in 2007 was reflected in a 20.57% expansion in net credit to JD17.9bn ($25.4bn) by the end of the year. The most improvement was in trade, construction and industry. Many banks suffered from the sharp correction in the Amman Stock Market in 2006, encouraging them to focus on core banking business in 2007, and this was reflected in a 16.65% rise in net interest and commission income to JD1.32bn ($1.87bn). The stock market also picked up in 2007 and total portfolio income losses decreased. Although Jordan's banking sector is small by global standards, it has attracted strong interest from regional investors in Lebanon and the GCC. New regulations introduced by the CBJ, in addition to political stability, have helped to create a favourable investment environment. Its conservative policies helped Jordan avoid the global financial crisis of 2009, Jordanian banks was one of the only countries that posted a profit in 2009.
Contributing an estimated JD477.5m ($678.05m), or 4.25% of Jordan's GDP, according to figures from the Central Bank, the construction sector performed strongly in 2007. The Great Amman Municipality (GAM) completed its master plan for the capital, which is expected to grow from 700 km2 today to 1700 km2 by 2025. Amman is changing from a predominantly horizontal to a largely vertical city due to various clusters of high-rises. Significant developments outside Amman include the rapid residential build-up of Zarqa, the transformation of Aqaba into a commercial and tourist centre, and the construction of a series of high-end hotels and tourist resorts along the Dead Sea. A new airport terminal, Amman ring road and a light rail between the capital and Zarqa are being constructed.
Despite recording a relative slowdown compared to the expansion of recent years, Jordan's construction and real estate market continued to grow in 2007. Trading totaled JD5.6bn ($8bn), up from JD5.2bn ($7.4bn) in 2006, according to Jordan's Land and Survey Department. Although the years of astounding growth—some 75% in 2004 and 48% in 2005—seem to have passed, the future looks bright for real estate, as demand continues to outstrip supply, while Jordan remains a very attractive investment destination for foreign businesses, second-home buyers and Jordanians working abroad. With Jordan's continuing sharp population growth, as well as its strategic location at the heart of the Middle East, the kingdom's main market drivers indicate a bright future for years to come. Although a number of class-A office space developments are currently under construction, it would take a few years to close the gap between demand and supply. The Amman retail market may become more saturated in the short term. Consequently, developers may turn to other cities to build supermarkets and malls.
Jordan's insurance market, with 29 companies operating in a country of just 5.7 million people, is saturated, despite regulatory encouragements for mergers and acquisitions. In terms of market share based on premiums, motor coverage accounts for 42.4%, medical insurance 18.6%, fire and property damage 17%, life 9.8%, marine and transport 7.9% and other insurance the remaining 4.3%. The insurance sector made up 2.52% of GDP in 2006, up from 2.43% in 2005. Current plans call for increasing the sector's GDP contribution to 7% in the short term and 10% in the long term. The sector holds great potential but remains underdeveloped. Region-wide price increases and a lack of consumer understanding of products are two major challenges. In addition, cultural considerations, including religion, make improving market penetration difficult. The cost of living has also risen, and the IMF forecasts that the inflation rate would reach 9% in 2008. Salaries have remained unchanged, however, leaving consumers with less disposable income. Other than mandatory motor coverage, insurance products are considered a luxury by average Jordanians, who must often prioritise spending. There would likely only be a few changes to the market in the coming year. Members of the sector would like to see greater coordination among the regulators and those working for the kingdom's legal system in order to improve insurance laws.
Tourism
The state of the tourism sector is widely regarded as below potential, especially given the country's rich history, ancient ruins, Mediterranean climate, and diverse geography. Despite personal appeals by the king and an increasingly sophisticated marketing campaign, the industry is still adversely affected by the political instability of the region. More than 5 million visitors entered Jordan in 2004, generating US$1.3 billion in earnings. Earnings from tourism rose to US$1.4 billion in 2005. The fact that the bulk of Jordan's tourist trade emanates from elsewhere in the Middle East should contribute to the industry's growth potential in the years ahead, as Jordan is relatively stable, open, and safe in comparison to many of its neighbors. The tourism sector remains an important element of the Jordanian economy, directly employing some 30,000 Jordanians and contributing 10% to the kingdom's GDP. Despite a decline in Arab and Gulf visitors, 2007 marked a year of steady growth for the tourism sector. Revenues jumped 13% to nearly $2.11bn during the first 11 months, up from $1.86bn for the same period in 2006. The sector is overseen by the government's National Tourism Strategy (NTS), which was established in 2004 to take the industry through 2010. NTS aimed to double tourism revenues during the period and to increase tourism-related jobs to 91,719. The first goal has already been met but the second one might be more of a challenge: between 2004 and 2007 the total number of people employed in the sector rose from 23,544 to 35,484. This is impressive growth, but less than half the 90,000-or-more goal. NTS hopes to place Jordan as a boutique destination for high-end tourists. The strategy identifies seven priorities or niche markets: cultural heritage (archaeology); religion; ecotourism; health and wellness; adventure; meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions (MICE); and cruises. The Jordan Tourism Board's (JTB) marketing budget has increased in the past year from JD6m ($8.52m) to JD11.5m ($16.3m). These are positive times for tourism in Jordan, with steady growth and major projects in the pipeline. The sector has to make improvements in infrastructure and marketing, but overall the industry has been improving for the past several years.
External trade
Since 1995, economic growth has been low. Real GDP has grown at only about 1.5% annually, while the official unemployment has hovered at 14% (unofficial estimates are double this number). The budget deficit and public debt have remained high and continue to widen, yet during this period inflation has remained low due mainly to stable monetary policy and the continued peg to the United States Dollar. Exports of manufactured goods have risen at an annual rate of 9%. Monetary stability has been reinforced, even when tensions were renewed in the region during 1998, and during the illness and ultimate death of King Hussein in 1999.
Expectations of increased trade and tourism as a consequence of Jordan's peace treaty with Israel have been disappointing. Security-related restrictions to trade with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have led to a substantial decline in Jordan's exports there. Following his ascension, King Abdullah improved relations with Arabic states of the Persian Gulf and Syria, but this brought few real economic benefits. Most recently the Jordanians have focused on WTO membership and a Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. as means to encourage export-led growth.
Investment
The stock market capitalisation of listed companies in Jordan was valued at $37.639 billion in 2005 by the World Bank.
Salaries
According to the 2015 Middle East and North Africa Salary Survey conducted by Bayt.com, Respondents from GCC (49%) seem somewhat happier with the raise they received in 2014, as compared to respondents from Levant (42%):
Aqaba Special Economic Zone
The population of Aqaba is only 100,000 people and is set to double over the next 10 years. The town benefits from some natural advantages. Located at the southern tip of the country, between Saudi Arabia and Israel on the shores of the Red Sea, the city is close to the Suez Canal, with easy access to key trade centres in both the Middle East and Africa. Aqaba is also the kingdom's only deep-water port town, taking up most of Jordan's scant of coastline. The Aqaba Special Economic Zone (ASEZ) has been responsible for most of this development since it opened in 2001.
It covers 375 km2 and offers tax and tariff incentives, as well as full repatriation rights and more flexible operating regulations. There is a 5% flat tax on most economic activities, no tariffs on imported goods, no currency restrictions and no property taxes for corporate land. Additionally – and somewhat controversially, given Jordan's past issues with unemployment – companies based in ASEZ are allowed to employ up to 70% foreign workers in their operations. Jordan's investment profile has been growing nationally, but according to the Jordan Investment Board (JIB), the ASEZ has exceeded investment targets by 33%. By 2006 it had already brought in around $8bn in investment, some $2bn more than the original target of $6bn by 2020. ASEZ expects to attract a further $12bn spread across a number of sectors, including tourism, finance and industry. The Development Law of 2008 set in place a universal framework for special development areas based on the Aqaba model.
See also
Jordan Investment Board
MENA ICT Forum
References
Notes
Bibliography
Brand, Laurie. Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations: The Political Economy of Alliance Making. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Country Profile: Jordan 1995-96. London: The Economist Intelligence Unit, 1995.
International Monetary Fund Jordan Page
Jeffreys, Andrew ed. Emerging Jordan 2003. London: The Oxford Business Group, 2002.
Maciejewski, Edouard and Ahsan Mansur eds. Jordan: Strategy for Adjustment and Growth. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1996.
Piro, Timothy. The Political Economy of Market Reform in Jordan. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998.
Prados, Alfred and Jeremy Sharp. Congressional Research Service. Report for Congress. Jordan: U.S. Relations and Bilateral Issues. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2006.
Robins, Philip. Jordan to 1990: Coping with Change. London: The Economist Intelligence Unit, 1986.
External links
Economy of Jordan extracted from the CIA Factbook & Worldbank data
ICT Association of Jordan - int@j
Economy of the Arab League
Jordan | [
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15720 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications%20in%20Jordan | Telecommunications in Jordan | Jordan has a highly developed communications infrastructure. Jordan's telecom infrastructure is growing at a very rapid pace and continually being updated and expanded. Communications in Jordan occur across many media, including telephone, radio, television, and internet.
Telephone
50% of households have at least one main line telephone. 103% of the population has a cell phone; 15% have more than one.
Telephones - main lines in use: 622,600 ()
Telephones - mobile cellular: 6,250,000 ()
Digital Radio Trunking:100,000 (Unofficial, Nov'07)In mid 2004, XPress Telecom was launched as the country's digital radio trunking operator.
Telephone system: The service has improved recently with the increased use of digital switching equipment, but better access to the telephone system is needed in some rural areas and easier access to pay telephones is needed by the urban public.
domestic: Microwave radio relay transmission and coaxial and fiber-optic cable are employed on trunk lines; considerable use is made of mobile cellular systems; Internet service is available.
international: satellite earth stations - 3 Intelsat, 1 Arabsat, and 29 land and maritime Inmarsat terminals; fiber-optic cable to Saudi Arabia and microwave radio relay link with Egypt and Syria; connection to international submarine cable FLAG (Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe); participant in MEDARABTEL; international links total about 4,000.
Radio
Radios: 1.66 million ()
Media and Communications Providers
Seagulls - www.seagullscommunications.com
FM Stations
Television
Television broadcast stations: 20 (plus 96 repeaters) ()
Televisions: 500,000 ()
PCs
40% of Jordanian households have a PC. This is expected to double in the coming years when the government reduces the sales tax on PCs and internet service in an effort to make Jordan the high-tech capital of the Middle East. The Jordanian Government is also providing every university student with a laptop in partnership with the private sector. All Jordan's schools are connected with internet service and the Jordanian Government is heavily purchasing computers and smart technology to be equipped in Jordan's classrooms.
Internet
As of 2013, Internet penetration in Jordan was 63%. It was 50.5 per cent by the end of 2011. Internet usage more than doubled from 2007 to 2009 with the rapid growth expected to continue. Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) figures indicate that Internet penetration stood at 29 per cent by the end of 2009 and 38 per cent by the end of 2010.
The Jordanian government has announced that the sales tax on computers and internet connection would be removed in order to further stimulate the ICT industry in Jordan. King Abdullah II told the BBC in 2004 that he hoped to make his country the tech hub of the Middle East. Jordan has more internet start up companies than any other country in the Middle East, and thus was dubbed the Middle East's "Silicon Valley". Amman was ranked as the 10th-best city in the world to launch a tech startup, according to a 2012 list compiled by Finaventures, a California-based venture-capital firm.Top 10 cities to launch a tech startup Tech entrepreneurs have praised the ability to access high speed internet connections in Jordan, comparing this to Dubai and Saudi Arabia. Al Jami'a Street, in Jordan's northern city of Irbid, was ranked as the street with the highest number of internet cafes in the world by the Guinness World Records.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs): 3,160 ()
Internet users:: 3.163 million ()
Country code top-level domain (ccTLD):''' .JO
Past
The IT industry in Jordan in the year 2000 and beyond got a very big boost after the Gulf War of 1991. This boost came from a large influx of immigrants from the Gulf countries to Jordan, mostly from Jordanian expatriates from Kuwait, totaling few hundred thousands. This large wave impacted Jordan in many ways, and one of them was on its IT industry.
Future
When King Abdullah II ascended to the throne in 1999, he stated his intentions to turn Jordan into the high-tech capital of the Middle East and to create a Silicon Valley-like venture in Jordan. All Jordanian schools are equipped with computers and internet connection and instituted an ICT curriculum into Jordan's education system. ICT faculties were established in Jordanian universities and these campuses have been churning out 15,000 ICT graduates every year. Information access centers were established across the Kingdom to allow rural areas access to the Internet.
The number of phone lines has decreased dramatically in the past three years to below 500K telephone lines, due to the introduction of WI-Max technology and 3G networks.
References
See also
Jordan Radio and Television (JRTV)
ATV Jordan
Jordan Cable Services (JCS)
Orange Jordan
Umniah
XPress
Zain Jordan
Jordan | [
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15721 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport%20in%20Jordan | Transport in Jordan | With the exception of a railway system, Jordan has a developed public and private transportation system. There are three international airports in Jordan. The Hedjaz Jordan Railway runs one passenger train a day each way.
Roadways
In 2009, it was estimated that Jordan had of paved highways. Some of the major highways in Jordan are:
Highway 15 (Desert Highway): connects the Syrian border with Amman and to the port city of Aqaba on the Gulf of Aqaba. It is a four-lane, double carriageway road almost on its entirety, from the Syrian border until the junction with the road to Petra.
Highway 35 (King's Highway): connects Irbid in the northern region to Aqaba, it takes the name and route of the historic King's Highway. It has four lanes on double carriageway on its stretch from Irbid until Amman.
Highway 65 (Dead Sea Highway): connects Aqaba to the northwestern region of Jordan.
The first part of the highway (Safi-Aqaba) was constructed in 1978 as part of the Red Sea - Dead Sea Access. It connected Safi, the south end of Dead Sea to Aqaba, the north point of Red Sea.
Jordan Highway: encircles the city of Amman and connects it to Jerash and Irbid
Railways
Total: 507 km - narrow gauge of (2008)
Railway companies in Jordan are:
Hedjaz Jordan Railway: The only passenger railway currently operating in Jordan, connecting Amman to Damascus, in Syria, and passing through Zarqa and Mafraq. It is narrow gauge; the rest of the Syrian network uses .
Aqaba Railway Corporation
Plans
The Jordanian government has begun acquiring land for new rail routes. Following a study by BNP Paribas, three routes are planned, which are expected to be tendered later in 2010. The three routes are:
From the Syrian border, via Zarqa, to the Saudi border; replacing part of the Hedjaz Railway;
Connecting the first line to Aqaba, and from Mafraq to Irbid, replacing another part of the Hedjaz Railway;
A link to the Iraqi border.
However, in late 2010 the government announced an economic relief package and following the 2011 Jordanian protests it was decided to reduce the expected three year capital investment plan in the national railway network by 72 percent, partly to fund the relief package. Therefore, it is unclear when the ambitions railway expansion plan will be carried out.
There are also plans for a light rail system operating between Amman and Zarqa and metro line in Amman.
Currently, two connected but non-contiguously operated sections of the Hedjaz Railway exist:
from Amman in Jordan to Syria, as the "Hedjaz Jordan Railway."
from phosphate mines near Ma'an to the Gulf of Aqaba as the "Aqaba Railway."
In August 2011, Jordanian government approved the construction of the railway from Aqaba to the Iraqi border (near Trebil). The Iraqis in the meantime started the construction of the line from the border to their current railhead at Ramadi.
Timeline
2008- Proposals for international links.
2007- China to rebuild Hejaz line
2006- Various rail proposals.
The Israeli business newspaper Globes reported that in a meeting between the Israeli minister of transport, Shaul Mofaz and the Jordanian ambassador in Tel Aviv in November, the transport minister announced that European nations are interested in financing the construction of a Haifa-Irbid-Amman railway.
2005- 2005 in rail transport
- Jordanian Transport Minister Saoud Nseirat responds to comments made on Monday, December 12, by Israeli Transport Minister Meir Shitrit. Shitrit had announced his intentions to propose a new standard gauge railway to connect Haifa, Israel, to Irbid, Jordan, passing through King Hussein Bridge and Jenin, a project that could cost as much as $300 million (for the Jordanian portion of the line). Nseirat responded to Shitrit's comments with a denial, stating that there have not been any discussions between the two nations on such a project and no plans for such a connection have been proposed by anyone in the Jordanian government. Shitrit plans to make his formal proposal at a conference for Mediterranean transport ministers in Marrakesh on December 20.
- The Public Transport Regulatory Commission has entered into an agreement with a private sector consortium, following a competitive bidding process, to develop a light rail system between the Jordanian capital Amman and nearby industrial city of Zarqa. This light rail project, to be operational by 2011, will be the first urban rail public-private partnership (PPP) in the Middle East. The system will be operated using (standard gauge) electrically propelled light rail vehicles on a double track. The total length of the LRS system will be approximately 25 kilometres. The majority of the LRS route, between Al-Mahatta (in Amman) and New Zarqa will be constructed within the existing Hedjaz Railway right-of-way (22.2 kilometres). The Public Transport Regulatory Commission estimates that the new system will carry about 45,000 passengers a day in its first year. Canada's CPCS was the lead advisor to the PTRC in this PPP transaction.
CPCS is also advising the Government of Jordan in the privatization of the Aqaba Railway Corporation, running from Ma'an to Aqaba. This railway is used to transport phosphate from mines located in Ma'an. The commission plans to modernize the old narrow gauge railway and replace it with new track.
Pipelines
gas 473 km; oil 49 km
Ports and harbors
The port of Aqaba on the Gulf of Aqaba is the only sea port in Jordan.
Merchant marine
total:
7 ships (with a volume of or over) totaling /
ships by type (1999):
bulk carrier 2, cargo ship 2, container ship 1, livestock carrier 1, roll-on/roll-off ship 1
The governments of Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq own and operate the Arab Bridge Maritime company, which is the largest passenger transport company on the Red Sea.
Airports
18 as of 2012
Airports - with paved runways
As of 2012, there was a total of 16 airports, the main airports being:
Queen Alia International Airport in Amman.
King Hussein International Airport in Aqaba
Amman Civil Airport in Amman
Muwaffaq Salti Air Base: A military airport in Azraq
total (2012):
16
over :
8
:
5
under :
1
Airports - with unpaved runways
total (2012):
2
under :
2
Heliports (2016)
56
Maps
UNHCR Atlas Map - most stations unnamed
See also
Jordan
Arab Mashreq International Railway
Red Sea–Dead Sea Access
References
External links
Hejaz RR Map | [
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15723 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign%20relations%20of%20Jordan | Foreign relations of Jordan | The foreign relations of Jordan have been consistently a pro-Western foreign policy. Jordan had close relations with the United States and the United Kingdom. These relations were damaged when Jordan proclaimed its neutrality during the Gulf War and maintained relations with Iraq. In public, Jordan continued to call for the lifting of UN sanctions against Iraq within the context of implementing UNIC resolutions .
Since the end of the war, Jordan has largely restored its relations with Western countries through its participation in the Middle East war process and enforcement of UN sanctions against Iraq.
Jordan signed a non-aggression pact with Israel (the Washington Declaration) in Washington, D.C., on July 25, 1994. Jordan and Israel signed a historic peace treaty on October 26, 1994, witnessed by President Clinton, accompanied by Secretary of State Warren Christopher. The U.S. has participated with Jordan and Israel in trilateral development discussions during which key issues have been water-sharing and security; cooperation on Jordan Rift Valley development; infrastructure projects; and trade, finance, and banking issues.
In 2013, the United States approved the CIA–led Timber Sycamore covert operation, based in Jordan, to train and arm Syrian rebels .
Jordan also participates in the multilateral war talks, and recently Jordan has signed a free trade agreement with the United States. Jordan is an active member of the UN and several of its specialized and related agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and World Health Organization (WHO). Jordan is a member of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Non-Aligned Movement, and Arab League.
Within the context of the European Union's "European Neighbourhood Policy" the EU and Jordan have jointly adopted an Action plan to reinforce their political and economic interdependence, and further implement their current Association Agreement. This Action Plan covers a timeframe of three to five years and will encourage and support Jordan's national reform objectives and further integration into European economic and social structures.
Israel captured Jerusalem in 1967, which is located at the West Bank of Jordan. Since 1967 Pakistan has been demanding its vacation at the international level. Jordan together with Pakistan is playing an effective role in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
Bilateral relations
See also
List of diplomatic missions in Jordan
List of diplomatic missions of Jordan
Visa requirements for Jordanian citizens
References
External links
The Washington Declaration between Jordan and Israel
EU Neighbourhood Info Centre: Country profile of Jordan | [
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15724 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan%20de%20Nova%20Island | Juan de Nova Island | Juan de Nova Island (, ), Malagasy: Nosy Kely) is a French-controlled tropical island in the narrowest part of the Mozambique Channel, about one-third of the way between Madagascar and Mozambique. It is a low, flat island, in size.
Anchorage is possible off the northeast of the island which also has a airstrip. Administratively, the island is one of the Scattered islands in the Indian Ocean, a district of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands.
The island is garrisoned by French troops from Réunion and has a weather station.
Description
Juan de Nova, about long and at its widest, is a nature reserve surrounded by reefs which enclose an area—not a true lagoon like in an atoll—of roughly . Forests, mainly of Casuarinaceae, cover about half the island. Sea turtles nest on the beaches around the island.
Geography
Juan de Nova is located in the Mozambique Canal, closer to the Madagascar side: from Tambohorano, west-southwest from and from the African coast.
The island was created when an underwater promontory of a coral reef emerged when the reef was dismantled by ocean currents, producing a sandy island. The prevailing south-southwest winds form dunes on the island, which, at tall, form the island's highest points.
Its southwest coast is bordered by a coral reef that prevents ships from landing, and the northeast coast consists of a lagoon that becomes sandy and impassable at low tide. There is a single pass that allows access to the island.
The difficult conditions for accessing the island has cause several shipwrecks, some of which remain on the Island, including that of the Tottenham (nicknamed the Charbonnier), which ran aground in 1911 on the island's southwest coast.
The island is about long from east to west, and wide, with an area of approximately 4.8 km² (1.9 sq mi). The entire atoll is in circumference, with an exclusive economic zone of 61,050 km² (23,572 sq mi).
History
Discovery of the island (1501)
João da Nova, a Galician admiral in the service of Portugal, came across the uninhabited island in 1501 while he was crossing the Mozambique Channel during an expedition to India. He called it Galega or Agalega (the Galician) in reference to his nationality. The island then came to be named for him, with the Spanish spelling: On subsequent maps it was labeled Johan de Nova on a map by Salvatore de Pilestrina (1519), Joa de Nova (Mercator, 1569), San-Christophoro (Ortelius, 1570), Saint-Christophe (Lislet Geoffroy), before finally being dubbed Juan de Nova by the British explorer William Fitzwilliam Owen. Historically, the island was sometimes confused with the nearby island Bassas da India, which is completely covered at high tide.
Although the island was located along the spice route, it was not of interest to the colonial powers because of its small size and little utility as a stopover. However, it is possible that it served as a refuge for pirates, such as Olivier Levasseur.
Acquisition by France and resource exploitation (1896–1975)
The island had never been inhabited when it became a possession of France, alongside Europa Island and Bassas da India, in 1897.
At the time, the only visitors to the island were Malagasy fishermen during sea turtles' nesting season. However, around 1900, the island was granted to a Frenchman for a 20-year lease. He initiated the exploitation of the island's guano deposits, which production reaching 53,000 tons in 1923. A coconut grove on the island also produced 12 tons of copra per year.
In 1921, France transferred the administration of Juan de Nova from Paris to Tananarive in its colony of Madagascar and Dependencies. Then, before the independence of Madagascar, France transferred the administration of the island to Saint-Pierre on Réunion. Madagascar became independent in 1960, and it has claimed sovereignty over the island since 1972.
An airstrip was built on the island in 1934. Guano exploitation continued for several decades, with a pause in activity during World War II. The island was abandoned during the war, and it was visited by German submariners. Installations, including a hangar, rail lines, houses and a jetty are in ruins.
In 1952, a second concession was granted for 15 years to the Société française des îles Malgaches (SOFIM), led by Hector Patureau. This concession was renewed for 25 years in 1960, after Madagascar's independence. Structures were built throughout the island to support the phosphate mining operation, including warehouses, housing, a prison, and a cemetery.
The workers on the island came mainly from Mauritius and the Seychelles. Working conditions were extremely harsh, with rule-breaking punished by flogging or imprisonment, and each worker had to extract one metric ton of phosphate per day to earn 3.5 rupees. In 1968, Mauritian workers revolted, and the operation's management appealed to the prefect of Réunion for help. The revolt brought government and media attention to abusive practices on the island, including droit du seigneur being practiced by one of the foremen, and some members of the staff were fired by SOFIM's president.
In the 1960s, the price of phosphate collapsed, and the mining operation on the island ceased to be profitable. SOFIM was dissolved in 1968, and the last workers left the island in 1975. The French government retook control of the concession, paying 45 million CFA to Hector Patureau in compensation.
Installation of a weather station (1971–1973)
In 1963, an auxiliary weather installation, called "la Goulette," was installed to carry out regular temperature and pressure readings. But on a visit to the island in 1971, a representative of the Weather Service found numerous irregularities in the readings, as well as poor security on the island, which was still under the responsibility of Patureau. Following the recommendations of the World Weather Watch, a basic, year-round weather station was built in 1973 in the southwest part of the island, at the end of the airstrip.
A project to create a Club Med tourist resort was proposed by Gilbert Trigano, which for a time brought a team of workers to the island under the supervision of Hector Patureau, but it was quickly abandoned.
Military presence (1974–present)
In 1974, the French government decided to install military detachments across the Scattered Islands in the Indian Ocean that lay within the Mozambique Channel (Juan de Nova, Europa Island, and the Glorioso Islands). Its aim was primarily to respond to Madagascar's claims to those territories, which France considers protected within an exclusive economic zone.
Juan de Nova Island was assigned a small garrison of 14 soldiers from the 2nd Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment, as well as a gendarme. They settled in housing that formerly hosted SOFIM workers. The troops receive supplies by air every 45 days.
Today, most of the installations from the mining days are in ruins, and only a few buildings are maintained for military use. Upkeep is also performed on the cemetery. The island has been converted into a nature preserve, which aims to protect biodiversity and particularly coral reefs. It is closed to access, with temporary authorization granted to scientists on short-term missions.
Wrecks
The island lies on the sea route between South Africa and the northern tip of Madagascar. It is affected by strong currents and has become the site of numerous wrecks. Most visible are the remains of the which ran onto the southern fringing reef in 1911.
Economic resources
Guano
The presence of a significant bird population on Juan de Nova Island led to a major guano deposit on the surface of the island. This became the first natural resource to be exploited on the island in the 20th century. This mining operation led to the establishment of the first structures on the island, and the workers also planted coconut trees, whose products were also exported. The exploitation of guano stopped around 1970, after the price of phosphates dropped.
Hydrocarbons
In 2005, a government decree authorized preliminary exploration for liquid or gas hydrocarbons offshore. This authorization covers an area of approximately 62,000 square kilometers surrounding the island. In 2008, a subsequent decree granted an exploration permit for the "Juan de Nova Est" field to the companies Nighthawk Energy Plc, Jupiter Petroleum Juan de Nova Ltd, and Osceola Hydrocarbons Ltd, as well as to Marex Inc. and Roc Oil Company Ltd for the "Juan de Nova Maritime Profond" field. The licensees had to commit to investing around $100 million over five years for mining and research. The eastern boundary of these exploration areas is in contention with Madagascar and its exclusive economic zone.
In 2015, the drilling authorization was renewed Sapetro and Marex Petroleum for a period of three years.
However, these projects have been abandoned since 2019, when the island was classified as a nature reserve.
Fauna and flora
Three or four times a year, scientists come to Juan de Nova Island to study its ecosystem. Despite the ongoing scientific efforts, an inventory of the island's biodiversity (particularly genetics) is only in its earliest stages. There is much to be studied.
Researchers from the University of Reunion Island's ECOMAR lab have worked to identify or observe seabirds around the island. In particular, they have worked to study the behavior of 2 million pairs of terns that have sought refuge on the island, forming the largest colony in the Indian Ocean.
Pascale Chabanet, of the Institut de recherche pour le développement, says based on their research on the island:
"The reefs of these deserted and isolated islands like Juan de Nova Island are preserved from all pollution and anthropogenic influence. But they are affected by climate change."Such environments are useful for scientists to measure to what degree environmental changes are attributable to humans.
The scientists are also observing and working to mitigate the impact of the presence of invasive species on the island, including mosquitoes such as Aedes aegypti, Aedes fryeri, Culex sitiens, Culex tritaeniorhynchus, and Mansonia uniformis. Aedes albopictus, an invasive Asian species that can carry pathogenic arbovirus, has also been seen on the island.
Geology
Important Bird Area
The island has been identified as an Important Bird Area by BirdLife International because it supports a very large colony of sooty terns, with up to 100,000 breeding pairs. It also has a much smaller colony of greater crested terns – with at least 50 breeding pairs recorded in 1994. Of at least seven species of land birds present, most are probably introduced.
Climate
A year on the island can be divided into two seasons: the cool season and the rainy season.
References
Islands of Madagascar
1897 establishments in the French colonial empire
Former populated places in the Indian Ocean
France–Madagascar relations
Important Bird Areas of the Scattered Islands in the Indian Ocean
Islands of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands
Territorial disputes of France
Territorial disputes of Madagascar
Seabird colonies | [
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15736 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes%20Kepler | Johannes Kepler | Johannes Kepler (; ; 27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae. These works also provided one of the foundations for Newton's theory of universal gravitation.
Kepler was a mathematics teacher at a seminary school in Graz, where he became an associate of Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg. Later he became an assistant to the astronomer Tycho Brahe in Prague, and eventually the imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II and his two successors Matthias and Ferdinand II. He also taught mathematics in Linz, and was an adviser to General Wallenstein.
Additionally, he did fundamental work in the field of optics, invented an improved version of the refracting (or Keplerian) telescope, and was mentioned in the telescopic discoveries of his contemporary Galileo Galilei. He was a corresponding member of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome.
Kepler lived in an era when there was no clear distinction between astronomy and astrology, but there was a strong division between astronomy (a branch of mathematics within the liberal arts) and physics (a branch of natural philosophy). Kepler also incorporated religious arguments and reasoning into his work, motivated by the religious conviction and belief that God had created the world according to an intelligible plan that is accessible through the natural light of reason. Kepler described his new astronomy as "celestial physics", as "an excursion into Aristotle's Metaphysics", and as "a supplement to Aristotle's On the Heavens", transforming the ancient tradition of physical cosmology by treating astronomy as part of a universal mathematical physics.
Early life
Childhood (1571–1590)
Kepler was born on 27 December 1571, in the Free Imperial City of Weil der Stadt (now part of the Stuttgart Region in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, 30 km west of Stuttgart's center). His grandfather, Sebald Kepler, had been Lord Mayor of the city. By the time Johannes was born, he had two brothers and one sister and the Kepler family fortune was in decline. His father, Heinrich Kepler, earned a precarious living as a mercenary, and he left the family when Johannes was five years old. He was believed to have died in the Eighty Years' War in the Netherlands. His mother, Katharina Guldenmann, an innkeeper's daughter, was a healer and herbalist. Born prematurely, Johannes claimed to have been weak and sickly as a child. Nevertheless, he often impressed travelers at his grandfather's inn with his phenomenal mathematical faculty.
He was introduced to astronomy at an early age and developed a strong passion for it that would span his entire life. At age six, he observed the Great Comet of 1577, writing that he "was taken by [his] mother to a high place to look at it." In 1580, at age nine, he observed another astronomical event, a lunar eclipse, recording that he remembered being "called outdoors" to see it and that the moon "appeared quite red". However, childhood smallpox left him with weak vision and crippled hands, limiting his ability in the observational aspects of astronomy.
In 1589, after moving through grammar school, Latin school, and seminary at Maulbronn, Kepler attended Tübinger Stift at the University of Tübingen. There, he studied philosophy under Vitus Müller and theology under Jacob Heerbrand (a student of Philipp Melanchthon at Wittenberg), who also taught Michael Maestlin while he was a student, until he became Chancellor at Tübingen in 1590. He proved himself to be a superb mathematician and earned a reputation as a skilful astrologer, casting horoscopes for fellow students. Under the instruction of Michael Maestlin, Tübingen's professor of mathematics from 1583 to 1631, he learned both the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system of planetary motion. He became a Copernican at that time. In a student disputation, he defended heliocentrism from both a theoretical and theological perspective, maintaining that the Sun was the principal source of motive power in the universe. Despite his desire to become a minister, near the end of his studies, Kepler was recommended for a position as teacher of mathematics and astronomy at the Protestant school in Graz. He accepted the position in April 1594, at the age of 22.
Graz (1594–1600)
In December 1595, Kepler was introduced to Barbara Müller, a 23-year-old widow (twice over) with a young daughter, Regina Lorenz, and he began courting her. Müller, an heiress to the estates of her late husbands, was also the daughter of a successful mill owner. Her father Jobst initially opposed a marriage. Even though Kepler had inherited his grandfather's nobility, Kepler's poverty made him an unacceptable match. Jobst relented after Kepler completed work on Mysterium, but the engagement nearly fell apart while Kepler was away tending to the details of publication. However, Protestant officials—who had helped set up the match—pressured the Müllers to honor their agreement. Barbara and Johannes were married on 27 April 1597.
In the first years of their marriage, the Keplers had two children (Heinrich and Susanna), both of whom died in infancy. In 1602, they had a daughter (Susanna); in 1604, a son (Friedrich); and in 1607, another son (Ludwig).
Other research
Following the publication of Mysterium and with the blessing of the Graz school inspectors, Kepler began an ambitious program to extend and elaborate his work. He planned four additional books: one on the stationary aspects of the universe (the Sun and the fixed stars); one on the planets and their motions; one on the physical nature of planets and the formation of geographical features (focused especially on Earth); and one on the effects of the heavens on the Earth, to include atmospheric optics, meteorology, and astrology.
He also sought the opinions of many of the astronomers to whom he had sent Mysterium, among them Reimarus Ursus (Nicolaus Reimers Bär)—the imperial mathematician to Rudolf II and a bitter rival of Tycho Brahe. Ursus did not reply directly, but republished Kepler's flattering letter to pursue his priority dispute over (what is now called) the Tychonic system with Tycho. Despite this black mark, Tycho also began corresponding with Kepler, starting with a harsh but legitimate critique of Kepler's system; among a host of objections, Tycho took issue with the use of inaccurate numerical data taken from Copernicus. Through their letters, Tycho and Kepler discussed a broad range of astronomical problems, dwelling on lunar phenomena and Copernican theory (particularly its theological viability). But without the significantly more accurate data of Tycho's observatory, Kepler had no way to address many of these issues.
Instead, he turned his attention to chronology and "harmony," the numerological relationships among music, mathematics and the physical world, and their astrological consequences. By assuming the Earth to possess a soul (a property he would later invoke to explain how the sun causes the motion of planets), he established a speculative system connecting astrological aspects and astronomical distances to weather and other earthly phenomena. By 1599, however, he again felt his work limited by the inaccuracy of available data—just as growing religious tension was also threatening his continued employment in Graz. In December of that year, Tycho invited Kepler to visit him in Prague; on 1 January 1600 (before he even received the invitation), Kepler set off in the hopes that Tycho's patronage could solve his philosophical problems as well as his social and financial ones.
Scientific career
Prague (1600–1612)
On 4 February 1600, Kepler met Tycho Brahe and his assistants Franz Tengnagel and Longomontanus at Benátky nad Jizerou (35 km from Prague), the site where Tycho's new observatory was being constructed. Over the next two months, he stayed as a guest, analyzing some of Tycho's observations of Mars; Tycho guarded his data closely, but was impressed by Kepler's theoretical ideas and soon allowed him more access. Kepler planned to test his theory from Mysterium Cosmographicum based on the Mars data, but he estimated that the work would take up to two years (since he was not allowed to simply copy the data for his own use). With the help of Johannes Jessenius, Kepler attempted to negotiate a more formal employment arrangement with Tycho, but negotiations broke down in an angry argument and Kepler left for Prague on 6 April. Kepler and Tycho soon reconciled and eventually reached an agreement on salary and living arrangements, and in June, Kepler returned home to Graz to collect his family.
Political and religious difficulties in Graz dashed his hopes of returning immediately to Brahe; in hopes of continuing his astronomical studies, Kepler sought an appointment as a mathematician to Archduke Ferdinand. To that end, Kepler composed an essay—dedicated to Ferdinand—in which he proposed a force-based theory of lunar motion: "In Terra inest virtus, quae Lunam ciet" ("There is a force in the earth which causes the moon to move"). Though the essay did not earn him a place in Ferdinand's court, it did detail a new method for measuring lunar eclipses, which he applied during the 10 July eclipse in Graz. These observations formed the basis of his explorations of the laws of optics that would culminate in Astronomiae Pars Optica.
On 2 August 1600, after refusing to convert to Catholicism, Kepler and his family were banished from Graz. Several months later, Kepler returned, now with the rest of his household, to Prague. Through most of 1601, he was supported directly by Tycho, who assigned him to analyzing planetary observations and writing a tract against Tycho's (by then deceased) rival, Ursus. In September, Tycho secured him a commission as a collaborator on the new project he had proposed to the emperor: the Rudolphine Tables that should replace the Prutenic Tables of Erasmus Reinhold. Two days after Tycho's unexpected death on 24 October 1601, Kepler was appointed his successor as the imperial mathematician with the responsibility to complete his unfinished work. The next 11 years as imperial mathematician would be the most productive of his life.
Imperial Advisor
Kepler's primary obligation as imperial mathematician was to provide astrological advice to the emperor. Though Kepler took a dim view of the attempts of contemporary astrologers to precisely predict the future or divine specific events, he had been casting well-received detailed horoscopes for friends, family, and patrons since his time as a student in Tübingen. In addition to horoscopes for allies and foreign leaders, the emperor sought Kepler's advice in times of political trouble. Rudolf was actively interested in the work of many of his court scholars (including numerous alchemists) and kept up with Kepler's work in physical astronomy as well.
Officially, the only acceptable religious doctrines in Prague were Catholic and Utraquist, but Kepler's position in the imperial court allowed him to practice his Lutheran faith unhindered. The emperor nominally provided an ample income for his family, but the difficulties of the over-extended imperial treasury meant that actually getting hold of enough money to meet financial obligations was a continual struggle. Partly because of financial troubles, his life at home with Barbara was unpleasant, marred with bickering and bouts of sickness. Court life, however, brought Kepler into contact with other prominent scholars (Johannes Matthäus Wackher von Wackhenfels, Jost Bürgi, David Fabricius, Martin Bachazek, and Johannes Brengger, among others) and astronomical work proceeded rapidly.
Supernova of 1604
It was in this context, as the imperial mathematician and astrologer to the emperor, that Kepler described the new star two years later in his De Stella Nova. In it, Kepler addressed the star's astronomical properties while taking a skeptical approach to the many astrological interpretations then circulating. He noted its fading luminosity, speculated about its origin, and used the lack of observed parallax to argue that it was in the sphere of fixed stars, further undermining the doctrine of the immutability of the heavens (the idea accepted since Aristotle that the celestial spheres were perfect and unchanging). The birth of a new star implied the variability of the heavens. Kepler also attached an appendix where he discussed the recent chronology work of the Polish historian Laurentius Suslyga; he calculated that, if Suslyga was correct that accepted timelines were four years behind, then the Star of Bethlehem—analogous to the present new star—would have coincided with the first great conjunction of the earlier 800-year cycle.
Over the following years, Kepler attempted (unsuccessfully) to begin a collaboration with Italian astronomer Giovanni Antonio Magini, and dealt with chronology, especially the dating of events in the life of Jesus. Around 1611, Kepler circulated a manuscript of what would eventually be published (posthumously) as Somnium [The Dream]. Part of the purpose of Somnium was to describe what practicing astronomy would be like from the perspective of another planet, to show the feasibility of a non-geocentric system. The manuscript, which disappeared after changing hands several times, described a fantastic trip to the Moon; it was part allegory, part autobiography, and part treatise on interplanetary travel (and is sometimes described as the first work of science fiction). Years later, a distorted version of the story may have instigated the witchcraft trial against his mother, as the mother of the narrator consults a demon to learn the means of space travel. Following her eventual acquittal, Kepler composed 223 footnotes to the story—several times longer than the actual text—which explained the allegorical aspects as well as the considerable scientific content (particularly regarding lunar geography) hidden within the text.
Later life
Troubles
In 1611, the growing political-religious tension in Prague came to a head. Emperor Rudolf—whose health was failing—was forced to abdicate as King of Bohemia by his brother Matthias. Both sides sought Kepler's astrological advice, an opportunity he used to deliver conciliatory political advice (with little reference to the stars, except in general statements to discourage drastic action). However, it was clear that Kepler's future prospects in the court of Matthias were dim.
Also in that year, Barbara Kepler contracted Hungarian spotted fever, then began having seizures. As Barbara was recovering, Kepler's three children all fell sick with smallpox; Friedrich, 6, died. Following his son's death, Kepler sent letters to potential patrons in Württemberg and Padua. At the University of Tübingen in Württemberg, concerns over Kepler's perceived Calvinist heresies in violation of the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord prevented his return. The University of Padua—on the recommendation of the departing Galileo—sought Kepler to fill the mathematics professorship, but Kepler, preferring to keep his family in German territory, instead travelled to Austria to arrange a position as teacher and district mathematician in Linz. However, Barbara relapsed into illness and died shortly after Kepler's return.
Kepler postponed the move to Linz and remained in Prague until Rudolf's death in early 1612, though between political upheaval, religious tension, and family tragedy (along with the legal dispute over his wife's estate), Kepler could do no research. Instead, he pieced together a chronology manuscript, Eclogae Chronicae, from correspondence and earlier work. Upon succession as Holy Roman Emperor, Matthias re-affirmed Kepler's position (and salary) as imperial mathematician but allowed him to move to Linz.
Linz (1612–1630)
In Linz, Kepler's primary responsibilities (beyond completing the Rudolphine Tables) were teaching at the district school and providing astrological and astronomical services. In his first years there, he enjoyed financial security and religious freedom relative to his life in Prague—though he was excluded from Eucharist by his Lutheran church over his theological scruples. It was also during his time in Linz that Kepler had to deal with the accusation and ultimate verdict of witchcraft against his mother Katharina in the Protestant town of Leonberg. That blow, happening only a few years after Kepler's excommunication, is not seen as a coincidence but as a symptom of the full-fledged assault waged by the Lutherans against Kepler.
His first publication in Linz was De vero Anno (1613), an expanded treatise on the year of Christ's birth. He also participated in deliberations on whether to introduce Pope Gregory's reformed calendar to Protestant German lands. On 30 October 1613, Kepler married the 24-year-old Susanna Reuttinger. Following the death of his first wife Barbara, Kepler had considered 11 different matches over two years (a decision process formalized later as the marriage problem). He eventually returned to Reuttinger (the fifth match) who, he wrote, "won me over with love, humble loyalty, economy of household, diligence, and the love she gave the stepchildren." The first three children of this marriage (Margareta Regina, Katharina, and Sebald) died in childhood. Three more survived into adulthood: Cordula (born 1621); Fridmar (born 1623); and Hildebert (born 1625). According to Kepler's biographers, this was a much happier marriage than his first.
Christianity
Kepler's belief that God created the cosmos in an orderly fashion caused him to attempt to determine and comprehend the laws that govern the natural world, most profoundly in astronomy. The phrase "I am merely thinking God's thoughts after Him" has been attributed to him, although this is probably a capsulized version of a writing from his hand:
Those laws [of nature] are within the grasp of the human mind; God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.
Astronomy
Mysterium Cosmographicum
Kepler's first major astronomical work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Cosmographic Mystery, 1596), was the first published defense of the Copernican system. Kepler claimed to have had an epiphany on 19 July 1595, while teaching in Graz, demonstrating the periodic conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the zodiac: he realized that regular polygons bound one inscribed and one circumscribed circle at definite ratios, which, he reasoned, might be the geometrical basis of the universe. After failing to find a unique arrangement of polygons that fit known astronomical observations (even with extra planets added to the system), Kepler began experimenting with 3-dimensional polyhedra. He found that each of the five Platonic solids could be inscribed and circumscribed by spherical orbs; nesting these solids, each encased in a sphere, within one another would produce six layers, corresponding to the six known planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. By ordering the solids selectively—octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, tetrahedron, cube—Kepler found that the spheres could be placed at intervals corresponding to the relative sizes of each planet's path, assuming the planets circle the Sun. Kepler also found a formula relating the size of each planet's orb to the length of its orbital period: from inner to outer planets, the ratio of increase in orbital period is twice the difference in orb radius. However, Kepler later rejected this formula, because it was not precise enough.
Kepler thought the Mysterium had revealed God's geometrical plan for the universe. Much of Kepler's enthusiasm for the Copernican system stemmed from his theological convictions about the connection between the physical and the spiritual; the universe itself was an image of God, with the Sun corresponding to the Father, the stellar sphere to the Son, and the intervening space between them to the Holy Spirit. His first manuscript of Mysterium contained an extensive chapter reconciling heliocentrism with biblical passages that seemed to support geocentrism. With the support of his mentor Michael Maestlin, Kepler received permission from the Tübingen university senate to publish his manuscript, pending removal of the Bible exegesis and the addition of a simpler, more understandable, description of the Copernican system as well as Kepler's new ideas. Mysterium was published late in 1596, and Kepler received his copies and began sending them to prominent astronomers and patrons early in 1597; it was not widely read, but it established Kepler's reputation as a highly skilled astronomer. The effusive dedication, to powerful patrons as well as to the men who controlled his position in Graz, also provided a crucial doorway into the patronage system.
In 1621, Kepler published an expanded second edition of Mysterium, half as long again as the first, detailing in footnotes the corrections and improvements he had achieved in the 25 years since its first publication. In terms of impact, the Mysterium can be seen as an important first step in modernizing the theory proposed by Copernicus in his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Whilst Copernicus sought to advance a heliocentric system in this book, he resorted to Ptolemaic devices (viz., epicycles and eccentric circles) in order to explain the change in planets' orbital speed, and also continued to use as a point of reference the center of the Earth's orbit rather than that of the Sun "as an aid to calculation and in order not to confuse the reader by diverging too much from Ptolemy." Modern astronomy owes much to Mysterium Cosmographicum, despite flaws in its main thesis, "since it represents the first step in cleansing the Copernican system of the remnants of the Ptolemaic theory still clinging to it."
Astronomia Nova
The extended line of research that culminated in Astronomia Nova (A New Astronomy)—including the first two laws of planetary motion—began with the analysis, under Tycho's direction, of Mars' orbit.In this work Kepler introduced the revolutionary concept of planetary orbit, a path of a planet in space resulting from the action of physical causes, distinct from previously held notion of planetary orb(a spherical shell to which planet is attached). As a result of this breakthrough astronomical phenomena came to be seen as being govern by physical laws. Kepler calculated and recalculated various approximations of Mars' orbit using an equant (the mathematical tool that Copernicus had eliminated with his system), eventually creating a model that generally agreed with Tycho's observations to within two arcminutes (the average measurement error). But he was not satisfied with the complex and still slightly inaccurate result; at certain points the model differed from the data by up to eight arcminutes. The wide array of traditional mathematical astronomy methods having failed him, Kepler set about trying to fit an ovoid orbit to the data.
In Kepler's religious view of the cosmos, the Sun (a symbol of God the Father) was the source of motive force in the Solar System. As a physical basis, Kepler drew by analogy on William Gilbert's theory of the magnetic soul of the Earth from De Magnete (1600) and on his own work on optics. Kepler supposed that the motive power (or motive species) radiated by the Sun weakens with distance, causing faster or slower motion as planets move closer or farther from it. Perhaps this assumption entailed a mathematical relationship that would restore astronomical order. Based on measurements of the aphelion and perihelion of the Earth and Mars, he created a formula in which a planet's rate of motion is inversely proportional to its distance from the Sun. Verifying this relationship throughout the orbital cycle required very extensive calculation; to simplify this task, by late 1602 Kepler reformulated the proportion in terms of geometry: planets sweep out equal areas in equal times—his second law of planetary motion.
He then set about calculating the entire orbit of Mars, using the geometrical rate law and assuming an egg-shaped ovoid orbit. After approximately 40 failed attempts, in late 1604 he at last hit upon the idea of an ellipse, which he had previously assumed to be too simple a solution for earlier astronomers to have overlooked. Finding that an elliptical orbit fit the Mars data, Kepler immediately concluded that all planets move in ellipses, with the Sun at one focus—his first law of planetary motion. Because he employed no calculating assistants, he did not extend the mathematical analysis beyond Mars. By the end of the year, he completed the manuscript for Astronomia nova, though it would not be published until 1609 due to legal disputes over the use of Tycho's observations, the property of his heirs.
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy
Since completing the Astronomia Nova, Kepler had intended to compose an astronomy textbook that would cover all the fundamentals of heliocentric astronomy. Kepler spent the next several years working on what would become Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae (Epitome of Copernican Astronomy). Despite its title, which merely hints at heliocentrism, the Epitome is less about Copernicus's work and more about Kepler's own astronomical system. The Epitome contained all three laws of planetary motion and attempted to explain heavenly motions through physical causes. Although it explicitly extended the first two laws of planetary motion (applied to Mars in Astronomia nova) to all the planets as well as the Moon and the Medicean satellites of Jupiter, it did not explain how elliptical orbits could be derived from observational data.
Originally intended as an introduction for the uninitiated, Kepler sought to model his Epitome after that of his master Michael Maestlin, who published a well-regarded book explaining the basics of geocentric astronomy to non-experts. Kepler completed the first of three volumes, consisting of Books I–III, by 1615 in the same question-answer format of Maestlin's and have it printed in 1617. However, the banning of Copernican books by the Catholic Church, as well as the start of the Thirty Years' War, meant that publication of the next two volumes would be delayed. In the interim, and to avoid being subject to the ban, Kepler switched the audience of the Epitome from beginners to that of expert astronomers and mathematicians, as the arguments became more and more sophisticated and requiring advanced mathematics to be understood. The second volume, consisting of Book IV, was published in 1620, followed by the third volume, consisting of Books V–VII, in 1621.
Rudolphine Tables
In the years following the completion of Astronomia Nova, most of Kepler's research was focused on preparations for the Rudolphine Tables and a comprehensive set of ephemerides (specific predictions of planet and star positions) based on the table (though neither would be completed for many years).
Kepler, at last, completed the Rudolphine Tables in 1623, which at the time was considered his major work. However, due to the publishing requirements of the emperor and negotiations with Tycho Brahe's heir, it would not be printed until 1627.
Astrology
Like Ptolemy, Kepler considered astrology as the counterpart to astronomy, and as being of equal interest and value. However, in the following years, the two subjects drifted apart until astrology was no longer practiced among professional astronomers.
Sir Oliver Lodge observed that Kepler was somewhat disdainful of astrology in his own day, as he was "continually attacking and throwing sarcasm at astrology, but it was the only thing for which people would pay him, and on it after a fashion he lived." Nonetheless, Kepler spent a huge amount of time trying to restore astrology on a firmer philosophical footing, composing numerous astrological calendars, more than 800 nativities, and a number of treaties dealing with the subject of astrology proper.
De Fundamentis
In his bid to become imperial astronomer, Kepler wrote De Fundamentis (1601), whose title can be translated as “On Giving Astrology Sounder Foundations”, as a short foreword to one of his yearly almanacs.
In this work, Kepler describes the effects of the Sun, Moon, and the planets in terms of their light and their influences upon humors, finalizing with Kepler's view that the Earth possesses a soul with some sense of geometry. Stimulated by the geometric convergence of rays formed around it, the world-soul is sentient but not conscious. As a shepherd is pleased by the piping of a flute without understanding the theory of musical harmony, so likewise Earth responds to the angles and aspects made by the heavens but not in a conscious manner. Eclipses are important as omens because the animal faculty of the Earth is violently disturbed by the sudden intermission of light, experiencing something like emotion and persisting in it for some time.
Kepler surmises that there are "cyclic journeys in the humors of the Earth", and gives an example "the 19 year period of the Moon" which sailors say affects tides - presumably the 18.6-year nutation cycle, that is rotation of the lunar nodes - and "if this is so the laws and periods of the cycles should be investigated by collating observations made over many years, something which has not yet been done".
Tertius Interveniens
Kepler and Helisaeus Roeslin engaged in a series of published attacks and counter-attacks on the importance of astrology after the supernova of 1604; around the same time, physician Philip Feselius published a work dismissing astrology altogether (and Roeslin's work in particular).
In response to what Kepler saw as the excesses of astrology, on the one hand, and overzealous rejection of it, on the other, Kepler prepared Tertius Interveniens (1610). Nominally this work—presented to the common patron of Roeslin and Feselius—was a neutral mediation between the feuding scholars (the titled meaning "Third-party interventions"), but it also set out Kepler's general views on the value of astrology, including some hypothesized mechanisms of interaction between planets and individual souls. While Kepler considered most traditional rules and methods of astrology to be the "evil-smelling dung" in which "an industrious hen" scrapes, there was an "occasional grain-seed, indeed, even a pearl or a gold nugget" to be found by the conscientious scientific astrologer.
Music
Harmonice Mundi
Kepler was convinced "that the geometrical things have provided the Creator with the model for decorating the whole world". In Harmonice Mundi (1619), he attempted to explain the proportions of the natural world—particularly the astronomical and astrological aspects—in terms of music. The central set of "harmonies" was the musica universalis or "music of the spheres", which had been studied by Pythagoras, Ptolemy and others before Kepler; in fact, soon after publishing Harmonice Mundi, Kepler was embroiled in a priority dispute with Robert Fludd, who had recently published his own harmonic theory.
Kepler began by exploring regular polygons and regular solids, including the figures that would come to be known as Kepler's solids. From there, he extended his harmonic analysis to music, meteorology, and astrology; harmony resulted from the tones made by the souls of heavenly bodies—and in the case of astrology, the interaction between those tones and human souls. In the final portion of the work (Book V), Kepler dealt with planetary motions, especially relationships between orbital velocity and orbital distance from the Sun. Similar relationships had been used by other astronomers, but Kepler—with Tycho's data and his own astronomical theories—treated them much more precisely and attached new physical significance to them.
Among many other harmonies, Kepler articulated what came to be known as the third law of planetary motion. He tried many combinations until he discovered that (approximately) "The square of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances." Although he gives the date of this epiphany (8 March 1618), he does not give any details about how he arrived at this conclusion. However, the wider significance for planetary dynamics of this purely kinematical law was not realized until the 1660s. When conjoined with Christiaan Huygens' newly discovered law of centrifugal force, it enabled Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and perhaps Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke to demonstrate independently that the presumed gravitational attraction between the Sun and its planets decreased with the square of the distance between them. This refuted the traditional assumption of scholastic physics that the power of gravitational attraction remained constant with distance whenever it applied between two bodies, such as was assumed by Kepler and also by Galileo in his mistaken universal law that gravitational fall is uniformly accelerated, and also by Galileo's student Borrelli in his 1666 celestial mechanics.
Optics
Astronomiae Pars Optica
As Kepler slowly continued analyzing Tycho's Mars observations—now available to him in their entirety—and began the slow process of tabulating the Rudolphine Tables, Kepler also picked up the investigation of the laws of optics from his lunar essay of 1600. Both lunar and solar eclipses presented unexplained phenomena, such as unexpected shadow sizes, the red color of a total lunar eclipse, and the reportedly unusual light surrounding a total solar eclipse. Related issues of atmospheric refraction applied to all astronomical observations. Through most of 1603, Kepler paused his other work to focus on optical theory; the resulting manuscript, presented to the emperor on 1 January 1604, was published as Astronomiae Pars Optica (The Optical Part of Astronomy). In it, Kepler described the inverse-square law governing the intensity of light, reflection by flat and curved mirrors, and principles of pinhole cameras, as well as the astronomical implications of optics such as parallax and the apparent sizes of heavenly bodies. He also extended his study of optics to the human eye, and is generally considered by neuroscientists to be the first to recognize that images are projected inverted and reversed by the eye's lens onto the retina. The solution to this dilemma was not of particular importance to Kepler as he did not see it as pertaining to optics, although he did suggest that the image was later corrected "in the hollows of the brain" due to the "activity of the Soul."
Today, Astronomiae Pars Optica is generally recognized as the foundation of modern optics (though the law of refraction is conspicuously absent). With respect to the beginnings of projective geometry, Kepler introduced the idea of continuous change of a mathematical entity in this work. He argued that if a focus of a conic section were allowed to move along the line joining the foci, the geometric form would morph or degenerate, one into another. In this way, an ellipse becomes a parabola when a focus moves toward infinity, and when two foci of an ellipse merge into one another, a circle is formed. As the foci of a hyperbola merge into one another, the hyperbola becomes a pair of straight lines. He also assumed that if a straight line is extended to infinity it will meet itself at a single point at infinity, thus having the properties of a large circle.
Dioptrice
In the first months of 1610, Galileo Galilei—using his powerful new telescope—discovered four satellites orbiting Jupiter. Upon publishing his account as Sidereus Nuncius [Starry Messenger], Galileo sought the opinion of Kepler, in part to bolster the credibility of his observations. Kepler responded enthusiastically with a short published reply, Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo [Conversation with the Starry Messenger]. He endorsed Galileo's observations and offered a range of speculations about the meaning and implications of Galileo's discoveries and telescopic methods, for astronomy and optics as well as cosmology and astrology. Later that year, Kepler published his own telescopic observations of the moons in Narratio de Jovis Satellitibus, providing further support of Galileo. To Kepler's disappointment, however, Galileo never published his reactions (if any) to Astronomia Nova.
Kepler also started a theoretical and experimental investigation of telescopic lenses using a telescope borrowed from Duke Ernest of Cologne. The resulting manuscript was completed in September 1610 and published as Dioptrice in 1611. In it, Kepler set out the theoretical basis of double-convex converging lenses and double-concave diverging lenses—and how they are combined to produce a Galilean telescope—as well as the concepts of real vs. virtual images, upright vs. inverted images, and the effects of focal length on magnification and reduction. He also described an improved telescope—now known as the astronomical or Keplerian telescope—in which two convex lenses can produce higher magnification than Galileo's combination of convex and concave lenses.
Mathematics and physics
As a New Year's gift that year (1611), he also composed for his friend and some-time patron, Baron Wackher von Wackhenfels, a short pamphlet entitled Strena Seu de Nive Sexangula (A New Year's Gift of Hexagonal Snow). In this treatise, he published the first description of the hexagonal symmetry of snowflakes and, extending the discussion into a hypothetical atomistic physical basis for the symmetry, posed what later became known as the Kepler conjecture, a statement about the most efficient arrangement for packing spheres.
Kepler wrote the influential mathematical treatise Nova stereometria doliorum vinariorum in 1613, on measuring the volume of containers such as wine barrels, which was published in 1615. Kepler also contributed to the development of infinitesimal methods and numerical analysis, including iterative approximations, infinitesimals, and the early use of logarithms and transcendental equations.
Legacy
Reception of his astronomy
Kepler's laws of planetary motion were not immediately accepted. Several major figures such as Galileo and René Descartes completely ignored Kepler's Astronomia nova. Many astronomers, including Kepler's teacher, Michael Maestlin, objected to Kepler's introduction of physics into his astronomy. Some adopted compromise positions. Ismaël Bullialdus accepted elliptical orbits but replaced Kepler's area law with uniform motion in respect to the empty focus of the ellipse, while Seth Ward used an elliptical orbit with motions defined by an equant.
Several astronomers tested Kepler's theory, and its various modifications, against astronomical observations. Two transits of Venus and Mercury across the face of the sun provided sensitive tests of the theory, under circumstances when these planets could not normally be observed. In the case of the transit of Mercury in 1631, Kepler had been extremely uncertain of the parameters for Mercury, and advised observers to look for the transit the day before and after the predicted date. Pierre Gassendi observed the transit on the date predicted, a confirmation of Kepler's prediction. This was the first observation of a transit of Mercury. However, his attempt to observe the transit of Venus just one month later was unsuccessful due to inaccuracies in the Rudolphine Tables. Gassendi did not realize that it was not visible from most of Europe, including Paris. Jeremiah Horrocks, who observed the 1639 Venus transit, had used his own observations to adjust the parameters of the Keplerian model, predicted the transit, and then built apparatus to observe the transit. He remained a firm advocate of the Keplerian model.
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy was read by astronomers throughout Europe, and following Kepler's death, it was the main vehicle for spreading Kepler's ideas. In the period 1630 – 1650, this book was the most widely used astronomy textbook, winning many converts to ellipse-based astronomy. However, few adopted his ideas on the physical basis for celestial motions. In the late 17th century, a number of physical astronomy theories drawing from Kepler's work—notably those of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and Robert Hooke—began to incorporate attractive forces (though not the quasi-spiritual motive species postulated by Kepler) and the Cartesian concept of inertia. This culminated in Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687), in which Newton derived Kepler's laws of planetary motion from a force-based theory of universal gravitation.
History of science
Beyond his role in the historical development of astronomy and natural philosophy, Kepler has loomed large in the philosophy and historiography of science. Kepler and his laws of motion were central to early histories of astronomy such as Jean-Étienne Montucla's 1758 Histoire des mathématiques and Jean-Baptiste Delambre's 1821 Histoire de l'astronomie moderne. These and other histories written from an Enlightenment perspective treated Kepler's metaphysical and religious arguments with skepticism and disapproval, but later Romantic-era natural philosophers viewed these elements as central to his success.
William Whewell, in his influential History of the Inductive Sciences of 1837, found Kepler to be the archetype of the inductive scientific genius; in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences of 1840, Whewell held Kepler up as the embodiment of the most advanced forms of scientific method. Similarly, Ernst Friedrich Apelt—the first to extensively study Kepler's manuscripts, after their purchase by Catherine the Great—identified Kepler as a key to the "Revolution of the sciences".
Apelt, who saw Kepler's mathematics, aesthetic sensibility, physical ideas, and theology as part of a unified system of thought, produced the first extended analysis of Kepler's life and work.
Alexandre Koyré's work on Kepler was, after Apelt, the first major milestone in historical interpretations of Kepler's cosmology and its influence. In the 1930s and 1940s, Koyré, and a number of others in the first generation of professional historians of science, described the "Scientific Revolution" as the central event in the history of science, and Kepler as a (perhaps the) central figure in the revolution. Koyré placed Kepler's theorization, rather than his empirical work, at the center of the intellectual transformation from ancient to modern world-views. Since the 1960s, the volume of historical Kepler scholarship has expanded greatly, including studies of his astrology and meteorology, his geometrical methods, the role of his religious views in his work, his literary and rhetorical methods, his interaction with the broader cultural and philosophical currents of his time, and even his role as an historian of science.
Philosophers of science—such as Charles Sanders Peirce, Norwood Russell Hanson, Stephen Toulmin, and Karl Popper—have repeatedly turned to Kepler: examples of incommensurability, analogical reasoning, falsification, and many other philosophical concepts have been found in Kepler's work. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli even used Kepler's priority dispute with Robert Fludd to explore the implications of analytical psychology on scientific investigation.
Editions and translations
Modern translations of a number of Kepler's books appeared in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the systematic publication of his collected works began in 1937 (and is nearing completion in the early 21st century).
An edition in eight volumes, Kepleri Opera omnia, was prepared by Christian Frisch (1807–1881), during 1858 to 1871, on the occasion of Kepler's 300th birthday.
Frisch's edition only included Kepler's Latin, with a Latin commentary.
A new edition was planned beginning in 1914 by Walther von Dyck (1856–1934). Dyck compiled copies of Kepler's unedited manuscripts, using international diplomatic contacts to convince the Soviet authorities to lend him the manuscripts kept in Leningrad for photographic reproduction. These manuscripts contained several works by Kepler that had not been available to Frisch. Dyck's photographs remain the basis for the modern editions of Kepler's unpublished manuscripts.
Max Caspar (1880–1956) published his German translation of Kepler's Mysterium Cosmographicum in 1923. Both Dyck and Caspar were influenced in their interest in Kepler by mathematician Alexander von Brill (1842–1935). Caspar became Dyck's collaborator, succeeding him as project leader in 1934, establishing the Kepler-Kommission in the following year. Assisted by Martha List (1908–1992) and Franz Hammer (1898–1979), Caspar continued editorial work during World War II. Max Caspar also published a biography of Kepler in 1948. The commission was later chaired by Volker Bialas (during 1976–2003) and Ulrich Grigull (during 1984–1999) and Roland Bulirsch (1998–2014).
Veneration and eponymy
Kepler has acquired a popular image as an icon of scientific modernity and a man before his time; science popularizer Carl Sagan described him as "the first astrophysicist and the last scientific astrologer". The debate over Kepler's place in the Scientific Revolution has produced a wide variety of philosophical and popular treatments. One of the most influential is Arthur Koestler's 1959 The Sleepwalkers, in which Kepler is unambiguously the hero (morally and theologically as well as intellectually) of the revolution.
A well-received, if fanciful, historical novel by John Banville, Kepler (1981), explored many of the themes developed in Koestler's non-fiction narrative and in the philosophy of science. Somewhat more fanciful is a recent work of nonfiction, Heavenly Intrigue (2004), suggesting that Kepler murdered Tycho Brahe to gain access to his data.
In Austria, Kepler left behind such a historical legacy that he was one of the motifs of a silver collector's coin: the 10-euro Johannes Kepler silver coin, minted on 10 September 2002. The reverse side of the coin has a portrait of Kepler, who spent some time teaching in Graz and the surrounding areas. Kepler was acquainted with Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg personally, and he probably influenced the construction of Eggenberg Castle (the motif of the obverse of the coin). In front of him on the coin is the model of nested spheres and polyhedra from Mysterium Cosmographicum.
The German composer Paul Hindemith wrote an opera about Kepler entitled Die Harmonie der Welt, and a symphony of the same name was derived from music for the opera.
Philip Glass wrote an opera called Kepler based on Kepler's life (2009).
Kepler is honored together with Nicolaus Copernicus with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on 23 May.
Directly named for Kepler's contribution to science are Kepler's laws of planetary motion, Kepler's Supernova (Supernova 1604, which he observed and described) and the Kepler Solids, a set of geometrical constructions, two of which were described by him, and the Kepler conjecture on sphere packing.
In astronomy: The lunar crater Kepler (Keplerus, named by Giovanni Riccioli, 1651), the asteroid 1134 Kepler (1929), Kepler (crater on Mars) (1973), Kepler Launch Site for model rockets (2001), the Kepler space telescope, a space photometer launched by NASA in 2009, Johannes Kepler ATV (Automated Transfer Vehicle launched to resupply the ISS in 2011).
Educational institutions: Johannes Kepler University Linz (1975), Kepler College (Seattle, Washington), besides several institutions of primary and secondary education, such as Johannes Kepler Grammar School, at the site where Kepler lived in Prague, and Kepler Gymnasium, Tübingen
Streets or squares named after him: Keplerplatz Vienna (station of Vienna U-Bahn), Keplerstraße in Hanau near Frankfurt am Main, Keplerstraße in Gera, Keplerstraße in Munich, Germany, Keplerstraße and Keplerbrücke in Graz, Austria, Keplerova ulice in Prague, ulitsa Keplera in Verkhnetemernitsky near Rostov-on-Don, Russia.
The Kepler Mountains and Kepler Track in Fiordland National Park, South Island, New Zealand; Kepler Challenge (1988).
Kepler, a high end graphics processing microarchitecture introduced by Nvidia in 2012.
Works
Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Sacred Mystery of the Cosmos) (1596)
De Fundamentis Astrologiae Certioribus (On Firmer Fundaments of Astrology; 1601)
De Stella nova in pede Serpentarii (On the New Star in Ophiuchus's Foot) (1606)
Astronomia nova (New Astronomy) (1609)
Tertius Interveniens (Third-party Interventions) (1610)
Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo (Conversation with the Starry Messenger) (1610)
Dioptrice (1611)
De nive sexangula (On the Six-Cornered Snowflake) (1611) (English translation on Google Books preview)
De vero Anno, quo aeternus Dei Filius humanam naturam in Utero benedictae Virginis Mariae assumpsit (1614)
Eclogae Chronicae (1615, published with Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo)
Nova stereometria doliorum vinariorum (New Stereometry of Wine Barrels) (1615)
Ephemerides nouae motuum coelestium (1617–30)
Harmonice Mundi (Harmony of the Worlds) (1619) (English translation on Google Books)
Mysterium cosmographicum (The Sacred Mystery of the Cosmos), 2nd edition (1621)
Tabulae Rudolphinae (Rudolphine Tables) (1627)
Somnium (The Dream) (1634) (English translation on Google Books preview)
A critical edition of Kepler's collected works (Johannes Kepler Gesammelte Werke, KGW) in 22 volumes is being edited by the Kepler-Kommission (founded 1935) on behalf of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Vol. 1: Mysterium Cosmographicum. De Stella Nova. Ed. M. Caspar. 1938, 2nd ed. 1993. Paperback .
Vol. 2: Astronomiae pars optica. Ed. F. Hammer. 1939, Paperback .
Vol. 3: Astronomia Nova. Ed. M. Caspar. 1937. IV, 487 p. 2. ed. 1990. Paperback . Semi-parchment .
Vol. 4: Kleinere Schriften 1602–1611. Dioptrice. Ed. M. Caspar, F. Hammer. 1941. .
Vol. 5: Chronologische Schriften. Ed. F. Hammer. 1953. Out-of-print.
Vol. 6: Harmonice Mundi. Ed. M. Caspar. 1940, 2nd ed. 1981, .
Vol. 7: Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae. Ed. M. Caspar. 1953, 2nd ed. 1991. , Paperback .
Vol. 8: Mysterium Cosmographicum. Editio altera cum notis. De Cometis. Hyperaspistes. Commentary F. Hammer. 1955. Paperback .
Vol 9: Mathematische Schriften. Ed. F. Hammer. 1955, 2nd ed. 1999. Out-of-print.
Vol. 10: Tabulae Rudolphinae. Ed. F. Hammer. 1969. .
Vol. 11,1: Ephemerides novae motuum coelestium. Commentary V. Bialas. 1983. , Paperback .
Vol. 11,2: Calendaria et Prognostica. Astronomica minora. Somnium. Commentary V. Bialas, H. Grössing. 1993. , Paperback .
Vol. 12: Theologica. Hexenprozeß. Tacitus-Übersetzung. Gedichte. Commentary J. Hübner, H. Grössing, F. Boockmann, F. Seck. Directed by V. Bialas. 1990. , Paperback .
Vols. 13–18: Letters:
Vol. 13: Briefe 1590–1599. Ed. M. Caspar. 1945. 432 p. .
Vol. 14: Briefe 1599–1603. Ed. M. Caspar. 1949. Out-of-print. 2nd ed. in preparation.
Vol 15: Briefe 1604–1607. Ed. M. Caspar. 1951. 2nd ed. 1995. .
Vol. 16: Briefe 1607–1611. Ed. M. Caspar. 1954. .
Vol. 17: Briefe 1612–1620. Ed. M. Caspar. 1955. .
Vol. 18: Briefe 1620–1630. Ed. M. Caspar. 1959. .
Vol. 19: Dokumente zu Leben und Werk. Commentary M. List. 1975. .
Vols. 20–21: manuscripts
Vol. 20,1: Manuscripta astronomica (I). Apologia, De motu Terrae, Hipparchus etc. Commentary V. Bialas. 1988. . Paperback .
Vol. 20,2: Manuscripta astronomica (II). Commentaria in Theoriam Martis. Commentary V. Bialas. 1998. Paperback .
Vol. 21,1: Manuscripta astronomica (III) et mathematica. De Calendario Gregoriano. In preparation.
Vol. 21,2: Manuscripta varia. In preparation.
Vol. 22: General index, in preparation.
The Kepler-Kommission also publishes Bibliographia Kepleriana (2nd ed. List, 1968), a complete bibliography of editions of Kepler's works, with a supplementary volume to the second edition (ed. Hamel 1998).
See also
Cavalieri's principle
History of astronomy
History of physics
Kepler orbit
Kepler problem
Kepler triangle
Kepler–Bouwkamp constant
Penrose tiling
Radiation pressure
Rhombicosidodecahedron
Rhombicuboctahedron
Simpson's rule
Stellated octahedron
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
Andersen, Hanne; Peter Barker; and Xiang Chen. The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions, chapter 6: "The Copernican Revolution." New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Armitage, Angus. John Kepler, Faber, 1966.
Banville, John. Kepler, Martin, Secker and Warburg, London, 1981 (fictionalised biography)
Barker, Peter and Bernard R. Goldstein: "Theological Foundations of Kepler's Astronomy". Osiris, Volume 16. Science in Theistic Contexts. University of Chicago Press, 2001, pp. 88–113
Caspar, Max. Kepler; transl. and ed. by C. Doris Hellman; with a new introduction and references by Owen Gingerich; bibliographic citations by Owen Gingerich and Alain Segonds. New York: Dover, 1993.
Connor, James A. Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother. HarperSanFrancisco, 2004.
De Gandt, Francois. Force and Geometry in Newton's Principia, Translated by Curtis Wilson, Princeton University Press, 1995.
Dreyer, J. L. E. A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler. Dover Publications Inc, 1967.
Ferguson, Kitty. The nobleman and his housedog: Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler: the strange partnership that revolutionized science. London: Review, 2002. – published in the US as: Tycho & Kepler: the unlikely partnership that forever changed our understanding of the heavens. New York: Walker, 2002.
Field, J. V. Kepler's geometrical cosmology. University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Gilder, Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder: Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One of History's Greatest Scientific Discoveries, Doubleday (18 May 2004). Reviews bookpage.com, crisismagazine.com
Gingerich, Owen. The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler. American Institute of Physics, 1993. (Masters of modern physics; v. 7)
Gingerich, Owen: "Kepler, Johannes" in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume VII. Charles Coulston Gillispie, editor. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973
Greenbaum and Boockmann: "Kepler's Astrology", Culture and Cosmos Vol. 14. Special Double Issue, 2012.
Jardine, Nick: "Koyré's Kepler/Kepler's Koyré," History of Science, Vol. 38 (2000), pp. 363–376
Kepler, Johannes. Johannes Kepler New Astronomy trans. W. Donahue, foreword by O. Gingerich, Cambridge University Press 1993.
Kepler, Johannes and Christian Frisch. Joannis Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia (John Kepler, Astronomer; Complete Works), 8 vols.(1858–1871). vol. 1, 1858, vol. 2, 1859, vol. 3, 1860, vol. 6, 1866, vol. 7, 1868, Frankfurt am Main and Erlangen, Heyder & Zimmer, – Google Books
Kepler, Johannes, et al. Great Books of the Western World. Volume 16: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952. (contains English translations by of Kepler's Epitome, Books IV & V and Harmonice Book 5)
Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. (1959).
Koyré, Alexandre: Galilean Studies Harvester Press, 1977.
Koyré, Alexandre: The Astronomical Revolution: Copernicus-Kepler-Borelli Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973. ; Methuen, 1973. ; Hermann, 1973.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957.
Lindberg, David C.: "The Genesis of Kepler's Theory of Light: Light Metaphysics from Plotinus to Kepler." Osiris, N.S. 2. University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 5–42.
Lear, John. Kepler's Dream. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965
M.T.K Al-Tamimi. "Great collapse Kepler's first law", Natural Science, 2 (2010),
North, John. The Fontana History of Astronomy and Cosmology, Fontana Press, 1994.
Pannekoek, Anton: A History of Astronomy, Dover Publications Inc 1989.
Pauli, Wolfgang. Wolfgang Pauli – Writings on physics and philosophy, translated by Robert Schlapp and edited by P. Enz and Karl von Meyenn (Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1994). See section 21, The influence of archetypical ideas on the scientific theories of Kepler, concerning Johannes Kepler and Robert Fludd (1574–1637).
Schneer, Cecil: "Kepler's New Year's Gift of a Snowflake." Isis, Volume 51, No. 4. University of Chicago Press, 1960, pp. 531–545.
Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Stephenson, Bruce. Kepler's physical astronomy. New York: Springer, 1987. (Studies in the history of mathematics and physical sciences; 13); reprinted Princeton:Princeton Univ. Pr., 1994.
Stephenson, Bruce. The Music of the Heavens: Kepler's Harmonic Astronomy, Princeton University Press, 1994.
Toulmin, Stephen and June Goodfield. The Fabric of the Heavens: The Development of Astronomy and Dynamics. Pelican, 1963.
Voelkel, James R. The Composition of Kepler's Astronomia nova, Princeton University Press, 2001.
Westfall, Richard S. The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanism and Mechanics. John Wiley and Sons, 1971. ; reprinted Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Wolf, A. A History of Science, Technology and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th centuries. George Allen & Unwin, 1950.
External links
Kepler's Conversation with the Starry Messenger (English translation of Dissertation cum Nuncio Sidereo)
Herausgabe der Werke von Johannes Kepler (with links to digital scans of the published volumes)
(1920 book, part of Men of Science series)
Plant, David, Kepler and the "Music of the Spheres"
1571 births
1630 deaths
People from Weil der Stadt
16th-century German writers
16th-century German male writers
17th-century German writers
17th-century German male writers
16th-century Latin-language writers
16th-century German mathematicians
17th-century Latin-language writers
17th-century German mathematicians
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German expatriates in Austria
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Scientists from Prague
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Natural philosophers
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Mathematicians from Prague
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17th-century German philosophers
16th-century German astronomers | [
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15737 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20Bardeen | John Bardeen | John Bardeen (; May 23, 1908 – January 30, 1991) was an American engineer and physicist. He is the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.
The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry, making possible the development of almost every modern electronic device, from telephones to computers, and ushering in the Information Age. Bardeen's developments in superconductivity—for which he was awarded his second Nobel Prize—are used in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Born and raised in Wisconsin, Bardeen received a PhD in physics from Princeton University. After serving in World War II, he was a researcher at Bell Labs, and a professor at the University of Illinois. In 1990, Bardeen appeared on Life magazine's list of "100 Most Influential Americans of the Century."
Education and early life
Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on May 23, 1908. He was the son of Charles Bardeen, the first dean of the University of Wisconsin Medical School.
Bardeen attended the University High School at Madison. He graduated from the school in 1923 at age 15. He could have graduated several years earlier, but this was postponed because he took courses at another high school and because of his mother's death. He entered the University of Wisconsin in 1923. While in college, he joined the Zeta Psi fraternity. He raised the needed membership fees partly by playing billiards. He was initiated as a member of Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society. He chose engineering because he did not want to be an academic like his father. He also felt that engineering had good job prospects.
Bardeen received his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1928 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He graduated in 1928 despite taking a year off to work in Chicago. He took all the graduate courses in physics and mathematics that had interested him, and he graduated in five years instead of the usual four. This allowed him time to complete his Master's thesis, which was supervised by Leo J. Peters. He received his Master of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1929 from Wisconsin.
Bardeen furthered his studies by staying on at Wisconsin, but he eventually went to work for Gulf Research Laboratories, the research arm of the Gulf Oil Corporation that was based in Pittsburgh. From 1930 to 1933, Bardeen worked there on the development of methods for the interpretation of magnetic and gravitational surveys. He worked as a geophysicist. After the work failed to keep his interest, he applied and was accepted to the graduate program in mathematics at Princeton University.
As a graduate student, Bardeen studied mathematics and physics. Under physicist Eugene Wigner, he ended up writing his thesis on a problem in solid-state physics. Before completing his thesis, he was offered a position as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University in 1935. He spent the next three years there, from 1935 to 1938, working with to-be Nobel laureates in physics John Hasbrouck van Vleck and Percy Williams Bridgman on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals, and also did some work on level density of nuclei. He received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton in 1936.
Career and research
World War II Service
From 1941 to 1944, Bardeen headed the group working on magnetic mines and torpedoes and mine and torpedo countermeasures at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. During this period, his wife Jane gave birth to a son (Bill, born in 1941) and a daughter (Betsy, born in 1944).
Bell Labs
In October 1945, Bardeen began work at Bell Labs. He was a member of a solid-state physics group, led by William Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan. Other personnel working in the group were Walter Brattain, physicist Gerald Pearson, chemist Robert Gibney, electronics expert Hilbert Moore and several technicians. He moved his family to Summit, New Jersey.
The assignment of the group was to seek a solid-state alternative to fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers. Their first attempts were based on Shockley's ideas about using an external electrical field on a semiconductor to affect its conductivity. These experiments mysteriously failed every time in all sorts of configurations and materials. The group was at a standstill until Bardeen suggested a theory that invoked surface states that prevented the field from penetrating the semiconductor. The group changed its focus to study these surface states, and they met almost daily to discuss the work. The rapport of the group was excellent, and ideas were freely exchanged. By the winter of 1946, they had enough results that Bardeen submitted a paper on the surface states to Physical Review. Brattain started experiments to study the surface states through observations made while shining a bright light on the semiconductor's surface. This led to several more papers (one of them co-authored with Shockley), which estimated the density of the surface states to be more than enough to account for their failed experiments. The pace of the work picked up significantly when they started to surround point contacts between the semiconductor and the conducting wires with electrolytes. Moore built a circuit that allowed them to vary the frequency of the input signal easily and suggested that they use glycol borate (gu), a viscous chemical that did not evaporate. Finally, they began to get some evidence of power amplification when Pearson, acting on a suggestion by Shockley, put a voltage on a droplet of gu placed across a p–n junction.
The invention of the transistor
On December 23, 1947, Bardeen and Brattain were working without Shockley when they succeeded in creating a point-contact transistor that achieved amplification. By the next month, Bell Labs' patent attorneys started to work on the patent applications.
Bell Labs' attorneys soon discovered that Shockley's field effect principle had been anticipated and patented in 1930 by Julius Lilienfeld, who filed his MESFET-like patent in Canada on October 22, 1925.
Shockley publicly took the lion's share of the credit for the invention of transistor; this led to a deterioration of Bardeen's relationship with Shockley. Bell Labs management, however, consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Shockley eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor. Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Brattain refused to work with Shockley further and was assigned to another group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention.
The "transistor" (a portmanteau of "transconductance" and "resistor") was 1/50 the size of the vacuum tubes it replaced in televisions and radios, used far less power, was far more reliable, and it allowed electrical devices to become more compact.
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
By 1951, Bardeen was looking for a new job. Fred Seitz, a friend of Bardeen, convinced the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign to make Bardeen an offer of $10,000 a year. Bardeen accepted the offer and left Bell Labs. He joined the engineering and physics faculties at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1951. He was Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Physics at Illinois. His Ph.D. student Nick Holonyak (1954), invented the LED in 1962.
At Illinois, he established two major research programs, one in the Electrical Engineering Department and one in the Physics Department. The research program in the Electrical Engineering Department dealt with both experimental and theoretical aspects of semiconductors, and the research program in the Physics Department dealt with theoretical aspects of macroscopic quantum systems, particularly superconductivity and quantum liquids.
He was an active professor at Illinois from 1951 to 1975 and then became Professor Emeritus. In his later life, Bardeen remained active in academic research, during which time he focused on understanding the flow of electrons in charge density waves (CDWs) through metallic linear chain compounds. His proposals that CDW electron transport is a collective quantum phenomenon (see Macroscopic quantum phenomena) were initially greeted with skepticism. However, experiments reported in 2012 show oscillations in CDW current versus magnetic flux through tantalum trisulfide rings, similar to the behavior of superconducting quantum interference devices (see SQUID and Aharonov–Bohm effect), lending credence to the idea that collective CDW electron transport is fundamentally quantum in nature. (See quantum mechanics.) Bardeen continued his research throughout the 1980s, and published articles in Physical Review Letters and Physics Today less than a year before he died.
A collection of Bardeen's personal papers are held by the University of Illinois Archives.
The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956
In 1956, John Bardeen shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with William Shockley of Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments and Walter Brattain of Bell Telephone Laboratories "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".
At the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, Brattain and Shockley received their awards that night from King Gustaf VI Adolf. Bardeen brought only one of his three children to the Nobel Prize ceremony. King Gustav chided Bardeen because of this, and Bardeen assured the King that the next time he would bring all his children to the ceremony. He kept his promise.
BCS theory
In 1957, Bardeen, in collaboration with Leon Cooper and his doctoral student John Robert Schrieffer, proposed the standard theory of superconductivity known as the BCS theory (named for their initials).
The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972
In 1972, Bardeen shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon N Cooper of Brown University and John Robert Schrieffer of the University of Pennsylvania "for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory". This was Bardeen's second Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field. Only three others have ever received more than one Nobel Prize.
Bardeen brought his three children to the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm. Bardeen gave much of his Nobel Prize money to fund the Fritz London Memorial Lectures at Duke University.
Other awards
In addition to being awarded the Nobel prize twice, Bardeen has numerous other awards including:
1952 Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal.
1959 elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1965 National Medal of Science.
1971 IEEE Medal of Honor for "his profound contributions to the understanding of the conductivity of solids, to the invention of the transistor, and to the microscopic theory of superconductivity."
Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1973.
1975 Franklin Medal.
On January 10, 1977, John Bardeen was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Gerald Ford. He was represented at the ceremony by his son, William Bardeen.
Bardeen was one of 11 recipients given the Third Century Award from President George H. W. Bush in 1990 for "exceptional contributions to American society" and was granted a gold medal from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1988.
1987 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
Xerox
Bardeen was also an important adviser to Xerox Corporation. Though quiet by nature, he took the uncharacteristic step of urging Xerox executives to keep their California research center, Xerox PARC, afloat when the parent company was suspicious that its research center would amount to little.
Personal life
Bardeen married Jane Maxwell on July 18, 1938. While at Princeton, he met Jane during a visit to his old friends in Pittsburgh.
Bardeen was a scientist with a very unassuming personality. While he served as a professor for almost 40 years at the University of Illinois, he was best remembered by neighbors for hosting cookouts where he would prepare food for his friends, many of whom were unaware of his accomplishments at the university. He would always ask his guests if they liked the hamburger bun toasted (since he liked his that way). He enjoyed playing golf and going on picnics with his family. Lillian Hoddeson, a University of Illinois historian who wrote a book on Bardeen, said that because he "differed radically from the popular stereotype of 'genius' and was uninterested in appearing other than ordinary, the public and the media often overlooked him."
When Bardeen was asked about his beliefs during a 1988 interview, he responded: "I am not a religious person, and so do not think about it very much". However, he has also said: "I feel that science cannot provide an answer to the ultimate questions about the meaning and purpose of life." Bardeen did believe in a code of moral values and behaviour. John Bardeen's children were taken to church by his wife, who taught Sunday school and was a church elder. Despite this, he and his wife made it clear that they did not have faith in an afterlife and other religious ideas.
Death
Bardeen died of heart disease at age 82 at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 30, 1991. Although he lived in Champaign-Urbana, he had come to Boston for medical consultation. Bardeen and his wife Jane (1907–1997) are buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, Madison, Wisconsin. They were survived by three children, James, William and Elizabeth Bardeen Greytak, and six grandchildren.
Legacy
In honor of Professor Bardeen, the engineering quadrangle at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is named the Bardeen Quad.
Also in honor of Bardeen, Sony Corporation endowed a $3 million John Bardeen professorial chair at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, beginning in 1990. SONY Corporation owed much of its success to commercializing Bardeen's transistors in portable TVs and radios, and had worked with Illinois researchers. The current John Bardeen Professor is Nick Holonyak, Bardeen's doctoral student and protege.
At the time of Bardeen's death, then-University of Illinois chancellor Morton Weir said, "It is a rare person whose work changes the life of every American; John's did."
Bardeen was honored on a March 6, 2008, United States postage stamp as part of the "American Scientists" series designed by artist Victor Stabin. The $0.41 stamp was unveiled in a ceremony at the University of Illinois. His citation reads: "Theoretical physicist John Bardeen (1908–1991) shared the Nobel Prize in Physics twice—in 1956, as co-inventor of the transistor and in 1972, for the explanation of superconductivity. The transistor paved the way for all modern electronics, from computers to microchips. Diverse applications of superconductivity include infrared sensors and medical imaging systems." The other scientists on the "American Scientists" sheet include biochemist Gerty Cori, chemist Linus Pauling and astronomer Edwin Hubble.
References
External links
The Bardeen Archives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
including his 2 Nobel lectures
December 11, 1956 Semiconductor Research Leading to the Point Contact Transistor
December 11, 1972 Electron-Phonon Interactions and Superconductivity
Associated Press Obituary of John Bardeen as printed in The Boston Globe
Oral History interview transcript with John Bardeen 12, 16 May, 1, 22 December 1977 & 4 April 1978, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives
Oral History interview transcript with John Bardeen 13 February 1980, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives
Interview with Bardeen about his experience at Princeton
The American Presidency Project
IEEE History Center biography
IEEE 2nd Int. Conference on Computers, Communications and Control (ICCCC 2008), an event dedicated to the Centenary of John Bardeen (1908–1991)
– "Three-Electrode Circuit Element Utilizing Semiconductive Materials"
1908 births
1991 deaths
People from Summit, New Jersey
Princeton University alumni
20th-century American inventors
20th-century American physicists
American agnostics
American electrical engineers
American Nobel laureates
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Fellows of the American Physical Society
Nobel laureates in Physics
Nobel laureates with multiple Nobel awards
Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize winners
Scientists from Madison, Wisconsin
Quantum physicists
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Engineering alumni
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
IEEE Medal of Honor recipients | [
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15739 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewellery | Jewellery | Jewellery or jewelry consists of decorative items worn for personal adornment, such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants, bracelets, and cufflinks. Jewellery may be attached to the body or the clothes. From a western perspective, the term is restricted to durable ornaments, excluding flowers for example. For many centuries metal such as gold often combined with gemstones, has been the normal material for jewellery, but other materials such as shells and other plant materials may be used.
Jewellery is one of the oldest types of archaeological artefact – with 100,000-year-old beads made from Nassarius shells thought to be the oldest known jewellery. The basic forms of jewellery vary between cultures but are often extremely long-lived; in European cultures the most common forms of jewellery listed above have persisted since ancient times, while other forms such as adornments for the nose or ankle, important in other cultures, are much less common.
Jewellery may be made from a wide range of materials. Gemstones and similar materials such as amber and coral, precious metals, beads, and shells have been widely used, and enamel has often been important. In most cultures jewellery can be understood as a status symbol, for its material properties, its patterns, or for meaningful symbols. Jewellery has been made to adorn nearly every body part, from hairpins to toe rings, and even genital jewellery. In modern European culture the amount worn by adult males is relatively low compared with other cultures and other periods in European culture.
The word jewellery itself is derived from the word jewel, which was anglicised from the Old French "jouel", and beyond that, to the Latin word "jocale", meaning plaything. In British English, Indian English, New Zealand English, Hiberno-English, Australian English, and South African English it is spelled jewellery, while the spelling is jewelry in American English. Both are used in Canadian English, though jewelry prevails by a two to one margin. In French and a few other European languages the equivalent term, joaillerie, may also cover decorated metalwork in precious metal such as objets d'art and church items, not just objects worn on the person.
Form and function
Humans have used jewellery for a number of different reasons:
functional, generally to fix clothing or hair in place
as a marker of social status and personal status, as with a wedding ring
as a signifier of some form of affiliation, whether ethnic, religious or social
to provide talismanic protection (in the form of amulets)
as an artistic display
as a carrier or symbol of personal meaning – such as love, mourning, a personal milestone or even luck
superstition
Most cultures at some point have had a practice of keeping large amounts of wealth stored in the form of jewellery. Numerous cultures store wedding dowries in the form of jewellery or make jewellery as a means to store or display coins. Alternatively, jewellery has been used as a currency or trade good. an example being the use of slave beads.
Many items of jewellery, such as brooches and buckles, originated as purely functional items, but evolved into decorative items as their functional requirement diminished.
Jewellery can symbolise group membership (as in the case, of the Christian crucifix or the Jewish Star of David) or status (as in the case of chains of office, or the Western practice of married people wearing wedding rings).
Wearing of amulets and devotional medals to provide protection or to ward off evil is common in some cultures. These may take the form of symbols (such as the ankh), stones, plants, animals, body parts (such as the Khamsa), or glyphs (such as stylised versions of the Throne Verse in Islamic art).
Materials and methods
In creating jewellery, gemstones, coins, or other precious items are often used, and they are typically set into precious metals. Platinum alloys range from 900 (90% pure) to 950 (95.0% pure). The silver used in jewellery is usually sterling silver, or 92.5% fine silver. In costume jewellery, stainless steel findings are sometimes used.
Other commonly used materials include glass, such as fused-glass or enamel; wood, often carved or turned; shells and other natural animal substances such as bone and ivory; natural clay; polymer clay; Hemp and other twines have been used as well to create jewellery that has more of a natural feel. However, any inclusion of lead or lead solder will give a British Assay office (the body which gives U.K. jewellery its stamp of approval, the Hallmark) the right to destroy the piece, however it is very rare for the assay office to do so.
Beads are frequently used in jewellery. These may be made of glass, gemstones, metal, wood, shells, clay and polymer clay. Beaded jewellery commonly encompasses necklaces, bracelets, earrings, belts and rings. Beads may be large or small; the smallest type of beads used are known as seed beads, these are the beads used for the "woven" style of beaded jewellery. Seed beads are also used in an embroidery technique where they are sewn onto fabric backings to create broad collar neck pieces and beaded bracelets. Bead embroidery, a popular type of handwork during the Victorian era, is enjoying a renaissance in modern jewellery making. Beading, or beadwork, is also very popular in many African and indigenous North American cultures.
Silversmiths, goldsmiths, and lapidaries use methods including forging, casting, soldering or welding, cutting, carving and "cold-joining" (using adhesives, staples and rivets to assemble parts).
Diamonds
Diamonds were first mined in India. Pliny may have mentioned them, although there is some debate as to the exact nature of the stone he referred to as Adamas. In 2005, Australia, Botswana, Russia and Canada ranked among the primary sources of gemstone diamond production. There are negative consequences of the diamond trade in certain areas. Diamonds mined during the recent civil wars in Angola, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and other nations have been labelled as blood diamonds when they are mined in a war zone and sold to finance an insurgency.
The British crown jewels contain the Cullinan Diamond, part of the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found (1905), at 3,106.75 carats (621.35 g).
Now popular in engagement rings, this usage dates back to the marriage of Maximilian I to Mary of Burgundy in 1477.
A popular style is the diamond solitaire, which features a single large diamond mounted prominently. Within solitaire, there are 3 categories in which a ring can be classified into: prong, bezel and tension setting.
Other gemstones
Many precious and semiprecious stones are used for jewellery. Among them are:
Amber Amber, an ancient organic gemstone, is composed of tree resin that has hardened over time. The stone must be at least one million years old to be classified as amber, and some amber can be up to 120 million years old.
Amethyst Amethyst has historically been the most prized gemstone in the quartz family. It is treasured for its purple hue, which can range in tone from light to dark.
Emerald Emeralds are one of the three main precious gemstones (along with rubies and sapphires) and are known for their fine green to bluish green colour. They have been treasured throughout history, and some historians report that the Egyptians mined emerald as early as 3500 BC.
Jade Jade is most commonly associated with the colour green but can come in a number of other colours as well. Jade is closely linked to Asian culture, history, and tradition, and is sometimes referred to as the stone of heaven.
Jasper Jasper is a gemstone of the chalcedony family that comes in a variety of colours. Often, jasper will feature unique and interesting patterns within the coloured stone. Picture jasper is a type of jasper known for the colours (often beiges and browns) and swirls in the stone's pattern.
Quartz Quartz refers to a family of crystalline gemstones of various colours and sizes. Among the well-known types of quartz are rose quartz (which has a delicate pink colour), and smoky quartz (which comes in a variety of shades of translucent brown). A number of other gemstones, such as Amethyst and Citrine, are also part of the quartz family. Rutilated quartz is a popular type of quartz containing needle-like inclusions.
Ruby Rubies are known for their intense red colour and are among the most highly valued precious gemstones. Rubies have been treasured for millennia. In Sanskrit, the word for ruby is ratnaraj, meaning king of precious stones.
Sapphire The most popular form of sapphire is blue sapphire, which is known for its medium to deep blue colour and strong saturation. Fancy sapphires of various colours are also available. In the United States, blue sapphire tends to be the most popular and most affordable of the three major precious gemstones (emerald, ruby, and sapphire).
Turquoise Turquoise is found in only a few places on earth, and the world's largest turquoise-producing region is the southwest United States. Turquoise is prized for its attractive colour, most often an intense medium blue or a greenish blue, and its ancient heritage. Turquoise is used in a great variety of jewellery styles. It is perhaps most closely associated with southwest and Native American jewellery, but it is also used in many sleek, modern styles. Some turquoise contains a matrix of dark brown markings, which provides an interesting contrast to the gemstone's bright blue colour.
Some gemstones (like pearls, coral, and amber) are classified as organic, meaning that they are produced by living organisms. Others are inorganic, meaning that they are generally composed of and arise from minerals.
Some gems, for example, amethyst, have become less valued as methods of extracting and importing them have progressed. Some man-made gems can serve in place of natural gems, such as cubic zirconia, which can be used in place of diamond.
Metal finishes
For platinum, gold, and silver jewellery, there are many techniques to create finishes. The most common are high-polish, satin/matte, brushed, and hammered. High-polished jewellery is the most common and gives the metal a highly reflective, shiny look. Satin, or matte finish reduces the shine and reflection of the jewellery, and this is commonly used to accentuate gemstones such as diamonds. Brushed finishes give the jewellery a textured look and are created by brushing a material (similar to sandpaper) against the metal, leaving "brush strokes". Hammered finishes are typically created by using a rounded steel hammer and hammering the jewellery to give it a wavy texture.
Some jewellery is plated to give it a shiny, reflective look or to achieve a desired colour. Sterling silver jewellery may be plated with a thin layer of 0.999 fine silver (a process known as flashing) or may be plated with rhodium or gold. Base metal costume jewellery may also be plated with silver, gold, or rhodium for a more attractive finish.
Impact on society
Jewellery has been used to denote status. In ancient Rome, only certain ranks could wear rings; later, sumptuary laws dictated who could wear what type of jewellery. This was also based on rank of the citizens of that time.
Cultural dictates have also played a significant role. For example, the wearing of earrings by Western men was considered effeminate in the 19th century and early 20th century. More recently, the display of body jewellery, such as piercings, has become a mark of acceptance or seen as a badge of courage within some groups but is completely rejected in others. Likewise, hip hop culture has popularised the slang term bling-bling, which refers to ostentatious display of jewellery by men or women.
Conversely, the jewellery industry in the early 20th century launched a campaign to popularise wedding rings for men, which caught on, as well as engagement rings for men, which did not, going so far as to create a false history and claim that the practice had medieval roots. By the mid-1940s, 85% of weddings in the U.S. featured a double-ring ceremony, up from 15% in the 1920s.
Some religions have specific rules or traditions surrounding jewellery (or even prohibiting it) and many religions have edicts against excessive display. Islam, for instance, considers the wearing of gold by men as Haraam. The majority of Islamic jewellery was in the form of bridal dowries, and traditionally was not handed down from generation to generation; instead, on a woman's death it was sold at the souk and recycled or sold to passers-by. Islamic jewellery from before the 19th century is thus exceedingly rare.
Some Christian denominations forbid the use of jewellery by both men and women, including Amish-Mennonites and Holiness churches. The New Testament of the Bible gives injunctions against the wearing of gold, in the writings of the apostles Paul and Peter, and Revelations, describes "the great whore", or false religious system, as being "decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand." (Rev. 17:4)
History
The history of jewellery is long and goes back many years, with many different uses among different cultures. It has endured for thousands of years and has provided various insights into how ancient cultures worked.
Prehistory
The earliest known Jewellery was actually created not by humans (Homo sapiens) but by Neanderthal living in Europe. Specifically, perforated beads made from small sea shells have been found dating to 115,000 years ago in the Cueva de los Aviones, a cave along the southeast coast of Spain. Later in Kenya, at Enkapune Ya Muto, beads made from perforated ostrich egg shells have been dated to more than 40,000 years ago. In Russia, a stone bracelet and marble ring are attributed to a similar age.
Later, the European early modern humans had crude necklaces and bracelets of bone, teeth, berries, and stone hung on pieces of string or animal sinew, or pieces of carved bone used to secure clothing together. In some cases, jewellery had shell or mother-of-pearl pieces.
A decorated engraved pendant (the Star Carr Pendant) dating to around 11,000 BC, and thought to be the oldest Mesolithic art in Britain, was found at the site of Star Carr in North Yorkshire in 2015. In southern Russia, carved bracelets made of mammoth tusk have been found. The Venus of Hohle Fels features a perforation at the top, showing that it was intended to be worn as a pendant.
Around seven-thousand years ago, the first sign of copper jewellery was seen. In October 2012 the Museum of Ancient History in Lower Austria revealed that they had found a grave of a female jewellery worker – forcing archaeologists to take a fresh look at prehistoric gender roles after it appeared to be that of a female fine metal worker – a profession that was previously thought to have been carried out exclusively by men.
Africa
Egypt
The first signs of established jewellery making in Ancient Egypt was around 3,000–5,000 years ago. The Egyptians preferred the luxury, rarity, and workability of gold over other metals. In Predynastic Egypt jewellery soon began to symbolise political and religious power in the community. Although it was worn by wealthy Egyptians in life, it was also worn by them in death, with jewellery commonly placed among grave goods.
In conjunction with gold jewellery, Egyptians used coloured glass, along with semi-precious gems. The colour of the jewellery had significance. Green, for example, symbolised fertility. Lapis lazuli and silver had to be imported from beyond the country's borders.
Egyptian designs were most common in Phoenician jewellery. Also, ancient Turkish designs found in Persian jewellery suggest that trade between the Middle East and Europe was not uncommon. Women wore elaborate gold and silver pieces that were used in ceremonies.
Maghreb countries in North Africa
Jewellery of the Berber cultures is a style of traditional jewellery worn by women and girls in the rural areas of the Maghreb region in North Africa inhabited by indigenous Berber people (in Berber language: Amazigh, Imazighen, pl). Following long social and cultural traditions, the silversmiths of different ethnic Berber groups of Morocco, Algeria and neighbouring countries created intricate jewellery to adorn their women and that formed part of their ethnic identity. Traditional Berber jewellery was usually made of silver and includes elaborate brooches made of triangular plates and pins (fibula), originally used as clasps for garments, but also necklaces, bracelets, earrings and similar items.
Another major type is the so-called khmissa (local pronunciation of the Arabic word "khamsa" for the number "five"), which is called afus in the Berber language (Tamazight). This form represents the five fingers of the hand and is traditionally believed both by Muslims as well as Jewish people to protect against the Evil Eye.
Europe and the Middle East
The first gold jewelry from Bulgaria
The oldest gold jewelry in the world is dating from 4,600 BC to 4,200 BC and was discovered in Europe, at the site of Varna Necropolis, near the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria. Several prehistoric Bulgarian finds are considered no less old – the golden treasures of Hotnitsa, Durankulak, artifacts from the Kurgan settlement of Yunatsite near Pazardzhik, the golden treasure Sakar, as well as beads and gold jewelry found in the Kurgan settlement of Provadia – Solnitsata (“salt pit”). However, Varna gold is most often called the oldest since this treasure is the largest and most diverse.
Mesopotamia
By approximately 5,000 years ago, jewellery-making had become a significant craft in the cities of Mesopotamia. The most significant archaeological evidence comes from the Royal Cemetery of Ur, where hundreds of burials dating 2900–2300 BC were unearthed; tombs such as that of Puabi contained a multitude of artefacts in gold, silver, and semi-precious stones, such as lapis lazuli crowns embellished with gold figurines, close-fitting collar necklaces, and jewel-headed pins. In Assyria, men and women both wore extensive amounts of jewellery, including amulets, ankle bracelets, heavy multi-strand necklaces, and cylinder seals.
Jewellery in Mesopotamia tended to be manufactured from thin metal leaf and was set with large numbers of brightly coloured stones (chiefly agate, lapis, carnelian, and jasper). Favoured shapes included leaves, spirals, cones, and bunches of grapes. Jewellers created works both for human use and for adorning statues and idols. They employed a wide variety of sophisticated metalworking techniques, such as cloisonné, engraving, fine granulation, and filigree.
Extensive and meticulously maintained records pertaining to the trade and manufacture of jewellery have also been unearthed throughout Mesopotamian archaeological sites. One record in the Mari royal archives, for example, gives the composition of various items of jewellery:
Greece
The Greeks started using gold and gems in jewellery in 1600 BC, although beads shaped as shells and animals were produced widely in earlier times. Around 1500 BC, the main techniques of working gold in Greece included casting, twisting bars, and making wire. Many of these sophisticated techniques were popular in the Mycenaean period, but unfortunately this skill was lost at the end of the Bronze Age. The forms and shapes of jewellery in ancient Greece such as the armring (13th century BC), brooch (10th century BC) and pins (7th century BC), have varied widely since the Bronze Age as well. Other forms of jewellery include wreaths, earrings, necklace and bracelets. A good example of the high quality that gold working techniques could achieve in Greece is the 'Gold Olive Wreath' (4th century BC), which is modeled on the type of wreath given as a prize for winners in athletic competitions like the Olympic Games. Jewellery dating from 600 to 475 BC is not well represented in the archaeological record, but after the Persian wars the quantity of jewellery again became more plentiful. One particularly popular type of design at this time was a bracelet decorated with snake and animal-heads Because these bracelets used considerably more metal, many examples were made from bronze. By 300 BC, the Greeks had mastered making coloured jewellery and using amethysts, pearl, and emeralds. Also, the first signs of cameos appeared, with the Greeks creating them from Indian Sardonyx, a striped brown pink and cream agate stone. Greek jewellery was often simpler than in other cultures, with simple designs and workmanship. However, as time progressed, the designs grew in complexity and different materials were soon used.
Jewellery in Greece was hardly worn and was mostly used for public appearances or on special occasions. It was frequently given as a gift and was predominantly worn by women to show their wealth, social status, and beauty. The jewellery was often supposed to give the wearer protection from the "Evil Eye" or endowed the owner with supernatural powers, while others had a religious symbolism. Older pieces of jewellery that have been found were dedicated to the Gods.
They worked two styles of pieces: cast pieces and pieces hammered out of sheet metal. Fewer pieces of cast jewellery have been recovered. It was made by casting the metal onto two stone or clay moulds. The two halves were then joined together, and wax, followed by molten metal, was placed in the centre. This technique had been practised since the late Bronze Age. The more common form of jewellery was the hammered sheet type. Sheets of metal would be hammered to thickness and then soldered together. The inside of the two sheets would be filled with wax or another liquid to preserve the metal work. Different techniques, such as using a stamp or engraving, were then used to create motifs on the jewellery. Jewels may then be added to hollows or glass poured into special cavities on the surface.'The Greeks took much of their designs from outer origins, such as Asia, when Alexander the Great conquered part of it. In earlier designs, other European influences can also be detected. When Roman rule came to Greece, no change in jewellery designs was detected. However, by 27 BC, Greek designs were heavily influenced by the Roman culture. That is not to say that indigenous design did not thrive. Numerous polychrome butterfly pendants on silver foxtail chains, dating from the 1st century, have been found near Olbia, with only one example ever found anywhere else.
Etruscan
Gorgons, pomegranates, acorns, lotus flowers and palms were a clear indicator of Greek influence in Etruscan jewelry. The modelling of heads, which was a typical practice from the Greek severe period, was a technique that spread throughout the Etruscan territory. An even clearer evidence of new influences is the shape introduced in the Orientalizing era: The Bullae. A pear shaped vessel used to hold perfume. Its surface was usually decorated with repoussé and engraved symbolic figures.
Much of the jewelry found was not worn by Etruscans, but were made to accompany them in the after world. Most, if not all, techniques of Etruscan goldsmiths were not invented by them as they are dated to the third millennium BC.
Rome
Although jewellery work was abundantly diverse in earlier times, especially among the barbarian tribes such as the Celts, when the Romans conquered most of Europe, jewellery was changed as smaller factions developed the Roman designs. The most common artefact of early Rome was the brooch, which was used to secure clothing together. The Romans used a diverse range of materials for their jewellery from their extensive resources across the continent. Although they used gold, they sometimes used bronze or bone, and in earlier times, glass beads & pearl. As early as 2,000 years ago, they imported Sri Lankan sapphires and Indian diamonds and used emeralds and amber in their jewellery. In Roman-ruled England, fossilised wood called jet from Northern England was often carved into pieces of jewellery. The early Italians worked in crude gold and created clasps, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. They also produced larger pendants that could be filled with perfume.
Like the Greeks, often the purpose of Roman jewellery was to ward off the "Evil Eye" given by other people. Although women wore a vast array of jewellery, men often only wore a finger ring. Although they were expected to wear at least one ring, some Roman men wore a ring on every finger, while others wore none. Roman men and women wore rings with an engraved gem on it that was used with wax to seal documents, a practice that continued into medieval times when kings and noblemen used the same method. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the jewellery designs were absorbed by neighbouring countries and tribes.
Middle Ages
Post-Roman Europe continued to develop jewellery making skills. The Celts and Merovingians in particular are noted for their jewellery, which in terms of quality matched or exceeded that of the Byzantine Empire. Clothing fasteners, amulets, and, to a lesser extent, signet rings, are the most common artefacts known to us. A particularly striking Celtic example is the Tara Brooch. The Torc was common throughout Europe as a symbol of status and power. By the 8th century, jewelled weaponry was common for men, while other jewellery (with the exception of signet rings) seemed to become the domain of women. Grave goods found in a 6th–7th century burial near Chalon-sur-Saône are illustrative. A young girl was buried with: 2 silver fibulae, a necklace (with coins), bracelet, gold earrings, a pair of hair-pins, comb, and buckle. The Celts specialised in continuous patterns and designs, while Merovingian designs are best known for stylised animal figures. They were not the only groups known for high quality work. Note the Visigoth work shown here, and the numerous decorative objects found at the Anglo-Saxon Ship burial at Sutton Hoo Suffolk, England are a particularly well-known example. On the continent, cloisonné and garnet were perhaps the quintessential method and gemstone of the period.
The Eastern successor of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, continued many of the methods of the Romans, though religious themes came to predominate. Unlike the Romans, the Franks, and the Celts, however, Byzantium used light-weight gold leaf rather than solid gold, and more emphasis was placed on stones and gems. As in the West, Byzantine jewellery was worn by wealthier females, with male jewellery apparently restricted to signet rings. Woman's jewellery had some peculiarities like kolts that decorated headband.
Like other contemporary cultures, jewellery was commonly buried with its owner.
Renaissance
The Renaissance and exploration both had significant impacts on the development of jewellery in Europe. By the 17th century, increasing exploration and trade led to increased availability of a wide variety of gemstones as well as exposure to the art of other cultures. Whereas prior to this the working of gold and precious metal had been at the forefront of jewellery, this period saw increasing dominance of gemstones and their settings. An example of this is the Cheapside Hoard, the stock of a jeweller hidden in London during the Commonwealth period and not found again until 1912. It contained Colombian emerald, topaz, amazonite from Brazil, spinel, iolite, and chrysoberyl from Sri Lanka, ruby from India, Afghan lapis lazuli, Persian turquoise, Red Sea peridot, as well as Bohemian and Hungarian opal, garnet, and amethyst. Large stones were frequently set in box-bezels on enamelled rings. Notable among merchants of the period was Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who brought the precursor stone of the Hope Diamond to France in the 1660s.
When Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned as Emperor of the French in 1804, he revived the style and grandeur of jewellery and fashion in France. Under Napoleon's rule, jewellers introduced parures, suites of matching jewellery, such as a diamond tiara, diamond earrings, diamond rings, a diamond brooch, and a diamond necklace. Both of Napoleon's wives had beautiful sets such as these and wore them regularly. Another fashion trend resurrected by Napoleon was the cameo. Soon after his cameo decorated crown was seen, cameos were highly sought. The period also saw the early stages of costume jewellery, with fish scale covered glass beads in place of pearls or conch shell cameos instead of stone cameos. New terms were coined to differentiate the arts: jewellers who worked in cheaper materials were called bijoutiers, while jewellers who worked with expensive materials were called joailliers, a practice which continues to this day.
Romanticism
Starting in the late 18th century, Romanticism had a profound impact on the development of western jewellery. Perhaps the most significant influences were the public's fascination with the treasures being discovered through the birth of modern archaeology and a fascination with Medieval and Renaissance art. Changing social conditions and the onset of the Industrial Revolution also led to growth of a middle class that wanted and could afford jewellery. As a result, the use of industrial processes, cheaper alloys, and stone substitutes led to the development of paste or costume jewellery. Distinguished goldsmiths continued to flourish, however, as wealthier patrons sought to ensure that what they wore still stood apart from the jewellery of the masses, not only through use of precious metals and stones but also though superior artistic and technical work. One such artist was the French goldsmith François-Désiré Froment-Meurice. A category unique to this period and quite appropriate to the philosophy of romanticism was mourning jewellery. It originated in England, where Queen Victoria was often seen wearing jet jewellery after the death of Prince Albert, and it allowed the wearer to continue wearing jewellery while expressing a state of mourning at the death of a loved one.
In the United States, this period saw the founding in 1837 of Tiffany & Co. by Charles Lewis Tiffany. Tiffany's put the United States on the world map in terms of jewellery and gained fame creating dazzling commissions for people such as the wife of Abraham Lincoln. Later, it would gain popular notoriety as the setting of the film Breakfast at Tiffany's. In France, Pierre Cartier founded Cartier SA in 1847, while 1884 saw the founding of Bulgari in Italy. The modern production studio had been born and was a step away from the former dominance of individual craftsmen and patronage.
This period also saw the first major collaboration between East and West. Collaboration in Pforzheim between German and Japanese artists led to Shakudō plaques set into Filigree frames being created by the Stoeffler firm in 1885).<ref>Ilse-Neuman, Ursula. Book review "Schmuck/Jewellery 1840–1940: Highlights from the Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim. Metalsmith. Fall2006, Vol. 26 Issue 3, pp. 12–13</ref> Perhaps the grand finalé – and an appropriate transition to the following period – were the masterful creations of the Russian artist Peter Carl Fabergé, working for the Imperial Russian court, whose Fabergé eggs and jewellery pieces are still considered as the epitome of the goldsmith's art.
18th century/Romanticism/Renaissance
Many whimsical fashions were introduced in the extravagant eighteenth century. Cameos that were used in connection with jewellery were the attractive trinkets along with many of the small objects such as brooches, ear-rings and scarf-pins. Some of the necklets were made of several pieces joined with the gold chains were in and bracelets were also made sometimes to match the necklet and the brooch. At the end of the Century the jewellery with cut steel intermixed with large crystals was introduced by an Englishman, Matthew Boulton of Birmingham.
Art Nouveau
In the 1890s, jewellers began to explore the potential of the growing Art Nouveau style and the closely related German Jugendstil, British (and to some extent American) Arts and Crafts Movement, Catalan Modernisme, Austro-Hungarian Sezession, Italian "Liberty", etc.
Art Nouveau jewellery encompassed many distinct features including a focus on the female form and an emphasis on colour, most commonly rendered through the use of enamelling techniques including basse-taille, champleve, cloisonné, and plique-à-jour. Motifs included orchids, irises, pansies, vines, swans, peacocks, snakes, dragonflies, mythological creatures, and the female silhouette.
René Lalique, working for the Paris shop of Samuel Bing, was recognised by contemporaries as a leading figure in this trend. The Darmstadt Artists' Colony and Wiener Werkstätte provided perhaps the most significant input to the trend, while in Denmark Georg Jensen, though best known for his Silverware, also contributed significant pieces. In England, Liberty & Co., (notably through the Cymric designs of Archibald Knox) and the British arts & crafts movement of Charles Robert Ashbee contributed slightly more linear but still characteristic designs. The new style moved the focus of the jeweller's art from the setting of stones to the artistic design of the piece itself. Lalique's dragonfly design is one of the best examples of this. Enamels played a large role in technique, while sinuous organic lines are the most recognisable design feature.
The end of World War I once again changed public attitudes, and a more sober style developed.
Art Deco
Growing political tensions, the after-effects of the war, and a reaction against the perceived decadence of the turn of the 20th century led to simpler forms, combined with more effective manufacturing for mass production of high-quality jewellery. Covering the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the style has become popularly known as Art Deco. Walter Gropius and the German Bauhaus movement, with their philosophy of "no barriers between artists and craftsmen" led to some interesting and stylistically simplified forms. Modern materials were also introduced: plastics and aluminium were first used in jewellery, and of note are the chromed pendants of Russian-born Bauhaus master Naum Slutzky. Technical mastery became as valued as the material itself. In the West, this period saw the reinvention of granulation by the German Elizabeth Treskow, although development of the re-invention has continued into the 1990s. It is based on the basic shapes.
Asia
In Asia, the Indian subcontinent has the longest continuous legacy of jewellery making anywhere, Asia was the first place where these jewellery were made in large numbers for the royals with a history of over 5,000 years. One of the first to start jewellery making were the peoples of the Indus Valley Civilization, in what is now predominately modern-day Pakistan and part of northern and western India. Early jewellery making in China started around the same period, but it became widespread with the spread of Buddhism around 2,000 years ago.
China
The Chinese used silver in their jewellery more than gold. Blue kingfisher feathers were tied onto early Chinese jewellery and later, blue gems and glass were incorporated into designs. However, jade was preferred over any other stone. The Chinese revered jade because of the human-like qualities they assigned to it, such as its hardness, durability, and beauty. The first jade pieces were very simple, but as time progressed, more complex designs evolved. Jade rings from between the 4th and 7th centuries BC show evidence of having been worked with a compound milling machine, hundreds of years before the first mention of such equipment in the west.
In China, the most uncommon piece of jewellery is the earring, which was worn neither by men nor women. In modern times, earrings are still considered culturally taboo for men in China—in fact, in 2019, the Chinese video streaming service iQiyi began blurring the ears of male actors wearing earrings. Amulets were common, often with a Chinese symbol or dragon. Dragons, Chinese symbols, and phoenixes were frequently depicted on jewellery designs.
The Chinese often placed their jewellery in their graves. Most Chinese graves found by archaeologists contain decorative jewellery.
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent has a long jewellery history, which has gone through various changes via cultural influence and politics for more than 5,000–8,000 years. Because India had an abundant supply of precious metals and gems, it prospered financially through export and exchange with other countries. While European traditions were heavily influenced by waxing and waning empires, India enjoyed a continuous development of art forms for some 5,000 years. One of the first to start jewellery making were the peoples of the Indus Valley Civilization. By 1500 BC, the peoples of the Indus Valley were creating gold earrings and necklaces, bead necklaces, and metallic bangles. Before 2100 BC, prior to the period when metals were widely used, the largest jewellery trade in the Indus Valley region was the bead trade. Beads in the Indus Valley were made using simple techniques. First, a bead maker would need a rough stone, which would be bought from an eastern stone trader. The stone would then be placed into a hot oven where it would be heated until it turned deep red, a colour highly prized by people of the Indus Valley. The red stone would then be chipped to the right size and a hole bored through it with primitive drills. The beads were then polished. Some beads were also painted with designs. This art form was often passed down through the family. Children of bead makers often learned how to work beads from a young age. Each stone had its own characteristics related to Hinduism.
Jewellery in the Indus Valley was worn predominantly by females, who wore numerous clay or shell bracelets on their wrists. They were often shaped like doughnuts and painted black. Over time, clay bangles were discarded for more durable ones. In present-day India, bangles are made out of metal or glass. Other pieces that women frequently wore were thin bands of gold that would be worn on the forehead, earrings, primitive brooches, chokers, and gold rings. Although women wore jewellery the most, some men in the Indus Valley wore beads. Small beads were often crafted to be placed in men and women's hair. The beads were about one millimetre long.
A female skeleton (presently on display at the National Museum, New Delhi, India) wears a carlinean bangle (bracelet) on her left hand. Kada is a special kind of bracelet and is widely popular in Indian culture. They symbolize animals such as peacock, elephant, etc.
According to Hindu belief, gold and silver are considered as sacred metals. Gold is symbolic of the warm sun, while silver suggests the cool moon. Both are the quintessential metals of Indian jewellery. Pure gold does not oxidise or corrode with time, which is why Hindu tradition associates gold with immortality. Gold imagery occurs frequently in ancient Indian literature. In the Vedic Hindu belief of cosmological creation, the source of physical and spiritual human life originated in and evolved from a golden womb (hiranyagarbha) or egg (hiranyanda), a metaphor of the sun, whose light rises from the primordial waters.
Jewellery had great status with India's royalty; it was so powerful that they established laws, limiting wearing of jewellery to royalty. Only royalty and a few others to whom they granted permission could wear gold ornaments on their feet. This would normally be considered breaking the appreciation of the sacred metals. Even though the majority of the Indian population wore jewellery, Maharajas and people related to royalty had a deeper connection with jewellery. The Maharaja's role was so important that the Hindu philosophers identified him as central to the smooth working of the world. He was considered as a divine being, a deity in human form, whose duty was to uphold and protect dharma, the moral order of the universe.
Navaratna (nine gems) is a powerful jewel frequently worn by a Maharaja (Emperor). It is an amulet, which comprises diamond, pearl, ruby, sapphire, emerald, topaz, cat's eye, coral, and hyacinth (red zircon). Each of these stones is associated with a celestial deity, represented the totality of the Hindu universe when all nine gems are together. The diamond is the most powerful gem among the nine stones. There were various cuts for the gemstone. Indian Kings bought gemstones privately from the sellers. Maharaja and other royal family members value gem as Hindu God. They exchanged gems with people to whom they were very close, especially the royal family members and other intimate allies.
India was the first country to mine diamonds, with some mines dating back to 296 BC. India traded the diamonds, realising their valuable qualities. Historically, diamonds have been given to retain or regain a lover's or ruler's lost favour, as symbols of tribute, or as an expression of fidelity in exchange for concessions and protection. Mughal emperors and Kings used the diamonds as a means of assuring their immortality by having their names and worldly titles inscribed upon them. Moreover, it has played and continues to play a pivotal role in Indian social, political, economic, and religious event, as it often has done elsewhere. In Indian history, diamonds have been used to acquire military equipment, finance wars, foment revolutions, and tempt defections. They have contributed to the abdication or the decapitation of potentates. They have been used to murder a representative of the dominating power by lacing his food with crushed diamond. Indian diamonds have been used as security to finance large loans needed to buttress politically or economically tottering regimes. Victorious military heroes have been honoured by rewards of diamonds and also have been used as ransom payment for release from imprisonment or abduction.
Today, many of the jewellery designs and traditions are used, and jewellery is commonplace in Indian ceremonies and weddings.
North and South America
Jewellery played a major role in the fate of the Americas when the Spanish established an empire to seize South American gold. Jewellery making developed in the Americas 5,000 years ago in Central and South America. Large amounts of gold was easily accessible, and the Aztecs, Mixtecs, Mayans, and numerous Andean cultures, such as the Mochica of Peru, created beautiful pieces of jewellery.
With the Mochica culture, goldwork flourished. The pieces are no longer simple metalwork, but are now masterful examples of jewellery making. Pieces are sophisticated in their design, and feature inlays of turquoise, mother of pearl, spondylus shell, and amethyst. The nose and ear ornaments, chest plates, small containers and whistles are considered masterpieces of ancient Peruvian culture.
Among the Aztecs, only nobility wore gold jewellery, as it showed their rank, power, and wealth. Gold jewellery was most common in the Aztec Empire and was often decorated with feathers from Quetzal birds and others. In general, the more jewellery an Aztec noble wore, the higher his status or prestige. The Emperor and his High Priests, for example, would be nearly completely covered in jewellery when making public appearances. Although gold was the most common and a popular material used in Aztec jewellery, jade, turquoise, and certain feathers were considered more valuable. In addition to adornment and status, the Aztecs also used jewellery in sacrifices to appease the gods. Priests also used gem-encrusted daggers to perform animal and human sacrifices.
Another ancient American civilization with expertise in jewellery making were the Maya. At the peak of their civilization, the Maya were making jewellery from jade, gold, silver, bronze, and copper. Maya designs were similar to those of the Aztecs, with lavish headdresses and jewellery. The Maya also traded in precious gems. However, in earlier times, the Maya had little access to metal, so they made the majority of their jewellery out of bone or stone. Merchants and nobility were the only few that wore expensive jewellery in the Maya region, much the same as with the Aztecs.
In North America, Native Americans used shells, wood, turquoise, and soapstone, almost unavailable in South and Central America. The turquoise was used in necklaces and to be placed in earrings. Native Americans with access to oyster shells, often located in only one location in America, traded the shells with other tribes, showing the great importance of the body adornment trade in Northern America.
Native American
Native American jewellery is the personal adornment, often in the forms of necklaces, earrings, bracelets, rings, pins, brooches, labrets, and more, made by the Indigenous peoples of the United States. Native American jewellery reflects the cultural diversity and history of its makers. Native American tribes continue to develop distinct aesthetics rooted in their personal artistic visions and cultural traditions. Artists create jewellery for adornment, ceremonies, and trade. Lois Sherr Dubin writes, "[i]n the absence of written languages, adornment became an important element of Indian [Native American] communication, conveying many levels of information." Later, jewellery and personal adornment "...signaled resistance to assimilation. It remains a major statement of tribal and individual identity."
Within the Haida Nation of the Pacific Northwest, copper was used as a form of jewelry for creating bracelets.
Metalsmiths, beaders, carvers, and lapidaries combine a variety of metals, hardwoods, precious and semi-precious gemstones, beadwork, quillwork, teeth, bones, hide, vegetal fibres, and other materials to create jewellery. Contemporary Native American jewellery ranges from hand-quarried and processed stones and shells to computer-fabricated steel and titanium jewellery.
Pacific
Jewellery making in the Pacific started later than in other areas because of recent human settlement. Early Pacific jewellery was made of bone, wood, and other natural materials, and thus has not survived. Most Pacific jewellery is worn above the waist, with headdresses, necklaces, hair pins, and arm and waist belts being the most common pieces.
Jewellery in the Pacific, with the exception of Australia, is worn to be a symbol of either fertility or power. Elaborate headdresses are worn by many Pacific cultures and some, such as the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea, wear certain headdresses once they have killed an enemy. Tribesman may wear boar bones through their noses.
Island jewellery is still very much primal because of the lack of communication with outside cultures. Some areas of Borneo and Papua New Guinea are yet to be explored by Western nations. However, the island nations that were flooded with Western missionaries have had drastic changes made to their jewellery designs. Missionaries saw any type of tribal jewellery as a sign of the wearer's devotion to paganism. Thus many tribal designs were lost forever in the mass conversion to Christianity.
Australia is now the number one supplier of opals in the world. Opals had already been mined in Europe and South America for many years prior, but in the late 19th century, the Australian opal market became predominant. Australian opals are only mined in a few select places around the country, making it one of the most profitable stones in the Pacific.
The New Zealand Māori traditionally had a strong culture of personal adornment, most famously the hei-tiki. Hei-tikis are traditionally carved by hand from bone, nephrite, or bowenite.
Nowadays a wide range of such traditionally inspired items such as bone carved pendants based on traditional fishhooks hei matau and other greenstone jewellery are popular with young New Zealanders of all backgrounds – for whom they relate to a generalized sense of New Zealand identity. These trends have contributed towards a worldwide interest in traditional Māori culture and arts.
Other than jewellery created through Māori influence, modern jewellery in New Zealand is multicultural and varied.
Modern
Most modern commercial jewellery continues traditional forms and styles, but designers such as Georg Jensen have widened the concept of wearable art. The advent of new materials, such as plastics, Precious Metal Clay (PMC), and colouring techniques, has led to increased variety in styles. Other advances, such as the development of improved pearl harvesting by people such as Mikimoto Kōkichi and the development of improved quality artificial gemstones such as moissanite (a diamond simulant), has placed jewellery within the economic grasp of a much larger segment of the population.
The "jewellery as art" movement was spearheaded by artisans such as Robert Lee Morris and continued by designers such as Gill Forsbrook in the UK. Influence from other cultural forms is also evident. One example of this is bling-bling style jewellery, popularised by hip-hop and rap artists in the early 21st century, e.g. grills, a type of jewellery worn over the teeth.
The late 20th century saw the blending of European design with oriental techniques such as Mokume-gane. The following are innovations in the decades straddling the year 2000: "Mokume-gane, hydraulic die forming, anti-clastic raising, fold-forming, reactive metal anodising, shell forms, PMC, photoetching, and [use of] CAD/CAM."
Also, 3D printing as a production technique gains more and more importance. With a great variety of services offering this production method, jewellery design becomes accessible to a growing number of creatives. An important advantage of using 3d printing are the relatively low costs for prototypes, small batch series or unique and personalized designs. Shapes that are hard or impossible to create by hand can often be realized by 3D printing. Popular materials to print include polyamide, steel and wax (latter for further processing). Every printable material has its very own constraints that have to be considered while designing the piece of jewellery using 3D modelling software.
Artisan jewellery continues to grow as both a hobby and a profession. With more than 17 United States periodicals about beading alone, resources, accessibility, and a low initial cost of entry continues to expand production of hand-made adornments. Some fine examples of artisan jewellery can be seen at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The increase in numbers of students choosing to study jewellery design and production in Australia has grown in the past 20 years, and Australia now has a thriving contemporary jewellery community. Many of these jewellers have embraced modern materials and techniques, as well as incorporating traditional workmanship.
More expansive use of metal to adorn the wearer, where the piece is larger and more elaborate than what would normally be considered jewellery, has come to be referred to by designers and fashion writers as metal couture.
Masonic
Freemasons attach jewels to their detachable collars when in Lodge to signify a Brothers Office held with the Lodge. For example, the square represents the Master of the Lodge and the dove represents the Deacon.
Body modification
Jewellery used in body modification can be simple and plain or dramatic and extreme. The use of simple silver studs, rings, and earrings predominates. Common jewellery pieces such as earrings are a form of body modification, as they are accommodated by creating a small hole in the ear.
Padaung women in Myanmar place large golden rings around their necks. From as early as five years old, girls are introduced to their first neck ring. Over the years, more rings are added. In addition to the twenty-plus pounds of rings on her neck, a woman will also wear just as many rings on her calves. At their extent, some necks modified like this can reach long. The practice has health impacts and has in recent years declined from cultural norm to tourist curiosity. Tribes related to the Padaung, as well as other cultures throughout the world, use jewellery to stretch their earlobes or enlarge ear piercings. In the Americas, labrets have been worn since before first contact by Innu and First Nations peoples of the northwest coast. Lip plates have been worn by the African Mursi and Sara people, as well as some South American peoples.
In the late twentieth century, the influence of modern primitivism led to many of these practices being incorporated into western subcultures. Many of these practices rely on a combination of body modification and decorative objects, thus keeping the distinction between these two types of decoration blurred.
In many cultures, jewellery is used as a temporary body modifier; in some cases, with hooks or other objects being placed into the recipient's skin. Although this procedure is often carried out by tribal or semi-tribal groups, often acting under a trance during religious ceremonies, this practice has seeped into western culture. Many extreme-jewellery shops now cater to people wanting large hooks or spikes set into their skin. Most often, these hooks are used in conjunction with pulleys to hoist the recipient into the air. This practice is said to give an erotic feeling to the person and some couples have even performed their marriage ceremony whilst being suspended by hooks.
Jewellery market
According to a 2007 KPMG study, the largest jewellery market is the United States with a market share of 30.8%, Japan, India, China, and the Middle East each with 8–9%, and Italy with 5%. The authors of the study predicted a dramatic change in market shares by 2015, where the market share of the United States will have dropped to around 25%, and China and India will increase theirs to over 13%. The Trend of buying jewellery online is also increasing day by day,as the results the best quality jewellery can be provided in cheaper price to any part of india via too many online shops. The Middle East will remain more or less constant at 9%, whereas Europe's and Japan's marketshare will be halved and become less than 4% for Japan, and less than 3% for the biggest individual European countries, Italy and the UK.
See also
Bronze and brass ornamental work
Estate jewelry
Heirloom
Gemology
Jewellery cleaning
Jewellery of the Berber cultures
Jewellery Quarter
Jewelry Television
List of jewellery types
List of topics characterized as pseudoscience (healing jewelry)
Live insect jewelry
Suffrage jewellery
Wire sculpture
References
Further reading
Borel, F. 1994. The Splendor of Ethnic Jewelry: from the Colette and Jean-Pierre Ghysels Collection. New York: H.N. Abrams ().
Evans, J. 1989. A History of Jewellery 1100–1870 ().
Nemet-Nejat, Karen Rhea 1998. Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press ().
Tait, H. 1986. Seven Thousand Years of Jewellery. London: British Museum Publications ().
External links
Fashion accessories
Human appearance | [
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15740 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan%20Berglin | Jan Berglin | Jan Berglin (born March 24, 1960) is a Swedish cartoonist who made his debut in the Uppsala student newspaper Ergo in 1985. After completing his studies, Berglin has been living in Gävle where he works as a teacher of Swedish and religion. He published his early strips in the local social democratic newspaper Arbetarbladet, but became known to a wider audience in 1995, when he started to draw for the Stockholm-based but nationally distributed conservative newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. His strips have been collected and republished in several albums.
Berglin's strips, usually in four panels, tend to find their humour in a sometimes absurd mix of everyday situations and literary and philosophical references or reflections. When he was awarded the Alf Henrikson Prize in 2004, the jury's motivation spoke of his renditions of the "existence of the everyday human between ideals and matter".
In later years Berglin has acknowledged the input of his wife Maria Berglin, an artist and literary critic, within his strips by signing them "Berglins".
Albums
Samlade serier ("Collected comics") (1992)
Avanti! – Serier för förryckta (1995)
Mitt i currykrysset – serier mot sekelslutsleda (1997)
Andra bullar! (1998)
Knektöppning – Ess i topp (1999)
Magnum Berglin: Samlade teckningar 1989-1999 ("Collected drawings 1989-1999") (2001)
Lagom Berglin (2002)
Pytte Berglin (2003)
Berglinska Tider (2004)
Berglin nästa (2006)
Berglins Tolva ("Berglin's Twelfth") (2007)
Berglin den trettonde : samlade teckningar av Jan och Maria Berglin ("Berglin the Thirteenth: drawings by Jan and Maria Berglin") (2008)
Varje dag man inte köper pizza är en seger ("Every day you don't get pizza is a victory") (2009)
Berglin den trettonde, Kartago 2008 (with Maria Berglin)
Någon ser dig när du petar näsan Galago, 2010 (with Maria Berglin)
Bronto Berglin, Galago 2011 (with Maria Berglin) (samlade serier 1999–2008)
Den speciella & den allmänna vardagsteorin, Bonnier Fakta, 2012 (with Maria Berglin)
Det är den som möter som ska backa, Wahlström & Widstrand, 2013 (with Maria Berglin)
Berglins stora bok om kropp & hälsa, Wahlström & Widstrand, 2014 (with Maria Berglin)
Mitt i rondellen, Wahlström & Widstrand, 2014 (with Maria Berglin)
Det sista rotavdraget, Wahlström & Widstrand, 2015 (with Maria Berglin)
God Jul Luj Dog – samlade julteckningar, Wahlström & Widstrand, 2015 (with Maria Berglin)
Serier från andra våningen, Wahlström & Widstrand, 2016 (with Maria Berglin)
Kaos är granne med Bjällermalms Natur och Kultur, 2017 (with Maria Berglin)
Nämenvaf…, Natur och Kultur, 2018 (with Maria Berglin)
Nya bokstavskombinationer, Natur och Kultur, 2019 (with Maria Berglin)
External links
Berglin, comic strip, dynamic page on the website of Swedish daily paper Svenska Dagbladet
Jan Berglin, some comic strips by berglin
Swedish cartoonists
1960 births
Living people | [
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15744 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim%20Jarmusch | Jim Jarmusch | James Robert Jarmusch (; born January 22, 1953) is an American film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, editor, and composer. He has been a major proponent of independent cinema since the 1980s, directing films such as Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Broken Flowers (2005), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Paterson (2016), and The Dead Don't Die (2019). Stranger Than Paradise was added to the National Film Registry in December 2002. As a musician, Jarmusch has composed music for his films and released three albums with Jozef van Wissem.
Early life
Jarmusch was born January 22, 1953, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, the middle of three children of middle-class suburbanites. His mother, of German and Irish descent, had been a reviewer of film and theatre for the Akron Beacon Journal before marrying his father, a businessman of Czech and German descent who worked for the B.F. Goodrich Company. She introduced Jarmusch to cinema by leaving him at a local cinema to watch matinee double features such as Attack of the Crab Monsters and Creature From the Black Lagoon while she ran errands. The first adult film he recalls seeing was the 1958 cult classic Thunder Road, the violence and darkness of which left an impression on the seven-year-old Jarmusch. Another B-movie influence from his childhood was Ghoulardi, an eccentric Cleveland television show which featured horror films.
Along with his enthusiasm for film, Jarmusch was an avid reader in his youth and had a greater interest in literature, which was encouraged by his grandmother. Though he refused to attend church with his Episcopalian parents (not being enthused by "the idea of sitting in a stuffy room wearing a little tie"), Jarmusch credits literature with shaping his metaphysical beliefs and leading him to reconsider theology in his mid-teens.
From his peers he developed a taste for counterculture, and he and his friends would steal the records and books of their older siblings—this included works by William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and The Mothers of Invention. They made fake identity documents which allowed them to visit bars at the weekend but also the local art house cinema, which typically showed pornographic films but would occasionally feature underground films such as Robert Downey, Sr.'s Putney Swope and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls. At one point, he took an apprenticeship with a commercial photographer. He later remarked, "Growing up in Ohio was just planning to get out."
After graduating from high school in 1971, Jarmusch moved to Chicago and enrolled in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. After being asked to leave because he had neglected to take any journalism courses—Jarmusch favored literature and art history—he transferred to Columbia University the following year, with the intention of becoming a poet. At Columbia, he studied English and American literature under professors including New York School avant garde poets Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro. At Columbia, he began to write short "semi-narrative abstract pieces" and edited the undergraduate literary journal The Columbia Review.
During his final year at Columbia, Jarmusch moved to Paris for what was initially a summer semester on an exchange program, but turned into 10 months. There, he worked as a delivery driver for an art gallery, and spent most of his time at the Cinémathèque Française.
Jarmusch graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1975. Broke and working as a musician in New York City after returning from Paris in 1976, he applied on a whim to the graduate film school of New York University's School of the Arts (then under the direction of Hollywood director László Benedek). Despite his lack of experience in filmmaking, his submission of a collection of photographs and an essay about film secured his acceptance into the program. He studied there for four years, meeting fellow students and future collaborators Sara Driver, Tom DiCillo, Howard Brookner, and Spike Lee in the process. During the late 1970s in New York City, Jarmusch and his contemporaries were part of an alternative culture scene centered on the CBGB music club.
In his final year at New York University, Jarmusch worked as an assistant to the film noir director Nicholas Ray, who was at that time teaching in the department. In an anecdote, Jarmusch recounted the formative experience of showing his mentor his first script; Ray disapproved of its lack of action, to which Jarmusch responded after meditating on the critique by reworking the script to be even less eventful. On Jarmusch's return with the revised script, Ray reacted favourably to his student's dissent, citing approvingly the young student's obstinate independence. Jarmusch was the only person Ray brought to work—as his personal assistant—on Lightning Over Water, a documentary about his dying years on which he was collaborating with Wim Wenders. Ray died in 1979 after a long fight with cancer. A few days afterwards, having been encouraged by Ray and New York underground filmmaker Amos Poe and using scholarship funds given by the Louis B. Mayer Foundation to pay for his school tuition, Jarmusch started work on a film for his final project. The university, unimpressed with Jarmusch's use of his funding as well as the project itself, promptly refused to award him a degree.
Career
1980s
Jarmusch's final year university project was completed in 1980 as Permanent Vacation, his first feature film. It had its premiere at the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg (formerly known as Filmweek Mannheim) and won the Josef von Sternberg Award. It was made on a shoestring budget of around $12,000 in misdirected scholarship funds and shot by cinematographer Tom DiCillo on 16 mm film. The 75 minute quasi-autobiographical feature follows an adolescent drifter (Chris Parker) as he wanders around downtown Manhattan.
The film was not released theatrically, and did not attract the sort of adulation from critics that greeted his later work. The Washington Post staff writer Hal Hinson would disparagingly comment in an aside during a review of Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989) that in the director's debut, "the only talent he demonstrated was for collecting egregiously untalented actors". The bleak and unrefined Permanent Vacation is nevertheless one of the director's most personal films, and established many of the hallmarks he would exhibit in his later work, including derelict urban settings, chance encounters, and a wry sensibility.
Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
Jarmusch's first major film, Stranger Than Paradise, was produced on a budget of approximately $125,000 and released in 1984 to much critical acclaim. A deadpan comedy recounting a strange journey of three disillusioned youths from New York through Cleveland to Florida, the film broke many conventions of traditional Hollywood filmmaking. It was awarded the Camera d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival as well as the 1985 National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Film, and became a landmark work in modern independent film.
Down by Law (1986)
In 1986, Jarmusch wrote and directed Down by Law, starring musicians John Lurie and Tom Waits, and Italian comic actor Roberto Benigni (his introduction to American audiences) as three convicts who escape from a New Orleans jailhouse. Shot like the director's previous efforts in black and white, this constructivist neo-noir was Jarmusch's first collaboration with Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller, who had been known for his work with Wenders.
Further films
His next two films each experimented with parallel narratives: Mystery Train (1989) told three successive stories set on the same night in and around a small Memphis hotel, and Night on Earth (1991) involved five cab drivers and their passengers on rides in five different world cities, beginning at sundown in Los Angeles and ending at sunrise in Helsinki. Less bleak and somber than Jarmusch's earlier work, Mystery Train nevertheless retained the director's askance conception of America. He wrote Night on Earth in about a week, out of frustration at the collapse of the production of another film he had written and the desire to visit and collaborate with friends such as Benigni, Gena Rowlands, Winona Ryder and Isaach de Bankolé.
As a result of his early work, Jarmusch became an influential representative of the trend of the American road movie. Not intended to appeal to mainstream filmgoers, these early Jarmusch films were embraced by art house audiences, gaining a small but dedicated American following and cult status in Europe and Japan. Each of the four films had its premiere at the New York Film Festival, while Mystery Train was in competition at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. Jarmusch's distinctive aesthetic and auteur status fomented a critical backlash at the close of this early period, however; though reviewers praised the charm and adroitness of Mystery Train and Night On Earth, the director was increasingly charged with repetitiveness and risk-aversion.
A film appearance in 1989 as a used car dealer in the cult comedy Leningrad Cowboys Go America further solidified his interest and participation in the road movie genre. In 1991 Jarmusch appeared as himself in Episode One of John Lurie's cult television series Fishing With John.
1990s
Dead Man (1995)
In 1995, Jarmusch released Dead Man, a period film set in the 19th century American West starring Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer. Produced at a cost of almost $9 million with a high-profile cast including John Hurt, Gabriel Byrne and, in his final role, Robert Mitchum, the film marked a significant departure for the director from his previous features. Earnest in tone in comparison to its self-consciously hip and ironic predecessors, Dead Man was thematically expansive and of an often violent and progressively more surreal character. The film was shot in black and white by Robby Müller, and features a score composed and performed by Neil Young, for whom Jarmusch subsequently filmed the tour documentary Year of the Horse, released to tepid reviews in 1997.
Though ill-received by mainstream American reviewers, Dead Man found much favor internationally and among critics, many of whom lauded it as a visionary masterpiece. It has been hailed as one of the few films made by a Caucasian that presents an authentic Native American culture and character, and Jarmusch stands by it as such, though it has attracted both praise and castigation for its portrayal of the American West, violence, and especially Native Americans.
Ghost Dog (1999)
Following artistic success and critical acclaim in the American independent film community, he achieved mainstream recognition with his far-East philosophical crime film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), shot in Jersey City and starring Forest Whitaker as a young inner-city man who has found purpose for his life by unyieldingly conforming it to the Hagakure, an 18th-century philosophy text and training manual for samurai, becoming, as directed, a terrifyingly deadly hit-man for a local mob boss to whom he may owe a debt, and who then betrays him. The soundtrack was supplied by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, which blends into the director's "aesthetics of sampling". The film was unique among other things for the number of books important to and discussed by its characters, most of them listed bibliographically as part of the end credits. The film is also considered to be a homage to Le Samourai, a 1967 French New Wave film by auteur Jean-Pierre Melville, which starred renowned French actor Alain Delon in a strikingly similar role and narrative.
2000s
A five-year gap followed the release of Ghost Dog, which the director has attributed to a creative crisis he experienced in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in New York City. 2004 saw the eventual release of Coffee and Cigarettes, a collection of eleven short films of characters sitting around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes that had been filmed by Jarmusch over the course of the previous two decades. The first vignette, "Strange to Meet You", had been shot for and aired on Saturday Night Live in 1986, and paired Roberto Benigni with comedian Steven Wright. This had been followed three years later by "Twins", a segment featuring actors Steve Buscemi and Joie and Cinqué Lee, and then in 1993 with the Short Film Palme d'Or-winning "Somewhere in California", starring musicians Tom Waits and Iggy Pop.
Broken Flowers (2005)
He followed Coffee and Cigarettes in 2005 with Broken Flowers, which starred Bill Murray as an early retiree who goes in search of the mother of his unknown son in attempt to overcome a midlife crisis. Following the release of Broken Flowers, Jarmusch signed a deal with Fortissimo Films, whereby the distributor would fund and have "first-look" rights to the director's future films, and cover some of the overhead costs of his production company, Exoskeleton. The film premiered at the 58th Cannes Film Festival where it competed for the Palme d'Or and received the Grand Prix. Film critic Peter Bradshaw for The Guardian described the film as "Jarmusch's most enjoyable, accessible work for some time, perhaps his most emotionally generous film...a very attractive piece of film-making, bolstered by terrific performances from an all-star cast, spearheaded by endlessly droll, seductively sensitive Bill Murray." In 2005, he struck a first look deal with Fortissimo Films.
The Limits of Control (2009)
In 2009, Jarmusch released The Limits of Control, a sparse, meditative crime film set in Spain, it starred Isaach de Bankolé as a lone assassin with a secretive mission. A behind-the-scenes documentary, Behind Jim Jarmusch, was filmed over three days on the set of the film in Seville by director Léa Rinaldi. In October 2009, Jarmusch appeared as himself in an episode of the HBO series Bored to Death, and the following September, Jarmusch helped to curate the All Tomorrow's Parties music festival in Monticello, New York.
2010s
In an August 2010 interview, Jarmusch revealed his forthcoming work schedule at that time:
I'm working on a documentary about the Stooges [Iggy Pop-fronted band]. It's going to take a few years. There's no rush on it, but it's something that Iggy asked me to do. I'm co-writing an "opera." It won't be a traditional opera, but it'll be about the inventor Nikola Tesla, with the composer Phil Klein. I have a new film project that's really foremost for me that I hope to shoot early next year with Tilda Swinton and Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska, who was Alice in Wonderland in Tim Burton's film. I don't have that quite financed yet, so I'm working on that. I'm also making music and hoping to maybe score some silent films to put out. Our band will have an EP that we'll give out at ATP. We have enough music for three EPs or an album.
Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Jarmusch eventually attained funding for the aforementioned film project after a protracted period and, in July 2012, Jarmusch began shooting Only Lovers Left Alive with Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston (who replaced Fassbender), Mia Wasikowska, Anton Yelchin, and John Hurt, while Jarmusch's musical project SQÜRL were the main contributors to the film's soundtrack. The film screened at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), with Jarmusch explaining the seven-year completion time frame at the former: "The reason it took so long is that no one wanted to give us the money. It took years to put it together. Its getting more and more difficult for films that are a little unusual, or not predictable, or don't satisfy people's expectations of something." The film's budget was US$7 million and its UK release date was February 21, 2014.
Paterson (2016)
Jarmusch wrote and directed Paterson in 2016. The film follows the daily experiences of an inner-city bus driver and poet (Adam Driver) in Paterson, New Jersey, who shares the same name as the city. Paterson was inspired by objectivist American poet William Carlos Williams and his epic poem "Paterson". The film features the wry, minimalist style found in Jarmusch's other works and earned 22 award nominations for Jarmusch, Driver and Nellie, the dog featured in the film. The story focuses on Paterson's poetry writing efforts, interspersed with his observations and experiences of the residents he encounters on his bus route and in his daily life. Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a positive review, writing: "A mild-mannered, almost startlingly undramatic work that offers discreet pleasures to longtime fans of the New York indie-scene veteran, who can always be counted on to go his own way." Eric Kohn, film critic of IndieWire wrote that the film was "an apt statement from Jarmusch, a filmmaker who continues to surprise and innovate while remaining true to his singular voice, and who here seems to have delivered its purest manifestation."
The Dead Don't Die (2019)
Jarmusch wrote and directed his first horror film, the zombie comedy The Dead Don't Die featuring an ensemble cast which included performances from Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, Carol Kane, and Selena Gomez. On June 14, 2019 the film premiered at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival and received mixed reviews. The film was distributed by Focus Features. Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote of the film "At times, the deadpan of Murray and Driver becomes, well, a bit deadening, and true wit is in short supply, even though the film remains amusing most of the way."
Music
In the early 1980s, Jarmusch was part of a revolving lineup of musicians in Robin Crutchfield's Dark Day project, and later became the keyboardist and one of two vocalists for The Del-Byzanteens, a No Wave band who released the LP Lies to Live By in 1982.
Jarmusch is also featured on the album Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture (2005) in two interludes described by Sean Fennessy in a Pitchfork review of the album as both "bizarrely pretentious" and "reason alone to give it a listen". Jarmusch and Michel Gondry each contributed a remix to a limited edition release of the track "Blue Orchid" by The White Stripes in 2005.
The author of a series of essays on influential bands, Jarmusch has also had at least two poems published. He is a founding member of The Sons of Lee Marvin, a humorous "semi-secret society" of artists resembling the iconic actor, which issues communiqués and meets on occasion for the ostensible purpose of watching Marvin's films.
He released three collaborative albums with lutist Jozef van Wissem, Concerning the Entrance into Eternity (Important Records), The Mystery of Heaven (Sacred Bones Records), in 2012 and the 2019 release An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil (Sacred Bones Records).
Jarmusch is a member of the avant-garde rock band SQÜRL with film associate Carter Logan and sound engineer Shane Stoneback. Band formed to create additional soundtrack for Jarmusch's film The Limits of Control, which they released together with two other songs on an EP called "Film Music from “The Limits Of Control” under the name Bad Rabbit. SQÜRL's version of Wanda Jackson's 1961 song "Funnel of Love", featuring Madeline Follin of Cults on vocals, opens Jarmusch's 2014 film Only Lovers Left Alive.
Dutch lute composer Jozef van Wissem also collaborated with Jarmusch on the soundtrack of Only Lovers Left Alive, and the pair also plays in a duo. Jarmusch first met van Wissem on a street in New York City's SoHo neighborhood in 2007, at which time the lute player handed the director a CD. Several months later, Jarmusch asked van Wissem to send his catalog of recordings and the two started playing together as part of their developing friendship. Van Wissem explained in early April 2014: "I know the way [Jarmusch] makes his films is kind of like a musician. He has music in his head when he's writing a script so it's more informed by a tonal thing than it is by anything else."
As a filmmaker
In 2014 Jarmusch shunned the "auteur theory" and likened the filmmaking process to human sexual reproduction:
I put 'A film by' as a protection of my rights, but I don't really believe it. It's important for me to have a final cut, and I do for every film. So I'm in the editing room every day, I'm the navigator of the ship, but I'm not the captain, I can't do it without everyone's equally valuable input. For me it's phases where I'm very solitary, writing, and then I'm preparing, getting the money, and then I'm with the crew and on a ship and it's amazing and exhausting and exhilarating, and then I'm alone with the editor again... I've said it before, it's like seduction, wild sex, and then pregnancy in the editing room. That's how it feels for me.
Style
Jarmusch has been characterized as a minimalist filmmaker whose idiosyncratic films are unhurried. His films often eschew traditional narrative structure, lacking clear plot progression and focus more on mood and character development. In an interview early in his career, he stated that his goal was "to approximate real time for the audience."
Jarmusch's early work is marked by a brooding, contemplative tone, featuring extended silent scenes and prolonged still shots. He has experimented with a vignette format in three films that were either released, or begun around, the early 1990s: Mystery Train, Night on Earth and Coffee and Cigarettes. The Salt Lake Tribune critic Sean P. Means wrote that Jarmusch blends "film styles and genres with sharp wit and dark humor", while his style is also defined by a signature deadpan comedic tone.
The protagonists of Jarmusch's films are usually lone adventurers. The director's male characters have been described by critic Jennie Yabroff as "three time losers, petty thiefs and inept con men, all... eminently likeable, if not down right charming"; while novelist Paul Auster described them as "laconic, withdrawn, sorrowful mumblers".
Jarmusch has revealed that his instinct is a greater influence during the filmmaking process than any cognitive processes. He explained: "I feel like I have to listen to the film and let it tell me what it wants. Sometimes it mumbles and it isn't very clear." Films such as Dead Man and Limits of Control have polarized fans and general viewers alike, as Jarmusch's stylistic instinct is embedded in his strong sense of independence.
Themes
Though his films are predominantly set in the United States, Jarmusch has advanced the notion that he looks at America "through a foreigner's eyes", with the intention of creating a form of world cinema that synthesizes European and Japanese film with that of Hollywood. His films have often included foreign actors and characters, and (at times substantial) non-English dialogue. In his two later-nineties films, he dwelt on different cultures' experiences of violence, and on textual appropriations between cultures: a wandering Native American's love of William Blake, a black hitman's passionate devotion to the Hagakure. The interaction and syntheses between different cultures, the arbitrariness of national identity, and irreverence towards ethnocentric, patriotic or nationalistic sentiment are recurring themes in Jarmusch's work.
Jarmusch's fascination with music is another characteristic that is readily apparent in his work. Musicians appear frequently in key roles—John Lurie, Tom Waits, Gary Farmer, Youki Kudoh, RZA and Iggy Pop have featured in multiple Jarmusch films, while Joe Strummer and Screamin' Jay Hawkins appear in Mystery Train and GZA, Jack and Meg White feature in Coffee and Cigarettes. Hawkins' song "I Put a Spell on You" was central to the plot of Stranger than Paradise, while Mystery Train is inspired by and named after a song popularized by Elvis Presley, who is also the subject of a vignette in Coffee and Cigarettes. In the words of critic Vincent Canby, "Jarmusch's movies have the tempo and rhythm of blues and jazz, even in their use—or omission—of language. His films work on the senses much the way that some music does, unheard until it's too late to get it out of one's head."
On his narrative focus, Jarmusch remarked in a 1989 interview, "I'd rather make a movie about a guy walking his dog than about the emperor of China."
Filmography
Awards and legacy
In 1980, Jarmusch’s film Permanent Vacation won the Josef von Sternberg Award at the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg. In 1999, he was laureate of the Douglas Sirk Preis at Filmfest Hamburg, Germany. In 1984, he won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes Film Festival for Stranger Than Paradise. In 2004, Jarmusch was honored with the “Filmmaker on the Edge Award” at the Provincetown International Film Festival. In 2005, he won the Grand Prix of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival for his film Broken Flowers.
Jarmusch is credited with having instigated the American independent film movement with Stranger Than Paradise. In her description of the film in a 2005 profile of the director for The New York Times, critic Lynn Hirschberg declared that Stranger than Paradise "permanently upended the idea of independent film as an intrinsically inaccessible avant-garde form". The success of the film accorded the director a certain iconic status within arthouse cinema, as an idiosyncratic and uncompromising auteur, exuding the aura of urban cool embodied by downtown Manhattan. Such perceptions were reinforced by the release of his subsequent features in the late 1980s, establishing him as one of the generation's most prominent and influential independent filmmakers.
New York critic and festival director Kent Jones undermined the "urban cool" association that Jarmusch has garnered and was quoted in a February 2014 media article, following the release of his eleventh feature film:
There's been an overemphasis on the hipness factor—and a lack of emphasis on his incredible attachment to the idea of celebrating poetry and culture. You can complain about the preciousness of a lot of his movies, [but] they are unapologetically standing up for poetry. [His attitude is] 'if you want to call me an elitist, go ahead, I don't care'.
Jarmusch's staunch independence has been represented by his success in retaining the negatives for all of his films, an achievement that was described by the Guardians Jonathan Romney as "extremely rare." British producer Jeremy Thomas, who was one of the eventual financiers of Only Lovers Left Alive called Jarmusch "one of the great American independent film-makers" who is "the last of the line." Thomas believes that filmmakers like Jarmusch "are not coming through... any more."
In a 1989 review of his work, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called Jarmusch "the most adventurous and arresting film maker to surface in the American cinema in this decade". Jarmusch was recognized with the “Filmmaker on the Edge” award at the 2004 Provincetown International Film Festival. A retrospective of the director's films was hosted at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during February 1994, and another, "The Sad and Beautiful World of Jim Jarmusch", by the American Film Institute in August 2005.
While Swinton, who has worked with Jarmusch on numerous occasions, describes him as a "rock star," the director admits that "I don't know where I fit in. I don't feel tied to my time." Dutch lute player Jozef van Wissem, who worked on the score for Only Lovers Left Alive calls Jarmusch a "cultural sponge" who "absorbs everything."
The moving image collection of Jim Jarmusch is held at the Academy Film Archive.
Personal life
Jarmusch rarely discusses his personal life in public. He divides his time between New York City and the Catskill Mountains. He stopped drinking coffee in 1986, the year of the first installment of Coffee and Cigarettes, although he continues to smoke cigarettes.
In a February 2014 interview, Jarmusch stated that he is not interested in eternal life, as "there's something about the cycle of life that's very important, and to have that removed would be a burden".
Frequent collaborators
Markings of an a indicated collaborators who acted in a film, c indicated that they composed music for the film.
Discography
Studio albums
Concerning the Entrance into Eternity (Important Records, 2012) (with Jozef van Wissem)
The Mystery of Heaven (Sacred Bones Records, 2012) (with Jozef van Wissem)
An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil (Sacred Bones Records, 2019) (with Jozef van Wissem)
Ranaldo Jarmusch Urselli Pandi (Trost, 2019) (with Lee Ranaldo, Marc Urselli, Balazs Pandi)
Churning of the Ocean (Trost, 2021) (with Lee Ranaldo, Marc Urselli, Balazs Pandi)
Soundtracks
Only Lovers Left Alive (ATP Recordings, 2013) (as Sqürl, with Jozef van Wissem)
Paterson (Original score) (Third Man Records, 2017) (as Squrl)
The Dead Don’t Die (Original Soundtrack) (Sacred Bones Records, 2019) (as Squrl)
Some Music for Robby Müller (Soundtrack Living the Light—documentary) (Sacred Bones Records, 2020) (as Sqürl)
EPs
EP #1 (ATP Recordings, 2013) (as Sqürl)
EP #2 (ATP Recordings, 2013) (as Sqürl)
EP #3 (ATP Recordings, 2014) (as Sqürl)
EP #260 (Sacred Bones Records, 2017) (as Squrl)Live albums SQÜRL Live at Third Man Records (12" vinyl, A Third Man Records, 2016) (as Sqürl)
Guest appearances
Jozef van Wissem—"Concerning the Beautiful Human Form After Death" from The Joy That Never Ends (2011)
Fucked Up—Year of the Tiger" (2012)
Remixes
The White Stripes—"Blue Orchid" (First Nations Remix) (2005)
See also
No Wave Cinema
ReferencesOther sources'
Gonzalez, Éric, "Jim Jarmusch's Aesthetics of Sampling in Ghost Dog–The Way of the Samurai", Volume!, vol. 3, n° 2, Nantes: Éditions Mélanie Seteun, 2004, pp. 109–21.
Ródenas, Gabri (2009), Guía para ver y analizar Noche en la Tierra de Jim Jarmusch, Barcelona/Valencia: Octaedro/Nau Llibres. /978-84-7642-776-7
Ródenas, Gabri (2009), "Jarmusch y Carver: Se ha roto el frigorífico" in Fernández, P. (Ed.), Rompiendo moldes: Discursos, género e hibridación en el siglo XXI. Zamora/Sevilla: Editorial Comunicación Social; . Available at Google Books.
Ródenas, Gabri (2009), "Jarmusch Vs Reagan" in Revista Odisea. Almería: University of Almería. December 2009. .
Ródenas, Gabri (2010), "Jim Jarmusch: Del insomnio americano al insomnio universal", in Comunicación y sociedad, Navarra: University of Navarra, June 2010; .
Ródenas, Gabri (2011), Jim Jarmusch: Lecturas sobre el insomnio americano (1980–1991), Spain/Germany: – Editorial Académica Española – LAP Lambert Academic Publishing GmbH & Co. KG; .
Mentana, Umberto (2016), Il cinema di Jim Jarmusch. Una filmografia per un'analisi della cultura e del cinema postmoderno, Aracne Editrice;
Further reading
Rice, Julian. (2012). The Jarmusch Way: Spirituality and Imagination in Dead Man, Ghost Dog, and The Limits of Control. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. (hardcover); (ebook).
External links
Jim Jarmusch at the Senses of Cinema Great Directors critical database
The Jim Jarmusch Resource Page, curated by Jarmusch scholar Ludvig Hertzberg
Limited Control, Hertzberg's companion blog
It's a sad and beautiful world
The films of Jim Jarmusch, Hell Is For Hyphenates'', May 31, 2014
1953 births
American people of Czech descent
American people of German descent
American people of Irish descent
American male screenwriters
Officiers of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
Columbia College (New York) alumni
Living people
Tisch School of the Arts alumni
Medill School of Journalism alumni
No wave musicians
Musicians from Akron, Ohio
People from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
Writers from Akron, Ohio
European Film Awards winners (people)
Film directors from New York City
Film directors from Ohio
Screenwriters from Ohio
Screenwriters from New York (state)
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15745 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes%20Gutenberg | Johannes Gutenberg | Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (; – 3 February 1468) was a German inventor, printer, publisher, and goldsmith who introduced printing to Europe with his mechanical movable-type printing press. His work started the Printing Revolution in Europe and is regarded as a milestone of the second millennium, ushering in the modern period of human history. It played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, Age of Enlightenment, and Scientific Revolution, as well as laying the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.
While not the first to use movable type in the world, Gutenberg was the first European to do so. His many contributions to printing include: the invention of a process for mass-producing movable type; the use of oil-based ink for printing books; adjustable molds; mechanical movable type; and the use of a wooden printing press similar to the agricultural screw presses of the period. His truly epochal invention was the combination of these elements into a practical system that allowed the mass production of printed books and was economically viable for printers and readers alike. Gutenberg's method for making type is traditionally considered to have included a type metal alloy and a hand mould for casting type. The alloy was a mixture of lead, tin, and antimony that melted at a relatively low temperature for faster and more economical casting, cast well, and created a durable type.
The use of movable type was a marked improvement on the handwritten manuscript, which was the existing method of book production in Europe, and upon woodblock printing, and revolutionized European book-making. Gutenberg's printing technology spread rapidly throughout Europe and later the world. His major work, the Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line Bible), was the first printed version of the Bible and has been acclaimed for its high aesthetic and technical quality. In Renaissance Europe, the arrival of mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information—including revolutionary ideas—transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation, and threatened the power of political and religious authorities; the sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle class. Across Europe, the increasing cultural self-awareness of its people led to the rise of proto-nationalism, accelerated by the flowering of the European vernacular languages to the detriment of Latin's status as lingua franca. In the 19th century, the replacement of the hand-operated Gutenberg-style press by steam-powered rotary presses allowed printing on an industrial scale, while Western-style printing was adopted all over the world, becoming practically the sole medium for modern bulk printing.
An overview of the wide acclaim of Gutenberg’s accomplishments is found in several sources: In 1999, the A&E Network ranked Gutenberg no. 1 on their "People of the Millennium" countdown. In 1997, Time–Life magazine picked Gutenberg's invention as the most important of the second millennium. Four prominent U.S. journalists did the same in their 1998 resume, ranking his impact high in shaping the millennium. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes Gutenberg’s invention as having made a practically unparalleled cultural impact in the Christian era.
Early life
Gutenberg was born in the German city of Mainz, Rhine-Main area, the youngest son of the patrician merchant Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden, and his second wife, Else Wyrich, who was the daughter of a shopkeeper. It is assumed that he was baptized in the area close to his birthplace of St. Christoph. According to some accounts, Friele was a goldsmith for the bishop at Mainz, but most likely, he was involved in the cloth trade. Gutenberg's year of birth is not precisely known, but it was sometime between the years of 1394 and 1404. In the 1890s the city of Mainz declared his official and symbolic date of birth to be 24 June 1400.
John Lienhard, technology historian, says "Most of Gutenberg's early life is a mystery. His father worked with the ecclesiastic mint. Gutenberg grew up knowing the trade of goldsmithing." This is supported by historian Heinrich Wallau, who adds, "In the 14th and 15th centuries his [ancestors] claimed a hereditary position as ... retainers of the household of the master of the archiepiscopal mint. In this capacity, they doubtless acquired considerable knowledge and technical skill in metal working. They supplied the mint with the metal to be coined, changed the various species of coins, and had a seat at the assizes in forgery cases."
Wallau adds, "His surname was derived from the house inhabited by his father and his paternal ancestors 'zu Laden, zu Gutenberg'. The house of Gänsfleisch was one of the patrician families of the town, tracing its lineage back to the thirteenth century." Patricians (the wealthy and political elite) in Mainz were often named after houses they owned. Around 1427, the name zu Gutenberg, after the family house in Mainz, is documented to have been used for the first time.
In 1411, there was an uprising in Mainz against the patricians, and more than a hundred families were forced to leave. As a result, the Gutenbergs are thought to have moved to Eltville am Rhein (Alta Villa), where his mother had an inherited estate. According to historian Heinrich Wallau, "All that is known of his youth is that he was not in Mainz in 1430. It is presumed that he migrated for political reasons to Strasbourg, where the family probably had connections." He is assumed to have studied at the University of Erfurt, where there is a record of the enrolment of a student called Johannes de Altavilla in 1418—Altavilla is the Latin form of Eltville am Rhein.
Nothing is now known of Gutenberg's life for the next fifteen years, but in March 1434, a letter by him indicates that he was living in Strasbourg, where he had some relatives on his mother's side. He also appears to have been a goldsmith member enrolled in the Strasbourg militia. In 1437, there is evidence that he was instructing a wealthy tradesman on polishing gems, but where he had acquired this knowledge is unknown. In 1436/37 his name also comes up in court in connection with a broken promise of marriage to a woman from Strasbourg, Ennelin. Whether the marriage actually took place is not recorded. Following his father's death in 1419, he is mentioned in the inheritance proceedings.
Printing press
Around 1439, Gutenberg was involved in a financial misadventure making polished metal mirrors (which were believed to capture holy light from religious relics) for sale to pilgrims to Aachen: in 1439 the city was planning to exhibit its collection of relics from Emperor Charlemagne but the event was delayed by one year due to a severe flood and the capital already spent could not be repaid.
Until at least 1444 Gutenberg lived in Strasbourg, most likely in the St. Arbogast parish. It was in Strasbourg in 1440 that he is said to have perfected and unveiled the secret of printing based on his research, mysteriously entitled Aventur und Kunst (enterprise and art). It is not clear what work he was engaged in, or whether some early trials with printing from movable type were conducted there. After this, there is a gap of four years in the record. In 1448, he was back in Mainz, where he took out a loan from his brother-in-law Arnold Gelthus, quite possibly for a printing press or related paraphernalia. By this date, Gutenberg may have been familiar with intaglio printing; it is claimed that he had worked on copper engravings with an artist known as the Master of Playing Cards.
By 1450, the press was in operation, and a German poem had been printed, possibly the first item to be printed there. Gutenberg was able to convince the wealthy moneylender Johann Fust for a loan of 800 guilders. Peter Schöffer, who became Fust's son-in-law, also joined the enterprise. Schöffer had worked as a scribe in Paris and is believed to have designed some of the first typefaces.
Gutenberg's workshop was set up at Humbrechthof, a property belonging to a distant relative. It is not clear when Gutenberg conceived the Bible project, but for this he borrowed another 800 guilders from Fust, and work commenced in 1452. At the same time, the press was also printing other, more lucrative texts (possibly Latin grammars). There is also some speculation that there were two presses: one for the pedestrian texts and one for the Bible. One of the profit-making enterprises of the new press was the printing of thousands of indulgences for the church, documented from 1454 to 1455.
In 1455 Gutenberg completed his 42-line Bible, known as the Gutenberg Bible. About 180 copies were printed, most on paper and some on vellum.
Court case
Some time in 1456, there was a dispute between Gutenberg and Fust, and Fust demanded his money back, accusing Gutenberg of misusing the funds. Gutenberg's two rounds of financing from Fust, a total of 1,600 guilders at 6% interest, now amounted to 2,026 guilders. Fust sued at the archbishop's court. A November 1455 legal document records that there was a partnership for a "project of the books," the funds for which Gutenberg had used for other purposes, according to Fust. The court decided in favor of Fust, giving him control over the Bible printing workshop and half of all printed Bibles.
Thus Gutenberg was effectively bankrupt, but it appears he retained (or restarted) a small printing shop, and participated in the printing of a Bible in the town of Bamberg around 1459, for which he seems at least to have supplied the type. But since his printed books never carry his name or a date, it is difficult to be certain, and there is consequently a considerable scholarly debate on this subject. It is also possible that the large Catholicon dictionary, 300 copies of 754 pages, printed in Mainz in 1460, was executed in his workshop.
Meanwhile, the Fust–Schöffer shop was the first in Europe to bring out a book with the printer's name and date, the Mainz Psalter of August 1457, and while proudly proclaiming the mechanical process by which it had been produced, it made no mention of Gutenberg.
Later life
In 1462, during the devastating Mainz Diocesan Feud, Mainz was sacked by Archbishop Adolph von Nassau. On 18 January 1465, Gutenberg's achievements were recognized by Archbishop von Nassau. He was given the title Hofmann (gentleman of the court). This honor included a stipend and an annual court outfit, as well as 2,180 litres of grain and 2,000 litres of wine tax-free.
Gutenberg died in 1468 and was buried likely as a tertiary in the Franciscan church at Mainz. This church and the cemetery were later destroyed, and Gutenberg's grave is now lost.
In 1504, he was mentioned as the inventor of typography in a book by Professor Ivo Wittig. It was not until 1567 that the first portrait of Gutenberg, almost certainly an imaginary reconstruction, appeared in Heinrich Pantaleon's biography of famous Germans.
Printed books
Between 1450 and 1455, Gutenberg printed several texts, some of which remain unidentified; his texts did not bear the printer's name or date, so attribution is possible only from typographical evidence and external references. Certainly several church documents including a papal letter and two indulgences were printed, one of which was issued in Mainz. In view of the value of printing in quantity, seven editions in two styles were ordered, resulting in several thousand copies being printed. Some printed editions of Ars Minor, a schoolbook on Latin grammar by Aelius Donatus, may have been printed by Gutenberg; these have been dated either 1451–52 or 1455.
In 1455, Gutenberg completed copies of a beautifully executed folio Bible (Biblia Sacra), with 42 lines on each page. Copies sold for 30 florins each, which was roughly three years' wages for an average clerk. Nonetheless, it was much cheaper than a manuscript Bible that could take a single scribe over a year to prepare. After printing, some copies were rubricated or hand-illuminated in the same elegant way as manuscript Bibles from the same period.
48 substantially complete copies are known to survive, including two at the British Library that can be viewed and compared online. The text lacks modern features such as page numbers, indentations, and paragraph breaks.
An undated 36-line edition of the Bible was printed, probably in Bamberg in 1458–60, possibly by Gutenberg. A large part of it was shown to have been set from a copy of Gutenberg's Bible, thus disproving earlier speculation that it was the earlier of the two.
Printing method with movable type
Gutenberg's early printing process, and what texts he printed with movable type, are not known in great detail. His later Bibles were printed in such a way as to have required large quantities of type, some estimates suggesting as many as 100,000 individual sorts. Setting each page would take, perhaps, half a day, and considering all the work in loading the press, inking the type, pulling the impressions, hanging up the sheets, distributing the type, etc., it is thought that the Gutenberg–Fust shop might have employed as many as 25 craftsmen.
Gutenberg's technique of making movable type remains unclear. In the following decades, punches and copper matrices became standardized in the rapidly disseminating printing presses across Europe. Whether Gutenberg used this sophisticated technique or a somewhat primitive version has been the subject of considerable debate.
In the standard process of making type, a hard metal punch (made by punchcutting, with the letter carved back to front) is hammered into a softer copper bar, creating a matrix. This is then placed into a hand-held mould and a piece of type, or "sort", is cast by filling the mould with molten type-metal; this cools almost at once, and the resulting piece of type can be removed from the mould. The matrix can be reused to create hundreds, or thousands, of identical sorts so that the same character appearing anywhere within the book will appear very uniform, giving rise, over time, to the development of distinct styles of typefaces or fonts. After casting, the sorts are arranged into type cases, and used to make up pages which are inked and printed, a procedure which can be repeated hundreds, or thousands, of times. The sorts can be reused in any combination, earning the process the name of "movable type". (For details, see Typography.)
The invention of the making of types with punch, matrix and mold has been widely attributed to Gutenberg. However, recent evidence suggests that Gutenberg's process was somewhat different. If he used the punch and matrix approach, all his letters should have been nearly identical, with some variation due to miscasting and inking. However, the type used in Gutenberg's earliest work shows other variations.
In 2001, the physicist Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Princeton librarian Paul Needham, used digital scans of a Papal bull in the Scheide Library, Princeton, to carefully compare the same letters (types) appearing in different parts of the printed text. The irregularities in Gutenberg's type, particularly in simple characters such as the hyphen, suggested that the variations could not have come either from ink smear or from wear and damage on the pieces of metal on the types themselves. Although some identical types are clearly used on other pages, other variations, subjected to detailed image analysis, suggested that they could not have been produced from the same matrix. Transmitted light pictures of the page also appeared to reveal substructures in the type that could not arise from traditional punchcutting techniques. They hypothesized that the method involved impressing simple shapes to create alphabets in "cuneiform" style in a matrix made of some soft material, perhaps sand. Casting the type would destroy the mould, and the matrix would need to be recreated to make each additional sort. This could explain the variations in the type, as well as the substructures observed in the printed images.
Thus, they speculated that "the decisive factor for the birth of typography", the use of reusable moulds for casting type, was a more progressive process than was previously thought. They suggested that the additional step of using the punch to create a mould that could be reused many times was not taken until twenty years later, in the 1470s. Others have not accepted some or all of their suggestions, and have interpreted the evidence in other ways, and the truth of the matter remains uncertain.
A 1568 book Batavia by Hadrianus Junius from Holland claims that the idea of the movable type came to Gutenberg from Laurens Janszoon Coster via Fust, who was apprenticed to Coster in the 1430s and may have brought some of his equipment from Haarlem to Mainz. While Coster appears to have experimented with moulds and castable metal type, there is no evidence that he had actually printed anything with this technology. He was an inventor and a goldsmith. However, there is one indirect supporter of the claim that Coster might be the inventor. The author of the Cologne Chronicle of 1499 quotes Ulrich Zell, the first printer of Cologne, that printing was performed in Mainz in 1450, but that some type of printing of lower quality had previously occurred in the Netherlands. However, the chronicle does not mention the name of Coster, while it actually credits Gutenberg as the "first inventor of printing" in the very same passage (fol. 312). The first securely dated book by Dutch printers is from 1471, and the Coster connection is today regarded as a mere legend.
The 19th-century printer and typefounder Fournier Le Jeune suggested that Gutenberg was not using type cast with a reusable matrix, but wooden types that were carved individually. A similar suggestion was made by Nash in 2004. This remains possible, albeit entirely unproven.
Legacy
Although Gutenberg was financially unsuccessful in his lifetime, the printing technologies spread quickly, and news and books began to travel across Europe much faster than before. It fed the growing Renaissance, and since it greatly facilitated scientific publishing, it was a major catalyst for the later scientific revolution.
The capital of printing in Europe shifted to Venice, where visionary printers like Aldus Manutius ensured widespread availability of the major Greek and Latin texts. The claims of an Italian origin for movable type have also focused on this rapid rise of Italy in movable-type printing. This may perhaps be explained by the prior eminence of Italy in the paper and printing trade. Additionally, Italy's economy was growing rapidly at the time, facilitating the spread of literacy. Christopher Columbus had a geography book (printed with movable type) bought by his father. That book is in a Spanish museum, the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville. Finally, the city of Mainz was sacked in 1462, driving many (including a number of printers and punch cutters) into exile.
Printing was also a factor in the Reformation. Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses were printed and circulated widely; subsequently he issued broadsheets outlining his anti-indulgences position (certificates of indulgences were one of the first items Gutenberg had printed). The broadsheet contributed to development of the newspaper.
In the decades after Gutenberg, many conservative patrons looked down on cheap printed books; books produced by hand were considered more desirable.
Today there is a large antique market for the earliest printed objects. Books printed prior to 1500 are known as incunabula.
There are many statues of Gutenberg in Germany, including the famous one by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1837) at Gutenbergplatz in Mainz, home to the eponymous Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and the Gutenberg Museum on the history of early printing. The latter publishes the Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, the leading periodical in the field.
Project Gutenberg, the oldest digital library, commemorates Gutenberg's name. The Mainzer Johannisnacht commemorates the person Johannes Gutenberg in his native city since 1968.
In 1952, the United States Postal Service issued a five hundredth anniversary stamp commemorating Johannes Gutenberg invention of the movable-type printing press.
In 1961 the Canadian philosopher and scholar Marshall McLuhan entitled his pioneering study in the fields of print culture, cultural studies, and media ecology, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man.
Regarded as one of the most influential people in human history, Gutenberg remains a towering figure in the popular image. In a 1978 book by a historian that purports to rank the 100 most influential persons in history, Gutenberg comes in at number 8, after T'sai Lun and before Christopher Columbus. In 1999, the A&E Network ranked Gutenberg the No. 1 most influential person of the second millennium on their "Biographies of the Millennium" countdown. In 1997, Time–Life magazine picked Gutenberg's invention as the most important of the second millennium.
In space, he is commemorated in the name of the asteroid 777 Gutemberga.
Two operas based on Gutenberg are G, Being the Confession and Last Testament of Johannes Gensfleisch, also known as Gutenberg, Master Printer, formerly of Strasbourg and Mainz, from 2001 with music by Gavin Bryars; and La Nuit de Gutenberg, with music by Philippe Manoury, premiered in 2011 in Strasbourg.
In 2018, WordPress named its new editing system Gutenberg in tribute to him.
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
Further reading
[More recent, abridged version]
Describes the social and technical aspects of the invention of printing.
External links
English homepage of the Gutenberg-Museum Mainz, Germany.
The Digital Gutenberg Project: the Gutenberg Bible in 1,300 digital images, every page of the University of Texas at Austin copy.
Treasures in Full – Gutenberg Bible View the British Library's Digital Versions Online
Giovanni Balbi. Catholicon. Mainz: Printed by Johann Gutenberg? 1460, at The Library of Congress.
1398 births
1468 deaths
15th-century German businesspeople
15th-century German inventors
15th-century printers
Businesspeople from Mainz
German goldsmiths
German printers
German Roman Catholics
German typographers and type designers
History of printing
People from the Electoral Palatinate
Printers of incunabula
University of Erfurt alumni | [
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15746 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques%20Mayol | Jacques Mayol | Jacques Mayol (1 April 1927 – 22 December 2001) was a French diver and the holder of many world records in free diving. The 1988 film The Big Blue, directed by Luc Besson, was inspired by his life story and that of his friend, Enzo Maiorca. Mayol was one of the screenwriters and authored the book Homo Delphinus: the Dolphin Within Man of his philosophy about the aquatic origins of humans.
Early life
Jacques Mayol was a French national born in Shanghai, China. Mayol spent his summer holidays in Karatsu (Japan) every year as a child. When he was 7, he would skin dive with his older brother in seas around Nanatsugama (:ja:七つ釜)(Karatsu, Japan), where he saw a dolphin for the first time. Mayol described the fateful encounter in his book, "Homo Delphinus: The Dolphin Within Man".
Career
On 23 November 1976, at 49, he became the first free diver to descend to 100 meters (330 ft) ; and when he was 56, he managed to descend to 105 meters. During the scientific research phase of his career, Mayol tried to answer the question of whether man had a hidden aquatic potential that could be evoked by rigorous physiological and psychological training.
Mayol's lifelong passion for diving was based on his love for the ocean, his personal philosophy and his desire to explore his own limits. During his lifetime, he helped introduce the then elitist sport of free-diving into the mainstream. His diving philosophy was to reach a state of mind based on relaxation and yoga breathing, with which he could accomplish apnea. He also contributed to technological advances in the field of free-diving, particularly improving assemblies used by no-limits divers. He was also instrumental in the development of scuba diving's octopus regulator, which was invented by Dave Woodward at UNEXSO around 1965–6. Woodward believed that having the safety divers carry two second stages would be a safer and more practical approach than buddy breathing in the event of an emergency.
Mayol was already an experienced free diver when he met the Sicilian Enzo Maiorca who was the first to dive below 50m. Mayol reached 60m depth. A friendship, as well as rivalry between the two men ensued. Their most famous records were set in the no-limits category, in which the divers are permitted to use weighted sleds to descend and air balloons for a speedy ascent. Between 1966 and 1983, Mayol was eight times no-limits world champion. In 1981 he set a world record of 61m in the constant weight discipline, using fins. In 1976 Mayol broke the 100m barrier with a no-limits 101m dive off Elba, Italy. Tests showed that during this dive his heart beat decreased from 60 to 27 beats/min, an aspect of the mammalian diving reflex, a reflex more evident in whales, seals, and dolphins. Mayol's last deep dive followed in 1983 when he reached the depth of 105m, at the age of 56.
Dolphins
Mayol's fascination with dolphins started in 1955 when he was working as a commercial diver at an aquarium in Miami, Florida. There he met a female dolphin called Clown and formed a close bond with her. Imitating Clown, he learned how to hold his breath longer and how to behave and integrate himself underwater. It is the dolphins that became the foundation of Mayol's life philosophy of "Homo Delphinus".
Throughout his book L'Homo Delphinus (2000 published in English as Homo Delphinus: The Dolphin within Man by Idelson Gnocchi Publishers Ltd.) Mayol expounds his theories about man's relationship with the sea where he explores the aquatic ape hypothesis of human origins. He felt man could re-awaken his dormant mental and spiritual faculties and the physiological mechanisms from the depths of his psyche and genetic make-up to develop the potential of his aquatic origins, to become a Homo delphinus.
Jacques Mayol predicted that, within a couple of generations, some people would be able to dive to 200 m and hold their breath for up to ten minutes. Today the no-limits record stands at 253 m (Herbert Nitsch, June 2012). Serbian Branko Petrović holds the record for Static Apnea at 11 minutes and 54 seconds (October 2014). Croatian Goran Čolak holds the record for static apnea on pure oxygen at 23 minutes 1 second (June 2014).
Film
The film The Big Blue, directed by Luc Besson in 1988, was inspired by his life story and the life story of the Italian diver Enzo Maiorca and their friendship. Mayol was one of the screenwriters.
Mayol was the subject of the 2017 documentary film Dolphin Man (L'Homme dauphin, sur les traces de Jacques Mayol), directed by Lefteris Charitos.
Death
On 22 December 2001 at the age of 74, suffering depression, Mayol committed suicide by hanging himself at his villa in Elba, Italy. His ashes were spread over the Tuscany coast. Friends have erected a monument to him in the southeast of Elba in 16 meters depth.
References
External links
Current Freediving World Records
Profile from Historical Diving Association website
Article from divernet.com
Obituary from The Independent
Article by Le Monde
1927 births
2001 suicides
French freedivers
Suicides by hanging in Italy
2001 deaths | [
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15747 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef%20Terboven | Josef Terboven | Josef Terboven (23 May 1898 – 8 May 1945) was a Nazi Party official and politician who was the long-serving Gauleiter of Gau Essen and the Reichskommissar for Norway during the German occupation.
Early life
Terboven (from the Dutch ter Boven) was born in Essen, the son of minor landed gentry of Dutch descent. He attended volksschule and realschule in Essen until 1915 and then volunteered for military service in the First World War. He served with Feldartillerie Regiment 9 and then with the nascent air force. He was awarded the Iron Cross, 1st and 2nd class, and attained the rank of Leutnant before being discharged on 22 December 1918. He studied law and political science at the University of Munich and the University of Freiburg, where he first got involved in politics. He dropped out of the university in 1922 without earning a degree and trained as a bank official in Essen, working as a bank clerk through June 1925.
Nazi Party career
Terboven joined the Nazi Party in November 1923 with membership number 25,247 and participated in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. When the Party subsequently was outlawed, he continued to work at the bank until after the ban was lifted in February 1925. In August 1925 Terboven went to work full-time for the Party, becoming the head of a small Nazi newspaper and book distributorship in Essen. At this time he also founded the Ortsgruppe (Local Group) in Essen, becoming its first Ortsgruppenleiter. He also joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) becoming the SA-Führer in Essen. He formally re-enrolled in the Party on 15 December 1925. From 1927 to December 1930, Terboven was the editor of the weekly Nazi newspaper “The New Front: The Weekly Sheet of the Working People.” By 1927 he had advanced to Bezirksleiter (District Leader) of the Essen district in the Großgau Ruhr. In the 20 May 1928 election, Terboven failed in his attempt to be elected to the Prussian Landtag.
On 1 October 1928 upon the dissolution of the Großgau Ruhr, the Essen district became an independent unit subordinated to the central Party headquarters in Munich. However, on 1 August 1930 the Essen district officially was raised to Gau status and Terboven was named Gauleiter. He would retain this post throughout the Nazi regime.
In 1930 Terboven also became a City Councilor in Essen and a member of the Provincial Landtag of the Rhine Province. On 14 September 1930, Terboven was elected to the Reichstag from electoral constituency 23, Dusseldorf-West; he would serve as a Reichstag deputy until the end of the Nazi regime. From 15 December 1930, Terboven was also the editor of the National-Zeiting in Essen.
After the Nazi seizure of power, Terboven was promoted to SA-Gruppenführer on 1 March 1933 and made a member of the Prussian State Council on 10 July 1933. On 28 June 1934, Terboven married Ilse Stahl, Joseph Goebbels's former secretary and mistress. Adolf Hitler was a witness at the wedding, and while in Essen put into play preparations for the Night of the Long Knives. On 5 February 1935, Terboven was appointed Oberpräsident (High President) of Prussia's Rhine Province which included Gau Essen and three other Gaue. He thus united under his control the highest party and governmental offices within his jurisdiction. On 27 April 1935 Terboven received the Golden Party Badge. He was promoted to the rank of SA-Obergruppenführer on 9 November 1936. On the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939, he was named Reich Defense Commissioner for Wehrkreis (Military District) VI, which included his Gau together with Gau Dusseldorf, Gau Cologne-Aachen, most of Gau Westphalia-North and Gau Westphalia-South and part of Gau Weser-Ems. On 16 November 1942, the jurisdiction of the Reich Defense Commissioners was changed from the Wehrkreis to the Gau level and Terboven remained Commissioner for only his Gau of Essen.
Reichskommissar of Norway
Terboven was named Reichskommissar for Norway on 24 April 1940, even before the military invasion was completed on 10 June 1940. He moved into Skaugum, the official residence of the Crown Prince of Norway, in September 1940 and made his headquarters in the Norwegian parliament building. Nothing in Terboven's background and training particularly qualified him for this post, though he had Hitler's full confidence. He was responsible to no one but Hitler, and within the Nazi governmental hierarchy his office stood on the same level as the Reich Ministries. Terboven regarded himself as virtually an autonomous viceroy with what he termed “limitless power of command.” His conception of his role resulted in his attempting to ignore any directives not issued by Hitler himself.
Reichskommissar Terboven had supervisory authority over only the German civilian administration that was very small and that did not rule Norway directly. Day-to-day governmental affairs were managed by the existing seven-member Norwegian Administrative Council set up by the Norwegian Supreme Court after the king and cabinet had fled into exile. On 25 September 1940, Terboven dismissed the Administrative Council and appointed a thirteen-member Provisional State Council to administer affairs. All the members were Terboven's hand-picked appointees and worked under his control and supervision. A proclamation was issued deposing King Haakon VII, outlawing the government-in-exile, disbanding the Storting and banning all political parties except Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling. Terboven therefore remained in ultimate charge of Norway until the end of the war in 1945, even after permitting the formation of a Norwegian puppet regime on 1 February 1942 under Quisling as minister-president, the so-called Quisling government.
Terboven also did not have authority over the 400,000 regular German Army forces stationed in Norway which were under the command of Generaloberst Nikolaus von Falkenhorst but he did command a personal force of around 6,000 men, of whom 800 were part of the secret police. In contrast to the military forces commanded by Falkenhorst, which aimed to reach an understanding with the Norwegian people and were under orders by Falkenhorst to treat Norwegians with courtesy, Terboven behaved in a petty and ruthless way and was widely disliked, not only by the Norwegians but also by many Germans. Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, expressed annoyance in his diary about what he called Terboven's "bullying tactics" against the Norwegians, as they alienated the population against the Germans. Though Terboven's relations with the army commander were strained, his relations with the Higher SS and Police Leader, Wilhelm Rediess, were very good and he cooperated in providing Rediess' staff a free hand with their policies of repression.
Repression and crimes against humanity
Terboven established multiple concentration camps in Norway, including Falstad concentration camp near Levanger and Bredtvet concentration camp in Oslo in late 1941. At one of these camps on 18 July 1942 the Beisfjord massacre took place – the murder of hundreds of Yugoslavian political prisoners and prisoners of war by German and Norwegian concentration camp guards. Some 288 prisoners were shot to death and many others were burned to death when the barracks were set on fire. Terboven had ordered the massacre a few days earlier. In July 1942 at least one German guard assigned to the Korgen prison camp was killed. The commandant ordered retribution: execution by gunfire for "39 prisoners at Korgen and 20 at Osen"; in the days that followed, Terboven also ordered retribution: around 400 prisoners shot and killed in various camps.
From 1941, Terboven increasingly focused on crushing the Norwegian resistance movement which engaged in acts of sabotage and assassination against the Germans. On 17 September 1941, Terboven decreed that special SS and Police Tribunals would have jurisdiction over Norwegian citizens who violated his decrees. These were summary proceedings with the accused provided no adequate defense. The trials were not open to the public and the proceedings were not published. Sentences were carried out shortly after being pronounced, with no right of appeal. It is estimated that some 150 individuals were sentenced to death by these tribunals. Many more were sentenced to long terms at hard labor.
On 26 April 1942, the Nazis learned that two members of the resistance were being sheltered by the inhabitants of Telavåg, a small fishing village. When the Gestapo arrived, shots were exchanged and two Gestapo agents were killed. Terboven was outraged and personally led a reprisal raid on 30 April that was quick and brutal. All buildings were burned to the ground, all boats were sunk or confiscated and all livestock taken away. All men in the village were either executed or sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. Of the 72 who were deported from Telavåg, 31 were murdered in captivity. The women and children were imprisoned for two years. Another 18 Norwegian prisoners (unrelated to Telavåg) held at the Trandum internment camp were also executed as a reprisal. In another incident, the shooting of two German police officials on 6 September 1942 led to Terboven personally declaring martial law in Trondheim from 5 to 12 October 1942. He imposed a curfew from 8:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. and suppressed all newspapers, public assemblies and railroad transportation. On Terboven's orders, ten prominent citizens were executed in reprisal and their assets confiscated. In addition, Terboven set up an ad hoc extrajudicial tribunal to try Norwegians considered “hostile to the state.” An additional 24 men were tried and summarily executed over the next three days.
Despite the small number of Jews in Norway's population (around 1,800) Terboven persecuted them relentlessly. Some 930 managed to escape to neighboring Sweden but some 770 were rounded up and deported to Germany. The main deportation occurred on 26 November 1942 when 532 Jews were shipped to Stettin aboard the SS Donau. From there, they were transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp; only 9 survived the war. On 25 February 1943 another 158 were similarly deported aboard the SS Gotenland; only 6 survived.
Last months of the war and death
On 25 September 1944, Terboven, in his capacity as Gauleiter of Essen, was named commander of the Volkssturm units in the Gau. In reality, it was his Deputy Gauleiter, Fritz Schlessmann, who executed these duties as he had been Acting Gauleiter in Essen during Terboven's absence in Norway since 1940. In October 1944, in response to the Red Army advance in to the Finnmark region of northern Norway, Terboven instituted a scorched earth policy that resulted in the forced evacuation of 50,000 Norwegians and widespread destruction, including the burning of 10,000 homes, 4700 farms and hundreds of schools, churches, shops and industrial buildings.
As the tide of the war turned against Germany, Terboven's personal aspiration was to organize Festung Norwegen (Fortress Norway) for the Nazi regime's last stand. However, after Hitler's suicide, his successor, Großadmiral Karl Dönitz, summoned Terboven to his headquarters in Flensburg on 3 May 1945 and ordered him to cooperate with winding down hostilities. However, Terboven expressed his desire to continue fighting. Consequently, Dönitz dismissed Terboven from his post as Reichskommissar on 7 May, transferring his powers to General der Gebirgstruppe Franz Böhme.
With the announcement of Germany's surrender, Terboven committed suicide on 8 May 1945 by detonating 50 kg of dynamite in a bunker on the Skaugum compound. He died alongside the body of Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Rediess, who had shot himself earlier. Terboven's family survived him in West Germany, and his wife Ilse died in 1972.
References
Sources
Biography from Deutsches Historisches Museum
Biography from Historisches Centrum Hagen
WorldStatesmen- here Norway
External links
1898 births
1945 suicides
Fascist rulers
Gauleiters
German military personnel of World War I
German newspaper editors
German people of Dutch descent
German people of World War II
Members of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic
Members of the Reichstag of Nazi Germany
Military personnel from Essen
Nazi Party officials
Nazi Party politicians
Nazis who committed suicide
Nazis who participated in the Beer Hall Putsch
People from the Rhine Province
Recipients of the Iron Cross (1914), 1st class
Recipients of the Iron Cross (1914), 2nd class
Sturmabteilung officers
Suicides by explosive device
Suicides in Norway
1945 deaths | [
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15766 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James%20Brown | James Brown | James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American singer, dancer, musician, record producer, and bandleader. The central progenitor of funk music and a major figure of 20th century music, he is often referred to by the honorific nicknames "Godfather of Soul", "Mr. Dynamite", and "Soul Brother No. 1". In a career that lasted more than 50 years, he influenced the development of several music genres. Brown was one of the first 10 inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction in New York on January 23, 1986.
Brown began his career as a gospel singer in Toccoa, Georgia. He first came to national public attention in the mid-1950s as the lead singer of the Famous Flames, a rhythm and blues vocal group founded by Bobby Byrd. With the hit ballads "Please, Please, Please" and "Try Me", Brown built a reputation as a dynamic live performer with the Famous Flames and his backing band, sometimes known as the James Brown Band or the James Brown Orchestra. His success peaked in the 1960s with the live album Live at the Apollo and hit singles such as "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", "I Got You (I Feel Good)" and "It's a Man's Man's Man's World".
During the late 1960s, Brown moved from a continuum of blues and gospel-based forms and styles to a profoundly "Africanized" approach to music-making, emphasizing stripped-down interlocking rhythms that influenced the development of funk music. By the early 1970s, Brown had fully established the funk sound after the formation of the J.B.s with records such as "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" and "The Payback". He also became noted for songs of social commentary, including the 1968 hit "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud". Brown continued to perform and record until his death from pneumonia in 2006.
Brown recorded 17 singles that reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B charts. He also holds the record for the most singles listed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart that did not reach No. 1. Brown was inducted into the first class of the Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2013 as an artist and then in 2017 as a songwriter. He also received honors from several other institutions, including inductions into the Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In Joel Whitburn's analysis of the Billboard R&B charts from 1942 to 2010, Brown is ranked No. 1 in The Top 500 Artists. He is ranked seventh on Rolling Stone list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
Early life
Brown was born on May 3, 1933, in Barnwell, South Carolina, to 16-year-old Susie (née Behling; 1916–2004) and 21-year-old Joseph Gardner Brown (1912–1993) in a small wooden shack. Brown's name was supposed to have been Joseph James Brown, but his first and middle names were mistakenly reversed on his birth certificate. In his autobiography, Brown stated that he had Chinese and Native American ancestry and that his father was of mixed African-American and Native American descent, while his mother was of mixed African-American and Asian descent.
The Brown family lived in extreme poverty in Elko, South Carolina, which was an impoverished town at the time. They later moved to Augusta, Georgia, when James was four or five. His family first settled at one of his aunts' brothels. They later moved into a house shared with another aunt. Brown's mother eventually left the family after a contentious and abusive marriage and moved to New York. Brown spent long stretches of time on his own, hanging out in the streets and hustling to get by. He managed to stay in school until the sixth grade.
He began singing in talent shows as a young child, first appearing at Augusta's Lenox Theater in 1944, winning the show after singing the ballad "So Long". While in Augusta, Brown performed buck dances for change to entertain troops from Camp Gordon at the start of World War II as their convoys traveled over a canal bridge near his aunt's home. He learned to play the piano, guitar, and harmonica during this period. He became inspired to become an entertainer after hearing "Caldonia" by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five. In his teen years, Brown briefly had a career as a boxer.
At the age of 16, he was convicted of robbery and sent to a juvenile detention center in Toccoa. There, he formed a gospel quartet with four fellow cellmates, including Johnny Terry. Brown met singer Bobby Byrd when the two played against each other in a baseball game outside the detention center. Byrd also discovered that Brown could sing after hearing of "a guy called Music Box", which was Brown's musical nickname at the prison. Byrd has since claimed he and his family helped to secure an early release, which led to Brown promising the court he would "sing for the Lord". Brown was released on a work sponsorship with Toccoa business owner S.C. Lawson. Lawson was impressed with Brown's work ethic and secured his release with a promise to keep him employed for two years. Brown was paroled on June 14, 1952. Brown went on to work with both of Lawson's sons, and would come back to visit the family from time to time throughout his career. Shortly after being paroled he joined the gospel group the Ever-Ready Gospel Singers, featuring Byrd's sister Sarah.
Music career
1953–1961: The Famous Flames
Brown eventually joined Bobby Byrd's group in 1954. The group had evolved from the Gospel Starlighters, an a cappella gospel group, to an R&B group with the name the Avons. He reputedly joined the band after one of its members, Troy Collins, died in a car crash. Along with Brown and Byrd, the group consisted of Sylvester Keels, Doyle Oglesby, Fred Pulliam, Nash Knox and Nafloyd Scott. Influenced by R&B groups such as Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the Orioles and Billy Ward and his Dominoes, the group changed its name, first to the Toccoa Band and then to the Flames. Nafloyd's brother Baroy later joined the group on bass guitar, and Brown, Byrd and Keels switched lead positions and instruments, often playing drums and piano. Johnny Terry later joined, by which time Pulliam and Oglesby had long left. one of his 10 children commited suicide.
Berry Trimier became the group's first manager, booking them at parties near college campuses in Georgia and South Carolina. The group had already gained a reputation as a good live act when they renamed themselves the Famous Flames. In 1955, the group had contacted Little Richard while performing in Macon. Richard convinced the group to get in contact with his manager at the time, Clint Brantley, at his nightclub. Brantley agreed to manage them after seeing the group audition. He then sent them to a local radio station to record a demo session, where they performed their own composition "Please, Please, Please", which was inspired when Little Richard wrote the words of the title on a napkin and Brown was determined to make a song out of it. The Famous Flames eventually signed with King Records' Federal subsidiary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and issued a re-recorded version of "Please, Please, Please" in March 1956. The song became the group's first R&B hit, selling over a million copies. None of their follow-ups gained similar success. By 1957, Brown had replaced Clint Brantley as manager and hired Ben Bart, chief of Universal Attractions Agency. That year the original Flames broke up, after Bart changed the name of the group to "James Brown and The Famous Flames".
In October 1958, Brown released the ballad "Try Me", which hit number one on the R&B chart in the beginning of 1959, becoming the first of seventeen chart-topping R&B hits. Shortly afterwards, he recruited his first band, led by J. C. Davis, and reunited with Bobby Byrd who joined a revived Famous Flames lineup that included Eugene "Baby" Lloyd Stallworth and Bobby Bennett, with Johnny Terry sometimes coming in as the "fifth Flame". Brown, the Flames, and his entire band debuted at the Apollo Theater on April 24, 1959, opening for Brown's idol, Little Willie John. Federal Records issued two albums credited to Brown and the Famous Flames (both contained previously released singles). By 1960, Brown began multi-tasking in the recording studio involving himself, his singing group, the Famous Flames, and his band, a separate entity from The Flames, sometimes named the James Brown Orchestra or the James Brown Band. That year the band released the top ten R&B hit "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" on Dade Records, owned by Henry Stone, billed under the pseudonym "Nat Kendrick & the Swans" due to label issues. As a result of its success, King president Syd Nathan shifted Brown's contract from Federal to the parent label, King, which according to Brown in his autobiography meant "you got more support from the company". While with King, Brown, under the Famous Flames lineup, released the hit-filled album Think! and the following year released two albums with the James Brown Band earning second billing. With the Famous Flames, Brown sang lead on several more hits, including"Bewildered", "I'll Go Crazy" and "Think", songs that hinted at his emerging style.
1962–1966: Mr. Dynamite
In 1962, Brown and his band scored a hit with their cover of the instrumental "Night Train", becoming a top five R&B single. That same year, the ballads "Lost Someone" and "Baby You're Right", the latter a Joe Tex composition, added to his repertoire and increased his reputation with R&B audiences. On October 24, 1962, Brown financed a live recording of a performance at the Apollo and convinced Syd Nathan to release the album, despite Nathan's belief that no one would buy a live album due to the fact that Brown's singles had already been bought and that live albums were usually bad sellers.
Live at the Apollo was released the following June and became an immediate hit, eventually reaching number two on the Top LPs chart and selling over a million copies, staying on the charts for 14 months. In 1963, Brown scored his first top 20 pop hit with his rendition of the standard "Prisoner of Love". He also launched his first label, Try Me Records, which included recordings by the likes of Tammy Montgomery (later to be famous as Tammi Terrell), Johnny & Bill (Famous Flames associates Johnny Terry and Bill Hollings) and the Poets, which was another name used for Brown's backing band. During this time Brown began an ill-fated two-year relationship with 17-year-old Tammi Terrell when she sang in his revue. Terrell ended their personal and professional relationship because of his abusive behavior.
In 1964, seeking bigger commercial success, Brown and Bobby Byrd formed the production company, Fair Deal, linking the operation to the Mercury imprint, Smash Records. King Records, however, fought against this and was granted an injunction preventing Brown from releasing any recordings for the label. Prior to the injunction, Brown had released three vocal singles, including the blues-oriented hit "Out of Sight", which further indicated the direction his music was going to take. Touring throughout the year, Brown and the Famous Flames grabbed more national attention after giving an explosive show-stopping performance on the live concert film The T.A.M.I. Show. The Flames' dynamic gospel-tinged vocals, polished choreography and timing as well as Brown's energetic dance moves and high-octane singing upstaged the proposed closing act, the Rolling Stones.
Having signed a new deal with King, Brown released his song "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" in 1965, which became his first top ten pop hit and won him his first Grammy Award. Brown also signed a production deal with Loma Records. Later in 1965, he issued "I Got You", which became his second single in a row to reach number-one on the R&B chart and top ten on the pop chart. Brown followed that up with the ballad "It's a Man's Man's Man's World", a third Top 10 Pop hit (No. 1 R&B) which confirmed his stance as a top-ranking performer, especially with R&B audiences from that point on.
1967–1970: Soul Brother No. 1
By 1967, Brown's emerging sound had begun to be defined as funk music. That year he released what some critics cited as the first true funk song, "Cold Sweat", which hit number-one on the R&B chart (Top 10 Pop) and became one of his first recordings to contain a drum break and also the first that featured a harmony that was reduced to a single chord. The instrumental arrangements on tracks such as "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" and "Licking Stick-Licking Stick" (both recorded in 1968) and "Funky Drummer" (recorded in 1969) featured a more developed version of Brown's mid-1960s style, with the horn section, guitars, bass and drums meshed together in intricate rhythmic patterns based on multiple interlocking riffs.
Changes in Brown's style that started with "Cold Sweat" also established the musical foundation for Brown's later hits, such as "I Got the Feelin'" (1968) and "Mother Popcorn" (1969). By this time Brown's vocals frequently took the form of a kind of rhythmic declamation, not quite sung but not quite spoken, that only intermittently featured traces of pitch or melody. This would become a major influence on the techniques of rapping, which would come to maturity along with hip hop music in the coming decades. Brown's style of funk in the late 1960s was based on interlocking syncopated parts: strutting bass lines, syncopated drum patterns, and iconic percussive guitar riffs. The main guitar ostinatos for "Ain't It Funky" and "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" (both 1969), are examples of Brown's refinement of New Orleans funk; irresistibly danceable riffs, stripped down to their rhythmic essence. On both recordings the tonal structure is bare bones. The pattern of attack-points is the emphasis, not the pattern of pitches, as if the guitar were an African drum, or idiophone. Alexander Stewart states that this popular feel was passed along from "New Orleans—through James Brown's music, to the popular music of the 1970s". Those same tracks were later resurrected by countless hip-hop musicians from the 1970s onward. As a result, James Brown remains to this day the world's most sampled recording artist, but, two tracks that he wrote, are also synonymous with modern dance, especially with house music, jungle music, and drum and bass music, (which were sped up exponentially, in the latter two genres).
"Bring it Up" has an Afro-Cuban guajeo-like structure. All three of these guitar riffs are based on an onbeat/offbeat structure. Stewart says that it "is different from a time line (such as clave and tresillo) in that it is not an exact pattern, but more of a loose organizing principle."
It was around this time as the musician's popularity increased that he acquired the nickname "Soul Brother No. 1", after failing to win the title "King of Soul" from Solomon Burke during a Chicago gig two years prior. Brown's recordings during this period influenced musicians across the industry, most notably groups such as Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Booker T. & the M.G.s as well as vocalists such as Edwin Starr, David Ruffin and Dennis Edwards from The Temptations, and Michael Jackson, who, throughout his career, cited Brown as his ultimate idol.
Brown's band during this period employed musicians and arrangers who had come up through the jazz tradition. He was noted for his ability as a bandleader and songwriter to blend the simplicity and drive of R&B with the rhythmic complexity and precision of jazz. Trumpeter Lewis Hamlin and saxophonist/keyboardist Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis (the successor to previous bandleader Nat Jones) led the band. Guitarist Jimmy Nolen provided percussive, deceptively simple riffs for each song, and Maceo Parker's prominent saxophone solos provided a focal point for many performances. Other members of Brown's band included stalwart Famous Flames singer and sideman Bobby Byrd, trombonist Fred Wesley, drummers John "Jabo" Starks, Clyde Stubblefield and Melvin Parker, saxophonist St. Clair Pinckney, guitarist Alphonso "Country" Kellum and bassist Bernard Odum.
In addition to a torrent of singles and studio albums, Brown's output during this period included two more successful live albums, Live at the Garden (1967) and Live at the Apollo, Volume II (1968), and a 1968 television special, James Brown: Man to Man. His music empire expanded along with his influence on the music scene. As Brown's music empire grew, his desire for financial and artistic independence grew as well. Brown bought radio stations during the late 1960s, including WRDW in his native Augusta, where he shined shoes as a boy. In November 1967, James Brown purchased radio station WGYW in Knoxville, Tennessee, for a reported $75,000, according to the January 20, 1968 Record World magazine. The call letters were changed to WJBE reflecting his initials. WJBE began on January 15, 1968, and broadcast a Rhythm & Blues format. The station slogan was "WJBE 1430 Raw Soul". Brown also bought WEBB in Baltimore in 1970.
Brown branched out to make several recordings with musicians outside his own band. In an attempt to appeal to the older, more affluent, and predominantly white adult contemporary audience, Brown recorded Gettin' Down To It (1969) and Soul on Top (1970)—two albums consisting mostly of romantic ballads, jazz standards, and homologous reinterpretations of his earlier hits—with the Dee Felice Trio and the Louie Bellson Orchestra. In 1968, he recorded a number of funk-oriented tracks with The Dapps, a white Cincinnati band, including the hit "I Can't Stand Myself". He also released three albums of Christmas music with his own band.
1970–1975: Godfather of Soul
In March 1970, most of Brown's mid-to-late 1960s road band walked out on him due to money disputes, a development augured by the prior disbandment of The Famous Flames singing group for the same reason in 1968. Brown and erstwhile Famous Flames singer Bobby Byrd (who chose to remain in the band during this tumultuous period) subsequently recruited several members of the Cincinnati-based The Pacemakers, which included Bootsy Collins and his brother Phelps "Catfish" Collins; augmented by the remaining members of the 1960s road band (including Fred Wesley, who rejoined Brown's outfit in December 1970) and other newer musicians, they would form the nucleus of The J.B.'s, Brown's new backing ensemble. Shortly following their first performance together, the band entered the studio to record the Brown-Byrd composition, "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine"; the song and other contemporaneous singles would further cement Brown's influence in the nascent genre of funk music. This iteration of the J.B.'s dissolved after a March 1971 European tour (documented on the 1991 archival release Love Power Peace) due to additional money disputes and Bootsy Collins' use of LSD; the Collins brothers would soon become integral members of Parliament-Funkadelic, while a new lineup of the J.B.'s coalesced around Wesley, St. Clair Pinckney and drummer John Starks.
In 1971, Brown began recording for Polydor Records which also took over distribution of Brown's King Records catalog. Many of his sidemen and supporting players, including Fred Wesley & the J.B.'s, Bobby Byrd, Lyn Collins, Vicki Anderson and former rival Hank Ballard, released records on the People label, an imprint founded by Brown that was purchased by Polydor as part of Brown's new contract. The recordings on the People label, almost all of which were produced by Brown himself, exemplified the mature flowering of his "house style". Several tracks thought by critics to be excessively sexual were released at this time. He would later soften his vocal approach. Songs such as "I Know You Got Soul" by Bobby Byrd, "Think" by Lyn Collins and "Doing It to Death" by Fred Wesley & the J.B.'s are considered as much a part of Brown's recorded legacy as the recordings released under his own name. That year, he also began touring African countries and was received well by audiences there. During the 1972 presidential election, James Brown openly proclaimed his support of Richard Nixon for reelection to the presidency over Democratic candidate George McGovern. The decision led to a boycott of his performances and, according to Brown, cost him a big portion of his black audience. As a result, Brown's record sales and concerts in the United States reached a lull in 1973 as he failed to land a number-one R&B single that year. Brown relied more on touring outside the United States where he continued to perform for sold-out crowds in cities such as London, Paris and Lausanne. That year he also faced problems with the IRS for failure to pay back taxes, charging he hadn't paid upwards of $4.5 million; five years earlier, the IRS had claimed he owed nearly $2 million.
In 1973, Brown provided the score for the blaxploitation film Black Caesar. He also recorded another soundtrack for the film, Slaughter's Big Rip-Off. Following the release of these soundtracks, Brown acquired a self-styled nickname, "The Godfather of Soul", which remains his most popular nickname. In 1974 he returned to the No. 1 spot on the R&B charts with "The Payback", with the parent album reaching the same spot on the album charts; he would reach No. 1 two more times in 1974, with "My Thang" and "Papa Don't Take No Mess". Later that year, he returned to Africa and performed in Kinshasa as part of the buildup to The Rumble in the Jungle fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Admirers of Brown's music, including Miles Davis and other jazz musicians, began to cite him as a major influence on their own styles. However, Brown, like others who were influenced by his music, also "borrowed" from other musicians. His 1976 single, "Hot (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved, Loved)" (R&B No. 31), interpolated the main riff from "Fame" by David Bowie while omitting any attribution to the latter song's composers (including Bowie, John Lennon and guitarist Carlos Alomar), not the other way around as was often believed.
"Papa Don't Take No Mess" would prove to be his final single to reach the No. 1 spot on the R&B charts and his final Top 40 pop single of the 1970s, though he continued to occasionally have Top 10 R&B recordings. Among his top ten R&B hits during this latter period included "Funky President" (R&B No. 4) and "Get Up Offa That Thing" (R&B No. 4), the latter song released in 1976 and aimed at musical rivals such as Barry White, The Ohio Players and K.C. and the Sunshine Band. Brown credited his then-wife and two of their children as writers of the song to avoid concurrent tax problems with the IRS. Starting in October 1975, Brown produced, directed, and hosted Future Shock, an Atlanta-based television variety show that ran for three years.
1975–1991: Decline and resurgence
Although his records were mainstays of the vanguard New York underground disco scene (exemplified by DJs such as David Mancuso and Francis Grasso) from 1969 onwards, Brown did not consciously yield to the trend until 1975's Sex Machine Today. By 1977, he was no longer a dominant force in R&B. After "Get Up Offa That Thing", thirteen of Brown's late 1970s recordings for Polydor failed to reach the Top 10 of the R&B chart, with only "Bodyheat" in 1976 and the disco-oriented "It's Too Funky in Here" in 1979 reaching the R&B Top 15 and the ballad "Kiss in '77" reaching the Top 20. After 1976's "Bodyheat", he also failed to appear on the Billboard Hot 100. As a result, Brown's concert attendance began dropping and his reported disputes with the IRS caused his business empire to collapse. In addition, Brown's former bandmates, including Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker and the Collins brothers, had found bigger success as members of George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic collective. The emergence of disco also stopped Brown's success on the R&B charts because its slicker, more commercial style had superseded his more raw funk productions.
By the release of 1979's The Original Disco Man, Brown was not providing much production or writing, leaving most of it to producer Brad Shapiro, resulting in the song "It's Too Funky in Here" becoming Brown's most successful single in this period. After two more albums failed to chart, Brown left Polydor in 1981. It was around this time that Brown changed the name of his band from the J.B.'s to the Soul Generals (or Soul G's). The band retained that name until his death. Despite Brown's declining record sales, promoters Gary LoConti and Jim Rissmiller helped Brown sell out a string of residency shows at the Country Club in Reseda. Brown's compromised commercial standing prevented him from charging a large live fee to the promoters for these shows. However, the great success of these shows marked a turning point for Brown's career, and soon he was back on top in Hollywood. Movies followed, starting with appearances in the feature films The Blues Brothers, Doctor Detroit and Rocky IV, as well as guest-starring in the Miami Vice episode "Missing Hours" (1987). In 1984, he teamed with rap musician Afrika Bambaataa on the song "Unity". A year later he signed with Scotti Brothers Records and issued the moderately successful album Gravity in 1986. It included Brown's final Top 10 pop hit, "Living in America", marking his first Top 40 entry since 1974 and his first Top 10 pop entry since 1968. Produced and written by Dan Hartman, it was also featured prominently on the Rocky IV film and soundtrack. Brown performed the song in the film at Apollo Creed's final fight, shot in the Ziegfeld Room at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and was credited in the film as "The Godfather of Soul". 1986 also saw the publication of his autobiography, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, co-written with Bruce Tucker. In 1987, Brown won the Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for "Living in America".
In 1988, Brown worked with the production team Full Force on the new jack swing-influenced I'm Real. It spawned his final two Top 10 R&B hits, "I'm Real" and "Static", which peaked at No. 2 and No. 5, respectively, on the R&B charts. Meanwhile, the drum break from the second version of the original 1969 hit "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose" (the recording included on the compilation album In the Jungle Groove) became so popular at hip hop dance parties (especially for breakdance) during the early 1980s that hip hop pioneer Kurtis Blow called the song "the national anthem of hip hop".
1991–2006: Final years
After his stint in prison during the late 1980s, Brown met Larry Fridie and Thomas Hart who produced the first James Brown biopic, entitled James Brown: The Man, the Message, the Music, released in 1992. He returned to music with the album Love Over-Due in 1991. It included the single "(So Tired of Standing Still We Got to) Move On", which peaked at No. 48 on the R&B chart. His former record label Polydor also released the four-CD box set Star Time, spanning Brown's career to date. Brown's release from prison also prompted his former record labels to reissue his albums on CD, featuring additional tracks and commentary by music critics and historians. That same year, Brown appeared on rapper MC Hammer's video for "Too Legit to Quit". Hammer had been noted, alongside Big Daddy Kane, for bringing Brown's unique stage shows and their own energetic dance moves to the hip-hop generation; both listed Brown as their idol. Both musicians also sampled his work, with Hammer having sampled the rhythms from "Super Bad" for his song "Here Comes the Hammer", from his best-selling album Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em. Big Daddy Kane sampled many times. Before the year was over, Brown–who had immediately returned to work with his band following his release–organized a pay-per-view concert following a show at Los Angeles' Wiltern Theatre, that was well received.
On June 10, 1991, James Brown and a star-filled line up performed before a crowd at the Wiltern Theatre for a live pay-per-view at-home audience. James Brown: Living in America – Live! was the brainchild of Indiana producer Danny Hubbard. It featured
M.C. Hammer as well as Bell Biv Devoe, Heavy D & the Boys, En Vogue, C+C Music Factory, Quincy Jones, Sherman Hemsley and Keenen Ivory Wayans. Ice-T, Tone Loc and Kool Moe Dee performed paying homage to Brown. This was Brown's first public performance since his parole from the South Carolina prison system in February. He had served two-and-a-half years of two concurrent six-year sentences for aggravated assault and other felonies.
Brown continued making recordings. In 1993 his album Universal James was released. It included his final Billboard charting single, "Can't Get Any Harder", which peaked at No. 76 on the US R&B chart and reached No. 59 on the UK chart. Its brief charting in the UK was probably due to the success of a remixed version of "I Feel Good" featuring Dakeyne. Brown also released the singles "How Long" and "Georgia-Lina", which failed to chart. In 1995, Brown returned to the Apollo and recorded Live at the Apollo 1995. It included a studio track titled "Respect Me", which was released as a single; again it failed to chart. Brown's final studio albums, I'm Back and The Next Step, were released in 1998 and 2002 respectively. I'm Back featured the song "Funk on Ah Roll", which peaked at No. 40 in the UK but did not chart in his native US. The Next Step included Brown's final single, "Killing Is Out, School Is In". Both albums were produced by Derrick Monk. Brown's concert success, however, remained unabated and he kept up with a grueling schedule throughout the remainder of his life, living up to his previous nickname, "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business", in spite of his advanced age. In 2003, Brown participated in the PBS American Masters television documentary James Brown: Soul Survivor, which was directed by Jeremy Marre.
Brown performed in the Super Bowl XXXI halftime show.
Brown celebrated his status as an icon by appearing in a variety of entertainment and sports events, including an appearance on the WCW pay-per-view event, SuperBrawl X, where he danced alongside wrestler Ernest "The Cat" Miller, who based his character on Brown, during his in-ring skit with The Maestro. Brown then appeared in Tony Scott's short film Beat the Devil in 2001. He was featured alongside Clive Owen, Gary Oldman, Danny Trejo and Marilyn Manson. Brown also made a cameo appearance in the 2002 Jackie Chan film The Tuxedo, in which Chan was required to finish Brown's act after having accidentally knocked out the singer. In 2002, Brown appeared in Undercover Brother, playing himself.
In 2004, Brown performed in Hyde Park, London as a support act for Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts. The beginning of 2005 saw the publication of Brown's second book, I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul, written with Marc Eliot. In February and March, he participated in recording sessions for an intended studio album with Fred Wesley, Pee Wee Ellis, and other longtime collaborators. Though he lost interest in the album, which remains unreleased, a track from the sessions, "Gut Bucket", appeared on a compilation CD included with the August 2006 issue of MOJO. He appeared at Edinburgh 50,000 – The Final Push, the final Live 8 concert on July 6, 2005, where he performed a duet with British pop star Will Young on "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag". In the Black Eyed Peas album "Monkey Business", Brown was featured on a track called, "They Don't Want Music". The previous week he had performed a duet with another British pop star, Joss Stone, on the United Kingdom chat show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. In 2006, Brown continued his "Seven Decades of Funk World Tour", his last concert tour where he performed all over the world. His final U.S. performances were in San Francisco on August 20, 2006, as headliner at the Festival of the Golden Gate (Foggfest) on the Great Meadow at Fort Mason. The following day, August 21, he performed at Humboldt State University in Arcata, CA, at a small theatre (800 seats) on campus. His last shows were greeted with positive reviews, and one of his final concert appearances at the Irish Oxegen festival in Punchestown in 2006 was performed for a record crowd of 80,000 people. He played a full concert as part of the BBC's Electric Proms on October 27, 2006, at The Roundhouse, supported by The Zutons, with special appearances from Max Beasley and The Sugababes.
Brown's last televised appearance was at his induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame in November 2006, before his death the following month. Before his death, Brown had been scheduled to perform a duet with singer Annie Lennox on the song "Vengeance" for her new album Venus, which was released in 2007.
Artistry
As a vocalist, Brown performed in a forceful shout style derived from gospel music. Meanwhile, "his rhythmic grunts and expressive shrieks harked back farther still to ring shouts, work songs, and field cries", according to the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (1996): "He reimported the rhythmic complexity from which rhythm and blues, under the dual pressure of rock 'n' roll and pop, had progressively fallen away since its birth from jazz and blues."
For many years, Brown's touring show was one of the most extravagant productions in American popular music. At the time of Brown's death, his band included three guitarists, two bass guitar players, two drummers, three horns and a percussionist. The bands that he maintained during the late 1960s and 1970s were of comparable size, and the bands also included a three-piece amplified string section that played during the ballads. Brown employed between 40 and 50 people for the James Brown Revue, and members of the revue traveled with him in a bus to cities and towns all over the country, performing upwards of 330 shows a year with almost all of the shows as one-nighters.
Concert style
Before James Brown appeared on stage, his personal MC gave him an elaborate introduction accompanied by drumrolls, as the MC worked in Brown's various sobriquets along with the names of many of his hit songs. The introduction by Fats Gonder, captured on Brown's 1963 album Live at the Apollo is a representative example:
James Brown's performances were famous for their intensity and length. His own stated goal was to "give people more than what they came for — make them tired, 'cause that's what they came for.'" Brown's concert repertoire consisted mostly of his own hits and recent songs, with a few R&B covers mixed in. Brown danced vigorously as he sang, working popular dance steps such as the Mashed Potato into his routine along with dramatic leaps, splits and slides. In addition, his horn players and singing group (The Famous Flames) typically performed choreographed dance routines, and later incarnations of the Revue included backup dancers. Male performers in the Revue were required to wear tuxedoes and cummerbunds long after more casual concert wear became the norm among the younger musical acts. Brown's own extravagant outfits and his elaborate processed hairdo completed the visual impression. A James Brown concert typically included a performance by a featured vocalist, such as Vicki Anderson or Marva Whitney, and an instrumental feature for the band, which sometimes served as the opening act for the show.
A trademark feature of Brown's stage shows, usually during the song "Please, Please, Please", involved Brown dropping to his knees while clutching the microphone stand in his hands, prompting the show's longtime MC, Danny Ray, to come out, drape a cape over Brown's shoulders and escort him off the stage after he had worked himself to exhaustion during his performance. As Brown was escorted off the stage by the MC, Brown's vocal group, the Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Lloyd Stallworth, and Bobby Bennett), continued singing the background vocals "Please, please don't go-oh". Brown would then shake off the cape and stagger back to the microphone to perform an encore. Brown's routine was inspired by a similar one used by the professional wrestler Gorgeous George, as well as Little Richard. In his 2005 autobiography I Feel Good: A Memoir in a Life of Soul, Brown, who was a fan of Gorgeous George, credited the wrestler as the inspiration for both his cape routine and concert attire, stating, "Seeing him on TV helped create the James Brown you see on stage". Brown performs a version of the cape routine in the film of the T.A.M.I. Show (1964) in which he and The Famous Flames upstaged The Rolling Stones, and over the closing credits of the film Blues Brothers 2000. The Police refer to "James Brown on the T.A.M.I. Show" in their 1980 song "When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around".
Band leadership
Brown demanded extreme discipline, perfection and precision from his musicians and dancers – performers in his Revue showed up for rehearsals and members wore the right "uniform" or "costume" for concert performances. During an interview conducted by Terri Gross during the NPR segment "Fresh Air" with Maceo Parker, a former saxophonist in Brown's band for most of the 1960s and part of the 1970s and 1980s, Parker offered his experience with the discipline that Brown demanded of the band:
Brown also had a practice of directing, correcting and assessing fines on members of his band who broke his rules, such as wearing unshined shoes, dancing out of sync or showing up late on stage. During some of his concert performances, Brown danced in front of his band with his back to the audience as he slid across the floor, flashing hand signals and splaying his pulsating fingers to the beat of the music. Although audiences thought Brown's dance routine was part of his act, this practice was actually his way of pointing to the offending member of his troupe who played or sang the wrong note or committed some other infraction. Brown used his splayed fingers and hand signals to alert the offending person of the fine that person must pay to him for breaking his rules.
Brown's demands of his support acts were, meanwhile, quite the reverse. As Fred Wesley recalled of his time as musical director of the JBs, if Brown felt intimidated by a support act he would try to "undermine their performances by shortening their sets without notice, demanding that they not do certain showstopping songs, and even insisting on doing the unthinkable, playing drums on some of their songs. A sure set killer."
Social activism
Education advocacy and humanitarianism
Brown's main social activism was in preserving the need for education among youths, influenced by his own troubled childhood and his being forced to drop out of the seventh grade for wearing "insufficient clothes". Due to heavy dropout rates in the 1960s, Brown released the pro-education song, "Don't Be a Drop-Out". Royalties of the song were donated to dropout-prevention charity programs. The success of this led to Brown meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House. Johnson cited Brown for being a positive role model to the youth. A lifelong Republican, Brown gained the confidence of President Richard Nixon, to whom he found he had to explain the plight of Black Americans.
Throughout the remainder of his life, Brown made public speeches in schools and continued to advocate the importance of education in school. Upon filing his will in 2002, Brown advised that most of the money in his estate go into creating the I Feel Good, Inc. Trust to benefit disadvantaged children and provide scholarships for his grandchildren. His final single, "Killing Is Out, School Is In", advocated against murders of young children in the streets. Brown often gave out money and other items to children while traveling to his childhood hometown of Augusta. A week before his death, while looking gravely ill, Brown gave out toys and turkeys to kids at an Atlanta orphanage, something he had done several times over the years.
Civil rights and self-reliance
Though Brown performed at benefit rallies for civil rights organizations in the mid-1960s, Brown often shied away from discussing civil rights in his songs in fear of alienating his crossover audience. In 1968, in response to a growing urge of anti-war advocacy during the Vietnam War, Brown recorded the song, "America Is My Home". In the song, Brown performed a rap, advocating patriotism and exhorting listeners to "stop pitying yoursel[ves] and get up and fight". At the time of the song's release, Brown had been participating in performing for troops stationed in Vietnam.
The Boston Garden concert
On April 5, 1968, a day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, Brown provided a free citywide televised concert at the Boston Garden to maintain public order and calm concerned Boston residents (over the objections of the police chief, who wanted to call off the concert, which he thought would incite violence). The show was later released on DVD as Live at the Boston Garden: April 5, 1968. According to the documentary The Night James Brown Saved Boston, then-mayor Kevin White had strongly restrained the Boston police from cracking down on minor violence and protests after the assassination, while religious and community leaders worked to keep tempers from flaring. White arranged to have Brown's performance broadcast multiple times on Boston's public television station, WGBH, thus keeping potential rioters off the streets, watching the concert for free. Angered by not being told of this, Brown demanded $60,000 for "gate" fees (money he thought would be lost from ticket sales on account of the concert being broadcast for free) and then threatened to go public about the secret arrangement when the city balked at paying up afterwards, news of which would have been a political death blow to White and spark riots of its own. White eventually lobbied the behind-the-scenes power-brokering group known as "The Vault" to come up with money for Brown's gate fee and other social programs, contributing $100,000. Brown received $15,000 from them via the city. White also persuaded management at the Garden to give up their share of receipts to make up the differences. Following this successful performance, Brown was counseled by President Johnson to urge cities ravaged from riots following King's assassination to not resort to violence, telling them to "cool it, there's another way".
Responding to pressure from black activists, including H. Rap Brown, to take a bigger stance on their issues and from footage of black on black crime committed in inner cities, Brown wrote the lyrics to the song "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud", which his bandleader Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis accompanied with a musical composition. Released late that summer, the song's lyrics helped to make it an anthem for the civil rights movement. Brown only performed the song sporadically following its initial release and later stated he had regrets about recording it, saying in 1984, "Now 'Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud' has done more for the black race than any other record, but if I had my choice, I wouldn't have done it, because I don't like defining anyone by race. To teach race is to teach separatism." In his autobiography he stated:
The song is obsolete now ... But it was necessary to teach pride then, and I think the song did a lot of good for a lot of people ... People called "Black and Proud" militant and angry – maybe because of the line about dying on your feet instead of living on your knees. But really, if you listen to it, it sounds like a children's song. That's why I had children in it, so children who heard it could grow up feeling pride ... The song cost me a lot of my crossover audience. The racial makeup at my concerts was mostly black after that. I don't regret it, though, even if it was misunderstood.
In 1969, Brown recorded two more songs of social commentary, "World" and "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing", the latter song pleading for equal opportunity and self-reliance rather than entitlement. In 1970, in response to some black leaders for not being outspoken enough, he recorded "Get Up, Get into It, Get Involved" and "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing". In 1971, he began touring Africa, including Zambia and Nigeria. He was made "freeman of the city" in Lagos, Nigeria, by Oba Adeyinka Oyekan, for his "influence on black people all over the world". With his company, James Brown Enterprises, Brown helped to provide jobs for blacks in business in the communities. As the 1970s continued, Brown continued to record songs of social commentary, most prominently 1972's "King Heroin" and the two-part ballad "Public Enemy", which dealt with drug addiction.
Political views
During the 1968 presidential campaign, Brown endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey and appeared with Humphrey at political rallies. Brown was labeled an "Uncle Tom" for supporting Humphrey and also for releasing the pro-American funk song, "America Is My Home", in which Brown had lambasted protesters of the Vietnam War as well as the politics of pro-black activists. Brown began supporting Republican president Richard Nixon after being invited to perform at Nixon's inaugural ball in January 1969. Brown's endorsement of Nixon during the 1972 presidential election negatively impacted his career during that period with several national Black organizations boycotting his records and protesting at his concert shows; a November 1972 show in Cincinnati was picketed with signs saying, "James Brown: Nixon's Clown". Brown initially was invited to perform at a Youth Concert following Nixon's inauguration in January 1973 but bailed out due to the backlash he suffered from supporting Nixon. Brown joined fellow black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., who faced similar backlash, to back out of the concert. Brown blamed it on "fatigue". Brown later reversed his support of Nixon and composed the song, "You Can Have Watergate (Just Gimme Some Bucks And I'll Be Straight)" as a result. After Nixon resigned from office, Brown composed the 1974 hit, "Funky President (People It's Bad)", right after Gerald Ford took Nixon's place. Brown later supported Democratic President Jimmy Carter, attending one of Carter's inaugural balls in 1977. Brown also openly supported President Ronald Reagan's reelection in 1984.
Brown stated he was neither Democratic nor Republican despite his support of Republican presidents such as Nixon and Reagan as well as Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Carter. In 1999, when being interviewed by Rolling Stone, the magazine asked him to name a hero in the 20th century; Brown mentioned John F. Kennedy and then-96-year-old U.S. Senator, and former Dixiecrat, Strom Thurmond, stating "when the young whippersnappers get out of line, whether Democratic or Republican, an old man can walk up and say 'Wait a minute, son, it goes this way.' And that's great for our country. He's like a grandfather to me." In 2003, Brown was the featured attraction of a Washington D.C. fundraiser for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Following the deaths of Ronald Reagan and his friend Ray Charles, Brown said to CNN, "I'm kind of in an uproar. I love the country and I got – you know I've been around a long time, through many presidents and everything. So after losing Mr. Reagan, who I knew very well, then Mr. Ray Charles, who I worked with and lived with like, all our life, we had a show together in Oakland many, many years ago and it's like you found the placard." Despite his contrarian political views, Brown mentored black activist Rev. Al Sharpton during the 1970s.
Personal life
At the end of his life, James Brown lived in Beech Island, South Carolina, directly across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. Brown had diabetes that went undiagnosed for years, according to his longtime manager Charles Bobbit. In 2004, Brown was successfully treated for prostate cancer. Regardless of his health, Brown maintained his reputation as the "hardest working man in show business" by keeping up with his grueling performance schedule.
In 1962, Tammi Terrell joined the James Brown Revue. Brown became sexually involved with Terrell even though she was only 17 in a relationship that continued until she escaped his abuse. Bobby Bennett, former member of the Famous Flames, told Rolling Stone about the abuse he witnessed: "He beat Tammi Terrell terrible", said Bennett. "She was bleeding, shedding blood." Terrell, who died in 1970, was Brown's girlfriend before she became famous as Marvin Gaye's singing partner in the mid-'60s. "Tammi left him because she didn't want her butt whipped", said Bennett, who also claimed he saw Brown kick one pregnant girlfriend down a flight of stairs.
Marriages and children
Brown was married four times. His first marriage was to Velma Warren in 1953, and they had one son together. Over a decade later, the couple had separated and the final divorce decree was issued in 1969. They maintained a close friendship that lasted until Brown's death. Brown's second marriage was to Deidre "Deedee" Jenkins, on October 22, 1970. They had two daughters together. The couple were separated by 1979, after what his daughter describes as years of domestic abuse, and the final divorce decree was issued on January 10, 1981. His third marriage was to Adrienne Lois Rodriguez (March 9, 1950 – January 6, 1996), in 1984. It was a contentious marriage that made headlines due to domestic abuse complaints. Rodriguez filed for divorce in 1988, "citing years of cruelty treatment", but they reconciled. Less than a year after Rodriguez died in 1996, Brown hired Tomi Rae Hynie to be a background singer for his band and she later became his fourth wife.
On December 23, 2002, Brown and Hynie held a wedding ceremony that was officiated by the Rev. Larry Flyer. Following Brown's death, controversy surrounded the circumstances of the marriage, with Brown's attorney, Albert "Buddy" Dallas, reporting that the marriage was not valid; Hynie was still married to Javed Ahmed, a man from Bangladesh. Hynie claimed Ahmed married her to obtain residency through a Green Card and that the marriage was annulled but the annulment did not occur until April 2004. In an attempt to prove her marriage to Brown was valid, Hynie produced a 2001 marriage certificate as proof of her marriage to Brown, but she did not provide King with court records pointing to an annulment of her marriage to him or to Ahmed. According to Dallas, Brown was angry and hurt that Hynie had concealed her prior marriage from him and Brown moved to file for annulment from Hynie. Dallas added that though Hynie's marriage to Ahmed was annulled after she married Brown, the Brown–Hynie marriage was not valid under South Carolina law because Brown and Hynie did not remarry after the annulment. In August 2003, Brown took out a full-page public notice in Variety featuring Hynie, James II and himself on vacation at Disney World to announce that he and Hynie were going their separate ways. In 2015, a judge ruled Hynie as Brown's legal widow.
Brown had numerous children and acknowledged nine of them including five sons – Teddy (1954–1973), Terry, Larry, Daryl, and James Joseph Brown Jr. and four daughters – Lisa, Dr. Yamma Noyola Brown Lumar, Deanna Brown Thomas, and Venisha Brown (1964–2018). Brown also had eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Brown's eldest son, Teddy, died in a car crash on June 14, 1973. According to an August 22, 2007, article published in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, DNA tests indicate that Brown also fathered at least three extramarital children. The first one of them to be identified is LaRhonda Pettit (born 1962), a retired flight attendant and teacher who lives in Houston. During contesting of Brown's will, another of the Brown family attorneys, Debra Opri, revealed to Larry King that Brown wanted a DNA test performed after his death to confirm the paternity of James Brown Jr. (born 2001)—not for Brown's sake but for the sake of the other family members. In April 2007, Hynie selected a guardian ad litem whom she wanted appointed by the court to represent her son, James Brown Jr., in the paternity proceedings. James Brown Jr. was confirmed to be his biological son.
Drug abuse
For most of his career, Brown had a strict drug- and alcohol-free policy for any member in his entourage, including band members, and would fire people who disobeyed orders, particularly those who used or abused drugs. Although early members of the Famous Flames were fired for using alcohol, Brown often served a highball consisting of Delaware Punch and moonshine at his St. Albans, Queens house in the mid-1960s. Some of the original members of Brown's 1970s band, the J.B.'s, including Catfish and Bootsy Collins, intentionally took LSD during a performance in 1971, causing Brown to fire them after the show because he had suspected them of being on drugs all along.
Aide Bob Patton has asserted that he accidentally shared a PCP-laced cannabis joint with Brown in the mid-1970s and "hallucinated for hours", although Brown "talked about it as if it was only marijuana he was smoking". By the mid-1980s, it was widely alleged that Brown was using drugs, with Vicki Anderson confirming to journalist Barney Hoskyns that Brown's regular use of PCP (colloquially known as "angel dust") "began before 1982". After he met and later married Adrienne Rodriguez in 1984, she and Brown began using PCP together. This drug usage often resulted in violent outbursts from him, and he was arrested several times for domestic violence against Rodriguez while high on the drug. By January 1988, Brown faced four criminal charges within a 12-month span relating to driving, PCP, and gun possession. After an April 1988 arrest for domestic abuse, Brown went on the CNN program Sonya Live in L.A. with host Sonya Friedman. The interview became notorious for Brown's irreverent demeanor, with some asserting that Brown was high.
One of Brown's former mistresses recalled in a GQ magazine article on Brown some years after his death that Brown would smoke PCP ("until that got hard to find") and cocaine, mixed with tobacco in Kool cigarettes. He also engaged in the off-label use of sildenafil, maintaining that it gave him "extra energy". While once under the influence of PCP (which he continued to procure dependent on its availability) when traveling in a car, Brown alleged that passing trees contained psychotronic surveillance technology.
In January 1998, he spent a week in rehab to deal with an addiction to unspecified prescription drugs. A week after his release, he was arrested for an unlawful use of a handgun and possession of cannabis. Prior to his death in December 2006, when Brown entered Emory University Hospital, traces of cocaine were found in the singer's urine. His widow suggested Brown would "do crack" with a female acquaintance.
Theft and assault convictions
Brown's personal life was marred by several brushes with the law. At the age of 16, he was convicted of theft and served three years in juvenile prison. During a concert held at Club 15 in Macon, Georgia in 1963, while Otis Redding was performing alongside his former band Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, Brown reportedly tried to shoot his musical rival Joe Tex. The incident led to multiple people being shot and stabbed. Since Brown was still on parole at the time, he relied on his agent Clint Brantley "and a few thousand dollars to make the situation disappear". According to Jenkins, "seven people got shot", and after the shootout ended, a man appeared and gave "each one of the injured a hundred dollars apiece not to carry it no further and not to talk to the press". Brown was never charged for the incident.
On July 16, 1978, after performing at the Apollo, Brown was arrested for reportedly failing to turn in records from one of his radio stations after the station was forced to file for bankruptcy. Brown was arrested on April 3, 1988, for assault, and again in May 1988 on drug and weapons charges, and again on September 24, 1988, following a high-speed car chase on Interstate 20 near the Georgia–South Carolina state border. He was convicted of carrying an unlicensed pistol and assaulting a police officer, along with various drug-related and driving offenses. Although he was sentenced to six years in prison, he was eventually released on parole on February 27, 1991, after serving two years of his sentence. Brown's FBI file, released to The Washington Post in 2007 under the Freedom of Information Act, related Brown's claim that the high-speed chase did not occur as claimed by the police, and that local police shot at his car several times during an incident of police harassment and assaulted him after his arrest. Local authorities found no merit to Brown's accusations.
In 1998, a woman named Mary Simons accused Brown in a civil suit of holding her captive for three days, demanding oral sex and firing a gun in his office; Simons' charge was eventually dismissed. In another civil suit, filed by former background singer Lisa Rushton alleged that between 1994 and 1999, Brown allegedly demanded sexual favors and when refused, would cut off her pay and kept her offstage. She also claimed Brown would "place a hand on her buttocks and loudly told her in a crowded restaurant to not look or speak to any other man besides himself;" Rushton eventually withdrew her lawsuit. In yet another civil suit, a woman named Lisa Agbalaya, who worked for Brown, said the singer would tell her he had "bull testicles", handed her a pair of zebra-print underwear, told her to wear them while he massaged her with oil, and fired her after she refused. A Los Angeles jury cleared the singer of sexual harassment but found him liable for wrongful termination.
The police were summoned to Brown's residence on July 3, 2000, after he was accused of charging at an electric company repairman with a steak knife when the repairman visited Brown's house to investigate a complaint about having no lights at the residence. In 2003, Brown was pardoned by the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services for past crimes that he was convicted of committing in South Carolina.
Domestic violence arrests
Brown was repeatedly arrested for domestic violence. Adrienne Rodriguez, his third wife, had him arrested four times between 1987 and 1995 on charges of assault. In one incident, Rodriguez reported to authorities that Brown beat her with an iron pipe and shot at her car. Rodriguez was hospitalized after the last assault in October 1995, but charges were dropped after she died in January 1996.
In January 2004, Brown was arrested in South Carolina on a domestic violence charge after Tomi Rae Hynie accused him of pushing her to the floor during an argument at their home, where she suffered scratches and bruises to her right arm and hip. In June, Brown pleaded no contest to the domestic violence incident, but served no jail time. Instead, Brown was required to forfeit a US$1,087 bond as punishment.
Rape accusation
In January 2005, a woman named Jacque Hollander filed a lawsuit against James Brown, which stemmed from an alleged 1988 rape. When the case was initially heard before a judge in 2002, Hollander's claims against Brown were dismissed by the court as the limitations period for filing the suit had expired. Hollander claimed that stress from the alleged assault later caused her to contract Graves' disease, a thyroid condition. Hollander claimed that the incident took place in South Carolina while she was employed by Brown as a publicist. Hollander alleged that, during her ride in a van with Brown, Brown pulled over to the side of the road and sexually assaulted her while he threatened her with a shotgun. In her case against Brown, Hollander entered as evidence a DNA sample and a polygraph result, but the evidence was not considered due to the limitations defense. Hollander later attempted to bring her case before the Supreme Court, but nothing came of her complaint.
Later life and death
Illness
On December 23, 2006, Brown became very ill and arrived at his dentist's office in Atlanta, Georgia, several hours late. His appointment was for dental implant work. During that visit, Brown's dentist observed that he looked "very bad ... weak and dazed". Instead of performing the work, the dentist advised Brown to see a doctor right away about his medical condition.
Brown went to the Emory Crawford Long Memorial Hospital the next day for medical evaluation and was admitted for observation and treatment. According to Charles Bobbit, his longtime personal manager and friend, Brown had been struggling with a noisy cough since returning from a November trip to Europe. Yet, Bobbit said, the singer had a history of never complaining about being sick and often performed while ill. Although Brown had to cancel upcoming concerts in Waterbury, Connecticut, and Englewood, New Jersey, he was confident that the doctor would discharge him from the hospital in time for his scheduled New Year's Eve shows at the Count Basie Theatre in New Jersey and the B. B. King Blues Club in New York, in addition to performing a song live on CNN for the Anderson Cooper New Year's Eve special. Brown remained hospitalized, however, and his condition worsened throughout the day.
Death
On Christmas Day 2006, Brown died at approximately 1:45 a.m. EST (06:45 UTC), at age 73, from congestive heart failure, resulting from complications of pneumonia. Bobbit was at his bedside and later reported that Brown stuttered, "I'm going away tonight", then took three long, quiet breaths and fell asleep before dying.
In 2019, an investigation by CNN and other journalists led to suggestions that Brown had been murdered.
Memorial services
After Brown's death, his relatives, a host of celebrities, and thousands of fans gathered, on December 28, 2006, for a public memorial service at the Apollo Theater in New York City and, on December 30, 2006, at the James Brown Arena in Augusta, Georgia. A separate, private ceremony was held in North Augusta, South Carolina, on December 29, 2006, with Brown's family in attendance. Celebrities at these various memorial events included Michael Jackson, Jimmy Cliff, Joe Frazier, Buddy Guy, Ice Cube, Ludacris, Dr. Dre, Little Richard, Dick Gregory, MC Hammer, Prince, Jesse Jackson, Ice-T, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bootsy Collins, LL Cool J, Lil Wayne, Lenny Kravitz, 50 Cent, Stevie Wonder, and Don King. Rev. Al Sharpton officiated at all of Brown's public and private memorial services.
Brown's memorial ceremonies were all elaborate, complete with costume changes for the deceased and videos featuring him in concert. His body, placed in a Promethean casket—bronze polished to a golden shine—was driven through the streets of New York to the Apollo Theater in a white, glass-encased horse-drawn carriage. In Augusta, Georgia, his memorial procession stopped to pay respects at his statue, en route to the James Brown Arena. During the public memorial there, a video showed Brown's last performance in Augusta, Georgia, with the Ray Charles version of "Georgia on My Mind" playing soulfully in the background. His last backup band, The Soul Generals, also played some of his hits during that tribute at the arena. The group was joined by Bootsy Collins on bass, with MC Hammer performing a dance in James Brown style. Former Temptations lead singer Ali-Ollie Woodson performed "Walk Around Heaven All Day" at the memorial services.
Last will and testament
Brown signed his last will and testament on August 1, 2000, before J. Strom Thurmond Jr., an attorney for the estate. The irrevocable trust, separate and apart from Brown's will, was created on his behalf, that same year, by his attorney, Albert "Buddy" Dallas, one of three personal representatives of Brown's estate. His will covered the disposition of his personal assets, such as clothing, cars, and jewelry, while the irrevocable trust covered the disposition of the music rights, business assets of James Brown Enterprises, and his Beech Island, South Carolina estate.
During the reading of the will on January 11, 2007, Thurmond revealed that Brown's six adult living children (Terry Brown, Larry Brown, Daryl Brown, Yamma Brown Lumar, Deanna Brown Thomas and Venisha Brown) were named in the document, while Hynie and James II were not mentioned as heirs. Brown's will had been signed 10 months before James II was born and more than a year before Brown's marriage to Tomi Rae Hynie. Like Brown's will, his irrevocable trust omitted Hynie and James II as recipients of Brown's property. The irrevocable trust had also been established before, and not amended since, the birth of James II.
On January 24, 2007, Brown's children filed a lawsuit, petitioning the court to remove the personal representatives from the estate (including Brown's attorney, as well as trustee Albert "Buddy" Dallas) and appoint a special administrator because of perceived impropriety and alleged mismanagement of Brown's assets. On January 31, 2007, Hynie also filed a lawsuit against Brown's estate, challenging the validity of the will and the irrevocable trust. Hynie's suit asked the court both to recognize her as Brown's widow and to appoint a special administrator for the estate.
On January 27, 2015, Judge Doyet Early III ruled that Tomi Rae Hynie Brown was officially the widow of James Brown. The decision was based on the grounds that Hynie's previous marriage was invalid and that James Brown had abandoned his efforts to annul his own marriage to Hynie.
On February 19, 2015, the South Carolina Supreme Court intervened, halting all lower court actions in the estate and undertaking to review previous actions itself. The South Carolina Court of Appeals in July 2018 ruled that Hynie was, in fact, Mr. Brown's wife. In 2020, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Hynie had not been legally married to Brown and did not have a right to his estate. It was reported in July 2021 that Brown's family had reached a settlement ending the 15-year battle over the estate.
Legacy
Brown received awards and honors throughout his lifetime and after his death. In 1993 the City Council of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, conducted a poll of residents to choose a new name for the bridge that crossed the Yampa River on Shield Drive. The winning name, with 7,717 votes, was "James Brown Soul Center of the Universe Bridge". The bridge was officially dedicated in September 1993, and Brown appeared at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the event. A petition was started by local ranchers to return the name to "Stockbridge" for historical reasons, but they backed off after citizens defeated their efforts because of the popularity of Brown's name. Brown returned to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, on July 4, 2002, for an outdoor festival, performing with bands such as The String Cheese Incident.
During his long career, Brown received many prestigious music industry awards and honors. In 1983 he was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. Brown was one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction dinner in New York on January 23, 1986. At that time, the members of his original vocal group, The Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Johnny Terry, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth) were not inducted. However, on April 14, 2012, The Famous Flames were automatically and retroactively inducted into the Hall of Fame alongside Brown, without the need for nomination and voting, on the basis that they should have been inducted with him in 1986. On February 25, 1992, Brown was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 34th annual Grammy Awards. Exactly a year later, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 4th annual Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Awards. A ceremony was held for Brown on January 10, 1997, to honor him with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
On June 15, 2000, Brown was honored as an inductee to the New York Songwriters Hall of Fame. On August 6, 2002, he was honored as the first BMI Urban Icon at the BMI Urban Awards. His BMI accolades include an impressive ten R&B Awards and six Pop Awards. On November 14, 2006, Brown was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame, and he was one of several inductees to perform at the ceremony. In recognition of his accomplishments as an entertainer, Brown was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors on December 7, 2003. In 2004 Rolling Stone magazine ranked James Brown as No. 7 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. In an article for Rolling Stone, critic Robert Christgau cited Brown as "the greatest musician of the rock era". He appeared on the BET Awards June 24, 2003, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award presented by Michael Jackson, and performed with him. In 2004, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Aretha Franklin.
Brown was also honored in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, for his philanthropy and civic activities. On November 20, 1993, Mayor Charles DeVaney of Augusta held a ceremony to dedicate a section of 9th Street between Broad and Twiggs Streets, renamed "James Brown Boulevard", in the entertainer's honor. On May 6, 2005, as a 72nd birthday present for Brown, the city of Augusta unveiled a life-sized bronze James Brown statue on Broad Street. The statue was to have been dedicated a year earlier, but the ceremony was put on hold because of a domestic abuse charge that Brown faced at the time. In 2005, Charles "Champ" Walker and the We Feel Good Committee went before the County commission and received approval to change Augusta's slogan to "We Feel Good". Afterward, officials renamed the city's civic center the James Brown Arena, and James Brown attended a ceremony for the unveiling of the namesake center on October 15, 2006.
On December 30, 2006, during the public memorial service at the James Brown Arena, Dr. Shirley A.R. Lewis, president of Paine College, a historically black college in Augusta, Georgia, bestowed posthumously upon Brown an honorary doctorate in recognition and honor of his many contributions to the school in its times of need. Brown had originally been scheduled to receive the honorary doctorate from Paine College during its May 2007 commencement.
During the 49th Annual Grammy Awards presentation on February 11, 2007, James Brown's famous cape was draped over a microphone by Danny Ray at the end of a montage in honor of notable people in the music industry who died during the previous year. Earlier that evening, Christina Aguilera delivered an impassioned performance of Brown's hit "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" followed by a standing ovation, while Chris Brown performed a dance routine in honor of James Brown.
On August 17, 2013, the official R&B Music Hall of Fame honored and inducted James Brown at a ceremony held at the Waetjen Auditorium at Cleveland State University.
ART THE BOX began in early 2015 as a collaboration between three organizations: the City of Augusta, the Downtown Development Authority and the Greater Augusta Arts Council. 19 local artists were selected by a committee to create art on 23 local traffic signal control cabinets (TSCCs). A competition was held to create the James Brown Tribute Box on the corner of James Brown Blvd. (9th Ave.) and Broad St. This box was designed and painted by local artist, Ms. Robbie Pitts Bellamy and has become a favorite photo opportunity to visitors and locals in Augusta, Georgia.
"I have a lot of musical heroes but I think James Brown is at the top of the list", remarked Public Enemy's Chuck D. "Absolutely the funkiest man on Earth ... In a black household, James Brown is part of the fabric – Motown, Stax, Atlantic and James Brown."
Tributes
As a tribute to James Brown, the Rolling Stones covered the song, "I'll Go Crazy" from Brown's Live at the Apollo album, during their 2007 European tour. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has remarked, "He [James Brown] was almost a musical genre in his own right and he changed and moved forward the whole time so people were able to learn from him."
On December 22, 2007, the first annual "Tribute Fit For the King of King Records" in honor of James Brown was held at the Madison Theater in Covington, Kentucky. The tribute, organized by Bootsy Collins, featured Tony Wilson as Young James Brown with appearances by Afrika Bambaataa, Chuck D of Public Enemy, The Soul Generals, Buckethead, Freekbass, Triage and many of Brown's surviving family members. Comedian Michael Coyer was the MC for the event. During the show, the mayor of Cincinnati proclaimed December 22 as James Brown Day.
As of September 2021, a significant collection of James Brown clothing, memorabilia, and personal artifacts are on exhibit in downtown Augusta, Georgia at the Augusta History Museum.
Discography
Studio albums
Please Please Please (1958)
Try Me! (1959)
Think! (1960)
The Amazing James Brown (1961)
James Brown and His Famous Flames Tour the U.S.A. (1962)
Prisoner of Love (1963)
Grits & Soul (1964)
Showtime (1964)
Out of Sight (1964)
James Brown Plays James Brown Today & Yesterday (1965)
Mighty Instrumentals (1966)
James Brown Plays New Breed (The Boo-Ga-Loo) (1966)
James Brown Sings Christmas Songs (1966)
Handful of Soul (1966)
James Brown Sings Raw Soul (1967)
James Brown Plays the Real Thing (1967)
Cold Sweat (1967)
I Can't Stand Myself When You Touch Me (1968)
I Got the Feelin' (1968)
James Brown Plays Nothing But Soul (1968)
Thinking About Little Willie John and a Few Nice Things (1968)
A Soulful Christmas (1968)
Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud (1969)
Gettin' Down to It (1969)
The Popcorn (1969)
It's a Mother (1969)
Ain't It Funky (1970)
Soul on Top (1970)
It's a New Day – Let a Man Come In (1970)
Hey America (1970)
Sho Is Funky Down Here (1971)
Hot Pants (1971)
There It Is (1972)
Get on the Good Foot (1972)
Black Caesar (1973)
Slaughter's Big Rip-Off (1973)
The Payback (1973)
Hell (1974)
Reality (1974)
Sex Machine Today (1975)
Everybody's Doin' the Hustle & Dead on the Double Bump (1975)
Hot (1976)
Get Up Offa That Thing (1976)
Bodyheat (1976)
Mutha's Nature (1977)
Jam 1980's (1978)
Take a Look at Those Cakes (1978)
The Original Disco Man (1979)
People (1980)
Soul Syndrome (1980)
Nonstop! (1981)
Bring It On! (1983)
Gravity (1986)
I'm Real (1988)
Love Over-Due (1991)
Universal James (1992)
I'm Back (1998)
The Merry Christmas Album (1999)
The Next Step (2002)
Filmography
The T.A.M.I. Show (1964) (concert film)- with The Famous Flames
Ski Party (1965)- with The Famous Flames
James Brown: Man to Man (1968) (concert film)
The Phynx (1970)
Black Caesar (1973) (soundtrack only)
Slaughter's Big Rip-Off (1973) (soundtrack only)
The Blues Brothers (1980)
Doctor Detroit (1983)
Rocky IV (1985)
Miami Vice (1987)
James Brown: Live in East Berlin (1989)
The Simpsons (1993)
When We Were Kings (1996) (documentary)
Duckman (1997)
Soulmates (1997)
Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)
Holy Man (1998)
Undercover Brother (2002)
The Tuxedo (2002)
The Hire: Beat the Devil (2002) (short film)
Paper Chasers (2003) (documentary)
Soul Survivor (2003) (documentary)
Sid Bernstein Presents ... (2005) (documentary)
Glastonbury (2006) (documentary)
Life on the Road with Mr. and Mrs. Brown (2007) (documentary; release pending)
Live at the Boston Garden: April 5, 1968 (2008) (concert film)
I Got The Feelin': James Brown in the '60s, three-DVD set featuring Live at the Boston Garden: April 5, 1968, Live at the Apollo '68 [DVD version of James Brown: Man to Man], and the documentary The Night James Brown Saved Boston
Soul Power (2009) (documentary)
Get on Up (2014)
Biopics
Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (2014), released in April 2014, written and directed by Alex Gibney, produced by Mick Jagger.
Get on Up (2014), released in theaters on August 1, 2014. Chadwick Boseman plays the role of James Brown in the film. Originally, Mick Jagger and Brian Grazer had begun producing a documentary film on Brown in 2013. A fiction film had been in the planning stages for many years and was revived when Jagger read the script by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth.
In other media
Games
In the video game World of Warcraft, the first boss character of the Forge of Souls dungeon is Bronjahm, "the Godfather of Souls". His quotes during the fight are musical references, and he has a chance of dropping an item called "Papa's Brand New Bag".
Television
As himself (voice) in the 1993 The Simpsons episode "Bart's Inner Child".
In 1991, Brown did a Pay Per View Special with top celebrities such as Quincy Jones, Rick James, Dan Aykroyd, Gladys Knight, Denzel Washington, MC Hammer and others attended or were opening acts. This was produced with boxing promoter Buddy Dallas. 15.5 million households tuned in at a cost $19.99.
In 2002, Brown starred in the Jackie Chan movie The Tuxedo as himself
See also
Progressive soul
References
Footnotes
Sources
Further reading
Danielsen, Anne (2006). Presence and pleasure: The funk grooves of James Brown and Parliament. Wesleyan University Press.
George, Nelson, and Leeds, Alan (editors). (2008). The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing about the Godfather of Soul. New York: Plume.
Lethem, J. (June 12, 2006). "Being James Brown", Rolling Stone Magazine. Retrieved January 14, 2007.
McBride, James (2016) Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. New York: Spiegel & Grau
Sullivan, James. (2008). The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved The Soul Of America. New York: Gotham Books.
Sussman, M. (producer). (December 25, 2006). Arts: Soul classics by James Brown (multimedia presentation). The New York Times. Retrieved January 9, 2007.
Wesley, Fred. (2002). Hit Me, Fred: Recollections of a Sideman. Durham: Duke University Press.
Whitney, Marva and Waring, Charles. (2013) God, The Devil & James Brown:(Memoirs of a Funky Diva). New Romney: Bank House Books
External links
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15767 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon%20Postel | Jon Postel | Jonathan Bruce Postel (; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. In his lifetime he was referred to as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence; Postel himself noted that this "compliment" came with a barb, the suggestion that he should be replaced by a "professional," and responded with typical self-effacing matter-of-factness: "Of course, there isn’t any 'God of the Internet.' The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together."
Career
Postel attended Van Nuys High School, and then UCLA where he earned his B.S. (1966) as well as his M.S. (1968) in Engineering. He then went on to complete his Ph.D. there in Computer Science in 1974, with Dave Farber as his thesis advisor.
Postel started work at UCLA on 23 December 1969 as a Postgraduate Research Engineer (I) where he was involved in early work on the ARPANET. He was involved in the development of the Internet domain system and, at his instigation, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed a second set of protocols for handling data between networks, which is now known as Internet Protocol (IP). Together with Cerf and Steve Crocker, Postel worked on implementing most of the ARPANET protocols. Cerf would later become one of the principal designers of the TCP/IP standard, which works because of the sentence known as Postel's Law.
Postel worked with ARPANET until 24 August 1973 when he left to join MITRE Corporation. He assisted with Network Information Center which was being set up at SRI by Elizabeth Feinler. In March 1977, he joined the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California as a research scientist.
Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFC 791, RFC 792 and RFC 793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. Between 1982 and 1984 Postel co-authored the RFCs which became the foundation of today's DNS (RFC 819, RFC 881, RFC 882 and RFC 920) which were joined in 1995 by RFC 1591 which he also co-wrote.
In total, he wrote or co-authored more than 200 RFCs.
Postel served on the Internet Architecture Board and its predecessors for many years. He was the Director of the names and number assignment clearinghouse, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from its inception. He was the first member of the Internet Society, and was on its Board of Trustees. He was the original and long-time .us Top-Level Domain administrator. He also managed the Los Nettos Network.
All of the above were part-time activities he assumed in conjunction with his primary position as Director of the Computer Networks Division, Division 7, of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.
DNS Root Authority test, U.S. response
On January 28, 1998, Postel, as a test, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regional root nameservers on his own authority and instructed them to reconfigure their servers, changing the root zone server from then SAIC subsidiary Network Solutions' A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET (198.41.0.4) to IANA's DNSROOT.IANA.ORG (198.32.1.98). The operators complied with Postel's instructions, thus dividing control of Internet naming between the non-government operators with IANA and the 4 remaining U.S. Government roots at NASA, DoD, and BRL with NSI. Though usage of the Internet was not interrupted, he soon received orders from senior government officials to undo this change, which he did. Within a week, the US NTIA issued A proposal to improve technical management of Internet names and addresses, including changes to authority over the Internet DNS root zone, which ultimately, and controversially, increased U.S. control.
Legacy
On October 16, 1998, nine months after the altercation with the US government over root server move, Postel died of complications from heart surgery in Los Angeles. He was recovering from a surgery to replace a leaking heart valve.
The significance of Jon Postel's contributions to building the Internet, both technical and personal, were such that a memorial recollection of his life forms part of the core technical literature sequence of the Internet in the form of RFC 2468 "I Remember IANA", written by Vinton Cerf.
The Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California is named in his honor, as is the annual Postel Award. His obituary was written by Vint Cerf and published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work. In 2012, Postel was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. The Channel Islands' Domain Registry building was named after him in early 2016.
Another tribute, "Working with Jon: Tribute delivered at UCLA, October 30, 1998"
(RFC2441), was written by Danny Cohen.
Postel's law
Perhaps his most famous legacy is from RFC 760, which includes a robustness principle often called Postel's law: "an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior" (reworded in RFC 1122 as "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send").
See also
ARPANET
Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing (1972 documentary w/Postel cameo)
History of the Internet
Jonathan B. Postel Service Award
STD 8
Notes
External links
postel.org Research center at USC/ISI created in his honor.
1943 births
1998 deaths
Van Nuys High School alumni
American computer scientists
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
Internet pioneers
Place of birth missing | [
0.15095114707946777,
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15768 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce%20K.%20Reynolds | Joyce K. Reynolds | Joyce Kathleen Reynolds (March 8, 1952 – December 28, 2015) was an American computer scientist who played a significant role in developing protocols underlying the Internet. She authored or co-authored many RFCs, most notably those introducing and specifying the Telnet, FTP, and POP protocols.
Career
Reynolds held bachelor's and master's degrees in social sciences from the University of Southern California.
From 1983 until 1998, she worked with Jon Postel to develop early functions of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, such as the global allocation of IP addresses, Autonomous System (AS) number allocation, and management of the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS). After Postel's death in 1998, Reynolds helped supervise the transition of the IANA functions to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. She worked with ICANN in this role until 2001, while remaining an employee of ISI.
From 1987 to 2006, she served on the editorial team of the Request for Comments series, co-leading the RFC Editor function at the ISI from 1998 until 2006.
As Area Director of the User Services area, she was a member of the Internet Engineering Steering Group of the IETF from 1990 to March 1998.
Recognition
With Bob Braden, she received the 2006 Postel Award in recognition of her services to the Internet. She is mentioned, along with a brief biography, in RFC 1336, Who's Who in the Internet (1992). Upon her death, former IETF Chairman Brian Carpenter suggested that "What would Joyce have said?" should be a guiding question for the organization.
Death
She died on December 28, 2015, due to complications from cancer.
Selected works
Reynolds, J. K., Postel, J. B., Katz, A. R., Finn, G. G., & DeSchon, A. L. (1985). The DARPA experimental multimedia mail system. Computer, 18(10), 82-89.
Postel, J. B., Finn, G. G., Katz, A. R., & Reynolds, J. K. (1988). An experimental multimedia mail system. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 6(1), 63-81.
Postel, J., & Reynolds, J. K. (1988). RFC1042: Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams over IEEE 802 networks.
Reynolds, J. K. (1989). RFC1135: Helminthiasis of the Internet.
Reynolds, J. K. (1991). The helminthiasis of the Internet. Computer networks and ISDN systems, 22(5), 347-361.
Marine, A. N., Reynolds, J. K., & Malkin, G. S. (1994). FYI on Questions and Answers-Answers to Commonly asked" New Internet User" Questions. RFC, 1594, 1-44.
See also
Internet pioneers
Women in Technology
References
External links
Page on the ICANNWiki
Obituary notice on IETF mailing list by Steve Crocker
1952 births
2015 deaths
American computer scientists
American women computer scientists
University of Southern California alumni
Internet pioneers
Women Internet pioneers
21st-century American women | [
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15769 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julmust | Julmust | Julmust ( "yule" and English: 'must' "not-yet-fermented juice of fruit or berries", though there is no such juice in julmust) is a soft drink that is mainly consumed in Sweden around Christmas. During the rest of the year, except Easter, it is usually quite difficult to find in stores, but sometimes it is sold at other times of the year under the name must. During Easter, the name is (from , "Easter"). The content is the same regardless of the marketing name, although the length of time it is stored before bottling differs; however, the beverage is more closely associated with Christmas, somewhat less with Easter and traditionally not at all with the summer. 45 million litres of julmust are consumed during December, which is around 50% of the total soft drink volume in December and 75% of the total yearly must sales. Must was created by Harry Roberts and his father Robert Roberts in 1910 as a non-alcoholic alternative to beer.
Ingredients
The syrup is still made exclusively by Roberts AB in Örebro. The syrup is sold to different soft drink manufacturers that then make the final product in their own way. This means that the must from two different companies doesn't taste the same, even though they are made of the same syrup.
Must is made of carbonated water, sugar, hop extract, malt extract, spices, caramel colouring, citric acid, and preservatives. The hops and malt extracts give the must a somewhat root beer-like taste without the sassafras - or British/Caribbean malt drinks such as Supermalt. It can be aged provided it is stored in a glass bottle. Some people buy julmust in December only to store it a year before drinking it. In 2013, a rumour occurred that the EU would ban julmust due to a directive banning the selling of malt beverages containing caramel colouring. The rumour however turned out to be false since julmust is not a fermented beverage and hence not affected by the directive.
Julmust and Coca-Cola
In Sweden, julmust outsells Coca-Cola during the Christmas season; in fact, the consumption of Coca-Cola drops by as much as 50% over the holiday. This was quoted as one of the main reasons that The Coca-Cola Company broke away from their contract with the local brewer Pripps and started Coca-Cola Drycker Sverige AB instead. Coca-Cola Drycker Sverige AB produced its own julmust, albeit very slyly with The Coca-Cola Company's name occupying only a small space on the label. Their julmust was never advertised until 2004, when Coca-Cola started marketing their julmust under the brand "Bjäre julmust", but they bought the syrup from Roberts AB. By 2007, the "Bjäre julmust" was only sold at McDonald's restaurants and it had completely disappeared from Coca-Colas range of products by Christmas 2008, only to return for Christmas 2011.
Outside Sweden
In November 2004, PepsiCo marketed a product somewhat similar in taste to julmust in the United States called Pepsi Holiday Spice. It was on sale during the 2004 and 2006 Christmas seasons.
Cost Plus World Market in the United States sells julmust during the Christmas holiday season.
IKEA in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Russia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Italy, Australia, Austria, Germany, Hungary and Switzerland sells Dryck Julmust during Christmas, which is a Julmust variant with sweetener instead of sugar. As of 2017, it is called "Vintersaga" (winter saga) Swedish festive drink. It is also sold in Russia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Hungary and Switzerland as Dryck Påskmust at Easter.
Julmust can be found at speciality shops in the United Kingdom (also through Sainsbury's and Ocado) and Belgium.
Julmust is also available for purchase in Finland around Christmas. It is considered part of the Christmas dinner by the Swedish-speaking minority. It has also found popularity within the rest of the population as well.
See also
Malt drink
Kvass
Dandelion and burdock
List of soft drinks by country
Svagdricka
References
Christmas food
Soft drinks
Swedish drinks
Soft beers and malt drinks
Non-alcoholic drinks
Swedish words and phrases | [
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0.2267224639654... |
15770 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules%20Verne | Jules Verne | Jules Gabriel Verne (; ; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time.
In addition to his novels, he wrote numerous plays, short stories, autobiographical accounts, poetry, songs and scientific, artistic and literary studies. His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music and video games.
Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in the Anglosphere where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed. Since the 1980s, his literary reputation has improved.
Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "Father of Science Fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. In the 2010s, he was the most translated French author in the world. In France, 2005 was declared "Jules Verne Year" on the occasion of the centenary of the writer's death.
Life
Early life
Verne was born on 8 February 1828, on Île Feydeau, a small artificial island on the river Loire within the town of Nantes, in No. 4 Rue Olivier-de-Clisson, the house of his maternal grandmother Dame Sophie Marie Adélaïde Julienne Allotte de La Fuÿe (born Guillochet de La Perrière). His parents were Pierre Verne, an attorney originally from Provins, and Sophie Allotte de La Fuÿe, a Nantes woman from a local family of navigators and shipowners, of distant Scottish descent. In 1829, the Verne family moved some hundred metres away to No. 2 Quai Jean-Bart, where Verne's brother Paul was born the same year. Three sisters, Anne "Anna" (1836), Mathilde (1839), and Marie (1842) would follow.
In 1834, at the age of six, Verne was sent to boarding school at 5 Place du Bouffay in Nantes. The teacher, Madame Sambin, was the widow of a naval captain who had disappeared some 30 years before. Madame Sambin often told the students that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway and that he would eventually return like Robinson Crusoe from his desert island paradise. The theme of the robinsonade would stay with Verne throughout his life and appear in many of his novels, including The Mysterious Island (1874), Second Fatherland (1900), and The School for Robinsons (1882).
In 1836, Verne went on to École Saint‑Stanislas, a Catholic school suiting the pious religious tastes of his father. Verne quickly distinguished himself in mémoire (recitation from memory), geography, Greek, Latin, and singing. In the same year, 1836, Pierre Verne bought a vacation house at 29 Rue des Réformés in the village of Chantenay (now part of Nantes) on the Loire. In his brief memoir Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse (Memories of Childhood and Youth, 1890), Verne recalled a deep fascination with the river and with the many merchant vessels navigating it. He also took vacations at Brains, in the house of his uncle Prudent Allotte, a retired shipowner, who had gone around the world and served as mayor of Brains from 1828 to 1837. Verne took joy in playing interminable rounds of the Game of the Goose with his uncle, and both the game and his uncle's name would be memorialized in two late novels (The Will of an Eccentric (1900) and Robur the Conqueror (1886), respectively).
Legend has it that in 1839, at the age of 11, Verne secretly procured a spot as cabin boy on the three-mast ship Coralie with the intention of traveling to the Indies and bringing back a coral necklace for his cousin Caroline. The evening the ship set out for the Indies, it stopped first at Paimboeuf where Pierre Verne arrived just in time to catch his son and make him promise to travel "only in his imagination". It is now known that the legend is an exaggerated tale invented by Verne's first biographer, his niece Marguerite Allotte de la Füye, though it may have been inspired by a real incident.
In 1840, the Vernes moved again to a large apartment at No. 6 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, where the family's youngest child, Marie, was born in 1842. In the same year Verne entered another religious school, the Petit Séminaire de Saint-Donatien, as a lay student. His unfinished novel Un prêtre en 1839 (A Priest in 1839), written in his teens and the earliest of his prose works to survive, describes the seminary in disparaging terms. From 1844 to 1846, Verne and his brother were enrolled in the Lycée Royal (now the Lycée Georges-Clemenceau) in Nantes. After finishing classes in rhetoric and philosophy, he took the baccalauréat at Rennes and received the grade "Good Enough" on 29 July 1846.
By 1847, when Verne was 19, he had taken seriously to writing long works in the style of Victor Hugo, beginning Un prêtre en 1839 and seeing two verse tragedies, Alexandre VI and La Conspiration des poudres (The Gunpowder Plot), to completion. However, his father took it for granted that Verne, being the firstborn son of the family, would not attempt to make money in literature but would instead inherit the family law practice.
In 1847, Verne's father sent him to Paris, primarily to begin his studies in law school, and secondarily (according to family legend) to distance him temporarily from Nantes. His cousin Caroline, with whom he was in love, was married on 27 April 1847, to Émile Dezaunay, a man of 40, with whom she would have five children.
After a short stay in Paris, where he passed first-year law exams, Verne returned to Nantes for his father's help in preparing for the second year. (Provincial law students were in that era required to go to Paris to take exams.) While in Nantes, he met Rose Herminie Arnaud Grossetière, a young woman one year his senior, and fell intensely in love with her. He wrote and dedicated some thirty poems to her, including La Fille de l'air (The Daughter of Air), which describes her as "blonde and enchanting / winged and transparent". His passion seems to have been reciprocated, at least for a short time, but Grossetière's parents frowned upon the idea of their daughter marrying a young student of uncertain future. They married her instead to Armand Terrien de la Haye, a rich landowner ten years her senior, on 19 July 1848.
The sudden marriage sent Verne into deep frustration. He wrote a hallucinatory letter to his mother, apparently composed in a state of half-drunkenness, in which under pretext of a dream he described his misery. This requited but aborted love affair seems to have permanently marked the author and his work, and his novels include a significant number of young women married against their will (Gérande in Master Zacharius (1854), Sava in Mathias Sandorf (1885), Ellen in A Floating City (1871), etc.), to such an extent that the scholar Christian Chelebourg attributed the recurring theme to a "Herminie complex". The incident also led Verne to bear a grudge against his birthplace and Nantes society, which he criticized in his poem La sixième ville de France (The Sixth City of France).
Studies in Paris
In July 1848, Verne left Nantes again for Paris, where his father intended him to finish law studies and take up law as a profession. He obtained permission from his father to rent a furnished apartment at 24 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, which he shared with Édouard Bonamy, another student of Nantes origin. (On his 1847 Paris visit, Verne had stayed at 2 Rue Thérèse, the house of his aunt Charuel, on the Butte Saint-Roch.)
Verne arrived in Paris during a time of political upheaval: the French Revolution of 1848. In February, Louis Philippe I had been overthrown and had fled; on 24 February, a provisional government of the French Second Republic took power, but political demonstrations continued, and social tension remained. In June, barricades went up in Paris, and the government sent Louis-Eugène Cavaignac to crush the insurrection. Verne entered the city shortly before the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as the first president of the Republic, a state of affairs that would last until the French coup of 1851. In a letter to his family, Verne described the bombarded state of the city after the recent June Days uprising but assured them that the anniversary of Bastille Day had gone by without any significant conflict.
Verne used his family connections to make an entrance into Paris society. His uncle Francisque de Chatêaubourg introduced him into literary salons, and Verne particularly frequented those of Mme de Barrère, a friend of his mother's. While continuing his law studies, he fed his passion for the theater, writing numerous plays. Verne later recalled: "I was greatly under the influence of Victor Hugo, indeed, very excited by reading and re-reading his works. At that time I could have recited by heart whole pages of Notre Dame de Paris, but it was his dramatic work that most influenced me." Another source of creative stimulation came from a neighbor: living on the same floor in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie apartment house was a young composer, Aristide Hignard, with whom Verne soon became good friends, and Verne wrote several texts for Hignard to set as chansons.
During this period, Verne's letters to his parents primarily focused on expenses and on a suddenly appearing series of violent stomach cramps, the first of many he would suffer from during his life. (Modern scholars have hypothesized that he suffered from colitis; Verne believed the illness to have been inherited from his mother's side.) Rumors of an outbreak of cholera in March 1849 exacerbated these medical concerns. Yet another health problem would strike in 1851 when Verne suffered the first of four attacks of facial paralysis. These attacks, rather than being psychosomatic, were due to an inflammation in the middle ear, though this cause remained unknown to Verne during his life.
In the same year, Verne was required to enlist in the French military, but the sortition process spared him, to his great relief. He wrote to his father: "You should already know, dear papa, what I think of the military life, and of these domestic servants in livery. … You have to abandon all dignity to perform such functions." Verne's strong antiwar sentiments, to the dismay of his father, would remain steadfast throughout his life.
Though writing profusely and frequenting the salons, Verne diligently pursued his law studies and graduated with a licence en droit in January 1851.
Literary debut
Thanks to his visits to salons, Verne came into contact in 1849 with Alexandre Dumas through the mutual acquaintance of a celebrated chirologist of the time, the Chevalier d'Arpentigny. Verne became close friends with Dumas' son, Alexandre Dumas fils, and showed him a manuscript for a stage comedy, Les Pailles rompues (The Broken Straws). The two young men revised the play together, and Dumas, through arrangements with his father, had it produced by the Opéra-National at the Théâtre Historique in Paris, opening on 12 June 1850.
In 1851, Verne met with a fellow writer from Nantes, Pierre-Michel-François Chevalier (known as "Pitre-Chevalier"), the editor-in-chief of the magazine Musée des familles (The Family Museum). Pitre-Chevalier was looking for articles about geography, history, science, and technology, and was keen to make sure that the educational component would be made accessible to large popular audiences using a straightforward prose style or an engaging fictional story. Verne, with his delight in diligent research, especially in geography, was a natural for the job. Verne first offered him a short historical adventure story, The First Ships of the Mexican Navy, written in the style of James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels had deeply influenced him. Pitre-Chevalier published it in July 1851, and in the same year published a second short story by Verne, A Voyage in a Balloon (August 1851). The latter story, with its combination of adventurous narrative, travel themes, and detailed historical research, would later be described by Verne as "the first indication of the line of novel that I was destined to follow".
Dumas fils put Verne in contact with Jules Seveste, a stage director who had taken over the directorship of the Théâtre Historique and renamed it the Théâtre Lyrique. Seveste offered Verne the job of secretary of the theater, with little or no salary attached. Verne accepted, using the opportunity to write and produce several comic operas written in collaboration with Hignard and the prolific librettist Michel Carré. To celebrate his employment at the Théâtre Lyrique, Verne joined with ten friends to found a bachelors' dining club, the Onze-sans-femme (Eleven Bachelors).
For some time, Verne's father pressed him to abandon his writing and begin a business as a lawyer. However, Verne argued in his letters that he could only find success in literature. The pressure to plan for a secure future in law reached its climax in January 1852, when his father offered Verne his own Nantes law practice. Faced with this ultimatum, Verne decided conclusively to continue his literary life and refuse the job, writing: "Am I not right to follow my own instincts? It's because I know who I am that I realize what I can be one day."
Meanwhile, Verne was spending much time at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, conducting research for his stories and feeding his passion for science and recent discoveries, especially in geography. It was in this period that Verne met the illustrious geographer and explorer Jacques Arago, who continued to travel extensively despite his blindness (he had lost his sight completely in 1837). The two men became good friends, and Arago's innovative and witty accounts of his travels led Verne toward a newly developing genre of literature: that of travel writing.
In 1852, two new pieces from Verne appeared in the Musée des familles: Martin Paz, a novella set in Lima, which Verne wrote in 1851 and published 10 July through 11 August 1852, and Les Châteaux en Californie, ou, Pierre qui roule n'amasse pas mousse (The Castles in California, or, A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss), a one-act comedy full of racy double entendres. In April and May 1854, the magazine published Verne's short story Master Zacharius, an E. T. A. Hoffmann-like fantasy featuring a sharp condemnation of scientific hubris and ambition, followed soon afterward by A Winter Amid the Ice, a polar adventure story whose themes closely anticipated many of Verne's novels. The Musée also published some nonfiction popular science articles which, though unsigned, are generally attributed to Verne. Verne's work for the magazine was cut short in 1856 when he had a serious quarrel with Pitre-Chevalier and refused to continue contributing (a refusal he would maintain until 1863, when Pitre-Chevalier died, and the magazine went to new editorship).
While writing stories and articles for Pitre-Chevalier, Verne began to form the idea of inventing a new kind of novel, a "Roman de la Science" ("novel of science"), which would allow him to incorporate large amounts of the factual information he so enjoyed researching in the Bibliothèque. He is said to have discussed the project with the elder Alexandre Dumas, who had tried something similar with an unfinished novel, Isaac Laquedem, and who enthusiastically encouraged Verne's project.
At the end of 1854, another outbreak of cholera led to the death of Jules Seveste, Verne's employer at the Théâtre Lyrique and by then a good friend. Though his contract only held him to a further year of service, Verne remained connected to the theater for several years after Seveste's death, seeing additional productions to fruition. He also continued to write plays and musical comedies, most of which were not performed.
Family
In May 1856, Verne traveled to Amiens to be the best man at the wedding of a Nantes friend, Auguste Lelarge, to an Amiens woman named Aimée du Fraysne de Viane. Verne, invited to stay with the bride's family, took to them warmly, befriending the entire household and finding himself increasingly attracted to the bride's sister, Honorine Anne Hébée Morel (née du Fraysne de Viane), a widow aged 26 with two young children. Hoping to find a secure source of income, as well as a chance to court Morel in earnest, he jumped at her brother's offer to go into business with a broker. Verne's father was initially dubious but gave in to his son's requests for approval in November 1856. With his financial situation finally looking promising, Verne won the favor of Morel and her family, and the couple were married on 10 January 1857.
Verne plunged into his new business obligations, leaving his work at the Théâtre Lyrique and taking up a full-time job as an agent de change on the Paris Bourse, where he became the associate of the broker Fernand Eggly. Verne woke up early each morning so that he would have time to write, before going to the Bourse for the day's work; in the rest of his spare time, he continued to consort with the Onze-Sans-Femme club (all eleven of its "bachelors" had by this time gotten married). He also continued to frequent the Bibliothèque to do scientific and historical research, much of which he copied onto notecards for future use—a system he would continue for the rest of his life. According to the recollections of a colleague, Verne "did better in repartee than in business".
In July 1858, Verne and Aristide Hignard seized an opportunity offered by Hignard's brother: a sea voyage, at no charge, from Bordeaux to Liverpool and Scotland. The journey, Verne's first trip outside France, deeply impressed him, and upon his return to Paris he fictionalized his recollections to form the backbone of a semi-autobiographical novel, Backwards to Britain (written in the autumn and winter of 1859–1860 and not published until 1989). A second complimentary voyage in 1861 took Hignard and Verne to Stockholm, from where they traveled to Christiania and through Telemark. Verne left Hignard in Denmark to return in haste to Paris, but missed the birth on 3 August 1861 of his only biological son, Michel.
Meanwhile, Verne continued work on the idea of a "Roman de la Science", which he developed in a rough draft, inspired, according to his recollections, by his "love for maps and the great explorers of the world". It took shape as a story of travel across Africa and would eventually become his first published novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon.
Hetzel
In 1862, through their mutual acquaintance Alfred de Bréhat, Verne came into contact with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, and submitted to him the manuscript of his developing novel, then called Voyage en Ballon. Hetzel, already the publisher of Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and other well-known authors, had long been planning to launch a high-quality family magazine in which entertaining fiction would combine with scientific education. He saw Verne, with his demonstrated inclination toward scrupulously researched adventure stories, as an ideal contributor for such a magazine, and accepted the novel, giving Verne suggestions for improvement. Verne made the proposed revisions within two weeks and returned to Hetzel with the final draft, now titled Five Weeks in a Balloon. It was published by Hetzel on 31 January 1863.
To secure his services for the planned magazine, to be called the Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation (Magazine of Education and Recreation), Hetzel also drew up a long-term contract in which Verne would give him three volumes of text per year, each of which Hetzel would buy outright for a flat fee. Verne, finding both a steady salary and a sure outlet for writing at last, accepted immediately. For the rest of his lifetime, most of his novels would be serialized in Hetzel's Magasin before their appearance in book form, beginning with his second novel for Hetzel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1864–65).
When The Adventures of Captain Hatteras was published in book form in 1866, Hetzel publicly announced his literary and educational ambitions for Verne's novels by saying in a preface that Verne's works would form a novel sequence called the Voyages extraordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages or Extraordinary Journeys), and that Verne's aim was "to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format that is his own, the history of the universe". Late in life, Verne confirmed that this commission had become the running theme of his novels: "My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the universe… And I have tried at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style. It is said that there can't be any style in a novel of adventure, but it isn't true." However, he also noted that the project was extremely ambitious: "Yes! But the Earth is very large, and life is very short! In order to leave a completed work behind, one would need to live to be at least 100 years old!"
Hetzel influenced many of Verne's novels directly, especially in the first few years of their collaboration, for Verne was initially so happy to find a publisher that he agreed to almost all of the changes Hetzel suggested. For example, when Hetzel disapproved of the original climax of Captain Hatteras, including the death of the title character, Verne wrote an entirely new conclusion in which Hatteras survived. Hetzel also rejected Verne's next submission, Paris in the Twentieth Century, believing its pessimistic view of the future and its condemnation of technological progress were too subversive for a family magazine. (The manuscript, believed lost for some time after Verne's death, was finally published in 1994.)
The relationship between publisher and writer changed significantly around 1869 when Verne and Hetzel were brought into conflict over the manuscript for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Verne had initially conceived of the submariner Captain Nemo as a Polish scientist whose acts of vengeance were directed against the Russians who had killed his family during the January Uprising. Hetzel, not wanting to alienate the lucrative Russian market for Verne's books, demanded that Nemo be made an enemy of the slave trade, a situation that would make him an unambiguous hero. Verne, after fighting vehemently against the change, finally invented a compromise in which Nemo's past is left mysterious. After this disagreement, Verne became notably cooler in his dealings with Hetzel, taking suggestions into consideration but often rejecting them outright.
From that point, Verne published two or more volumes a year. The most successful of these are: Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864); De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865); Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 1869); and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), which first appeared in Le Temps in 1872. Verne could now live on his writings, but most of his wealth came from the stage adaptations of Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1874) and Michel Strogoff (1876), which he wrote with Adolphe d'Ennery.
In 1867, Verne bought a small boat, the Saint-Michel, which he successively replaced with the Saint-Michel II and the Saint-Michel III as his financial situation improved. On board the Saint-Michel III, he sailed around Europe. After his first novel, most of his stories were first serialised in the Magazine d'Éducation et de Récréation, a Hetzel biweekly publication, before being published in book form. His brother Paul contributed to 40th French climbing of the Mont-Blanc and a collection of short stories – Doctor Ox – in 1874. Verne became wealthy and famous.
Meanwhile, Michel Verne married an actress against his father's wishes, had two children by an underage mistress and buried himself in debts. The relationship between father and son improved as Michel grew older.
Later years
Though raised as a Roman Catholic, Verne gravitated towards deism.
Some scholars believe his novels reflect a deist philosophy, as they often involve the notion of God or divine providence but rarely mention the concept of Christ.
On 9 March 1886, as Verne returned home, his twenty-six-year-old nephew, Gaston, shot at him twice with a pistol. The first bullet missed, but the second one entered Verne's left leg, giving him a permanent limp that could not be overcome. This incident was hushed up in the media, but Gaston spent the rest of his life in a mental asylum.
After the deaths of both his mother and Hetzel (who died in 1886), Jules Verne began publishing darker works. In 1888 he entered politics and was elected town councillor of Amiens, where he championed several improvements and served for fifteen years.
Verne was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1870. He was promoted to an Officier de la Légion d'honneur in 1892.
Death and posthumous publications
On 24 March 1905, while ill with chronic diabetes and complications from a stroke which paralyzed his right side, Verne died at his home in Amiens, 44 Boulevard Longueville (now Boulevard Jules-Verne). His son, Michel Verne, oversaw the publication of the novels Invasion of the Sea and The Lighthouse at the End of the World after Jules's death. The Voyages extraordinaires series continued for several years afterwards at the same rate of two volumes a year. It was later discovered that Michel Verne had made extensive changes in these stories, and the original versions were eventually published at the end of the 20th century by the Jules Verne Society (Société Jules Verne). In 1919, Michel Verne published The Barsac Mission (), whose original drafts contained references to Esperanto, a language that his father had been very interested in.
In 1989, Verne's great-grandson discovered his ancestor's as-yet-unpublished novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, which was subsequently published in 1994.
Works
Verne's largest body of work is the Voyages extraordinaires series, which includes all of his novels except for the two rejected manuscripts Paris in the Twentieth Century and Backwards to Britain (published posthumously in 1994 and 1989, respectively) and for projects left unfinished at his death (many of which would be posthumously adapted or rewritten for publication by his son Michel). Verne also wrote many plays, poems, song texts, operetta libretti, and short stories, as well as a variety of essays and miscellaneous non-fiction.
Literary reception
After his debut under Hetzel, Verne was enthusiastically received in France by writers and scientists alike, with George Sand and Théophile Gautier among his earliest admirers. Several notable contemporary figures, from the geographer Vivien de Saint-Martin to the critic Jules Claretie, spoke highly of Verne and his works in critical and biographical notes.
However, Verne's growing popularity among readers and playgoers (due especially to the highly successful stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days) led to a gradual change in his literary reputation. As the novels and stage productions continued to sell, many contemporary critics felt that Verne's status as a commercially popular author meant he could only be seen as a mere genre-based storyteller, rather than a serious author worthy of academic study.
This denial of formal literary status took various forms, including dismissive criticism by such writers as Émile Zola and the lack of Verne's nomination for membership in the Académie Française, and was recognized by Verne himself, who said in a late interview: "The great regret of my life is that I have never taken any place in French literature." To Verne, who considered himself "a man of letters and an artist, living in the pursuit of the ideal", this critical dismissal on the basis of literary ideology could only be seen as the ultimate snub.
This bifurcation of Verne as a popular genre writer but a critical persona non grata continued after his death, with early biographies (including one by Verne's own niece, Marguerite Allotte de la Fuÿe) focusing on error-filled and embroidered hagiography of Verne as a popular figure rather than on Verne's actual working methods or his output. Meanwhile, sales of Verne's novels in their original unabridged versions dropped markedly even in Verne's home country, with abridged versions aimed directly at children taking their place.
However, the decades after Verne's death also saw the rise in France of the "Jules Verne cult", a steadily growing group of scholars and young writers who took Verne's works seriously as literature and willingly noted his influence on their own pioneering works. Some of the cult founded the Société Jules Verne, the first academic society for Verne scholars; many others became highly respected avant garde and surrealist literary figures in their own right. Their praise and analyses, emphasizing Verne's stylistic innovations and enduring literary themes, proved highly influential for literary studies to come.
In the 1960s and 1970s, thanks in large part to a sustained wave of serious literary study from well-known French scholars and writers, Verne's reputation skyrocketed in France. Roland Barthes' seminal essay Nautilus et Bateau Ivre (The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat) was influential in its exegesis of the Voyages extraordinares as a purely literary text, while book-length studies by such figures as Marcel Moré and Jean Chesneaux considered Verne from a multitude of thematic vantage points.
French literary journals devoted entire issues to Verne and his work, with essays by such imposing literary figures as Michel Butor, Georges Borgeaud, Marcel Brion, Pierre Versins, Michel Foucault, René Barjavel, Marcel Lecomte, Francis Lacassin, and Michel Serres; meanwhile, Verne's entire published opus returned to print, with unabridged and illustrated editions of his works printed by Livre de Poche and Éditions Rencontre. The wave reached its climax in Verne's sesquicentennial year 1978, when he was made the subject of an academic colloquium at the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, and Journey to the Center of the Earth was accepted for the French university system's agrégation reading list. Since these events, Verne has been consistently recognized in Europe as a legitimate member of the French literary canon, with academic studies and new publications steadily continuing.
Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries has been considerably slower in changing. Throughout the 20th century, most anglophone scholars dismissed Verne as a genre writer for children and a naïve proponent of science and technology (despite strong evidence to the contrary on both counts), thus finding him more interesting as a technological "prophet" or as a subject of comparison to English-language writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells than as a topic of literary study in his own right. This narrow view of Verne has undoubtedly been influenced by the poor-quality English translations and very loosely adapted Hollywood film versions through which most American and British readers have discovered Verne. However, since the mid-1980s a considerable number of serious English-language studies and translations have appeared, suggesting that a rehabilitation of Verne's anglophone reputation may currently be underway.
English translations
Translation of Verne into English began in 1852, when Verne's short story A Voyage in a Balloon (1851) was published in the American journal Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art in a translation by Anne T. Wilbur. Translation of his novels began in 1869 with William Lackland's translation of Five Weeks in a Balloon (originally published in 1863), and continued steadily throughout Verne's lifetime, with publishers and hired translators often working in great haste to rush his most lucrative titles into English-language print. Unlike Hetzel, who targeted all ages with his publishing strategies for the Voyages extraordinaires, the British and American publishers of Verne chose to market his books almost exclusively to young audiences; this business move, with its implication that Verne could be treated purely as a children's author, had a long-lasting effect on Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries.
These early English-language translations have been widely criticized for their extensive textual omissions, errors, and alterations, and are not considered adequate representations of Verne's actual novels. In an essay for The Guardian, British writer Adam Roberts commented: "I'd always liked reading Jules Verne and I've read most of his novels; but it wasn't until recently that I really understood I hadn't been reading Jules Verne at all ... It's a bizarre situation for a world-famous writer to be in. Indeed, I can't think of a major writer who has been so poorly served by translation."
Similarly, the American novelist Michael Crichton observed:
Since 1965, a considerable number of more accurate English translations of Verne have appeared. However, the older, deficient translations continue to be republished due to their public domain status, and in many cases their easy availability in online sources.
Relationship with science fiction
The relationship between Verne's Voyages extraordinaires and the literary genre science fiction is a complex one. Verne, like H. G. Wells, is frequently cited as one of the founders of the genre, and his profound influence on its development is indisputable; however, many earlier writers, such as Lucian of Samosata, Voltaire, and Mary Shelley, have also been cited as creators of science fiction, an unavoidable ambiguity arising from the vague definition and history of the genre.
A primary issue at the heart of the dispute is the question of whether Verne's works count as science fiction to begin with. Maurice Renard claimed that Verne "never wrote a single sentence of scientific-marvelous". Verne himself argued repeatedly in interviews that his novels were not meant to be read as scientific, saying "I have invented nothing". His own goal was rather to "depict the earth [and] at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style", as he pointed out in an example:
Closely related to Verne's science-fiction reputation is the often-repeated claim that he is a "prophet" of scientific progress, and that many of his novels involve elements of technology that were fantastic for his day but later became commonplace. These claims have a long history, especially in America, but the modern scholarly consensus is that such claims of prophecy are heavily exaggerated. In a 1961 article critical of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas scientific accuracy, Theodore L. Thomas speculated that Verne's storytelling skill and readers misremembering a book they read as children caused people to "remember things from it that are not there. The impression that the novel contains valid scientific prediction seems to grow as the years roll by". As with science fiction, Verne himself flatly denied that he was a futuristic prophet, saying that any connection between scientific developments and his work was "mere coincidence" and attributing his indisputable scientific accuracy to his extensive research: "even before I began writing stories, I always took numerous notes out of every book, newspaper, magazine, or scientific report that I came across."
Legacy
Verne's novels have had a wide influence on both literary and scientific works; writers known to have been influenced by Verne include Marcel Aymé, Roland Barthes, René Barjavel, Michel Butor, Blaise Cendrars, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, François Mauriac, Raymond Roussel, Claude Roy, Julio Cortázar, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Jean-Paul Sartre, while scientists and explorers who acknowledged Verne's inspiration have included Richard E. Byrd, Yuri Gagarin, Simon Lake, Hubert Lyautey, Guglielmo Marconi, Fridtjof Nansen, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Wernher von Braun, and Jack Parsons. Verne is credited with helping inspire the steampunk genre, a literary and social movement that glamorizes science fiction based on 19th-century technology.
Ray Bradbury summed up Verne's influence on literature and science the world over by saying: "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne."
Notes
Footnotes
References
General sources
; statistics on Index Translationum database (1979–present, updates processed upon receipt from UNESCO members states)
External links
Zvi Har'El's Jules Verne Collection, including a complete primary bibliography, a collection of academic scholarship, a Verne chronology, and a multilingual virtual library
Annotated bibliography with summaries of Verne's works
A Jules Verne Centennial at the Smithsonian Institution
The Jules Verne Collecting Resource with sources, images, and ephemera
Maps from Verne's books
Jules Verne at Biography.com
The Jules Verne Museum in Nantes
The North American Jules Verne Society
Centre International Jules Verne
Jules Verne Collection from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress
Online editions
Jules Verne's works with concordances and frequency list
1828 births
1905 deaths
19th-century French dramatists and playwrights
19th-century French novelists
19th-century French poets
20th-century French novelists
Breton writers
Burials in France
Chevaliers of the Légion d'honneur
Deaths from diabetes
French deists
French dramatists and playwrights
French male novelists
French male short story writers
French short story writers
French people of Scottish descent
French science fiction writers
Maritime writers
Members of the Ligue de la patrie française
People from Nantes
Science Fiction Hall of Fame inductees
Stockbrokers
Writers from Pays de la Loire
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15771 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes%20Rau | Johannes Rau | Johannes Rau (; 16 January 193127 January 2006) was a German politician (SPD). He was the president of Germany from 1 July 1999 until 30 June 2004 and the minister president of North Rhine-Westphalia from 20 September 1978 to 9 June 1998. In the latter role, he also served as president of the Bundesrat in 1982/83 and in 1994/95.
Education and work
Rau was born in the Barmen part of Wuppertal, Rhine Province, as the third of five children. His family was strongly Protestant. As a schoolboy, Rau was active in the Confessing Church, a circle of the German Protestant Church which resisted Nazism.
Rau left school in 1949 and worked as a publisher, especially with the Protestant Youth Publishing House.
Political career
Rau was a member of the All-German People's Party (GVP), which was founded by Gustav Heinemann. The party was known for proposing German reunification from 1952 until it was disbanded in 1957.
In 1958, the pacifist Rau and his political mentor, Gustav Heinemann, joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), where he was active in the Wuppertal chapter. He served as deputy chairman of the SPD party of Wuppertal and was elected later on to the City Council (1964–1978), where he served as chairman of the SPD Group (1964–1967) and later as Mayor (1969–1970).
In 1958, Rau was elected for the first time as member of the Landtag (state parliament) of North Rhine-Westphalia. In 1967, he became chairman of the SPD fraction in the Landtag, and in 1970, he was Minister of Science and Education in the cabinet of Minister President Heinz Kühn. He soon gained a reputation as a reformer. As part of the mass education campaign of the 1970s, he founded five universities, each at different sites, in North Rhine-Westphalia and initiated Germany's first distance learning university at Hagen (modelled on the British Open University).
In 1977, Rau became Chairman of the North Rhine-Westphalia SPD and, in 1978, Minister President of the state, which he remained until 1998, with four successful elections for the SPD, which became strongest party in the Landtag each time and gained an absolute majority three times, in 1980, 1985, 1990 and finally 1995. From 1995 onwards, Rau led an SPD-Greens coalition in North Rhine-Westphalia. Rau twice served as President of the Bundesrat in 1982/83 and 1994/95.
In 1987, Rau was his party's candidate to become chancellor of Germany for the SPD, but he lost the elections against Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats (CDU). In 1994, Rau was a candidate to become President of Germany but lost to Roman Herzog.
In 1998, Rau stepped down from his positions as SPD chairman and Minister President, and on 23 May 1999, he was elected President of Germany by the Federal Assembly of Germany to succeed Roman Herzog (CDU). On 1 July 2004, he was succeeded by Horst Köhler. In common with all other Federal presidents except for Heinemann, who had not wished to be seen off in this manner, Rau was honored by a Großer Zapfenstreich which, at his request, included the hymn "Jesus bleibet meine Freude" (literally "that Jesus remain my Joy", but commonly Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring).
During 2000, Rau became the first German head of state to address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in German. The controversial step prompted some Israeli delegates to walk out. However, Israeli President Moshe Katsav supported and praised him for bridging the gap between the two states. Rau had a deep and lifelong commitment to bringing reconciliation between Germany and its past.
Death
Rau had a long history of heart disease and died 11 days after his 75th birthday on 27 January 2006. The funeral took place on 7 February following a funeral act of state on the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in Berlin in the closest of family and friends.
Motto and maxim
The maxim of Rau was "to reconcile, not divide".
As his personal motto, Rau adopted the Confessing Church dictum "teneo, quia teneor" (I hold because I am held).
In his acceptance speech after his election, Rau claimed "A patriot I will be" because "a patriot is someone who loves his fatherland, a nationalist is someone who despises the fatherlands of the others". The quote can be attributed to the French writer Romain Gary.
Prizes and medals
Rau was awarded 15 honorary doctorates.
In 2001, he received the Leo Baeck Medal for his humanitarian work promoting tolerance and social justice.
Private life
Rau was known as a practising Christian (sometimes known as , "Brother John", in ridicule of his intense Christian position; however, he sometimes used this term himself). He held lay positions in and was a member of the Synod of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, a member church of the Evangelical Church in Germany.
On 9 August 1982, Rau married the political scientist Christina Delius (born 1956). Christina Rau is a granddaughter of her husband's mentor, Gustav Heinemann, former President of Germany. The couple had three children: Anna Christina, born 1983, Philip Immanuel, born 1985 and Laura Helene, born 1986.
On 18 August 2004, Rau had to undergo serious heart surgery, in which an artificial heart valve was inserted. Only two months later (19 October 2004), a hematoma in the abdominal cavity was surgically removed.
After leaving office, Rau lived with his family in the federal capital, Berlin. However, they also kept a house in Wuppertal.
Honours
: Grand Cross Special Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
Foreign honours
: Grand Star of the Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria (2004)
: Collar of the Order of the White Lion
: Knight of the Order of the Elephant (2002)
: Collar of the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana
: Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of the Falcon (2003)
: 2nd Class, then, 1st Class with Chain of the Order of the Three Stars
: Order of the White Eagle
: Grand Cross (or 1st Class) of the Order of the White Double Cross (2001)
: Collar of the Order of Isabella the Catholic (2002)
: First Class of the Order of the State of Republic of Turkey (2000)
Olympic Order (2004)
Leo Baeck Medal (1996)
See also
Politics of Germany
References
External links
www.bundespraesident.de: Johannes Rau—Official biography
online book of condolence for Johannes Rau
1931 births
2006 deaths
20th-century presidents of Germany
21st-century presidents of Germany
All-German People's Party politicians
Presidents of the German Bundesrat
Members of the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia
German Lutherans
Lutheran pacifists
German Christian socialists
People from the Rhine Province
Politicians from Wuppertal
Presidents of Germany
Social Democratic Party of Germany politicians
Collars of the Order of the White Lion
Recipients of the Collar of the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana
Recipients of the Grand Star of the Decoration for Services to the Republic of Austria
Recipients of the Olympic Order
Collars of the Order of Isabella the Catholic
Lutheran socialists
Ministers-President of North Rhine-Westphalia
Grand Crosses Special Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
Burials at the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery
Recipients of the Order of the White Eagle (Poland) | [
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15772 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson | Jackson | Jackson may refer to:
People
Jackson (name), including a list of people with the surname or given name, with nicknames including "Jackson" "Jacky" or "Jack"
Places
Australia
Jackson, Queensland, a town in the Maranoa Region
Jackson North, Queensland, a locality in the Maranoa Region
Jackson South, Queensland, a locality in the Maranoa Region
Jackson oil field in Durham, Shire of Bulloo, Queensland
Port Jackson, a large body of water in Sydney
Canada
Jackson Inlet, Nunavut, Canada
Jackson Island (Nunavut), Canada
Jackson, Ontario, a small community southeast of London, Ontario
New Zealand
Jackson River (New Zealand)
Jacksons, New Zealand
United States
Jackson, Alabama
Jackson, California
Jackson, Georgia
Jackson, Idaho
Jackson, Indiana
Jackson, Ripley County, Indiana
Jackson, Kentucky
Jackson, Louisiana
Jackson, Maine
Jackson, Michigan
Jackson, Minnesota
Jackson, Mississippi, the state capital and most populous city of Mississippi
Jackson, Missouri
Jackson, Nebraska
Jackson, New Hampshire
Jackson, Camden County, New Jersey
Jackson Township, New Jersey
Jackson, New York
Jackson, North Carolina
Jackson, Ohio
Jackson Township, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania
Jackson, Rhode Island
Jackson, South Carolina
Jackson, Tennessee
Jackson, Washington
Jackson, Wisconsin (disambiguation)
Jackson, Wyoming
Jackson County (disambiguation)
Jackson Hole, a valley in the state of Wyoming
Jackson metropolitan area (disambiguation)
Jackson Parish, Louisiana
Jackson River (Virginia)
Jackson Township (disambiguation)
Lake Jackson (Georgia), a reservoir
Elsewhere
Jackson Island, in Franz Josef Land, Russian Federation
Mount Jackson (disambiguation)
Jackson (crater), a prominent lunar impact crater in the northern hemisphere on the far side of the Moon
Arts, entertainment, and media
Films
Jackson (2008 film), an American film
Jackson (2015 film), a film
Other arts, entertainment, and media
Jackson (song), written by Jerry Leiber and Billy Edd Wheeler
Classical Electrodynamics (book), a physics textbook often known by the name of its author: Jackson
Jackson (album)
The Jackson Twins, a comic strip
Companies
Jackson Guitars, a manufacturing company
Jackson Laboratory, a biomedical research institution
Jackson National Life, a financial services company
Jacksons (department store), a department store chain in the United Kingdom
Computing
Jackson (API) - a JSON processor for Java
Jackson structured programming
Other uses
M36 tank destroyer, nicknamed the "Jackson", a United States tank destroyer in World War II
United States twenty-dollar bill, nicknamed for Andrew Jackson, whose picture appears on the obverse side
See also
Jaxon (disambiguation)
Jackson Hole (disambiguation)
Jackson station (disambiguation)
Jacksonville (disambiguation)
Jax (disambiguation)
Justice Jackson (disambiguation) | [
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15773 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabal%20Ram | Jabal Ram | Jabal Ram is a mountain in Jordan. Most authorities give its elevation as above sea level. It was once thought to be the highest point in Jordan, but SRTM data shows that Jabal Umm al Dami is above sea level and therefore higher.
Traditional climbing routes over its eastern face make it one of the main attractions for climbers.
There are about ten scrambling routes across the mountain.
Tony Howard wrote a valuable book about Jordan, including Wadi Rum and Jabal Rum: Treks and Climbs in Wadi Rum, Jordan.
The most popular scrambling routes are the Thamudic and Sheikh Hamdans.
References
External links
Ram | [
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15777 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph%20Goebbels | Joseph Goebbels | Paul Joseph Goebbels (; 29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German Nazi politician who was the Gauleiter (district leader) of Berlin, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and most devoted acolytes, known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism, which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.
Goebbels, who aspired to be an author, obtained a Doctor of Philology degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1921. He joined the Nazi Party in 1924, and worked with Gregor Strasser in its northern branch. He was appointed Gauleiter of Berlin in 1926, where he began to take an interest in the use of propaganda to promote the party and its programme. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry quickly gained and exerted control over the news media, arts, and information in Germany. He was particularly adept at using the relatively new media of radio and film for propaganda purposes. Topics for party propaganda included antisemitism, attacks on the Christian churches, and (after the start of the Second World War) attempting to shape morale.
In 1943, Goebbels began to pressure Hitler to introduce measures that would produce "total war", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Hitler finally appointed him as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War on 23 July 1944, whereby Goebbels undertook largely unsuccessful measures to increase the number of people available for armaments manufacture and the Wehrmacht.
As the war drew to a close and Nazi Germany faced defeat, Magda Goebbels and the Goebbels children joined him in Berlin. They moved into the underground Vorbunker, part of Hitler's underground bunker complex, on 22 April 1945. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April. In accordance with Hitler's will, Goebbels succeeded him as Chancellor of Germany; he served one day in this post. The following day, Goebbels and his wife committed suicide, after poisoning their six children with cyanide.
Early life
Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on 29 October 1897 in Rheydt, an industrial town south of Mönchengladbach near Düsseldorf, Germany. Both of his parents were Roman Catholics with modest family backgrounds. His father Fritz was a German factory clerk; his mother Katharina Maria (née Odenhausen) was born to Dutch and German parents in the Netherlands. Goebbels had five siblings: Konrad (1893–1949), Hans (1895–1947), Maria (1896–1896), Elisabeth (1901–1915), and Maria (1910–1949), who married the German filmmaker Max W. Kimmich in 1938. In 1932, Goebbels commissioned the publication of a pamphlet of his family tree to refute the rumours that his maternal grandmother was of Jewish ancestry.
During childhood, Goebbels suffered from ill health, which included a long bout of inflammation of the lungs. He had a deformed right foot that turned inwards, due to a congenital deformity. It was thicker and shorter than his left foot. He underwent a failed operation to correct it just prior to starting grammar school. Goebbels wore a metal brace and special shoe because of his shortened leg and walked with a limp. He was rejected for military service in World War I because of this deformity.
Goebbels was educated at a Gymnasium, where he completed his Abitur (university entrance examination) in 1917. He was the top student of his class and was given the traditional honour to speak at the awards ceremony. His parents initially hoped that he would become a Catholic priest, which Goebbels seriously considered. He studied literature and history at the universities of Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg, and Munich, aided by a scholarship from the Albertus Magnus Society. By this time Goebbels had begun to distance himself from the church.
Historians, including Richard J. Evans and Roger Manvell, speculate that Goebbels' lifelong pursuit of women may have been in compensation for his physical disability. At Freiburg, he met and fell in love with Anka Stalherm, who was three years his senior. She went on to Würzburg to continue school, as did Goebbels. In 1921, he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Michael, a three-part work of which only Parts I and III have survived. Goebbels felt he was writing his "own story". Antisemitic content and material about a charismatic leader may have been added by Goebbels shortly before the book was published in 1929 by Eher-Verlag, the publishing house of the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers' Party; NSDAP). By 1920, the relationship with Anka was over. The break-up filled Goebbels with thoughts of suicide.
At the University of Heidelberg, Goebbels wrote his doctoral thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz, a minor 19th-century romantic dramatist. He had hoped to write his thesis under the supervision of Friedrich Gundolf, a literary historian. It did not seem to bother Goebbels that Gundolf was Jewish. Gundolf was no longer teaching, so directed Goebbels to associate professor Max Freiherr von Waldberg. Waldberg, also Jewish, recommended Goebbels write his thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz. After submitting the thesis and passing his oral examination, Goebbels earned his PhD in 1921. By 1940, he had written 14 books.
Goebbels returned home and worked as a private tutor. He also found work as a journalist and was published in the local newspaper. His writing during that time reflected his growing antisemitism and dislike for modern culture. In the summer of 1922, he met and began a love affair with Else Janke, a schoolteacher. After she revealed to him that she was half-Jewish, Goebbels stated the "enchantment [was] ruined." Nevertheless, he continued to see her on and off until 1927.
He continued for several years to try to become a published author. His diaries, which he began in 1923 and continued for the rest of his life, provided an outlet for his desire to write. The lack of income from his literary works (he wrote two plays in 1923, neither of which sold) forced him to take employment as a caller on the stock exchange and as a bank clerk in Cologne, a job he detested. He was dismissed from the bank in August 1923 and returned to Rheydt. During this period, he read avidly and was influenced by the works of Oswald Spengler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British-born German writer whose book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) was one of the standard works of the extreme right in Germany. He also began to study the "social question" and read the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, August Bebel and Gustav Noske. According to German historian Peter Longerich, Goebbels's diary entries from late 1923 to early 1924 reflected the writings of a man who was isolated, preoccupied with "religious-philosophical" issues, and lacked a sense of direction. Diary entries of mid-December 1923 forward show Goebbels was moving towards the Völkisch nationalist movement.
Nazi activist
Goebbels first took an interest in Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1924. In February 1924, Hitler's trial for treason began in the wake of his failed attempt to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch of 8–9 November 1923. The trial attracted widespread press coverage and gave Hitler a platform for propaganda. Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, but was released on 20 December 1924, after serving just over a year. Goebbels was drawn to the Nazi Party mostly because of Hitler's charisma and commitment to his beliefs. He joined the Nazi Party around this time, becoming member number 8762. In late 1924, Goebbels offered his services to Karl Kaufmann, who was Gauleiter (Nazi Party district leader) for the Rhine-Ruhr District. Kaufmann put him in touch with Gregor Strasser, a leading Nazi organiser in northern Germany, who hired him to work on their weekly newspaper and undertake secretarial work for the regional party offices. He was also put to work as party speaker and representative for Rhineland-Westphalia. Members of Strasser's northern branch of the Nazi Party, including Goebbels, had a more socialist outlook than the rival Hitler group in Munich. Strasser disagreed with Hitler on many parts of the party platform, and in November 1926 began working on a revision.
Hitler viewed Strasser's actions as a threat to his authority, and summoned 60 Gauleiters and party leaders, including Goebbels, to a special conference in Bamberg, in Streicher's Gau of Franconia, where he gave a two-hour speech repudiating Strasser's new political programme. Hitler was opposed to the socialist leanings of the northern wing, stating it would mean "political bolshevization of Germany." Further, there would be "no princes, only Germans," and a legal system with no "Jewish system of exploitation ... for plundering of our people." The future would be secured by acquiring land, not through expropriation of the estates of the former nobility, but through colonising territories to the east. Goebbels was horrified by Hitler's characterisation of socialism as "a Jewish creation" and his assertion that a Nazi government would not expropriate private property. He wrote in his diary: "I no longer fully believe in Hitler. That's the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken away."
After reading Hitler's book Mein Kampf, Goebbels found himself agreeing with Hitler's assertion of a "Jewish doctrine of Marxism". In February 1926, Goebbels gave a speech titled "Lenin or Hitler?" in which he asserted that communism or Marxism could not save the German people, but he believed it would cause a "socialist nationalist state" to arise in Russia. In 1926, Goebbels published a pamphlet titled Nazi-Sozi which attempted to explain how National Socialism differed from Marxism.
In hopes of winning over the opposition, Hitler arranged meetings in Munich with the three Greater Ruhr Gau leaders, including Goebbels. Goebbels was impressed when Hitler sent his own car to meet them at the railway station. That evening, Hitler and Goebbels both gave speeches at a beer hall rally. The following day, Hitler offered his hand in reconciliation to the three men, encouraging them to put their differences behind them. Goebbels capitulated completely, offering Hitler his total loyalty. He wrote in his diary: "I love him ... He has thought through everything," "Such a sparkling mind can be my leader. I bow to the greater one, the political genius." He later wrote: "Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius." As a result of the Bamberg and Munich meetings, Strasser's new draft of the party programme was discarded. The original National Socialist Program of 1920 was retained unchanged, and Hitler's position as party leader was greatly strengthened.
Propagandist in Berlin
At Hitler's invitation, Goebbels spoke at party meetings in Munich and at the annual Party Congress, held in Weimar in 1926. For the following year's event, Goebbels was involved in the planning for the first time. He and Hitler arranged for the rally to be filmed. Receiving praise for doing well at these events led Goebbels to shape his political ideas to match Hitler's, and to admire and idolise him even more.
Gauleiter
Goebbels was first offered the position of party Gauleiter for the Berlin section in August 1926. He travelled to Berlin in mid-September and by the middle of October accepted the position. Thus Hitler's plan to divide and dissolve the northwestern Gauleiters group that Goebbels had served in under Strasser was successful. Hitler gave Goebbels great authority over the area, allowing him to determine the course for organisation and leadership for the Gau. Goebbels was given control over the local Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) and answered only to Hitler. The party membership numbered about 1,000 when Goebbels arrived, and he reduced it to a core of 600 of the most active and promising members. To raise money, he instituted membership fees and began charging admission to party meetings. Aware of the value of publicity (both positive and negative), he deliberately provoked beer-hall battles and street brawls, including violent attacks on the Communist Party of Germany. Goebbels adapted recent developments in commercial advertising to the political sphere, including the use of catchy slogans and subliminal cues. His new ideas for poster design included using large type, red ink, and cryptic headers that encouraged the reader to examine the fine print to determine the meaning.
Like Hitler, Goebbels practised his public speaking skills in front of a mirror. Meetings were preceded by ceremonial marches and singing, and the venues were decorated with party banners. His entrance (almost always late) was timed for maximum emotional impact. Goebbels usually meticulously planned his speeches ahead of time, using pre-planned and choreographed inflection and gestures, but he was also able to improvise and adapt his presentation to make a good connection with his audience. He used loudspeakers, decorative flames, uniforms, and marches to attract attention to speeches.
Goebbels' tactic of using provocation to bring attention to the Nazi Party, along with violence at the public party meetings and demonstrations, led the Berlin police to ban the Nazi Party from the city on 5 May 1927. Violent incidents continued, including young Nazis randomly attacking Jews in the streets. Goebbels was subjected to a public speaking ban until the end of October. During this period, he founded the newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack) as a propaganda vehicle for the Berlin area, where few supported the party. It was a modern-style newspaper with an aggressive tone; 126 libel suits were pending against Goebbels at one point. To his disappointment, circulation was initially only 2,000. Material in the paper was highly anti-communist and antisemitic. Among the paper's favourite targets was the Jewish Deputy Chief of the Berlin Police Bernhard Weiß. Goebbels gave him the derogatory nickname "Isidore" and subjected him to a relentless campaign of Jew-baiting in the hope of provoking a crackdown he could then exploit. Goebbels continued to try to break into the literary world, with a revised version of his book Michael finally being published, and the unsuccessful production of two of his plays (Der Wanderer and Die Saat (The Seed)). The latter was his final attempt at playwriting. During this period in Berlin he had relationships with many women, including his old flame Anka Stalherm, who was now married and had a small child. He was quick to fall in love, but easily tired of a relationship and moved on to someone new. He worried too about how a committed personal relationship might interfere with his career.
1928 election
The ban on the Nazi Party was lifted before the Reichstag elections on 20 May 1928. The Nazi Party lost nearly 100,000 voters and earned only 2.6 per cent of the vote nationwide. Results in Berlin were even worse, where they attained only 1.4 per cent of the vote. Goebbels was one of the first 12 Nazi Party members to gain election to the Reichstag. This gave him immunity from prosecution for a long list of outstanding charges, including a three-week jail sentence he received in April for insulting the deputy police chief Weiß. The Reichstag changed the immunity regulations in February 1931, and Goebbels was forced to pay fines for libellous material he had placed in Der Angriff over the course of the previous year. Goebbels continued to be elected to the Reichstag at every subsequent election during the Weimar and Nazi regimes.
In his newspaper Berliner Arbeiterzeitung (Berlin Workers Newspaper), Gregor Strasser was highly critical of Goebbels' failure to attract the urban vote. However, the party as a whole did much better in rural areas, attracting as much as 18 per cent of the vote in some regions. This was partly because Hitler had publicly stated just prior to the election that Point 17 of the party programme, which mandated the expropriation of land without compensation, would apply only to Jewish speculators and not private landholders. After the election, the party refocused their efforts to try to attract still more votes in the agricultural sector. In May, shortly after the election, Hitler considered appointing Goebbels as party propaganda chief. But he hesitated, as he worried that the removal of Gregor Strasser from the post would lead to a split in the party. Goebbels considered himself well suited to the position, and began to formulate ideas about how propaganda could be used in schools and the media.
By 1930 Berlin was the party's second-strongest base of support after Munich. That year the violence between the Nazis and communists led to local SA troop leader Horst Wessel being shot by two members of the Communist Party of Germany. He later died in hospital. Exploiting Wessel's death, Goebbels turned him into a martyr for the Nazi movement. He officially declared Wessel's march Die Fahne hoch (Raise the flag), renamed as the Horst-Wessel-Lied, to be the Nazi Party anthem.
Great Depression
The Great Depression greatly impacted Germany and by 1930 there was a dramatic increase in unemployment. During this time, the Strasser brothers started publishing a new daily newspaper in Berlin, the Nationaler Sozialist. Like their other publications, it conveyed the brothers' own brand of Nazism, including nationalism, anti-capitalism, social reform, and anti-Westernism. Goebbels complained vehemently about the rival Strasser newspapers to Hitler, and admitted that their success was causing his own Berlin newspapers to be "pushed to the wall". In late April 1930, Hitler publicly and firmly announced his opposition to Gregor Strasser and appointed Goebbels to replace him as Reich leader of Nazi Party propaganda. One of Goebbels' first acts was to ban the evening edition of the Nationaler Sozialist. Goebbels was also given control of other Nazi papers across the country, including the party's national newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (People's Observer). He still had to wait until 3 July for Otto Strasser and his supporters to announce they were leaving the Nazi Party. Upon receiving the news, Goebbels was relieved the "crisis" with the Strassers was finally over and glad that Otto Strasser had lost all power.
The rapid deterioration of the economy led to the resignation on 27 March 1930 of the coalition government that had been elected in 1928. A new cabinet was formed, and Paul von Hindenburg used his power as president to govern via emergency decrees. He appointed Heinrich Brüning as chancellor. Goebbels took charge of the Nazi Party's national campaign for Reichstag elections called for 14 September 1930. Campaigning was undertaken on a huge scale, with thousands of meetings and speeches held all over the country. Hitler's speeches focused on blaming the country's economic woes on the Weimar Republic, particularly its adherence to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which required war reparations that had proven devastating to the German economy. He proposed a new German society based on race and national unity. The resulting success took even Hitler and Goebbels by surprise: the party received 6.5 million votes nationwide and took 107 seats in the Reichstag, making it the second largest party in the country.
In late 1930 Goebbels met Magda Quandt, a divorcée who had joined the party a few months earlier. She worked as a volunteer in the party offices in Berlin, helping Goebbels organise his private papers. Her flat on the Reichskanzlerplatz soon became a favourite meeting place for Hitler and other Nazi Party officials. Goebbels and Quandt married on 19 December 1931. Hitler was his best man.
For two further elections held in 1932, Goebbels organised massive campaigns that included rallies, parades, speeches, and Hitler travelling around the country by aeroplane with the slogan "the Führer over Germany". Goebbels wrote in his diary that the Nazis must gain power and exterminate Marxism. He undertook numerous speaking tours during these election campaigns and had some of their speeches published on gramophone records and as pamphlets. Goebbels was also involved in the production of a small collection of silent films that could be shown at party meetings, though they did not yet have enough equipment to widely use this medium. Many of Goebbels' campaign posters used violent imagery such as a giant half-clad male destroying political opponents or other perceived enemies such as "International High Finance". His propaganda characterised the opposition as "November criminals", "Jewish wire-pullers", or a communist threat. Support for the party continued to grow, but neither of these elections led to a majority government. In an effort to stabilise the country and improve economic conditions, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reich chancellor on 30 January 1933.
To celebrate Hitler's appointment as chancellor, Goebbels organised a torchlight parade in Berlin on the night of 30 January of an estimated 60,000 men, many in the uniforms of the SA and SS. The spectacle was covered by a live state radio broadcast, with commentary by longtime party member and future Minister of Aviation Hermann Göring. Goebbels was disappointed not to be given a post in Hitler's new cabinet. Bernhard Rust was appointed as Minister of Culture, the post that Goebbels was expecting to receive. Like other Nazi Party officials, Goebbels had to deal with Hitler's leadership style of giving contradictory orders to his subordinates, while placing them into positions where their duties and responsibilities overlapped. In this way, Hitler fostered distrust, competition, and infighting among his subordinates to consolidate and maximise his own power. The Nazi Party took advantage of the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933, with Hindenburg passing the Reichstag Fire Decree the following day at Hitler's urging. This was the first of several pieces of legislation that dismantled democracy in Germany and put a totalitarian dictatorship—headed by Hitler—in its place. On 5 March, yet another Reichstag election took place, the last to be held before the defeat of the Nazis at the end of the Second World War. While the Nazi Party increased their number of seats and percentage of the vote, it was not the landslide expected by the party leadership. Goebbels finally received Hitler's appointment to the cabinet, officially becoming head of the newly created Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on 14 March.
The role of the new ministry, which set up its offices in the 18th-century Ordenspalais across from the Reich Chancellery, was to centralise Nazi control of all aspects of German cultural and intellectual life. Goebbels hoped to increase popular support of the party from the 37 per cent achieved at the last free election held in Germany on 25 March 1933 to 100 per cent support. An unstated goal was to present to other nations the impression that the Nazi Party had the full and enthusiastic backing of the entire population. One of Goebbels' first productions was staging the Day of Potsdam, a ceremonial passing of power from Hindenburg to Hitler, held in Potsdam on 21 March. He composed the text of Hitler's decree authorising the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, held on 1 April. Later that month, Goebbels travelled back to Rheydt, where he was given a triumphal reception. The townsfolk lined the main street, which had been renamed in his honour. On the following day, Goebbels was declared a local hero.
Goebbels converted the 1 May holiday from a celebration of workers' rights (observed as such especially by the communists) into a day celebrating the Nazi Party. In place of the usual ad hoc labour celebrations, he organised a huge party rally held at Tempelhof Field in Berlin. The following day, all trade union offices in the country were forcibly disbanded by the SA and SS, and the Nazi-run German Labour Front was created to take their place. "We are the masters of Germany," he commented in his diary entry of 3 May. Less than two weeks later, he gave a speech at the Nazi book burning in Berlin on 10 May, a ceremony he suggested.
Meanwhile, the Nazi Party began passing laws to marginalise Jews and remove them from German society. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933, forced all non-Aryans to retire from the legal profession and civil service. Similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of their right to practise. The first Nazi concentration camps (initially created to house political dissenters) were founded shortly after Hitler seized power. In a process termed Gleichschaltung (co-ordination), the Nazi Party proceeded to rapidly bring all aspects of life under control of the party. All civilian organisations, including agricultural groups, volunteer organisations, and sports clubs, had their leadership replaced with Nazi sympathisers or party members. By June 1933, virtually the only organisations not in the control of the Nazi Party were the army and the churches. On 2 June 1933, Hitler appointed Goebbels a Reichsleiter, the second highest political rank in the Nazi Party. On 3 October 1933, on the formation of the Academy for German Law, Goebbels was made a member and given a seat on its executive committee.
In a move to manipulate Germany's middle class and shape popular opinion, the regime passed on 4 October 1933 the Schriftleitergesetz (Editor's Law), which became the cornerstone of the Nazi Party's control of the popular press. Modelled to some extent on the system in Benito Mussolini's Italy, the law defined a Schriftleiter as anyone who wrote, edited, or selected texts and/or illustrated material for serial publication. Individuals selected for this position were chosen based on experiential, educational, and racial criteria. The law required journalists to "regulate their work in accordance with National Socialism as a philosophy of life and as a conception of government."
At the end of June 1934, top officials of the SA and opponents of the regime, including Gregor Strasser, were arrested and killed in a purge later called the Night of Long Knives. Goebbels was present at the arrest of SA leader Ernst Röhm in Munich. On 2 August 1934, President von Hindenburg died. In a radio broadcast, Goebbels announced that the offices of president and chancellor had been combined, and Hitler had been formally named as Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor).
Workings of the Ministry
The propaganda ministry was organised into seven departments: administration and legal; mass rallies, public health, youth, and race; radio; national and foreign press; films and film censorship; art, music, and theatre; and protection against counter-propaganda, both foreign and domestic. Goebbels's style of leadership was tempestuous and unpredictable. He would suddenly change direction and shift his support between senior associates; he was a difficult boss and liked to berate his staff in public. Goebbels was successful at his job, however; Life wrote in 1938 that "[p]ersonally he likes nobody, is liked by nobody, and runs the most efficient Nazi department." John Gunther wrote in 1940 that Goebbels "is the cleverest of all the Nazis", but could not succeed Hitler because "everybody hates him".
The Reich Film Chamber, which all members of the film industry were required to join, was created in June 1933. Goebbels promoted the development of films with a Nazi slant, and ones that contained subliminal or overt propaganda messages. Under the auspices of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), created in September, Goebbels added additional sub-chambers for the fields of broadcasting, fine arts, literature, music, the press, and the theatre. As in the film industry, anyone wishing to pursue a career in these fields had to be a member of the corresponding chamber. In this way anyone whose views were contrary to the regime could be excluded from working in their chosen field and thus silenced. In addition, journalists (now considered employees of the state) were required to prove Aryan descent back to the year 1800, and if married, the same requirement applied to the spouse. Members of any chamber were not allowed to leave the country for their work without prior permission of their chamber. A committee was established to censor books, and works could not be re-published unless they were on the list of approved works. Similar regulations applied to other fine arts and entertainment; even cabaret performances were censored. Many German artists and intellectuals left Germany in the pre-war years rather than work under these restrictions.
Goebbels was particularly interested in controlling the radio, which was then still a fairly new mass medium. Sometimes under protest from individual states (particularly Prussia, headed by Göring), Goebbels gained control of radio stations nationwide, and placed them under the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (German National Broadcasting Corporation) in July 1934. Manufacturers were urged by Goebbels to produce inexpensive home receivers, called Volksempfänger (people's receiver), and by 1938 nearly ten million sets had been sold. Loudspeakers were placed in public areas, factories, and schools, so that important party broadcasts would be heard live by nearly all Germans. On 2 September 1939 (the day after the start of the war), Goebbels and the Council of Ministers proclaimed it illegal to listen to foreign radio stations. Disseminating news from foreign broadcasts could result in the death penalty. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and later Minister for Armaments and War Production, later said the regime "made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought."
A major focus of Nazi propaganda was Hitler himself, who was glorified as a heroic and infallible leader and became the focus of a cult of personality. Much of this was spontaneous, but some was stage-managed as part of Goebbels' propaganda work. Adulation of Hitler was the focus of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, where his moves were carefully choreographed. The rally was the subject of the film Triumph of the Will, one of several Nazi propaganda films directed by Leni Riefenstahl. It won the gold medal at the 1935 Venice Film Festival. At the 1935 Nazi party congress rally at Nuremberg, Goebbels declared that "Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself."
Goebbels was involved in planning the staging of the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin. It was around this time that he met and started having an affair with the actress Lída Baarová, whom he continued to see until 1938. A major project in 1937 was the Degenerate Art Exhibition, organised by Goebbels, which ran in Munich from July to November. The exhibition proved wildly popular, attracting over two million visitors. A degenerate music exhibition took place the following year. Meanwhile, Goebbels was disappointed by the lack of quality in the National Socialist artwork, films, and literature.
Church struggle
In 1933, Hitler signed the Reichskonkordat (Reich Concordat), a treaty with the Vatican that required the regime to honour the independence of Catholic institutions and prohibited clergy from involvement in politics. However, the regime continued to target the Christian churches to weaken their influence. Throughout 1935 and 1936, hundreds of clergy and nuns were arrested, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or sexual offences. Goebbels widely publicised the trials in his propaganda campaigns, showing the cases in the worst possible light. Restrictions were placed on public meetings, and Catholic publications faced censorship. Catholic schools were required to reduce religious instruction and crucifixes were removed from state buildings. Hitler often vacillated on whether or not the Kirchenkampf (church struggle) should be a priority, but his frequent inflammatory comments on the issue were enough to convince Goebbels to intensify his work on the issue; in February 1937 he stated he wanted to eliminate the Protestant church.
In response to the persecution, Pope Pius XI had the "Mit brennender Sorge" ("With Burning Concern") Encyclical smuggled into Germany for Passion Sunday 1937 and read from every pulpit. It denounced the systematic hostility of the regime toward the church. In response, Goebbels renewed the regime's crackdown and propaganda against Catholics. His speech of 28 May in Berlin in front of 20,000 party members, which was also broadcast on the radio, attacked the Catholic church as morally corrupt. As a result of the propaganda campaign, enrolment in denominational schools dropped sharply, and by 1939 all such schools were disbanded or converted to public facilities. Harassment and threats of imprisonment led the clergy to be much more cautious in their criticism of the regime. Partly out of foreign policy concerns, Hitler ordered a scaling back of the church struggle by the end of July 1937.
Antisemitism and the Holocaust
Goebbels was antisemitic from a young age. After joining the Nazi Party and meeting Hitler, his antisemitism grew and became more radical. He began to see the Jews as a destructive force with a negative impact on German society. After the Nazis seized control, he repeatedly urged Hitler to take action against the Jews. Despite his extreme antisemitism, Goebbels spoke of the "rubbish of race-materialism" and of the unnecessity of biological racism for the Nazi ideology. He also described Himmler's ideology as "in many regards, mad" and thought Alfred Rosenberg's theories were ridiculous.
The Nazi Party's goal was to remove Jews from German cultural and economic life, and eventually to remove them from the country altogether. In addition to his propaganda efforts, Goebbels actively promoted the persecution of the Jews through pogroms, legislation, and other actions. Discriminatory measures he instituted in Berlin in the early years of the regime included bans against their using public transport and requiring that Jewish shops be marked as such.
In November 1938, the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath was killed in Paris by the young Jewish man Herschel Grynszpan. In response, Goebbels arranged for inflammatory antisemitic material to be released by the press, and the result was the start of a pogrom. Jews were attacked and synagogues destroyed all over Germany. The situation was further inflamed by a speech Goebbels gave at a party meeting on the night of 8 November, where he obliquely called for party members to incite further violence against Jews while making it appear to be a spontaneous series of acts by the German people. At least a hundred Jews were killed, several hundred synagogues were damaged or destroyed, and thousands of Jewish shops were vandalised in an event called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). Around 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. The destruction stopped after a conference held on 12 November, where Göring pointed out that the destruction of Jewish property was in effect the destruction of German property since the intention was that it would all eventually be confiscated.
Goebbels continued his intensive antisemitic propaganda campaign that culminated in Hitler's 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech, which Goebbels helped to write:
While Goebbels had been pressing for expulsion of the Berlin Jews since 1935, there were still 62,000 living in the city in 1940. Part of the delay in their deportation was that they were needed as workers in the armaments industry. Deportations of German Jews began in October 1941, with the first transport from Berlin leaving on 18 October. Some Jews were shot immediately on arrival in destinations such as Riga and Kaunas. In preparation for the deportations, Goebbels ordered that all German Jews wear an identifying yellow badge as of 5 September 1941. On 6 March 1942, Goebbels received a copy of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, which indicated indirectly that the Jewish population of Europe was to be sent to extermination camps in occupied areas of Poland and killed. His diary entries of the period show that he was well aware of the fate of the Jews. "In general, it can probably be established that 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated, while only 40 per cent can be put to work. ... A judgment is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric but thoroughly deserved," he wrote on 27 March 1942.
Goebbels had frequent discussions with Hitler about the fate of the Jews, a subject they discussed almost every time they met. He was aware throughout that the Jews were being exterminated, and completely supported this decision. He was one of the few top Nazi officials to do so publicly.
World War II
As early as February 1933, Hitler announced that rearmament must be undertaken, albeit clandestinely at first, as to do so was in violation of the Versailles Treaty. A year later he told his military leaders that 1942 was the target date for going to war in the east. Goebbels was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Hitler aggressively pursuing Germany's expansionist policies sooner rather than later. At the time of the Reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, Goebbels summed up his general attitude in his diary: "[N]ow is the time for action. Fortune favors the brave! He who dares nothing wins nothing." In the lead-up to the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, Goebbels took the initiative time and again to use propaganda to whip up sympathy for the Sudeten Germans while campaigning against the Czech government. Still, Goebbels was well aware there was a growing "war panic" in Germany and so by July had the press conduct propaganda efforts at a lower level of intensity. After the western powers acceded to Hitler's demands concerning Czechoslovakia in 1938, Goebbels soon redirected his propaganda machine against Poland. From May onwards, he orchestrated a campaign against Poland, fabricating stories about atrocities against ethnic Germans in Danzig and other cities. Even so, he was unable to persuade the majority of Germans to welcome the prospect of war. He privately held doubts about the wisdom of risking a protracted war against Britain and France by attacking Poland.
After the Invasion of Poland in September 1939, Goebbels used his propaganda ministry and the Reich chambers to control access to information domestically. To his chagrin, his rival Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, continually challenged Goebbels' jurisdiction over the dissemination of international propaganda. Hitler declined to make a firm ruling on the subject, so the two men remained rivals for the remainder of the Nazi era. Goebbels did not participate in the military decision-making process, nor was he made privy to diplomatic negotiations until after the fact.
The Propaganda Ministry took over the broadcasting facilities of conquered countries immediately after surrender, and began broadcasting prepared material using the existing announcers as a way to gain the trust of the citizens. Most aspects of the media, both domestically and in the conquered countries, were controlled by Goebbels and his department. The German Home Service, the Armed Forces Programme, and the German European Service were all rigorously controlled in everything from the information they were permitted to disseminate to the music they were allowed to play. Party rallies, speeches, and demonstrations continued; speeches were broadcast on the radio and short propaganda films were exhibited using 1,500 mobile film vans. Hitler made fewer public appearances and broadcasts as the war progressed, so Goebbels increasingly became the voice of the Nazi regime for the German people. From May 1940 he wrote frequent editorials that were published in Das Reich which were later read aloud over the radio. He found films to be his most effective propaganda medium, after radio. At his insistence, initially half the films made in wartime Germany were propaganda films (particularly on antisemitism) and war propaganda films (recounting both historical wars and current exploits of the Wehrmacht).
Goebbels became preoccupied with morale and the efforts of the people on the home front. He believed that the more the people at home were involved in the war effort, the better their morale would be. For example, he initiated a programme for the collection of winter clothing and ski equipment for troops on the eastern front. At the same time, Goebbels implemented changes to have more "entertaining material" in radio and film produced for the public, decreeing in late 1942 that 20 per cent of the films should be propaganda and 80 per cent light entertainment. As Gauleiter of Berlin, Goebbels dealt with increasingly serious shortages of necessities such as food and clothing, as well as the need to ration beer and tobacco, which were important for morale. Hitler suggested watering the beer and degrading the quality of the cigarettes so that more could be produced, but Goebbels refused, saying the cigarettes were already of such low quality that it was impossible to make them any worse. Through his propaganda campaigns, he worked hard to maintain an appropriate level of morale among the public about the military situation, neither too optimistic nor too grim. The series of military setbacks the Germans suffered in this period – the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne (May 1942), the Allied victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein (November 1942), and especially the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad (February 1943) – were difficult matters to present to the German public, who were increasingly weary of the war and sceptical that it could be won. On 16 November 1942 Goebbels, like all Gauleiters, was appointed the Reich Defense Commissioner for his Gau. This enabled him to issue direct instructions to authorities within his jurisdiction in matters concerning the civilian war effort. On 15 January 1943, Hitler appointed Goebbels as head of the newly created Air Raid Damage committee, which meant Goebbels was nominally in charge of nationwide civil air defences and shelters as well as the assessment and repair of damaged buildings. In actuality, the defence of areas other than Berlin remained in the hands of the local Gauleiters, and his main tasks were limited to providing immediate aid to the affected civilians and using propaganda to improve their morale.
By early 1943, the war produced a labour crisis for the regime. Hitler created a three-man committee with representatives of the State, the army, and the Party in an attempt to centralise control of the war economy. The committee members were Hans Lammers (head of the Reich Chancellery), Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command; OKW), and Martin Bormann, who controlled the Party. The committee was intended to independently propose measures regardless of the wishes of various ministries, with Hitler reserving most final decisions to himself. The committee, soon known as the Dreierausschuß (Committee of Three), met eleven times between January and August 1943. However, they ran up against resistance from Hitler's cabinet ministers, who headed deeply entrenched spheres of influence and were excluded from the committee. Seeing it as a threat to their power, Goebbels, Göring, and Speer worked together to bring it down. The result was that nothing changed, and the Committee of Three declined into irrelevance by September 1943.
Partly in response to being excluded from the Committee of Three, Goebbels pressured Hitler to introduce measures that would produce "total war", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Some of these measures were implemented in an edict of 13 January, but to Goebbels' dismay, Göring demanded that his favourite restaurants in Berlin should remain open, and Lammers successfully lobbied Hitler to have women with children exempted from conscription, even if they had child care available. After receiving an enthusiastic response to his speech of 30 January 1943 on the topic, Goebbels believed he had the support of the German people in his call for total war. His next speech, the Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943, was a passionate demand for his audience to commit to total war, which he presented as the only way to stop the Bolshevik onslaught and save the German people from destruction. The speech also had a strong antisemitic element and hinted at the extermination of the Jewish people that was already underway. The speech was presented live on radio and was filmed as well. During the live version of the speech, Goebbels accidentally begins to mention the "extermination" of the Jews; this is omitted in the published text of the speech.
Goebbels' efforts had little impact for the time being, because Hitler, who in principle was in favour of total war, was not prepared to implement changes over the objections of his ministers. The discovery around this time of a mass grave of Polish officers that had been killed by the Red Army in the 1940 Katyn massacre was made use of by Goebbels in his propaganda in an attempt to drive a wedge between the Soviets and the other western allies.
Plenipotentiary for total war
On 1 April 1943, Goebbels was named Stadtpräsident of Berlin, thus uniting under his control the city's highest party and governmental offices. After the Allied invasion of Sicily (July 1943) and the strategic Soviet victory in the Battle of Kursk (July–August 1943), Goebbels began to recognise that the war could no longer be won. Following the Allied invasion of Italy and the fall of Mussolini in September, he raised with Hitler the possibility of a separate peace, either with the Soviets or with Britain. Hitler rejected both of these proposals.
As Germany's military and economic situation grew steadily worse, on 25 August 1943 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler took over the post of interior minister, replacing Wilhelm Frick. Intensive air raids on Berlin and other cities took the lives of thousands of people. Göring's Luftwaffe attempted to retaliate with air raids on London in early 1944, but they no longer had sufficient aircraft to make much of an impact. While Goebbels' propaganda in this period indicated that a huge retaliation was in the offing, the V-1 flying bombs, launched on British targets beginning in mid-June 1944, had little effect, with only around 20 per cent reaching their intended targets. To boost morale, Goebbels continued to publish propaganda to the effect that further improvements to these weapons would have a decisive impact on the outcome of the war. Meanwhile, in the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, the Allies successfully gained a foothold in France.
Throughout July 1944, Goebbels and Speer continued to press Hitler to bring the economy to a total war footing. The 20 July plot, where Hitler was almost killed by a bomb at his field headquarters in East Prussia, played into the hands of those who had been pushing for change: Bormann, Goebbels, Himmler, and Speer. Over the objections of Göring, Goebbels was appointed on 23 July as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War, charged with maximising the manpower for the Wehrmacht and the armaments industry at the expense of sectors of the economy not critical to the war effort. Through these efforts, he was able to free up an additional half a million men for military service. However, as many of these new recruits came from the armaments industry, the move put him in conflict with armaments minister Speer. Untrained workers from elsewhere were not readily absorbed into the armaments industry, and likewise, the new Wehrmacht recruits waited in barracks for their turn to be trained.
At Hitler's behest, the Volkssturm (People's Storm) – a nationwide militia of men previously considered unsuitable for military service – was formed on 18 October 1944. Goebbels recorded in his diary that 100,000 recruits were sworn in from his Gau alone. However, the men, mostly age 45 to 60, received only rudimentary training and many were not properly armed. Goebbels' notion that these men could effectively serve on the front lines against Soviet tanks and artillery was unrealistic at best. The programme was deeply unpopular.
Goebbels realised that his influence would diminish in wartime. He suffered a series of setbacks as propaganda became less important compared to warfare, the war economy, and the Allied bombing of German cities. Historian Michael Balfour states that from 1942 onward, Goebbels, "lost control over Nazi policy toward the press and over the handling of news in general." Rival agencies expanded. The foreign ministry took charge of propaganda outside Germany. The military set up its own propaganda division, providing daily reports on the progress of the war and the conditions of the armed forces. The Nazi Party also generated and distributed its own propaganda during the war. Goebbels was still influential when he had the opportunity to meet with Hitler, who became less available as he moved his headquarters closer to the military front lines. They were together perhaps one day a month. Furthermore, Hitler rarely gave speeches or rallies of the sort that had dominated propaganda in the 1930s. After Hitler returned to Berlin in 1945, Goebbels' ministry was destroyed by an Allied air raid on 13 March, and Goebbels had great difficulty disseminating propaganda. In April 1945, he finally bested the rival agencies and took full charge of propaganda, but by then the Soviet Red Army had already entered Berlin. Goebbels was an astute observer of the war, and historians have exhaustively mined his diary for insights on how the Nazi leadership tried to maintain public morale.
Defeat and death
In the last months of the war, Goebbels's speeches and articles took on an increasingly apocalyptic tone. By the beginning of 1945, with the Soviets on the Oder River and the Western Allies preparing to cross the Rhine River, he could no longer disguise the inevitability of German defeat. Berlin had little in the way of fortifications or artillery, and even Volkssturm units were in short supply, as almost everything and everyone had been sent to the front. Goebbels noted in his diary on 21 January that millions of Germans were fleeing westward. He tentatively discussed with Hitler the issue of making peace overtures to the western allies, but Hitler again refused. Privately, Goebbels was conflicted at pushing the case with Hitler since he did not want to lose Hitler's confidence.
When other Nazi leaders urged Hitler to leave Berlin and establish a new centre of resistance in the National Redoubt in Bavaria, Goebbels opposed this, arguing for a heroic last stand in Berlin. His family (except for Magda's son Harald, who had served in the Luftwaffe and been captured by the Allies) moved into their house in Berlin to await the end. He and Magda may have discussed suicide and the fate of their young children in a long meeting on the night of 27 January. He knew how the outside world would view the criminal acts committed by the regime and had no desire to subject himself to the "debacle" of a trial. He burned his private papers on the night of 18 April.
Goebbels knew how to play on Hitler's fantasies, encouraging him to see the hand of providence in the death of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 12 April. Whether Hitler really saw this event as a turning point as Goebbels proclaimed is not known. By this time, Goebbels had gained the position he had wanted so long—at Hitler's side. Göring was utterly discredited, although he was not stripped of his offices until 23 April. Himmler, whose appointment as commander of Army Group Vistula had led to disaster on the Oder, was also in disgrace with Hitler. Most of Hitler's inner circle, including Göring, Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Speer, prepared to leave Berlin immediately after Hitler's birthday celebration on 20 April. Even Bormann was "not anxious" to meet his end at Hitler's side. On 22 April, Hitler announced that he would stay in Berlin until the end and then shoot himself. Goebbels moved with his family into the Vorbunker, connected to the lower Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery garden in central Berlin, that same day. He told Vice-Admiral Hans-Erich Voss that he would not entertain the idea of either surrender or escape. On 23 April, Goebbels made the following proclamation to the people of Berlin:
After midnight on 29 April, with the Soviets advancing ever closer to the bunker complex, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in the Führerbunker. Afterward, he hosted a modest wedding breakfast. Hitler then took secretary Traudl Junge to another room and dictated his last will and testament. Goebbels and Bormann were two of the witnesses.
In his last will and testament, Hitler named no successor as Führer or leader of the Nazi Party. Instead, he appointed Goebbels as Reich Chancellor; Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was at Flensburg near the Danish border, as Reich President; and Bormann as Party Minister. Goebbels wrote a postscript to the will stating that he would "categorically refuse" to obey Hitler's order to leave Berlin—as he put it, "the first time in my life" that he had not complied with Hitler's orders. He felt compelled to remain with Hitler "for reasons of humanity and personal loyalty". His wife and children would stay as well. They would end their lives "side by side with the Führer".
In the mid-afternoon of 30 April, Hitler shot himself. Goebbels was depressed, and said he would walk around the Chancellery garden until he was killed by the Russian shelling. Voss later recounted Goebbels as saying: "It is a great pity that such a man [Hitler] is not with us any longer. But there is nothing to be done. For us, everything is lost now and the only way out left for us is the one Hitler chose. I shall follow his example."
On 1 May, Goebbels carried out his sole official act as Chancellor: he dictated a letter to General Vasily Chuikov and ordered German General Hans Krebs to deliver it under a white flag. Chuikov, as commander of the Soviet 8th Guards Army, commanded the Soviet forces in central Berlin. Goebbels's letter informed Chuikov of Hitler's death and requested a ceasefire. After this was rejected, Goebbels decided that further efforts were futile.
Later on 1 May, Voss saw Goebbels for the last time: "While saying goodbye I asked Goebbels to join us. But he replied: 'The captain must not leave his sinking ship. I have thought about it all and decided to stay here. I have nowhere to go because with little children I will not be able to make it, especially with a leg like mine'." On the evening of 1 May, Goebbels arranged for an SS dentist, Helmut Kunz, to inject his six children with morphine so that when they were unconscious, an ampule of cyanide could be then crushed in each of their mouths. According to Kunz's later testimony, he gave the children morphine injections but Magda Goebbels and SS-Obersturmbannführer Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's personal doctor, administered the cyanide.
At around 20:30, Goebbels and Magda left the bunker and walked up to the garden of the Chancellery, where they killed themselves. There are several different accounts of this event. One is that they each bit on a cyanide ampule near where Hitler had been buried and were given a coup de grâce immediately afterward. Goebbels's SS adjutant Günther Schwägermann testified in 1948 that they walked ahead of him up the stairs and out into the Chancellery garden. He waited in the stairwell and heard shots. Schwägermann then walked up the remaining stairs and, once outside, saw their lifeless bodies. Following Goebbels's prior order, Schwägermann had an SS soldier fire several shots into Goebbels's body, which did not move.
The corpses were then doused with petrol, but they were only partially burned and not buried. A few days later, the Soviets brought Voss back to the bunker to identify the Goebbelses' partly burned bodies. The remains of the Goebbels family, Krebs, and Hitler's dogs were repeatedly buried and exhumed. The last burial was at the SMERSH facility in Magdeburg on 21 February 1946. In 1970, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to destroy the remains. On 4 April 1970, a Soviet KGB team used detailed burial charts to exhume five wooden boxes at the Magdeburg SMERSH facility. They were burned, crushed, and scattered into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.
Family life
Hitler was very fond of Magda and the children. He enjoyed staying at the Goebbelses' Berlin apartment, where he could relax. Magda had a close relationship with Hitler, and became a member of his small coterie of female friends. She also became an unofficial representative of the regime, receiving letters from all over Germany from women with questions about domestic matters or child custody issues.
In 1936, Goebbels met the Czech actress Lída Baarová and by the winter of 1937 began an intense affair with her. Magda had a long conversation with Hitler about it on 15 August 1938. Unwilling to put up with a scandal involving one of his top ministers, Hitler demanded that Goebbels break off the relationship. Thereafter, Joseph and Magda seemed to reach a truce until the end of September. The couple had another falling out at that point, and again Hitler became involved, insisting the couple stay together. He arranged for publicity photos to be taken of himself with the reconciled couple in October. Goebbels also had short-term affairs and relationships with numerous other women. Magda too had affairs, including a relationship with Kurt Ludecke in 1933 and Karl Hanke in 1938.
The Goebbels family included Harald Quandt (Magda's son from her first marriage; born 1921), plus Helga (1932), Hilde (1934), Helmuth (1935), Holde (1937), Hedda (1938), and Heide (1940). Harald was the only member of the family to survive the war. He died in an airplane crash in 1967.
See also
Glossary of Nazi Germany
Gottbegnadeten list
List of Nazi Party leaders and officials
Nazi propaganda
References
Informational notes
Citations
Bibliography
online
Further reading
online
External links
Online books, movies, images, and speeches at the Internet Archive
Collection of speeches and essays by Joseph Goebbels at Calvin University
The Man Behind Hitler, documentary film and supplementary material from PBS
1897 births
1945 suicides
20th-century Chancellors of Germany
20th-century diarists
Adolf Hitler
Antisemitism in Germany
Burials in Germany
Chancellors of Germany
Filicides in Germany
Former Roman Catholics
Gauleiters
German anti-capitalists
German anti-communists
German conspiracy theorists
German diarists
German former Christians
German murderers of children
German nationalists
German people of Dutch descent
German people of World War II
German politicians who committed suicide
German propagandists
Joseph
Government ministers with physical disabilities
Heidelberg University alumni
Holocaust perpetrators
Joint suicides by Nazis
Kirchenkampf
Members of the Academy for German Law
Members of the Reichstag of Nazi Germany
Members of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic
Murder–suicides in Germany
Nazi Germany ministers
Nazi Party officials
Nazi Party politicians
Nazi propagandists
Nazis who committed suicide in Germany
People from Mönchengladbach
People from the Rhine Province
Presidents of the Organising Committees for the Olympic Games
Quandt family
Reichsleiters
Suicides by firearm in Germany
University of Bonn alumni
University of Freiburg alumni
University of Würzburg alumni | [
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15780 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coen%20brothers | Coen brothers | Joel Daniel Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957), collectively known as the Coen Brothers (), are American filmmakers. Their films span many genres and styles, which they frequently subvert or parody. Their most acclaimed works include Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), Burn After Reading (2008), A Serious Man (2009), True Grit (2010), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018).
The brothers write, direct and produce their films jointly, although until The Ladykillers (2004) Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing. They often alternate top billing for their screenplays while sharing editing credits under the alias Roderick Jaynes. They have been nominated for 13 Academy Awards together, and individually for one award each, winning Best Original Screenplay for Fargo and Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for No Country for Old Men. The duo also won the Palme d'Or for Barton Fink (1991).
The Coens have written a number of films they did not direct, including the biographical war drama Unbroken (2014), the historical legal thriller Bridge of Spies (2015), and lesser-known, commercially unsuccessful comedies such as Crimewave (1985), The Naked Man (1998) and Gambit (2012). Ethan is also a writer of short stories, theater and poetry.
They are known for their distinctive stylistic trademarks including genre hybridity. No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis have been ranked in the BBC's 2016 poll of the greatest motion pictures since 2000. In 1998, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked Fargo among the 100 greatest American movies ever made.
Background
Early life
Joel Daniel Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957) were born and raised in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their mother, Rena (née Neumann; 1925–2001), was an art historian at St. Cloud State University, and their father, Edward Coen (1919–2012), was an economist at the University of Minnesota. The brothers have an older sister, Deborah, who grew up to become a psychiatrist working in Israel.
Both sides of the Coen family were Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. Their paternal grandfather, Victor Coen, was a barrister in the Inns of Court in London before retiring to Hove with their grandmother. Edward Coen was an American citizen born in the United States, but grew up in Croydon, London and studied at the London School of Economics. Afterwards he moved to the United States, where he met the Coens' mother, and served in the United States Army during World War II.
The Coens developed an early interest in cinema through television. They grew up watching Italian films (ranging from the works of Federico Fellini to the Sons of Hercules films) aired on a Minneapolis station, the Tarzan films and comedies (Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope and Doris Day).
In the mid-1960s, Joel saved money from mowing lawns to buy a Vivitar Super 8 camera. Together, the brothers remade movies they saw on television, with their neighborhood friend Mark Zimering ("Zeimers") as the star. Cornel Wilde's 1965 film The Naked Prey became their Zeimers in Zambezi, which featured Ethan as a native with a spear. The 1943 film Lassie Come Home was reinterpreted as their Ed... A Dog, with Ethan playing the mother role in his sister's tutu. They also made original films like Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go, Lumberjacks of the North and The Banana Film.
Education
Joel and Ethan graduated from St. Louis Park High School in 1973 and 1976, respectively, and from Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
After Simon's Rock, Joel spent four years in the undergraduate film program at New York University, where he made a 30-minute thesis film called Soundings. In 1979 he briefly enrolled in the graduate film program at the University of Texas at Austin, following a woman he had married who was in the graduate linguistics program. The marriage soon ended in divorce and Joel left UT Austin after nine months.
Ethan went on to Princeton University and earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1979. His senior thesis was a 41-page essay, "Two Views of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy," which was supervised by Raymond Geuss.
Personal lives
Joel has been married to actress Frances McDormand since 1984. In 1995, they adopted a son, Pedro McDormand Coen, from Paraguay when he was six months old. McDormand has acted in several Coen Brothers films: Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Man Who Wasn't There, Burn After Reading, and Hail, Caesar! For her performance in Fargo, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Ethan married film editor Tricia Cooke in 1990. They have two children: daughter Dusty and son Buster Jacob.
Ethan Coen and family live in New York, while Joel Coen and Frances McDormand live in Marin County, California.
Career
1980s
After graduating from New York University, Joel worked as a production assistant on a variety of industrial films and music videos. He developed a talent for film editing and met Sam Raimi while assisting Edna Ruth Paul in editing Raimi's first feature film, The Evil Dead (1981).
In 1984 the brothers wrote and directed Blood Simple, their first commercial film together. Set in Texas, the film tells the tale of a shifty, sleazy bar owner who hires a private detective to kill his wife and her lover. The film contains elements that point to their future direction: distinctive homages to genre movies (in this case noir and horror), plot twists layered over a simple story, dark humor, and mise-en-scène. The film starred Frances McDormand, who went on to feature in many of the Coen brothers' films (and marry Joel). Upon release the film received much praise and won awards for Joel's direction at both the Sundance and Independent Spirit awards.
Their next project was Crimewave (1985), directed by Sam Raimi and written by the Coens and Raimi. Joel and Raimi also made cameo appearances in Spies Like Us (1985).
The brothers' next film was Raising Arizona (1987), the story of an unlikely married couple: ex-convict H.I. (Nicolas Cage) and police officer Ed (Holly Hunter), who long for a baby but are unable to conceive. When a local furniture tycoon (Trey Wilson) appears on television with his newly born quintuplets and jokes that they "are more than we can handle", H.I. steals one of the quintuplets to bring up as their own. The film featured Frances McDormand, John Goodman, William Forsythe, Sam McMurray, and Randall "Tex" Cobb.
1990s
Miller's Crossing, released in 1990, starred Albert Finney, Gabriel Byrne, and John Turturro. The film is about feuding gangsters in the Prohibition era, inspired by Dashiell Hammett's novels Red Harvest (1929) and The Glass Key (serialized in 1930).
The following year, they released Barton Fink (1991); set in 1941, in which a New York playwright, the eponymous Barton Fink (played by John Turturro), moves to Los Angeles to write a B-movie. He settles down in his hotel room to commence writing but suffers writer's block until his room is invaded by the man next door (John Goodman). Barton Fink was a critical success, earning Oscar nominations and winning three major awards at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, including the Palme d'Or. It was their first film with cinematographer Roger Deakins, a key collaborator for the next 25 years.
The Hudsucker Proxy (co-written with Raimi) was released in 1994. In it, the board of a large corporation in 1958 New York City appoints a naive schmo as president (Tim Robbins) for underhanded reasons. The film bombed at the box office ($30 million budget, $3 million gross in the USA), even though it featured Paul Newman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Frances McDormand appears in a brief uncredited role.
The Coens wrote and directed the crime thriller Fargo (1996), set in their home state of Minnesota. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), who has serious financial problems, has his wife kidnapped so that his wealthy father-in-law will pay the ransom. His plan goes wrong when the kidnappers deviate from the plan and local cop Marge Gunderson (McDormand) starts to investigate. Produced on a small budget of $7 million, Fargo was a critical and commercial success, with particular praise for its dialogue and McDormand's performance. The film received several awards, including a BAFTA award and Cannes award for direction, and two Oscars: a Best Original Screenplay and a Best Actress Oscar for McDormand.
In the Coens' next film, the black comedy The Big Lebowski (1998), "The Dude" (Jeff Bridges), a Los Angeles slacker, is used as an unwitting pawn in a kidnapping plot with his bowling buddies (Steve Buscemi and John Goodman). Despite initially receiving mixed reviews and underperforming at the box office, it is now well received by critics, and is regarded as a classic cult film. An annual festival, Lebowski Fest, began in 2002, and many adhere to the philosophy of "Dudeism". Entertainment Weekly ranked it 8th on their Funniest Movies of the Past 25 Years list in 2008.
Gates of Eden, a collection of short stories written by Ethan Coen, was published in 1998. The same year, Ethan co-wrote the comedy The Naked Man, directed by their storyboard artist J. Todd Anderson.
2000s
The Coen brothers' next film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), was another critical and commercial success. The title was borrowed from the Preston Sturges film Sullivan's Travels (1941), whose lead character, movie director John Sullivan, had planned to make a film with that title. Based loosely on Homer's Odyssey (complete with a Cyclops, sirens, et al.), the story is set in Mississippi in the 1930s and follows a trio of escaped convicts who, after absconding from a chain gang, journey home to recover bank-heist loot the leader has buried—but they have no clear perception of where they are going. The film highlighted the comic abilities of George Clooney as the oddball lead character Ulysses Everett McGill, and of Tim Blake Nelson and John Turturro, his sidekicks. The film's bluegrass and old-time soundtrack, offbeat humor and digitally desaturated cinematography made it a critical and commercial hit. It was the first feature film to use all-digital color grading. The film's soundtrack CD was also successful, spawning a concert and concert/documentary DVD, Down from the Mountain.
The Coens next produced another noirish thriller, The Man Who Wasn't There (2001). Set in late 1940s California, a laconic chain-smoking barber (played by Billy Bob Thornton) discovers a way to blackmail his wife's lover and use the proceeds to invest in a dry cleaning business.
The Coens directed the 2003 film Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, a throwback to the romantic comedies of the 1940s. It focuses on hotshot divorce lawyer Miles Massey and a beautiful divorcée whom Massey managed to prevent from receiving any money in her divorce. She vows to get even with him while, at the same time, he becomes smitten with her. Intolerable Cruelty received generally positive reviews, although it is considered one of the duo's weaker films. Also that year, they executive produced and did an uncredited rewrite of the Christmas black comedy Bad Santa, which garnered positive reviews.
In 2004, the Coens made The Ladykillers, a remake of the Ealing Studios classic. A professor, played by Tom Hanks, assembles a team to rob a casino. They rent a room in an elderly woman's home to plan the heist. When the woman discovers the plot, the gang decides to murder her to ensure her silence. The Coens received some of the most lukewarm reviews of their careers in response to this film.
They directed two short films for two separate anthology films—Paris, je t'aime (Tuileries, 2006) starring Steve Buscemi, and To Each His Own Cinema (World Cinema, 2007) starring Josh Brolin. Both films received highly positive reviews.
No Country for Old Men, released in November 2007, closely follows the 2005 novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), living near the Texas/Mexico border, stumbles upon, and decides to take, two million dollars in drug money. He must then go on the run to avoid those trying to recover the money, including sociopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who confounds both Llewelyn and local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). The plotline is a return to noir themes, but in some respects it was a departure for the Coens; with the exception of Stephen Root, none of the stable of regular actors appears in the film. No Country received nearly universal critical praise, garnering a 94% "Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes. It won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, all of which were received by the Coens, as well as Best Supporting Actor received by Bardem. The Coens, as "Roderick Jaynes", were also nominated for Best Editing, but lost. It was the first time since 1961 (when Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise won for West Side Story) that two directors received the Academy Award for Best Director at the same time.
In January 2008, Ethan Coen's play Almost an Evening premiered off-broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company Stage 2, opening to mostly enthusiastic reviews. The initial run closed on February 10, 2008, but the same production was moved to a new theatre for a commercial off-Broadway run at the Bleecker Street Theater in New York City. Produced by The Atlantic Theater Company, it ran there from March 2008 through June 1, 2008. and Art Meets Commerce. In May 2009, the Atlantic Theater Company produced Coen's Offices, as part of their mainstage season at the Linda Gross Theater.
Burn After Reading, a comedy starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney, was released September 12, 2008, and portrays a collision course between two gym instructors, spies and Internet dating. Released to positive reviews, it debuted at No. 1 in North America.
In 2009, the Coens directed a television commercial titled "Air Freshener" for the Reality Coalition.
They next directed A Serious Man, released October 2, 2009, a "gentle but dark" period comedy (set in 1967) with a low budget. The film is based loosely on the Coens' childhoods in an academic family in the largely Jewish suburb of Saint Louis Park, Minnesota; it also drew comparisons to the Book of Job. Filming took place late in the summer of 2008, in the neighborhoods of Roseville and Bloomington, Minnesota, at Normandale Community College, and at St. Olaf College. The film was nominated for the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
2010s
True Grit (2010) is based on the 1968 novel of the same name by Charles Portis. Filming was done in Texas and New Mexico. Hailee Steinfeld stars as Mattie Ross along with Jeff Bridges as Marshal Rooster Cogburn. Matt Damon and Josh Brolin also appear in the movie. True Grit was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Ethan Coen wrote the one-act comedy Talking Cure, which was produced on Broadway in 2011 as part of Relatively Speaking, an anthology of three one-act plays by Coen, Elaine May, and Woody Allen.
In 2011, the Coen brothers won the $1 million Dan David Prize for their contribution to cinema and society.
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) is a treatise on the 1960s folk music scene in New York City's Greenwich Village, and very loosely based on the life of Dave Van Ronk. The film stars Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan. It won the Grand Prix at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where it was highly praised by critics. They received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Song for "Please Mr. Kennedy", which is heard in the film.
Fargo, a television series inspired by their film of the same name, premiered in April 2014 on the FX network. It is created by Noah Hawley and executive produced by the brothers.
The Coens also contributed to the screenplay for Unbroken, along with Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson. The film, directed by Angelina Jolie, and based on Laura Hillenbrand's non-fiction book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010) which itself was based on the life of Louis Zamperini, was released on December 25, 2014, to average reviews.
The Coens co-wrote, with playwright Matt Charman, the screenplay for the dramatic historical thriller Bridge of Spies, about the 1960 U-2 Incident. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and released on October 4, 2015, to critical acclaim. They were nominated for the Best Original Screenplay at the 88th Academy Awards.
The Coens directed the film Hail, Caesar!, about a "fixer" in 1950s Hollywood trying to discover what happened to a cast member who vanishes during filming. It stars Coen regulars George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johansson and Tilda Swinton, as well as Channing Tatum, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, and Alden Ehrenreich. The film was released on February 5, 2016.
In 2016, the Coens gave to their longtime friend and collaborator John Turturro the right to use his character of Jesus Quintana from The Big Lebowski in his own spin-off, The Jesus Rolls, which he would also write and direct. The Coens have no involvement in the production. In August 2016, the film began principal photography.
The Coens first wrote the script for Suburbicon in 1986. The film was eventually directed by George Clooney and began filming in October 2016. It was released by Paramount Pictures in the fall of 2017.
The Coens directed The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Western anthology starring Tim Blake Nelson, Liam Neeson, and James Franco. It began streaming on Netflix on November 16, 2018, after a brief theatrical run.
2020s
It was announced in March 2019 that Joel Coen would be directing an adaptation of Macbeth starring Denzel Washington. The film, titled The Tragedy of Macbeth, would be Joel's first directorial effort without his brother Ethan, who was taking a break from films to focus on theater. The film premiered at the 2021 New York Film Festival.
Planned and uncompleted projects
In a 1998 interview with Alex Simon for Venice magazine, the Coens discussed a project called The Contemplations, which would be an anthology of short films based on stories in a leather bound book from a "dusty old library". This project may have influenced or evolved into The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which has the same structure.
In 2001, Joel stated that "a Cold War comedy called 62 Skidoo is one I'd like to do someday".
The Coens had hoped to film James Dickey's novel To the White Sea. They were due to start production in 2002, with Jeremy Thomas producing and Brad Pitt in the lead role, but it was canceled when the Coens felt that the budget offered was not enough to successfully produce the film.
In 2008, it was announced that the Coen brothers would write and direct an adaptation of Michael Chabon's novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007). They were to produce the film with Scott Rudin for Columbia Pictures. In the fall of 2012, however, Chabon told Mother Jones that "the Coen brothers wrote a draft of a script and then they seemed to move on", and that the film rights had "lapsed back to me".
In 2009, the Coens stated that they were interested in making a sequel to Barton Fink called Old Fink, which would take place in the 1960s, around the same time period as A Serious Man. The Coens also stated that they had talks with John Turturro in reprising his role as Fink, but they were waiting "until he was actually old enough to play the part".
In 2011, the Coens were working on a television project, called Harve Karbo, about a quirky Los Angeles private eye, for Imagine Television.
In December 2013, the Coens stated in an interview that they were working on a new musical comedy centered around an opera singer, though they said it is "not a musical per se".
In August 2015, it was announced that Warner Bros. had optioned the film rights to Ross Macdonald's novel Black Money for the Coen brothers to potentially write and direct.
In October 2016, The Hollywood Reporter reported that the Coens would work on the screenplay for Fox titled Dark Web, and based on Joshuah Bearman's two-part Wired article about Ross Ulbricht and his illicit Silk Road online marketplace. The project originated in 2013, with novelist Dennis Lehane on board for the screenplay. Chernin Entertainment would produce.
On February 10, 2017, it was announced that the Scarface remake's script was being written by the Coens. Luca Guadagnino announced plans to direct the film.
Production company
The Coen brothers' own film production company, Mike Zoss Productions located in New York City, has been credited on their films from O Brother, Where Art Thou? onwards. It was named after Mike Zoss Drug, an independent pharmacy in St. Louis Park since 1950 that was the brothers' beloved hangout when they were growing up in the Twin Cities. The name was also used for the pharmacy in No Country for Old Men. The Mike Zoss logo consists of a crayon drawing of a horse, standing in a field of grass, with its head turned around as it looks back over its hindquarters.
Directing distinctions
Up to 2003, Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing, due to guild rules that disallowed multiple director credits to prevent dilution of the position's significance. The only exception to this rule is if the co-directors are an "established duo". From 2004 on, they were able to share the director credit and since then, the Coen brothers have become only the third duo to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director.
With four Academy Award nominations for No Country for Old Men for the duo (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing as Roderick Jaynes), the Coen brothers have tied the record for the most nominations by a single nominee (counting an "established duo" as one nominee) for the same film. Orson Welles set the record in 1941 with Citizen Kane being nominated for Best Picture (though at the time, individual producers were not named as nominees), Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay. Warren Beatty received the same nominations, first for Heaven Can Wait in 1978 and again in 1981 with Reds. Alan Menken also then achieved the same feat when he was nominated for Best Score and triple-nominated for Best Song for Beauty and the Beast in 1991. In 2018, Alfonso Cuarón was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography for Roma. Most recently, Chloé Zhao matched this record in 2021 when she was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing for Nomadland (which also starred McDormand in her third Oscar-winning role).
Filmography
Collaborators
Accolades
Directed Academy Award performances
Bibliography
(Includes all films up to The Ladykillers and some subsidiary works [Crimewave, Down from the Mountain, Bad Santa].)
Notes
References
External links
Joel and Ethan Coen at Rotten Tomatoes
Coenesque: The Films of the Coen Brothers
(joint pseudonym)
Ethan and Joel Coen at LC Authorities, with 27 and 20 records
Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award winners
Best Directing Academy Award winners
Best Director BAFTA Award winners
Best Original Screenplay Academy Award winners
Best Screenplay Golden Globe winners
Coen, Joel
Directors Guild of America Award winners
Coen, Joel
Film directors from Minnesota
Filmmaking duos
Coen, Joel
Jews and Judaism in Minnesota
Producers who won the Best Picture Academy Award
Screenwriting duos
Sibling duos
Sibling filmmakers
Sundance Film Festival award winners
Tisch School of the Arts alumni
Writers Guild of America Award winners
Pseudonymous artists
1950s births
Living people | [
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15781 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge%20Luis%20Borges | Jorge Luis Borges | Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, philosophers, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and influenced the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature. His late poems converse with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.
Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages.
In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the Latin American Boom and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists."
Life and career
Early life and education
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born into an educated middle-class family on 24 August 1899. They were in comfortable circumstances but not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires so the family resided in Palermo, then a poorer neighbourhood. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of criollo (Spanish) origin. Her family had been much involved in the European settling of South America and the Argentine War of Independence, and she spoke often of their "heroic" actions.
His 1929 book, Cuaderno San Martín, includes the poem "Isidoro Acevedo", commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, Acevedo Laprida fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, and Los Corrales in 1880. Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born.
According to a study by Antonio Andrade, Jorge Luis Borges had Portuguese ancestry: Borges's great grandfather, Francisco, was born in Portugal in 1770, and lived in Torre de Moncorvo, in the North of the country before he emigrated to Argentina, where he married Cármen Lafinur.
Borges's own father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam (24 February 1874 – 14 February 1938), was a lawyer, and wrote the novel El caudillo in 1921. Borges Haslam was born in Entre Ríos of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent, the son of Francisco Borges Lafinur, a colonel, and Frances Ann Haslam, an Englishwoman. Borges Haslam grew up speaking English at home. The family frequently traveled to Europe. Borges Haslam wed Leonor Acevedo Suárez in 1898 and their offspring also included the painter Norah Borges, sister of Jorge Luis Borges.
At age of nine, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish. It was published in a local journal, but Borges's friends thought the real author was his father. Borges Haslam was a lawyer and psychology teacher who harboured literary aspirations. Borges said his father "tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt", despite the 1921 opus El caudillo. Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "as most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action."
Jorge Luis Borges was taught at home until the age of 11, was bilingual in Spanish and English, reading Shakespeare in the latter at the age of twelve. The family lived in a large house with an English library of over one thousand volumes; Borges would later remark that "if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library."
His father gave up practicing law due to the failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son. In 1914, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and spent the next decade in Europe. In Geneva, Borges Haslam was treated by an eye specialist, while his son and daughter attended school. Jorge Luis learned French, read Thomas Carlyle in English, and began to read philosophy in German. In 1917, when he was eighteen, he met writer Maurice Abramowicz and began a literary friendship that would last for the remainder of his life. He received his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The Borges family decided that, due to political unrest in Argentina, they would remain in Switzerland during the war. After World War I, the family spent three years living in various cities: Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. They remained in Europe until 1921.
At that time, Borges discovered the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem (1915) which became influential to his work. In Spain, Borges fell in with and became a member of the avant-garde, anti-Modernismo Ultraist literary movement, inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, close to the Imagists. His first poem, "Hymn to the Sea," written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia. While in Spain, he met such noted Spanish writers as Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.
Early writing career
In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires. He had little formal education, no qualifications and few friends. He wrote to a friend that Buenos Aires was now "overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and decorative young ladies". He brought with him the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career, publishing surreal poems and essays in literary journals. In 1923, Borges first published his poetry, a collection called Fervor de Buenos Aires and contributed to the avant-garde review Martín Fierro.
Borges co-founded the journals Prisma, a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires, and Proa. Later in life, Borges regretted some of these early publications, attempting to purchase all known copies to ensure their destruction.
By the mid-1930s, he began to explore existential questions and fiction. He worked in a style that Argentine critic Ana María Barrenechea has called "irreality." Many other Latin American writers, such as Juan Rulfo, Juan José Arreola, and Alejo Carpentier, were investigating these themes, influenced by the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. In this vein, Borges biographer Edwin Williamson underlines the danger of inferring an autobiographically inspired basis for the content or tone of certain of his works: books, philosophy, and imagination were as much a source of real inspiration to him as his own lived experience, if not more so.
From the first issue, Borges was a regular contributor to Sur, founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo. It was then Argentina's most important literary journal and helped Borges find his fame. Ocampo introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy Casares, another well-known figure of Argentine literature who was to become a frequent collaborator and close friend. They wrote a number of works together, some under the nom de plume H. Bustos Domecq, including a parody detective series and fantasy stories. During these years, a family friend, Macedonio Fernández, became a major influence on Borges. The two would preside over discussions in cafés, at country retreats, or in Fernandez's tiny apartment in the Balvanera district. He appears by name in Borges's Dialogue about a Dialogue, in which the two discuss the immortality of the soul. In 1933, Borges gained an editorial appointment at Revista Multicolor de los Sábados (the literary supplement of the Buenos Aires newspaper Crítica), where he first published the pieces collected as Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) in 1935.
The book includes two types of writing: the first lies somewhere between non-fictional essays and short stories, using fictional techniques to tell essentially true stories. The second consists of literary forgeries, which Borges initially passed off as translations of passages from famous but seldom-read works. In the following years, he served as a literary adviser for the publishing house Emecé Editores, and from 1936 to 1939 wrote weekly columns for El Hogar. In 1938, Borges found work as the first assistant at the Miguel Cané Municipal Library. It was in a working-class area and there were so few books that cataloging more than one hundred books per day, he was told, would leave little to do for the other staff and would make them look bad. The task took him about an hour each day and the rest of his time he spent in the basement of the library, writing and translating.
Later career
Borges's father died in 1938, shortly before his 64th birthday. On Christmas Eve that year, Borges suffered a severe head injury; during treatment, he nearly died of sepsis. While recovering from the accident, Borges began exploring a new style of writing for which he would become famous. His first story written after his accident, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” came out in May 1939. One of his most famous works, "Menard" examines the nature of authorship, as well as the relationship between an author and his historical context. His first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), appeared in 1941, composed mostly of works previously published in Sur.
The title story concerns a Chinese professor in England, Dr. Yu Tsun, who spies for Germany during World War I, in an attempt to prove to the authorities that an Asian person is able to obtain the information that they seek. A combination of book and maze, it can be read in many ways. Through it, Borges arguably invented the hypertext novel and went on to describe a theory of the universe based upon the structure of such a novel.
Composed of stories taking up over sixty pages, the book was generally well received, but El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan failed to garner for him the literary prizes many in his circle expected. Victoria Ocampo dedicated a large portion of the July 1942 issue of Sur to a "Reparation for Borges." Numerous leading writers and critics from Argentina and throughout the Spanish-speaking world contributed writings to the "reparation" project.
With his vision beginning to fade in his early thirties and unable to support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer. He became an increasingly public figure, obtaining appointments as president of the Argentine Society of Writers and as professor of English and American Literature at the Argentine Association of English Culture. His short story "Emma Zunz" was made into a film (under the name of Días de odio, Days of Hate, directed in 1954 by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson). Around this time, Borges also began writing screenplays.
In 1955, he became director of the Argentine National Library. By the late 1950s he had become completely blind. Neither the coincidence nor the irony of his blindness as a writer escaped Borges:
Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.
No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and night at one touch.
His later collection of poetry, Elogio de la Sombra (In Praise of Darkness), develops this theme. In 1956 the University of Cuyo awarded Borges the first of many honorary doctorates and the following year he received the National Prize for Literature. From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and other temporary appointments at other universities. In the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University.
As his eyesight deteriorated, Borges relied increasingly on his mother's help. When he was not able to read and write anymore (he never learned to read Braille), his mother, to whom he had always been close, became his personal secretary. When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.
International renown
Eight of Borges's poems appear in the 1943 anthology of Spanish American Poets by H. R. Hays. "The Garden of Forking Paths", one of the first Borges stories to be translated into English, appeared in the August 1948 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, translated by Anthony Boucher. Though several other Borges translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies during the 1950s (and one story appeared in the science fiction magazine Fantastic Universe in 1960), his international fame dates from the early 1960s.
In 1961, Borges received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. While Beckett had garnered a distinguished reputation in Europe and America, Borges had been largely unknown and untranslated in the English-speaking world and the prize stirred great interest in his work. The Italian government named Borges Commendatore and the University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker Chair. This led to his first lecture tour in the United States. In 1962, two major anthologies of Borges's writings were published in English by New York presses: Ficciones and Labyrinths. In that year, Borges began lecture tours of Europe. Numerous honors were to accumulate over the years such as a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America "for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre" (1976), the Balzan Prize (for Philology, Linguistics and literary Criticism) and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (all 1980), as well as the French Legion of Honour (1983) and the Diamond Konex Award for Literature Arts as the most important writer in the last decade in his country.
In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, through whom he became better known in the English-speaking world. Di Giovanni contended that Borges's popularity was due to his writing with multiple languages in mind and deliberately using Latin words as a bridge from Spanish to English.
Borges continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios (Book of Imaginary Beings, 1967, co-written with Margarita Guerrero), El informe de Brodie (Dr. Brodie's Report, 1970), and El libro de arena (The Book of Sand, 1975). He lectured prolifically. Many of these lectures were anthologized in volumes such as Siete noches (Seven Nights) and Nueve ensayos dantescos (Nine Dantesque Essays).
His presence in 1967 on campus at the University of Virginia (UVA) in the U.S. influenced a group of students among whom was Jared Loewenstein, who would later become founder and curator of the Jorge Luis Borges Collection at UVA, one of the largest repositories of documents and manuscripts pertaining to Borges's early works. In 1984, he travelled to Athens, Greece, and later to Rethymnon, Crete, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the School of Philosophy at the University of Crete.
Later personal life
In 1967, Borges married the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. Friends believed that his mother, who was 90 and anticipating her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. The marriage lasted less than three years. After a legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at age 99. Thereafter, he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her, cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper of many decades.
From 1975 until the time of his death, Borges traveled internationally. He was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry. In April 1986, a few months before his death, he married her via an attorney in Paraguay, in what was then a common practice among Argentines wishing to circumvent the Argentine laws of the time regarding divorce. On his religious views, Borges declared himself an agnostic, clarifying: "Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen." Borges was taught to read the Bible by his English Protestant grandmother and he prayed the Our Father each night because of a promise he made to his mother. He also died in the presence of a priest.
Death
During his final days in Geneva, Borges began brooding about the possibility of an afterlife. Although calm and collected about his own death, Borges began probing Kodama as to whether she inclined more towards the Shinto beliefs of her father or the Catholicism of her mother. Kodama "had always regarded Borges as an Agnostic, as she was herself", but given the insistence of his questioning, she offered to call someone more "qualified". Borges responded, "You are asking me if I want a priest." He then instructed her to call two clergymen, a Catholic priest, in memory of his mother, and a Protestant minister, in memory of his English grandmother. He was visited first by Father Pierre Jacquet and by Pastor Edouard de Montmollin.
Borges died of liver cancer on 14 June 1986, aged 86, in Geneva. His burial was preceded by an ecumenical service at the Protestant Cathédrale de Saint Pierre on 18 June. With many Swiss and Argentine dignitaries present, Pastor de Montmollin read the First Chapter of St John's Gospel. He then preached that "Borges was a man who had unceasingly searched for the right word, the term that could sum up the whole, the final meaning of things." He said, however, that no man can reach that word through his own efforts and in trying becomes lost in a labyrinth. Pastor de Montmollin concluded, "It is not man who discovers the word, it is the Word that comes to him."
Father Jacquet also preached, saying that, when visiting Borges before his death, he had found "a man full of love, who received from the Church the forgiveness of his sins". After the funeral, Borges was laid to rest in Geneva's Cimetière de Plainpalais. His grave, marked by a rough-hewn headstone, is adorned with carvings derived from Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse art and literature.
Legacy
Kodama, his widow and heir on the basis of the marriage and two wills, gained control over his works. Her assertive administration of his estate resulted in a bitter dispute with the French publisher Gallimard regarding the republication of the complete works of Borges in French, with Pierre Assouline in Le Nouvel Observateur (August 2006) calling her "an obstacle to the dissemination of the works of Borges". Kodama took legal action against Assouline, considering the remark unjustified and defamatory, asking for a symbolic compensation of one euro.
Kodama also rescinded all publishing rights for existing collections of his work in English, including the translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in which Borges himself collaborated, and from which di Giovanni would have received an unusually high fifty percent of the royalties. Kodama commissioned new translations by Andrew Hurley, which have become the official translations in English.
Political opinions
During the 1920s and 1930s, Borges was a vocal supporter of Hipólito Yrigoyen and the social democratic Radical Civic Union. In 1945, Borges signed a manifesto calling for an end to military rule and the establishment of political liberty and democratic elections. By the 1960s, he had grown more skeptical of democracy. During a 1971 conference at Columbia University, a creative writing student asked Borges what he regarded as "a writer's duty to his time". Borges replied, "I think a writer's duty is to be a writer, and if he can be a good writer, he is doing his duty. Besides, I think of my own opinions as being superficial. For example, I am a Conservative, I hate the Communists, I hate the Nazis, I hate the anti-Semites, and so on; but I don't allow these opinions to find their way into my writings—except, of course, when I was greatly elated about the Six-Day War. Generally speaking, I think of keeping them in watertight compartments. Everybody knows my opinions, but as for my dreams and my stories, they should be allowed their full freedom, I think. I don't want to intrude into them, I'm writing fiction, not fables." In the 1980s, towards the end of his life, Borges regained his earlier faith in democracy and held it out as the only hope for Argentina. In 1983, Borges applauded the election of the Radical Civic Union's Raúl Alfonsín and welcomed the end of military rule with the following words: "I once wrote that democracy is the abuse of statistics ... On October 30, 1983, Argentine democracy refuted me splendidly. Splendidly and resoundingly."
Anti-communism
Borges recurrently declared himself a "Spencerian anarchist who believes in the individual and not in the State" due to his father's influence. In an interview with Richard Burgin during the late 1960s, Borges described himself as a "mild" adherent of classical liberalism. He further recalled that his opposition to communism and to Marxism was absorbed in his childhood, stating: "Well, I have been brought up to think that the individual should be strong and the State should be weak. I couldn't be enthusiastic about theories where the State is more important than the individual." After the overthrow via coup d'état of President Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, Borges supported efforts to purge Argentina's Government of Peronists and dismantle the former President's welfare state. He was enraged that the Communist Party of Argentina opposed these measures and sharply criticized them in lectures and in print. Borges's opposition to the Party in this matter ultimately led to a permanent rift with his longtime lover, Argentine Communist Estela Canto.
In a 1956 interview given to El Hogar, he stated that "[Communists] are in favor of totalitarian regimes and systematically combat freedom of thought, oblivious of the fact that the principal victims of dictatorships are, precisely, intelligence and culture." Borges elaborated: "Many people are in favor of dictatorships because they allow them to avoid thinking for themselves. Everything is presented to them ready-made. There are even agencies of the State that supply them with opinions, passwords, slogans, and even idols to exalt or cast down according to the prevailing wind or in keeping with the directives of the thinking heads of the single party."
In later years, Borges frequently expressed contempt for Marxist and Communist authors, poets, and intellectuals. In an interview with Burgin, Borges referred to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as "a very fine poet" but a "very mean man" for unconditionally supporting the Soviet Union and demonizing the United States. Borges commented about Neruda, "Now he knows that's rubbish."
In the same interview, Borges also criticized famed poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was abducted by Nationalist soldiers and executed without trial during the Spanish Civil War. In Borges's opinion, Lorca's poetry and plays, when examined against his tragic death, appeared better than they actually were.
Anti-fascism
In 1934, Argentine ultra-nationalists, sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, asserted Borges was secretly Jewish, and by implication, not truly Argentinian. Borges responded with the essay "Yo, Judío" ("Me, I'm a Jew"), a reference to the old phrase "Yo, Argentino" ("Me, I'm Argentine") uttered by potential victims during pogroms against Argentine Jews, to signify one was not Jewish. In the essay, Borges declares he would be proud to be a Jew, and remarks that any pure Castilian is likely to come from ancient Jewish descent, from a millennium ago.
Both before and during the Second World War, Borges regularly published essays attacking the Nazi police state and its racist ideology. His outrage was fueled by his deep love for German literature. In an essay published in 1937, Borges attacked the Nazi Party's use of children's books to inflame antisemitism. He wrote, "I don't know if the world can do without German civilization, but I do know that its corruption by the teachings of hatred is a crime."
In a 1938 essay, Borges reviewed an anthology which rewrote German authors of the past to fit the Nazi party line. He was disgusted by what he described as Germany's "chaotic descent into darkness" and the attendant rewriting of history. He argued that such books sacrificed the German people's culture, history and integrity in the name of restoring their national honour. Such use of children's books for propaganda he writes, "perfect the criminal arts of barbarians."
In a 1944 essay, Borges postulated,
In 1946, Borges published the short story "Deutsches Requiem", which masquerades as the last testament of a condemned Nazi war criminal named Otto Dietrich zur Linde.
In a 1971 conference at Columbia University, Borges was asked about the story by a student from the creative writing program. He recalled, "When the Germans were defeated I felt great joy and relief, but at the same time I thought of the German defeat as being somehow tragic, because here we have perhaps the most educated people in Europe, who have a fine literature, a fine tradition of philosophy and poetry. Yet these people were bamboozled by a madman named Adolf Hitler, and I think there is tragedy there."
In a 1967 interview with Burgin, Borges recalled how his interactions with Argentina's Nazi sympathisers led him to create the story. He recalled, "And then I realized that those people that were on the side of Germany, that they never thought of German victories or the German glory. What they really liked was the idea of the Blitzkrieg, of London being on fire, of the country being destroyed. As to the German fighters, they took no stock in them. Then I thought, well now Germany has lost, now America has saved us from this nightmare, but since nobody can doubt on which side I stood, I'll see what can be done from a literary point of view in favor of the Nazis. And then I created the ideal Nazi."
At Columbia University in 1971, Borges further elaborated on the story's creation, "I tried to imagine what a real Nazi might be like. I mean someone who thought of violence as being praiseworthy for its own sake. Then I thought that this archetype of the Nazis wouldn't mind being defeated; after all, defeats and victories are mere matters of chance. He would still be glad of the fact, even if the Americans and British won the war. Naturally, when I am with Nazis, I find they are not my idea of what a Nazi is, but this wasn't meant to be a political tract. It was meant to stand for the fact that there was something tragic in the fate of a real Nazi. Except that I wonder if a real Nazi ever existed. At least, when I went to Germany, I never met one. They were all feeling sorry for themselves and wanted me to feel sorry for them as well."
Anti-Peronism
In 1946, Argentine President Juan Perón began transforming Argentina into a one-party state with the assistance of his wife, Evita. Almost immediately, the spoils system was the rule of the day, as ideological critics of the ruling Partido Justicialista were fired from government jobs. During this period, Borges was informed that he was being "promoted" from his position at the Miguel Cané Library to a post as inspector of poultry and rabbits at the Buenos Aires municipal market. Upon demanding to know the reason, Borges was told, "Well, you were on the side of the Allies, what do you expect?" Borges resigned the following day.
Perón's treatment of Borges became a cause célèbre for the Argentine intelligentsia. The Argentine Society of Writers (SADE) held a formal dinner in his honour. At the dinner, a speech was read which Borges had written for the occasion. It said:
In the aftermath, Borges found himself much in demand as a lecturer and one of the intellectual leaders of the Argentine opposition. In 1951 he was asked by anti-Peronist friends to run for president of SADE. Borges, then suffering from depression caused by a failed romance, reluctantly accepted. He later recalled that he would awake every morning and remember that Perón was President and feel deeply depressed and ashamed. Perón's government had seized control of the Argentine mass media and regarded SADE with indifference. Borges later recalled, however, "Many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside its doors." Meanwhile, SADE became an increasing refuge for critics of the regime. SADE official Luisa Mercedes Levinson noted, "We would gather every week to tell the latest jokes about the ruling couple and even dared to sing the songs of the French Resistance, as well as 'La Marseillaise'".
After Evita Perón's death on 26 July 1952, Borges received a visit from two policemen, who ordered him to put up two portraits of the ruling couple on the premises of SADE. Borges indignantly refused, calling it a ridiculous demand. The policemen replied that he would soon face the consequences. The Justicialist Party placed Borges under 24-hour surveillance and sent policemen to sit in on his lectures; in September they ordered SADE to be permanently closed down. Like much of the Argentine opposition to Perón, SADE had become marginalized due to persecution by the State, and very few active members remained.
According to Edwin Williamson,
On 16 September 1955, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu's Revolución Libertadora toppled the ruling party and forced Perón into exile. Borges was overjoyed and joined demonstrators marching through the streets of Buenos Aires. According to Williamson, Borges shouted, "Viva la Patria", until his voice grew hoarse. Due to the influence of Borges's mother and his own role on the opposition to Peron, the provisional government appointed Borges as the Director of the National Library.
In his essay L'Illusion Comique, Borges wrote there were two histories of Peronism in Argentina. The first he described as "the criminal one", composed of the police state tactics used against both real and imagined anti-Peronists. The second history was, according to Borges, "the theatrical one" composed of "tales and fables made for consumption by dolts." He argued that, despite their claims to detest capitalism, Juan and Eva Perón "copied its methods, dictating names and slogans to the people" in the same way that multi-national corporations "impose their razor blades, cigarettes, and washing machines." Borges then listed the numerous conspiracy theories the ruling couple dictated to their followers and how those theories were accepted without question.
Borges concluded:
In a 1967 interview, Borges said, "Perón was a humbug, and he knew it, and everybody knew it. But Perón could be very cruel. I mean, he had people tortured, killed. And his wife was a common prostitute."
When Perón returned from exile in 1973 and regained the Presidency, Borges was enraged. In a 1975 interview for National Geographic, he said "Damn, the snobs are back in the saddle. If their posters and slogans again defile the city, I'll be glad I've lost my sight. Well, they can't humiliate me as they did before my books sold well."
After being accused of being unforgiving, Borges quipped, "I resented Perón's making Argentina look ridiculous to the world ... as in 1951, when he announced control over thermonuclear fusion, which still hasn't happened anywhere but in the sun and the stars. For a time, Argentines hesitated to wear band aids for fear friends would ask, 'Did the atomic bomb go off in your hand?' A shame, because Argentina really has world-class scientists."
After Borges's death in 1986, the Peronist Partido Justicialista declined to send a delegate to the writer's memorial service in Buenos Aires. A spokesman for the Party said that this was in reaction to "certain declarations he had made about the country." Later, at the City Council of Buenos Aires, Peronist politicians refused to honor Borges as an Argentine, commenting that he "chose to die abroad." When infuriated politicians from the other parties demanded to know the real reason, the Peronists finally explained that Borges had made statements about Evita Perón which they called "unacceptable".
Military junta
During the 1970s, Borges at first expressed support for Argentina's military junta, but was scandalized by the junta's actions during the Dirty War. In protest against their support of the regime, Borges ceased publishing in the newspaper La Nación.
In 1985, he wrote a short poem about the Falklands War called Juan López y John Ward, about two fictional soldiers (one from each side), who died in the Falklands, in which he refers to "islands that were too famous". He also said about the war: "The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb."
Borges was an observer at the trials of the military junta in 1985 and wrote that "not to judge and condemn the crimes would be to encourage impunity and to become, somehow, its accomplice." Borges added that "the news of the missing people, the crimes and atrocities [the military] committed" had inspired him to return to his earlier Emersonian faith in democracy.
Works
Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort argue that Borges "may have been the most important figure in Spanish-language literature since Cervantes. He was clearly of tremendous influence, writing intricate poems, short stories, and essays that instantiated concepts of dizzying power." The work of Borges has been compared to that of Homer and Milton.
In addition to short stories for which he is most noted, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, literary criticism, and edited numerous anthologies. His longest work of fiction is a fourteen-page story, "The Congress", first published in 1971. His late-onset blindness strongly influenced his later writing. Borges wrote: "When I think of what I've lost, I ask, 'Who know themselves better than the blind?' – for every thought becomes a tool."
Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, integrating these through literature, sometimes playfully, sometimes with great seriousness.
Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned (it came and went, with a struggle between advancing age and advances in eye surgery), he increasingly focused on writing poetry, since he could memorize an entire work in progress.
His poems embrace the same wide range of interests as his fiction, along with issues that emerge in his critical works and translations, and from more personal musings. For example, his interest in idealism runs through his work, reflected in the fictional world of Tlön in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and in his essay "A New Refutation of Time". It also appears as a theme in "On Exactitude in Science" and in his poems "Things" and "El Golem" ("The Golem") and his story "The Circular Ruins".
Borges was a notable translator. He translated works of literature in English, French, German, Old English, and Old Norse into Spanish. His first publication, for a Buenos Aires newspaper, was a translation of Oscar Wilde's story "The Happy Prince" into Spanish when he was nine. At the end of his life he produced a Spanish-language version of a part of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. He also translated (while simultaneously subtly transforming) the works of, among others, Ambrose Bierce, William Faulkner, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf. Borges wrote and lectured extensively on the art of translation, holding that a translation may improve upon the original, may even be unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid. Borges employed the devices of literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work, both forms of modern pseudo-epigrapha.
Hoaxes and forgeries
Borges's best-known set of literary forgeries date from his early work as a translator and literary critic with a regular column in the Argentine magazine El Hogar. Along with publishing numerous legitimate translations, he also published original works, for example, in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg or One Thousand and One Nights, originally claiming them to be translations of works he had chanced upon. In another case, he added three short, falsely attributed pieces into his otherwise legitimate and carefully researched anthology El matrero. Several of these are gathered in the A Universal History of Infamy.
While Borges was the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, he had developed the idea from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book-length review of a non-existent German transcendentalist work, and the biography of its equally non-existent author. In This Craft of Verse, Borges says that in 1916 in Geneva "[I] discovered, and was overwhelmed by, Thomas Carlyle. I read Sartor Resartus, and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart."
In the introduction to his first published volume of fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges remarks, "It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." He then cites both Sartor Resartus and Samuel Butler's The Fair Haven, remarking, however, that "those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books."
On the other hand, some works were wrongly attributed to Borges, like the poem "Instantes".
Criticism of Borges's work
Borges's change in style from regionalist criollismo to a more cosmopolitan style brought him much criticism from journals such as Contorno, a leftist, Sartre-influenced Argentine publication founded by David Viñas and his brother, along with other intellectuals such as Noé Jitrik and Adolfo Prieto. In the post-Peronist Argentina of the early 1960s, Contorno met with wide approval from the youth who challenged the authenticity of older writers such as Borges and questioned their legacy of experimentation. Magic realism and exploration of universal truths, they argued, had come at the cost of responsibility and seriousness in the face of society's problems.
The Contorno writers acknowledged Borges and Eduardo Mallea for being "doctors of technique" but argued that their work lacked substance due to their lack of interaction with the reality that they inhabited, an existentialist critique of their refusal to embrace existence and reality in their artwork.
Sexuality and perception of women
The story "The Sect of the Phoenix" is famously interpreted to allude to the ubiquity of sexual intercourse among humans – a concept whose essential qualities the narrator of the story is not able to relate to.
With a few notable exceptions, women are almost entirely absent from Borges's fiction. However, there are some instances in Borges's later writings of romantic love, for example the story "Ulrikke" from The Book of Sand. The protagonist of the story "El muerto" also lusts after the "splendid, contemptuous, red-haired woman" of Azevedo Bandeira and later "sleeps with the woman with shining hair". Although they do not appear in the stories, women are significantly discussed as objects of unrequited love in his short stories "The Zahir" and "The Aleph". The plot of La Intrusa was based on a true story of two friends. Borges turned their fictional counterparts into brothers, excluding the possibility of a homosexual relationship.
"Emma Zunz" is Borges's only story with a female protagonist. Originally published in 1948, this work tells the tale of a young woman who kills a man in order to avenge the disgrace and suicide of her father. She carefully plans the crime, submitting to an unpleasant sexual encounter with a stranger in order to create the appearance of sexual impropriety in her intended victim. Despite the fact that she premeditates and executes a murder, the eponymous heroine of this story is surprisingly likable, both because of intrinsic qualities in the character (interestingly enough, she believes in nonviolence) and because the story is narrated from a "remote but sympathetic" point of view that highlights the poignancy of her situation.
Nobel Prize omission
Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, something which continually distressed the writer. He was one of several distinguished authors who never received the honour. Borges commented, "Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me".
Some observers speculated that Borges did not receive the award in his later life because of his conservative political views, or, more specifically, because he had accepted an honour from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Borges was however among the short-listed candidates several times. In 1965 he was considered along with Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda and Mikhail Sholokhov, and in 1966 a shared prize to Borges and Miguel Ángel Asturias was proposed. Borges was nominated again in 1967, and was among the final three choices considered by the committee, according to Nobel records unsealed on the 50th anniversary, in 2017. The committee considered Borges, Graham Greene and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with the last chosen winner.
Fact, fantasy and non-linearity
Many of Borges's best-known stories deal with themes of time ("The Secret Miracle"), infinity ("The Aleph"), mirrors ("Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") and labyrinths ("The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths", "The House of Asterion", "The Immortal", "The Garden of Forking Paths"). Williamson writes, "His basic contention was that fiction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an author's ability to generate 'poetic faith' in his reader."
His stories often have fantastical themes, such as a library containing every possible 410-page text ("The Library of Babel"), a man who forgets nothing he experiences ("Funes, the Memorious"), an artifact through which the user can see everything in the universe ("The Aleph"), and a year of still time given to a man standing before a firing squad ("The Secret Miracle"). Borges told realistic stories of South American life, of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, and historical figures. He mixed the real and the fantastic, fact with fiction. His interest in compounding fantasy, philosophy, and the art of translation are evident in articles such as "The Translators of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights". In the Book of Imaginary Beings, a thoroughly researched bestiary of mythical creatures, Borges wrote, "There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition." Borges's interest in fantasy was shared by Bioy Casares, with whom he coauthored several collections of tales between 1942 and 1967.
Often, especially early in his career, the mixture of fact and fantasy crossed the line into the realm of hoax or literary forgery.
"The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) presents the idea of forking paths through networks of time, none of which is the same, all of which are equal. Borges uses the recurring image of "a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression" so we "become aware of all the possible choices we might make." The forking paths have branches to represent these choices that ultimately lead to different endings. Borges saw man's search for meaning in a seemingly infinite universe as fruitless and instead uses the maze as a riddle for time, not space. He examined the themes of universal randomness ("The Lottery in Babylon") and madness ("The Zahir"). Due to the success of the "Forking Paths" story, the term "Borgesian" came to reflect a quality of narrative non-linearity.
Borgesian conundrum
The philosophical term "Borgesian conundrum" is named after him and has been defined as the ontological question of "whether the writer writes the story, or it writes him." The original concept was put forward by Borges in Kafka and His Precursors. After reviewing works that were written before those of Kafka, Borges wrote:
Culture and Argentine literature
Martín Fierro and Argentine tradition
Along with other young Argentine writers of his generation, Borges initially rallied around the fictional character of Martín Fierro. Martín Fierro, a poem by José Hernández, was a dominant work of 19th century Argentine literature. Its eponymous hero became a symbol of Argentine sensibility, untied from European values – a gaucho, free, poor, pampas-dwelling.
The character Fierro is illegally drafted to serve at a border fort to defend it against the indigenous population but ultimately deserts to become a gaucho matrero, the Argentine equivalent of a North American western outlaw. Borges contributed keenly to the avant garde Martín Fierro magazine in the early 1920s.
As Borges matured, he came to a more nuanced attitude toward the Hernández poem. In his book of essays on the poem, Borges separates his admiration for the aesthetic virtues of the work from his mixed opinion of the moral virtues of its protagonist. In his essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition" (1951), Borges celebrates how Hernández expresses the Argentine character. In a key scene in the poem, Martín Fierro and El Moreno compete by improvising songs on universal themes such as time, night, and the sea, reflecting the real-world gaucho tradition of payadas, improvised musical dialogues on philosophical themes. Borges points out that Hernández evidently knew the difference between actual gaucho tradition of composing poetry versus the "gauchesque" fashion among Buenos Aires literati.
In his works he refutes the arch-nationalist interpreters of the poem and disdains others, such as critic Eleuterio Tiscornia, for their Europeanising approach. Borges denies that Argentine literature should distinguish itself by limiting itself to "local colour", which he equates with cultural nationalism. Racine and Shakespeare's work, he says, looked beyond their countries' borders. Neither, he argues, need the literature be bound to the heritage of old world Spanish or European tradition. Nor should it define itself by the conscious rejection of its colonial past. He asserts that Argentine writers need to be free to define Argentine literature anew, writing about Argentina and the world from the point of view of those who have inherited the whole of world literature. Williamson says "Borges's main argument is that the very fact of writing from the margins provides Argentine writers with a special opportunity to innovate without being bound to the canons of the centre, ... at once a part of and apart from the centre, which gives them much potential freedom".
Argentine culture
Borges focused on universal themes, but also composed a substantial body of literature on themes from Argentine folklore and history. His first book, the poetry collection Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion for Buenos Aires), appeared in 1923. Borges's writings on things Argentine, include Argentine culture ("History of the Tango"; "Inscriptions on Horse Wagons"), folklore ("Juan Muraña", "Night of the Gifts"), literature ("The Argentine Writer and Tradition", "Almafuerte"; "Evaristo Carriego"), and national concerns ("Celebration of the Monster", "Hurry, Hurry", "The Mountebank", "Pedro Salvadores"). Ultranationalists, however, continued to question his Argentine identity.
Borges's interest in Argentine themes reflects, in part, the inspiration of his family tree. Borges had an English paternal grandmother who, around 1870, married the criollo Francisco Borges, a man with a military command and a historic role in the Argentine Civil Wars in what is now Argentina and Uruguay.
Spurred by pride in his family's heritage, Borges often used those civil wars as settings in fiction and quasi-fiction (for example, "The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz," "The Dead Man," "Avelino Arredondo") as well as poetry ("General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage"). Borges's maternal great-grandfather, Manuel Isidoro Suárez, was another military hero, whom Borges immortalized in the poem "A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín".
His non-fiction explores many of the themes found in his fiction. Essays such as "The History of the Tango" or his writings on the epic poem "Martín Fierro" explore Argentine themes, such as the identity of the Argentine people and of various Argentine subcultures. The varying genealogies of characters, settings, and themes in his stories, such as "La muerte y la brújula", used Argentine models without pandering to his readers or framing Argentine culture as "exotic".
In fact, contrary to what is usually supposed, the geographies found in his fictions often do not correspond to those of real-world Argentina. In his essay "El escritor argentino y la tradición", Borges notes that the very absence of camels in the Qur'an was proof enough that it was an Arabian work (despite the fact that camels are, in fact, mentioned in the Qur'an). He suggested that only someone trying to write an "Arab" work would purposefully include a camel. He uses this example to illustrate how his dialogue with universal existential concerns was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos and tangos.
Multicultural influences
At the time of the Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816, the population was predominantly criollo (of Spanish ancestry). From the mid-1850s on waves of immigration from Europe, especially Italy and Spain, arrived in the country, and in the following decades the Argentine national identity diversified. Borges was writing in a strongly European literary context, immersed in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature. He also read translations of Near Eastern and Far Eastern works. Borges's writing is also informed by scholarship of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, including prominent religious figures, heretics, and mystics.
Religion and heresy are explored in such stories as "Averroes's Search", "The Writing of the God", "The Theologians", and "Three Versions of Judas". The curious inversion of mainstream Christian concepts of redemption in the last story is characteristic of Borges's approach to theology in his literature.
In describing himself, he said, "I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors." As a young man, he visited the frontier pampas which extend beyond Argentina into Uruguay and Brazil. Borges said that his father wished him "to become a citizen of the world, a great cosmopolitan," in the way of Henry and William James.
Borges lived and studied in Switzerland and Spain as a young student. As Borges matured, he traveled through Argentina as a lecturer and, internationally, as a visiting professor; he continued to tour the world as he grew older, finally settling in Geneva where he had spent some of his youth. Drawing on the influence of many times and places, Borges's work belittled nationalism and racism. However, Borges also scorned his own Basque ancestry and criticised the abolition of slavery in America because he believed black people were happier remaining uneducated and without freedom. Portraits of diverse coexisting cultures characteristic of Argentina are especially pronounced in the book Six Problems for don Isidoro Parodi (co-authored with Bioy Casares) and Death and the Compass. Borges wrote that he considered Mexican essayist Alfonso Reyes to be "the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time."
Borges was also an admirer of Asian culture, e.g. the ancient Chinese board game of Go, about which he penned some verses, while The Garden of Forking Paths had a strong Chinese theme.
Influences
Modernism
Borges was rooted in the Modernism predominant in its early years and was influenced by Symbolism. Like Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, he combined an interest in his native culture with broader perspectives, also sharing their multilingualism and inventiveness with language. However, while Nabokov and Joyce tended toward progressively larger works, Borges remained a miniaturist. His work progressed away from what he referred to as "the baroque": his later style is far more transparent and naturalistic than his earlier works. Borges represented the humanist view of media that stressed the social aspect of art driven by emotion. If art represented the tool, then Borges was more interested in how the tool could be used to relate to people.
Existentialism saw its apogee during the years of Borges's greatest artistic production. It has been argued that his choice of topics largely ignored existentialism's central tenets. Critic Paul de Man notes, "Whatever Borges's existential anxieties may be, they have little in common with Sartre's robustly prosaic view of literature, with the earnestness of Camus' moralism, or with the weighty profundity of German existential thought. Rather, they are the consistent expansion of a purely poetic consciousness to its furthest limits."
Mathematics
The essay collection Borges y la Matemática (Borges and Mathematics, 2003) by Argentine mathematician and writer Guillermo Martínez, outlines how Borges used concepts from mathematics in his work. Martínez states that Borges had, for example, at least a superficial knowledge of set theory, which he handles with elegance in stories such as "The Book of Sand". Other books such as The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch (2008) and Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics by Floyd Merrell (1991) also explore this relationship.
Philosophy
Fritz Mauthner, philosopher of language and author of the Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Dictionary of Philosophy), had an important influence on Borges. Borges always recognized the influence of this German philosopher. According to the literary review Sur, the book was one of the five books most noted and read by Borges. The first time that Borges mentioned Mauthner was in 1928 in his book The language of the Argentines (El idioma de los argentinos). In a 1962 interview Borges described Mauthner as possessing a fine sense of humor as well as great knowledge and erudition.
In an interview, Denis Dutton asked Borges who were the "philosophers who have influenced your works, in whom you’ve been the most interested". In reply, Borges named Berkeley and Schopenhauer.
He was also influenced by Spinoza, about whom Borges wrote a famous poem
It is not without humour that Borges once wrote “Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca.” (I always imagined Paradise to be some kind of a library.)
Notes
References
Further reading
Illustrated by Donato Grima.
Burgin, Richard (1969) Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, Holt Rinehart & Winston
Burgin, Richard (1998) Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, University Press of Mississippi
Laín Corona, Guillermo. "Borges and Cervantes: Truth and Falsehood in the Narration". Neophilologus, 93 (2009): 421–37.
Laín Corona, Guillermo. "Teoría y práctica de la metáfora en torno a Fervor de Buenos Aires, de Borges". Cuadernos de Aleph. Revista de literatura hispánica, 2 (2007): 79–93. https://web.archive.org/web/20120105024915/http://cuadernosdealeph.com/revista_2007/A2007_pdf/06%20Teor%C3%ADa.pdf
Manovich, Lev, New Media from Borges to HTML, 2003
Mackay, Neil, Borges and Argentina: A Relocation, in Cencrastus No. 9, Summer 1982, pp. 17–19,
Murray, Janet H., Inventing the Medium, 2003
Pérez, Rolando. "Borges and Bruno Schulz on the Infinite Book of the Kabbalah." Confluencia. Volume 31. Spring 2016. https://www.academia.edu/25252312/Borges_and_Bruno_Schulz_on_the_Infinite_Book_of_the_Kabbalah.
Documentaries
External links
BBC Radio 4 discussion programme from In our time. (Audio 45 mins)
The Garden of Forking Paths Borges site from The Modern Word.
De Peryton, a work by Dutch composer Theo Verbey for seven wind instruments inspired by Borges.
Borges Center, University of Pittsburgh.
The Friends of Jorge Luis Borges Worldwide Society & Associates
International Foundation Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges recorded at the Library of Congress for the Hispanic Division's audio literary archive on 23 April 1976.
Six Norton Lectures (1967–68; audio; 4h13m)
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15782 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane%20Austen | Jane Austen | Jane Austen (; 16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her use of biting irony, along with her realism and social commentary, have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.
With the publication of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), in her lifetime she achieved modest success and, as the books were published anonymously, little fame. She wrote two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began another, eventually titled Sanditon, but died before its completion. She also left behind three volumes of juvenile writings in manuscript, the short epistolary novel Lady Susan, and another unfinished novel, The Watsons.
Austen gained far more status after her death, and her six full-length novels have rarely been out of print. A significant transition in her posthumous reputation occurred in 1833, when her novels were republished in Richard Bentley's Standard Novels series, illustrated by Ferdinand Pickering, and sold as a set. They gradually gained wider acclaim and popular readership. In 1869, fifty-two years after her death, her nephew's publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced a compelling version of her writing career and supposedly uneventful life to an eager audience.
Austen has inspired a large number of critical essays and literary anthologies. Her novels have inspired many films, from 1940's Pride and Prejudice to more recent productions like Sense and Sensibility (1995) and Love & Friendship (2016).
Biographical sources
Little biographical information about Jane Austen's life exists except the few letters that survived and the biographical notes her family members wrote. During her lifetime, Austen may have written as many as 3,000 letters, but only 161 survive. Her older sister Cassandra burned or destroyed the bulk of letters she received in 1843, to prevent their falling into the hands of relatives and ensuring that "younger nieces did not read any of Jane Austen's sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbours or family members". Cassandra meant to protect the family's reputation from her sister's penchant for forthrightness; in the interest of tact she omitted details of family illnesses and unhappinesses.
The first Austen biography was Henry Thomas Austen's 1818 "Biographical Notice". It appeared in a posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey, and included extracts from two letters, against the judgement of other family members. Details of Austen's life continued to be omitted or embellished in her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen, published in 1869, and in William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh's biography Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, published in 1913, all of which included additional letters. The legend the family and relatives created reflected their bias in favour of presenting the image of "good quiet Aunt Jane", the portrayal of a woman whose domestic situation was happy and whose family was the mainstay of her life. Modern biographers include details previously excised from the letters and family biographies, but Austen scholar Jan Fergus explains that the challenge is to avoid the presenting the opposite view – one of Austen languishing in periods of deep unhappiness who was "an embittered, disappointed woman trapped in a thoroughly unpleasant family".
Life
Family
Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, on 16 December 1775. She was born a month later than her parents expected; her father wrote of her arrival in a letter that her mother "certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago". He added that the newborn infant was "a present plaything for Cassy and a future companion". The winter of 1776 was particularly harsh and it was not until 5 April that she was baptised at the local church with the single name Jane.
George Austen (1731–1805), served as the rector of the Anglican parishes at Steventon and at nearby Deane. He came from an old, respected, and wealthy family of wool merchants. As each generation of eldest sons received inheritances, the wealth was divided, and George's branch of the family fell into poverty. He and his two sisters were orphaned as children and had to be taken in by relatives. His sister Philadelphia went to India to find a husband and George entered St John's College, Oxford on a fellowship, where he most likely met Cassandra Leigh (1739–1827). She came from the prominent Leigh family; her father was rector at All Souls College, Oxford, where she grew up among the gentry. Her eldest brother James inherited a fortune and large estate from his great-aunt Perrot, with the only condition that he change his name to Leigh-Perrot.
The two were engaged, probably around 1763 when they exchanged miniatures. George had received the living for the Steventon parish from the wealthy husband of his second cousin, Thomas Knight. They married on 26 April 1764 at St Swithin's Church in Bath, by licence, in a simple ceremony, two months after Cassandra's father died. Their income was modest, with George's small per annum living; Cassandra brought to the marriage the expectation of a small inheritance at the time of her mother's death.
The Austens took up temporary residence at the nearby Deane rectory until Steventon, a 16th-century house in disrepair, underwent necessary renovations. Cassandra gave birth to three children while living at Deane: James in 1765, George in 1766, and Edward in 1767. Her custom was to keep an infant at home for several months and then place it with Elizabeth Littlewood, a woman living nearby to nurse and raise for twelve to eighteen months.
Steventon
In 1768, the family finally took up residence in Steventon. Henry was the first child to be born there, in 1771. At about this time, Cassandra could no longer ignore the signs that little George was developmentally disabled. He was subject to seizures, may have been deaf and mute, and she chose to send him out to be fostered. In 1773, Cassandra was born, followed by Francis in 1774, and Jane in 1775.
According to Honan, the atmosphere of the Austen home was an "open, amused, easy intellectual" one, where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed. The family relied on the patronage of their kin and hosted visits from numerous family members. Mrs Austen spent the summer of 1770 in London with George's sister, Philadelphia, and her daughter Eliza, accompanied by his other sister, Mrs Walter and her daughter Philly. Philadelphia and Eliza Hancock were, according to Le Faye, "the bright comets flashing into an otherwise placid solar system of clerical life in rural Hampshire, and the news of their foreign travels and fashionable London life, together with their sudden descents upon the Steventon household in between times, all helped to widen Jane's youthful horizon and influence her later life and works."
Cassandra Austen's cousin Thomas Leigh visited a number of times in the 1770s and 1780s, inviting young Cassie to visit them in Bath in 1781. The first mention of Jane occurs in family documents on her return, "... and almost home they were when they met Jane & Charles, the two little ones of the family, who had to go as far as New Down to meet the chaise, & have the pleasure of riding home in it." Le Faye writes that "Mr Austen's predictions for his younger daughter were fully justified. Never were sisters more to each other than Cassandra and Jane; while in a particularly affectionate family, there seems to have been a special link between Cassandra and Edward on the one hand, and between Henry and Jane on the other."
From 1773 until 1796, George Austen supplemented his income by farming and by teaching three or four boys at a time, who boarded at his home. The Reverend Austen had an annual income of £200 from his two livings. This was a very modest income at the time; by comparison, a skilled worker like a blacksmith or a carpenter could make about £100 annually while the typical annual income of a gentry family was between £1,000 and £5,000.
During this period of her life, Austen attended church regularly, socialised with friends and neighbours, and read novels—often of her own composition—aloud to her family in the evenings. Socialising with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall. Her brother Henry later said that "Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it".
Education
In 1783, Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs Ann Cawley who took them with her to Southampton when she moved there later in the year. In the autumn both girls were sent home when they caught typhus and Austen nearly died. Austen was from then home educated, until she attended boarding school in Reading with her sister from early in 1785 at the Reading Abbey Girls' School, ruled by Mrs La Tournelle, who had a cork leg and a passion for theatre. The school curriculum probably included some French, spelling, needlework, dancing and music and, perhaps, drama. The sisters returned home before December 1786 because the school fees for the two girls were too high for the Austen family. After 1786, Austen "never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment".
The remainder of her education came from reading, guided by her father and brothers James and Henry. Irene Collins believes that Austen "used some of the same school books as the boys" her father tutored. Austen apparently had unfettered access both to her father's library and that of a family friend, Warren Hastings. Together these collections amounted to a large and varied library. Her father was also tolerant of Austen's sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing.
Private theatricals were an essential part of Austen's education. From her early childhood, the family and friends staged a series of plays in the rectory barn, including Richard Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) and David Garrick's Bon Ton. Austen's eldest brother James wrote the prologues and epilogues and she probably joined in these activities, first as a spectator and later as a participant. Most of the plays were comedies, which suggests how Austen's satirical gifts were cultivated. At the age of 12, she tried her own hand at dramatic writing; she wrote three short plays during her teenage years.
Juvenilia (1787–1793)
From the age of eleven, and perhaps earlier, Austen wrote poems and stories for her own and her family's amusement. In these works, the details of daily life are exaggerated, common plot devices are parodied, and the "stories are full of anarchic fantasies of female power, licence, illicit behaviour, and general high spirits", according to Janet Todd. Containing work written between 1787 and 1793, Austen compiled fair copies of twenty-nine early works into three bound notebooks, now referred to as the Juvenilia. She called the three notebooks "Volume the First", "Volume the Second" and "Volume the Third", and they preserve 90,000 words she wrote during those years. The Juvenilia are often, according to scholar Richard Jenkyns, "boisterous" and "anarchic"; he compares them to the work of 18th-century novelist Laurence Sterne.
Among these works are a satirical novel in letters titled Love and Freindship , written at age fourteen in 1790, in which she mocked popular novels of sensibility. The next year she wrote The History of England, a manuscript of thirty-four pages accompanied by thirteen watercolour miniatures by her sister, Cassandra. Austen's History parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's History of England (1764). Honan speculates that not long after writing Love and Freindship, Austen decided to "write for profit, to make stories her central effort", that is, to become a professional writer. When she was around eighteen years old, Austen began to write longer, more sophisticated works.
In August 1792, aged seventeen, Austen started writing Catharine or the Bower, which presaged her mature work, especially Northanger Abbey; it was left unfinished and the story picked up in Lady Susan, which Todd describes as less prefiguring than Catharine. A year later, she began, but abandoned a short play, later titled Sir Charles Grandison or the happy Man, a comedy in 6 acts, which she returned to and completed around 1800. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgements of Austen's favourite contemporary novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), by Samuel Richardson.
When Austen became an aunt for the first time at age eighteen, she sent new-born niece Fanny-Catherine Austen-Knight "five short pieces of ... the Juvenilia now known collectively as 'Scraps' .., purporting to be her 'Opinions and Admonitions on the conduct of Young Women. For niece Jane-Anna-Elizabeth Austen (also born in 1793) Jane Austen wrote "two more 'Miscellanious [sic] Morsels', dedicating them to [Anna] on 2 June 1793, 'convinced that if you seriously attend to them, You will derive from them very important Instructions, with regard to your Conduct in Life. There is manuscript evidence that Austen continued to work on these pieces as late as 1811 (when she was 36), and that her niece and nephew, Anna and James Edward Austen, made further additions as late as 1814.
Between 1793 and 1795 (aged eighteen to twenty) Austen wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel, usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work. It is unlike any of Austen's other works. Austen biographer Claire Tomalin describes the novella's heroine as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray and abuse her lovers, friends and family. Tomalin writes:
Told in letters, it is as neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration dramatists who may have provided some of her inspiration ... It stands alone in Austen's work as a study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater than those of anyone she encounters.
According to Janet Todd, the model for the title character may have been Eliza de Feuillide, who inspired Austen with stories of her glamorous life and various adventures. Eliza's French husband was guillotined in 1794; she married Jane's brother Henry Austen in 1797.
Tom Lefroy
When Austen was twenty, Tom Lefroy, a neighbour, visited Steventon from December 1795 to January 1796. He had just finished a university degree and was moving to London for training as a barrister. Lefroy and Austen would have been introduced at a ball or other neighbourhood social gathering, and it is clear from Austen's letters to Cassandra that they spent considerable time together: "I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together."
Austen wrote in her first surviving letter to her sister Cassandra that Lefroy was a "very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man". Five days later in another letter, Austen wrote that she expected an "offer" from her "friend" and that "I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat", going on to write "I will confide myself in the future to Mr Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't give a sixpence" and refuse all others. The next day, Austen wrote: "The day will come on which I flirt my last with Tom Lefroy and when you receive this it will be all over. My tears flow as I write at this melancholy idea".
Halperin cautioned that Austen often satirised popular sentimental romantic fiction in her letters, and some of the statements about Lefroy may have been ironic. However, it is clear that Austen was genuinely attracted to Lefroy and subsequently none of her other suitors ever quite measured up to him. The Lefroy family intervened and sent him away at the end of January. Marriage was impractical as both Lefroy and Austen must have known. Neither had any money, and he was dependent on a great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career. If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again. In November 1798, Lefroy was still on Austen's mind as she wrote to her sister she had tea with one of his relatives, wanted desperately to ask about him, but could not bring herself to raise the subject.
Early manuscripts (1796–1798)
After finishing Lady Susan, Austen began her first full-length novel Elinor and Marianne. Her sister remembered that it was read to the family "before 1796" and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility.
Austen began a second novel, First Impressions (later published as Pride and Prejudice), in 1796. She completed the initial draft in August 1797, aged 21; as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an "established favourite". At this time, her father made the first attempt to publish one of her novels. In November 1797, George Austen wrote to Thomas Cadell, an established publisher in London, to ask if he would consider publishing First Impressions. Cadell returned Mr. Austen's letter, marking it "Declined by Return of Post". Austen may not have known of her father's efforts. Following the completion of First Impressions, Austen returned to Elinor and Marianne and from November 1797 until mid-1798, revised it heavily; she eliminated the epistolary format in favour of third-person narration and produced something close to Sense and Sensibility. In 1797, Austen met her cousin (and future sister-in-law), Eliza de Feuillide, a French aristocrat whose first husband the Comte de Feuillide had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austen. The description of the execution of the Comte de Feuillide related by his widow left Austen with an intense horror of the French Revolution that lasted for the rest of her life.
During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of Elinor and Marianne, Austen began writing a third novel with the working title Susan—later Northanger Abbey—a satire on the popular Gothic novel. Austen completed her work about a year later. In early 1803, Henry Austen offered Susan to Benjamin Crosby, a London publisher, who paid £10 for the copyright. Crosby promised early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being "in the press", but did nothing more. The manuscript remained in Crosby's hands, unpublished, until Austen repurchased the copyright from him in 1816.
Bath and Southampton
In December 1800 George Austen unexpectedly announced his decision to retire from the ministry, leave Steventon, and move the family to 4, Sydney Place in Bath. While retirement and travel were good for the elder Austens, Jane Austen was shocked to be told she was moving from the only home she had ever known. An indication of her state of mind is her lack of productivity as a writer during the time she lived at Bath. She was able to make some revisions to Susan, and she began and then abandoned a new novel, The Watsons, but there was nothing like the productivity of the years 1795–1799. Tomalin suggests this reflects a deep depression disabling her as a writer, but Honan disagrees, arguing Austen wrote or revised her manuscripts throughout her creative life, except for a few months after her father died. It is often claimed that Austen was unhappy in Bath, which caused her to lose interest in writing, but it is just as possible that Austen's social life in Bath prevented her from spending much time writing novels. The critic Robert Irvine argued that if Austen spent more time writing novels when she was in the countryside, it might just have been because she had more spare time as opposed to being more happy in the countryside as is often argued. Furthermore, Austen frequently both moved and travelled over southern England during this period, which was hardly a conducive environment for writing a long novel. Austen sold the rights to publish Susan to a publisher Crosby & Company, who paid her £10. The Crosby & Company advertised Susan, but never published it.
The years from 1801 to 1804 are something of a blank space for Austen scholars as Cassandra destroyed all of her letters from her sister in this period for unknown reasons. In December 1802 Austen received her only known proposal of marriage. She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted. As described by Caroline Austen, Jane's niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive—he was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance. No contemporary letters or diaries describe how Austen felt about this proposal. Irvine described Bigg-Wither as a somebody who "...seems to have been a man very hard to like, let alone love".
In 1814, Austen wrote a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, who had asked for advice about a serious relationship, telling her that "having written so much on one side of the question, I shall now turn around & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection". The English scholar Douglas Bush wrote that Austen had "had a very high ideal of the love that should unite a husband and wife ... All of her heroines ... know in proportion to their maturity, the meaning of ardent love". A possible autobiographical element in Sense and Sensibility occurs when Elinor Dashwood contemplates that "the worse and most irremediable of all evils, a connection for life" with an unsuitable man.
In 1804, while living in Bath, Austen started, but did not complete, her novel The Watsons. The story centres on an invalid and impoverished clergyman and his four unmarried daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as "a study in the harsh economic realities of dependent women's lives". Honan suggests, and Tomalin agrees, that Austen chose to stop work on the novel after her father died on 21 January 1805 and her personal circumstances resembled those of her characters too closely for her comfort.
Her father's relatively sudden death left Jane, Cassandra, and their mother in a precarious financial situation. Edward, James, Henry, and Francis Austen (known as Frank) pledged to make annual contributions to support their mother and sisters. For the next four years, the family's living arrangements reflected their financial insecurity. They spent part of the time in rented quarters in Bath before leaving the city in June 1805 for a family visit to Steventon and Godmersham. They moved for the autumn months to the newly fashionable seaside resort of Worthing, on the Sussex coast, where they resided at Stanford Cottage. It was here that Austen is thought to have written her fair copy of Lady Susan and added its "Conclusion". In 1806 the family moved to Southampton, where they shared a house with Frank Austen and his new wife. A large part of this time they spent visiting various branches of the family.
On 5 April 1809, about three months before the family's move to Chawton, Austen wrote an angry letter to Richard Crosby, offering him a new manuscript of Susan if needed to secure the immediate publication of the novel, and requesting the return of the original so she could find another publisher. Crosby replied that he had not agreed to publish the book by any particular time, or at all, and that Austen could repurchase the manuscript for the £10 he had paid her and find another publisher. She did not have the resources to buy the copyright back at that time, but was able to purchase it in 1816.
Chawton
Around early 1809 Austen's brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a more settled life—the use of a large cottage in Chawton village that was part of Edward's nearby estate, Chawton House. Jane, Cassandra and their mother moved into Chawton cottage on 7 July 1809. Life was quieter in Chawton than it had been since the family's move to Bath in 1800. The Austens did not socialise with gentry and entertained only when family visited. Her niece Anna described the family's life in Chawton as "a very quiet life, according to our ideas, but they were great readers, and besides the housekeeping our aunts occupied themselves in working with the poor and in teaching some girl or boy to read or write."
Published author
Like many women authors at the time, Austen published her books anonymously. At the time, the ideal roles for a woman were as wife and mother, and writing for women was regarded at best as a secondary form of activity; a woman who wished to be a full-time writer was felt to be degrading her femininity, so books by women were usually published anonymously in order to maintain the conceit that the female writer was only publishing as a sort of part-time job, and was not seeking to become a "literary lioness" (i.e a celebrity).
During her time at Chawton, Jane Austen published four generally well-received novels. Through her brother Henry, the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and Sensibility, which, like all of Jane Austen's novels except Pride and Prejudice, was published "on commission", that is, at the author's financial risk. When publishing on commission, publishers would advance the costs of publication, repay themselves as books were sold and then charge a 10% commission for each book sold, paying the rest to the author. If a novel did not recover its costs through sales, the author was responsible for them. The alternative to selling via commission was by selling the copyright, where an author received a one-time payment from the publisher for the manuscript, which occurred with Pride and Prejudice. Austen's experience with Susan (the manuscript that became Northanger Abbey) where she sold the copyright to the publisher Crosby & Sons for £10, who did not publish the book, forcing her to buy back the copyright in order to get her work published, left Austen leery of this method of publishing. The final alternative, of selling by subscription, where a group of people would agree to buy a book in advance, was not an option for Austen as only authors who were well known or had an influential aristocratic patron who would recommend an up-coming book to their friends, could sell by subscription. Sense and Sensibility appeared in October 1811, and was described as being written "By a Lady". As it was sold on commission, Egerton used expensive paper and set the price at 15 shillings.
Reviews were favourable and the novel became fashionable among young aristocratic opinion-makers; the edition sold out by mid-1813. Austen's novels were published in larger editions than was normal for this period. The small size of the novel-reading public and the large costs associated with hand production (particularly the cost of handmade paper) meant that most novels were published in editions of 500 copies or less to reduce the risks to the publisher and the novelist. Even some of the most successful titles during this period were issued in editions of not more than 750 or 800 copies and later reprinted if demand continued. Austen's novels were published in larger editions, ranging from about 750 copies of Sense and Sensibility to about 2,000 copies of Emma. It is not clear whether the decision to print more copies than usual of Austen's novels was driven by the publishers or the author. Since all but one of Austen's books were originally published "on commission", the risks of overproduction were largely hers (or Cassandra's after her death) and publishers may have been more willing to produce larger editions than was normal practice when their own funds were at risk. Editions of popular works of non-fiction were often much larger.
Austen made £140 from Sense and Sensibility, which provided her with some financial and psychological independence. After the success of Sense and Sensibility, all of Austen's subsequent books were billed as written "By the author of Sense and Sensibility" and Austen's name never appeared on her books during her lifetime. Egerton then published Pride and Prejudice, a revision of First Impressions, in January 1813. Austen sold the copyright to Pride and Prejudice to Egerton for £110. To maximise profits, he used cheap paper and set the price at 18 shillings. He advertised the book widely and it was an immediate success, garnering three favourable reviews and selling well. Had Austen sold Pride and Prejudice on commission, she would have made a profit of £475, or twice her father's annual income. By October 1813 Egerton was able to begin selling a second edition. Mansfield Park was published by Egerton in May 1814. While Mansfield Park was ignored by reviewers, it was very popular with readers. All copies were sold within six months, and Austen's earnings on this novel were larger than for any of her other novels.
Without Austen's knowledge or approval, her novels were translated into French and published in cheaply produced, pirated editions in France. The literary critic Noel King commented in 1953 that, given the prevailing rage in France at the time for lush romantic fantasies, it was remarkable that her novels with the emphasis on everyday English life had any sort of a market in France. However, King cautioned that Austen's chief translator in France, Madame Isabelle de Montolieu, had only the most rudimentary knowledge of English, and her translations were more of "imitations" than translations proper, as Montolieu depended upon assistants to provide a summary, which she then translated into an embellished French that often radically altered Austen's plots and characters. The first of the Austen novels to be published that credited her as the author was in France, when Persuasion was published in 1821 as La Famille Elliot ou L'Ancienne Inclination.
Austen learned that the Prince Regent admired her novels and kept a set at each of his residences. In November 1815, the Prince Regent's librarian James Stanier Clarke invited Austen to visit the Prince's London residence and hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming Emma to the Prince. Though Austen disapproved of the Prince Regent, she could scarcely refuse the request. Austen disapproved of the Prince Regent on the account of his womanising, gambling, drinking, spendthrift ways and generally disreputable behaviour. She later wrote Plan of a Novel, according to Hints from Various Quarters, a satiric outline of the "perfect novel" based on the librarian's many suggestions for a future Austen novel. Austen was greatly annoyed by Clarke's often pompous literary advice, and the Plan of A Novel parodying Clarke was intended as her revenge for all of the unwanted letters she had received from the royal librarian.
In mid-1815 Austen moved her work from Egerton to John Murray, a better known London publisher, who published Emma in December 1815 and a second edition of Mansfield Park in February 1816. Emma sold well, but the new edition of Mansfield Park did poorly, and this failure offset most of the income from Emma. These were the last of Austen's novels to be published during her lifetime.
While Murray prepared Emma for publication, Austen began The Elliots, later published as Persuasion. She completed her first draft in July 1816. In addition, shortly after the publication of Emma, Henry Austen repurchased the copyright for Susan from Crosby. Austen was forced to postpone publishing either of these completed novels by family financial troubles. Henry Austen's bank failed in March 1816, depriving him of all of his assets, leaving him deeply in debt and costing Edward, James, and Frank Austen large sums. Henry and Frank could no longer afford the contributions they had made to support their mother and sisters.
Illness and death
Austen was feeling unwell by early 1816, but ignored the warning signs. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable, and she began a slow, irregular deterioration. The majority of biographers rely on Zachary Cope's 1964 retrospective diagnosis and list her cause of death as Addison's disease, although her final illness has also been described as resulting from Hodgkin's lymphoma. When her uncle died and left his entire fortune to his wife, effectively disinheriting his relatives, she suffered a relapse, writing, "I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle's Will brought on a relapse ... but a weak Body must excuse weak Nerves".
She continued to work in spite of her illness. Dissatisfied with the ending of The Elliots, she rewrote the final two chapters, which she finished on 6 August 1816. In January 1817, Austen began The Brothers (titled Sanditon when published in 1925), and completed twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably due to illness. Todd describes Sanditons heroine, Diana Parker, as an "energetic invalid". In the novel, Austen mocked hypochondriacs and though she describes the heroine as "bilious", five days after abandoning the novel she wrote of herself that she was turning "every wrong colour" and living "chiefly on the sofa". She put down her pen on 18 March 1817, making a note of it.
Austen made light of her condition, describing it as "bile" and rheumatism. As her illness progressed, she experienced difficulty walking and lacked energy; by mid-April she was confined to bed. In May, Cassandra and Henry brought her to Winchester for treatment, by which time she suffered agonising pain and welcomed death. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817 at the age of 41. Henry, through his clerical connections, arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen's personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation and mentions the "extraordinary endowments of her mind", but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer.
Posthumous publication
In the months after Austen's death in July 1817, Cassandra, Henry Austen and Murray arranged for the publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey as a set. Henry Austen contributed a Biographical Note dated December 1817, which for the first time identified his sister as the author of the novels. Tomalin describes it as "a loving and polished eulogy". Sales were good for a year—only 321 copies remained unsold at the end of 1818.
Although Austen's six novels were out of print in England in the 1820s, they were still being read through copies housed in private libraries and circulating libraries. Austen had early admirers. The first piece of what might now be called fan fiction (or real person fiction) using her as a character appeared in 1823 in a letter to the editor in The Lady's Magazine. It refers to Austen's genius and suggests that aspiring authors were envious of her powers.
In 1832 Richard Bentley purchased the remaining copyrights to all of her novels, and over the following winter published five illustrated volumes as part of his Standard Novels series. In October 1833, Bentley released the first collected edition of her works. Since then, Austen's novels have been continuously in print.
Genre and style
Austen's works critique the sentimental novels of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. The earliest English novelists, Richardson, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, were followed by the school of sentimentalists and romantics such as Walter Scott, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and Oliver Goldsmith, whose style and genre Austen rejected, returning the novel on a "slender thread" to the tradition of Richardson and Fielding for a "realistic study of manners". In the mid-20th century, literary critics F. R. Leavis and Ian Watt placed her in the tradition of Richardson and Fielding; both believe that she used their tradition of "irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both".
Walter Scott noted Austen's "resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much of modern fiction—'the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries'". Yet her rejection of these genres is complex, as evidenced by Northanger Abbey and Emma. Similar to William Wordsworth, who excoriated the modern frantic novel in the "Preface" to his Lyrical Ballads (1800), Austen distances herself from escapist novels; the discipline and innovation she demonstrates is similar to his, and she shows "that rhetorically less is artistically more." She eschewed popular Gothic fiction, stories of terror in which a heroine typically was stranded in a remote location, a castle or abbey (32 novels between 1784 and 1818 contain the word "abbey" in their title). Yet in Northanger Abbey she alludes to the trope, with the heroine, Catherine, anticipating a move to a remote locale. Rather than full-scale rejection or parody, Austen transforms the genre, juxtaposing reality, with descriptions of elegant rooms and modern comforts, against the heroine's "novel-fueled" desires. Nor does she completely denigrate Gothic fiction: instead she transforms settings and situations, such that the heroine is still imprisoned, yet her imprisonment is mundane and real—regulated manners and the strict rules of the ballroom. In Sense and Sensibility Austen presents characters who are more complex than in staple sentimental fiction, according to critic Keymer, who notes that although it is a parody of popular sentimental fiction, "Marianne in her sentimental histrionics responds to the calculating world ... with a quite justifiable scream of female distress."
Richardson's Pamela, the prototype for the sentimental novel, is a didactic love story with a happy ending, written at a time women were beginning to have the right to choose husbands and yet were restricted by social conventions. Austen attempted Richardson's epistolary style, but found the flexibility of narrative more conducive to her realism, a realism in which each conversation and gesture carries a weight of significance. The narrative style utilises free indirect speech—she was the first English novelist to do so extensively—through which she had the ability to present a character's thoughts directly to the reader and yet still retain narrative control. The style allows an author to vary discourse between the narrator's voice and values and those of the characters.
Austen had a natural ear for speech and dialogue, according to scholar Mary Lascelles: "Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing and thoughts of their characters." Techniques such as fragmentary speech suggest a character's traits and their tone; "syntax and phrasing rather than vocabulary" is utilised to indicate social variants. Dialogue reveals a character's mood—frustration, anger, happiness—each treated differently and often through varying patterns of sentence structures. When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Darcy, her stilted speech and the convoluted sentence structure reveals that he has wounded her:
From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that the groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike. And I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.
Austen's plots highlight women's traditional dependence on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. As an art form, the 18th-century novel lacked the seriousness of its equivalents from the 19th century, when novels were treated as "the natural vehicle for discussion and ventilation of what mattered in life". Rather than delving too deeply into the psyche of her characters, Austen enjoys them and imbues them with humour, according to critic John Bayley. He believes that the well-spring of her wit and irony is her own attitude that comedy "is the saving grace of life". Part of Austen's fame rests on the historical and literary significance that she was the first woman to write great comic novels. Samuel Johnson's influence is evident, in that she follows his advice to write "a representation of life as may excite mirth".
Her humour comes from her modesty and lack of superiority, allowing her most successful characters, such as Elizabeth Bennet, to transcend the trivialities of life, which the more foolish characters are overly absorbed in. Austen used comedy to explore the individualism of women's lives and gender relations, and she appears to have used it to find the goodness in life, often fusing it with "ethical sensibility", creating artistic tension. Critic Robert Polhemus writes, "To appreciate the drama and achievement of Austen, we need to realize how deep was her passion for both reverence and ridicule ... and her comic imagination reveals both the harmonies and the telling contradictions of her mind and vision as she tries to reconcile her satirical bias with her sense of the good."
Reception
Contemporaneous responses
As Austen's works were published anonymously, they brought her little personal renown. They were fashionable among opinion-makers, but were rarely reviewed. Most of the reviews were short and on balance favourable, although superficial and cautious, most often focused on the moral lessons of the novels.
Sir Walter Scott, a leading novelist of the day, anonymously wrote a review of Emma 1815, using it to defend the then-disreputable genre of the novel and praising Austen's realism, "the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes from an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him". The other important early review was attributed to Richard Whately in 1821. However, Whately denied having authored the review, which drew favourable comparisons between Austen and such acknowledged greats as Homer and Shakespeare, and praised the dramatic qualities of her narrative. Scott and Whately set the tone for almost all subsequent 19th-century Austen criticism.
19th century
Because Austen's novels did not conform to Romantic and Victorian expectations that "powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and colour in the writing", 19th-century critics and audiences preferred the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Though the Romantic Scott was positive, Austen's work did not match the prevailing aesthetic values of the Romantic zeitgeist. Her novels were republished in Britain from the 1830s and sold steadily, but they were not best-sellers.
The first French critic who paid notice to Austen was Philarète Chasles in an 1842 essay, dismissing her in two sentences as a boring, imitative writer with no substance. Austen was almost completely ignored in France until 1878, when the French critic Léon Boucher published the essay Le Roman Classique en Angleterre, in which he called Austen a "genius", the first French author to do so. The first accurate translation of Austen into French occurred in 1899 when Félix Fénéon translated Northanger Abbey as Catherine Moreland.
In Britain, Austen gradually grew in the estimation of the literati. Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes published a series of enthusiastic articles in the 1840s and 1850s. Later in the century, novelist Henry James referred to Austen several times with approval, and on one occasion ranked her with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding as among "the fine painters of life".
The publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced Austen to a wider public as "dear aunt Jane", the respectable maiden aunt. Publication of the Memoir spurred the reissue of Austen's novels—the first popular editions were released in 1883 and fancy illustrated editions and collectors' sets quickly followed. Author and critic Leslie Stephen described the popular mania that started to develop for Austen in the 1880s as "Austenolatry". Around the start of the 20th century, an intellectual clique of Janeites reacted against the popularisation of Austen, distinguishing their deeper appreciation from the vulgar enthusiasm of the masses.
In response, Henry James decried "a beguiled infatuation" with Austen, a rising tide of public interest that exceeded Austen's "intrinsic merit and interest". The American literary critic A. Walton Litz noted that the "anti-Janites" in the 19th and 20th centuries comprised a formidable literary squad of Mark Twain, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, D. H. Lawrence and Kingsley Amis, but in "every case the adverse judgement merely reveals the special limitations or eccentricities of the critic, leaving Jane Austen relatively untouched".
Modern
Austen's works have attracted legions of scholars. The first dissertation on Austen was published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard University. Another early academic analysis came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley, who grouped Austen's novels into "early" and "late" works, a distinction still used by scholars today. The first academic book devoted to Austen in France was Jane Austen by Paul and Kate Rague (1914), who set out to explain why French critics and readers should take Austen seriously. The same year, Léonie Villard published Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres, originally her PhD thesis, the first serious academic study of Austen in France. In 1923, R.W. Chapman published the first scholarly edition of Austen's collected works, which was also the first scholarly edition of any English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published editions of Austen's works.
With the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles' Jane Austen and Her Art, the academic study of Austen took hold. Lascelles analyzed the books Austen read and their influence on her work, and closely examined Austen's style and "narrative art". Concern arose that academics were obscuring the appreciation of Austen with increasingly esoteric theories, a debate that has continued since.
The period since World War II has seen a diversity of critical approaches to Austen, including feminist theory, and perhaps most controversially, postcolonial theory. The divide has widened between the popular appreciation of Austen, particularly by modern Janeites, and academic judgements. In 1994, literary critic Harold Bloom placed Austen among the greatest Western writers of all time.
In the People's Republic of China after 1949, writings of Austen were regarded as too frivolous, and thus during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–69, Austen was banned as a "British bourgeois imperialist". In the late 1970s, when Austen's works was re-published in China, her popularity with readers confounded the authorities who had trouble understanding that people generally read books for enjoyment, not political edification.
In a typical modern debate, the conservative American professor Gene Koppel, to the indignation of his liberal literature students, mentioned that Austen and her family were "Tories of the deepest dye", i.e. Conservatives in opposition to the liberal Whigs. Although several feminist authors such as Claudia Johnson and Mollie Sandock claimed Austen for their own cause, Koppel argued that different people react to a work of literature in different subjective ways, as explained by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thus competing interpretations of Austen's work can be equally valid, provided they are grounded in textual and historical analysis: it is equally possible to see Austen as a feminist critiquing Regency society and as a conservative upholding its values.
Adaptations
Austen's novels have resulted in sequels, prequels and adaptations of almost every type, from soft-core pornography to fantasy. From the 19th century, her family members published conclusions to her incomplete novels, and by 2000 there were over 100 printed adaptations. The first dramatic adaptation of Austen was published in 1895, Rosina Filippi's Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane Austen: Arranged and Adapted for Drawing-Room Performance, and Filippi was also responsible for the first professional stage adaptation, The Bennets (1901). The first film adaptation was the 1940 MGM production of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. BBC television dramatisations since the 1970s have attempted to adhere meticulously to Austen's plots, characterisations and settings. The British critic Robert Irvine noted that in American film adaptations of Austen's novels, starting with the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, class is subtly downplayed, and the society of Regency England depicted by Austen that is grounded in a hierarchy based upon the ownership of land and the antiquity of the family name is one that Americans cannot embrace in its entirety.
From 1995 many Austen adaptations appeared, with Ang Lee's film of Sense and Sensibility, for which screenwriter and star Emma Thompson won an Academy Award, and the BBC's immensely popular TV mini-series Pride and Prejudice, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. A 2005 British production of Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, was followed in 2007 by ITV's Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and in 2016 by Love & Friendship starring Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan, a film version of Lady Susan, that borrowed the title of Austen's Love and [sic].
Honours
Austen is on the £10 note which was introduced in 2017, replacing Charles Darwin.
List of works
Novels
Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Mansfield Park (1814)
Emma (1815)
Northanger Abbey (1818, posthumous)
Persuasion (1818, posthumous)
Lady Susan (1871, posthumous)
Unfinished fiction
The Watsons (1804)
Sanditon (1817)
Other works
Sir Charles Grandison (adapted play) (1793, 1800)
Plan of a Novel (1815)
Poems (1796–1817)
Prayers (1796–1817)
Letters (1796–1817)
Juvenilia—Volume the First (1787–1793)
Frederic & Elfrida
Jack & Alice
Edgar & Emma
Henry and Eliza
The Adventures of Mr. Harley
Sir William Mountague
Memoirs of Mr. Clifford
The Beautifull Cassandra
Amelia Webster
The Visit
The Mystery
The Three Sisters
A Fragment
A beautiful description
The generous Curate
Ode to Pity
Juvenilia—Volume the Second (1787–1793)
Love and Freindship
Lesley Castle
The History of England
A Collection of Letters
The female philosopher
The first Act of a Comedy
A Letter from a Young Lady
A Tour through Wales
A Tale
Juvenilia—Volume the Third (1787–1793)
Evelyn
Catharine, or The Bower
Family trees
See also
Jane Austen's family and ancestry
Notes
References
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Further reading
Gubar, Susan and Sandra Gilbert. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984 [1979]. .
External links
Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition, a digital archive from the University of Oxford
A Memoir of Jane Austen by James Edward Austen-Leigh
Jane Austen at the British Library
Museums
Jane Austen's House Museum in Chawton
The Jane Austen Centre in Bath
Fan sites and societies
The Republic of Pemberley
The Jane Austen Society of Australia
The Jane Austen Society of North America
The Jane Austen Society of the United Kingdom
1775 births
1817 deaths
18th-century English novelists
19th-century English novelists
18th-century English women writers
18th-century English writers
19th-century English women writers
Austen family
Burials at Winchester Cathedral
Culture in Bath, Somerset
19th-century deaths from tuberculosis
English Anglicans
English romantic fiction writers
History of Bath, Somerset
History of Winchester
Tuberculosis deaths in England
People from Steventon, Hampshire
People from Chawton
People from Winchester
English women novelists
Women of the Regency era
Writers of Gothic fiction
Women romantic fiction writers
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15785 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June | June | June is the sixth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars, the second of four months to have a length of 30 days, and the third of five months to have a length of less than 31 days. June contains the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the day with the most daylight hours, and the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, the day with the fewest daylight hours (excluding polar regions in both cases). June in the Northern Hemisphere is the seasonal equivalent to December in the Southern Hemisphere and vice versa. In the Northern Hemisphere, the beginning of the traditional astronomical summer is 21 June (meteorological summer begins on 1 June). In the Southern Hemisphere, meteorological winter begins on 1 June.
At the start of June, the sun rises in the constellation of Taurus; at the end of June, the sun rises in the constellation of Gemini. However, due to the precession of the equinoxes, June begins with the sun in the astrological sign of Gemini, and ends with the sun in the astrological sign of Cancer.
Etymology and history
The Latin name for June is Junius. Ovid offers multiple etymologies for the name in the Fasti, a poem about the Roman calendar. The first is that the month is named after the Roman goddess Juno, the goddess of marriage and the wife of the supreme deity Jupiter; the second is that the name comes from the Latin word iuniores, meaning "younger ones", as opposed to maiores ("elders") for which the preceding month May (Maius) may be named.
Another source claims June is named after Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic and ancestor of the Roman gens Junia.
In ancient Rome, the period from mid-May through mid-June was considered inauspicious for marriage. Ovid says that he consulted the Flaminica Dialis, the high priestess of Jupiter, about setting a date for his daughter's wedding, and was advised to wait till after June 15. Plutarch, however, implies that the entire month of June was more favorable for weddings than May.
Certain meteor showers take place in June. The Arietids takes place May 22 to July 2 each year, and peaks on June 7. The Beta Taurids June 5 to July 18. The June Bootids take place roughly between 26 June and 2 July each year.
Ancient Roman observances
Under the calendar of ancient Rome, the festival of Ludi Fabarici took place on May 29 – June 1, Kalendae Fabariae took place on June 1, the Festival to Bellona took place on June 3, Ludi Piscatorii took place on June 7, and Vestalia took place from June 7 – June 15. A Rosalia was held on June 20. The Secular Games were held roughly every 100 years in either May or June. These dates do not correspond to the modern Gregorian calendar.
Events in June
Month-long observances
LGBTQ+ Awareness and Pride month
In Catholic tradition, June is the Month of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.
African-American Music Appreciation Month (officially recognized by the United States)
ALS Awareness Month (Canada)
Caribbean American Heritage Month (United States)
Crop over (Barbados), celebrated until the first Monday in August.
Great Outdoors Month (United States)
National Smile Month (United Kingdom)
National Oceans Month (United States)
Season of Emancipation (April 14 to August 23) (Barbados)
PTSD Awareness Month (United States)
Non-Gregorian observances, 2019
(All Baha'i, Islamic, and Jewish observances begin at the sundown prior to the date listed, and end at sundown of the date in question unless otherwise noted.)
List of observances set by the Bahá'í calendar
List of observances set by the Chinese calendar
List of observances set by the Hebrew calendar
List of observances set by the Islamic calendar
List of observances set by the Solar Hijri calendar
Moveable observances
Phi Ta Khon (Dan Sai, Loei province, Isan, Thailand) Dates are selected by village mediums and can take place anywhere between March and July.
See also Movable Western Christian observances
See also Movable Eastern Christian observances
By other date
First Tuesday
International Children's Day
First Wednesday
Global Running Day
World Bicycle Day
First Friday
Labour Day (Bahamas)
National Doughnut Day (United States)
First Saturday
Birthday of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (Malaysia)
National Trails Day (United States)
Saiō Matsuri (Meiwa, Mie, Japan)
First Sunday
Armed Forces Day (Canada)
Children's Day (United States)
Father's Day (Lithuania, Switzerland)
National Cancer Survivors Day (United States)
Teacher's Day (Hungary)
The Seamen's Day (Iceland)
First Monday
June Holiday (Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh) (Republic of Ireland)
Queen's Official Birthday (New Zealand, Cook Islands, Western Australia)
Western Australia Day
Second Thursday
Seersucker Thursday (United States)
Second Saturday
China's Cultural Heritage Day (China)
Start of National Dairy Goat Awareness Week, ending on the third Saturday
National Day (Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands, Tristan da Cunha (United Kingdom))
Queen's Official Birthday (United Kingdom, Tuvalu)
Second Sunday
Canadian Rivers Day
Children's Day (United States)
Father's Day (Austria, Belgium)
Mother's Day (Luxembourg)
Third Week
Bike Week (Bicycle Week) (United Kingdom, Ireland)
Second Monday
Queen's Official Birthday (Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Australia, with the exception of Western Australia, which celebrates on the first Monday)
Flag Day (US)
Monday after the second Saturday
Queen's Official Birthday (Norfolk Island)
Third Friday
National Flip Flop Day (United States)
Third Saturday
Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere
Day of Private Reflection (Northern Ireland)
International Surfing Day
International Yoga Day
Midsummer
World Music Day
Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere
We Tripantu, (Mapuche, southern Chile)
Willkakuti, an Andean-Amazonic New Year (Aymara)
Saturday between June 20–25
Finnish Flag Day
Juhannus (Finland)
Saturday nearest Summer Solstice
Pixie Day (Ottery St. Mary, England)
Third Sunday
Father's Day (Afghanistan, Albania, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Aruba, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Brunei, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Curaçao, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Dominica, Ecuador, Ethiopia, France, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Guyana, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Kosovo, Kuwait, Laos, Macau, Madagascar, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Mozambique, Namibia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, People's Republic of China, Peru, Philippines, Qatar, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe)
Monday Nearest to June 24
Discovery Day (Newfoundland and Labrador)
Last Thursday
National Bomb Pop Day (United States)
Friday following Third Sunday
Take Your Dog to Work Day (United Kingdom, United States)
Last Saturday
Armed Forces Day (United Kingdom)
Inventors' and Rationalizers' Day (Russia)
Veterans' Day (Netherlands)
Last Sunday
Father's Day (Haiti)
Log Cabin Day (Michigan, United States)
Mother's Day (Kenya)
Fixed Gregorian observances
May 15 – June 15 Tourette Syndrome awareness month.
May 25 – June 25 Bicycle Month (Canada)
May 27 – June 3 National Reconciliation Week (Australia)
May 28 – Flag Day (Philippines) (Display of the flag in all places until June 12 is encouraged)
May 31 – June 1 Gawai Dayak (Dayaks in Sarawak, Malaysia and West Kalimantan, Indonesia)
June 1
Children's Day (International), and its related observances:
Global Day of Parents
The Day of Protection of Children Rights (Armenia)
Mothers' and Children's Day (Mongolia)
Fei Fei Day (Vancouver)
Global Day of Parents
Independence Day (Samoa)
Madaraka Day (Kenya)
National Maritime Day (Mexico)
National Tree Planting Day (Cambodia)
Pancasila Day (Indonesia)
President's Day (Palau)
Victory Day (Tunisia)
World Milk Day
June 2
Children's Day (North Korea)
Civil Aviation Day (Azerbaijan)
Coronation of King Jigme Singye Wangchuck (Bhutan)
Day of Hristo Botev (Bulgaria)
Decoration Day (Canada)
Festa della Repubblica (Italy)
International Whores' Day
National Rocky Road Day (United States)
National Rotisserie Chicken Day (United States)
Social Forestry Day (Bhutan)
June 3
Confederate Memorial Day (Kentucky, Louisiana, and Tennessee, United States)
Economist day (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Mabo Day (Australia)
Martyr's Day (Uganda)
National Chocolate Macaroon Day (United States)
National Egg Day (United States)
Opium Suppression Movement Day (Taiwan)
World Clubfoot Day
June 4
Armed Forces Day/Birthday of Marshal of Finland Gustaf Mannerheim (Finland)
Emancipation Day/Independence Day (Tonga)
Flag Day (Estonia)
International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression
National Cheese Day (United States)
National Cognac Day (United States)
National Unity Day (Hungary)
Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 Memorial Day (International)
June 5
Arbor Day (New Zealand)
Constitution Day (Denmark)
Constitution Day (Faroe Island)
Day of Reclamation (Azerbaijan)
Father's Day (Denmark)
Indian Arrival Day (Suriname)
Liberation Day (Seychelles)
National Gingerbread Day (United States)
National Moonshine Day (United States)
President's Day (Equatorial Guinea)
Teachers' Day (Romania)
World Environment Day
June 6
Anniversary of the Normandy Landings
Argentina's Engineering Day
Engineer's Day (Taiwan)
Memorial Day (South Korea)
Korean Children's Union Foundation Day (North Korea)
National Applesauce Day (United States)
National Day of Sweden (Sweden)
Queensland Day (Queensland)
Teachers' Day (Bolivia)
UN Russian Language Day (United Nations)
June 7
Anniversary of the Memorandum of the Slovak Nation (Slovakia)
Battle of Arica Day (Arica y Parinacota Region, Chile)
Birthday of Prince Joachim (Denmark)
Chocolate Ice Cream Day (United States)
Commemoration Day of St John the Forerunner (Armenian Apostolic Church)
Flag Day (Peru)
Journalist Day (Argentina)
Ludi Piscatorii (Roman Empire)
Sette Giugno (Malta)
Union Dissolution Day (Norway)
June 8
Bounty Day (Norfolk Island)
Caribbean American HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
Engineer's Day (Peru)
Primož Trubar Day (Slovenia)
World Brain Tumor Day (international)
World Oceans Day (international)
June 9
Anniversary of the Accession of King Abdullah II (Jordan)
Autonomy Day (Åland)
La Rioja Day (La Rioja)
Murcia Day (Murcia)
National Heroes' Day (Uganda)
June 10
Abolition Day (French Guiana)
Army Day (Jordan)
National Iced Tea Day (United States)
Navy Day (Italy)
Portugal Day (Portugal)
Reconciliation Day (Republic of the Congo)
June 11
American Evacuation Day (Libya)
Birthday of Prince Henrik (Denmark)
Brazilian Navy commemorative day
Davis Day (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada)
Kamehameha Day (Hawaii, United States)
National Corn on the Cob Day (United States)
National German Chocolate Cake Day Day (United States)
Student Day (Honduras)
June 12
Chaco Armistice Day (Paraguay)
Dia dos Namorados (Brazil)
Helsinki Day (Finland)
June 12 Commemoration (Lagos State)
Loving Day (United States)
Independence Day (Philippines)|Philippine Independence Day
National Peanut Butter Cookie Day (United States)
Russia Day (Russia)
World Day Against Child Labour (international)
June 13
Inventors' Day (Hungary)
Suleimaniah City Fallen and Martyrs Day (Iraqi Kurdistan)
June 14
Commemoration of the Soviet Deportation related observances:
Mourning and Commemoration Day or Leinapäev (Estonia)
Mourning and Hope Day (Lithuania)
Day of Memory for Repressed People (Armenia)
Flag Day (United States)
Freedom Day (Malawi)
Liberation Day (Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands)
World Blood Donor Day (international)
June 15
Arbor Day (Costa Rica)
Cagayan de Oro Charter Day (Cagayan de Oro City)
Day of Valdemar and Reunion day (Flag Day) (Denmark)
Engineer's Day (Italy)
Global Wind Day (international)
Mangaia Gospel Day (Mangaia, Cook Islands)
National Lobster Day (United States)
National Salvation Day (Azerbaijan)
Statehood Day (Arkansas, United States)
June 16
Bloomsday (Dublin, Ireland)
Engineer's Day (Argentina)
International Day of the African Child
Anniversary of Martyrdom of Guru Arjan Dev (Sikhism)
National Fudge Day (United States)
Sussex Day (Sussex)
Youth Day (South Africa)
June 17
Bunker Hill Day (Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States)
Father's Day (El Salvador, Guatemala)
Icelandic National Day
National Eat Your Vegetables Day (United States)
Occupation of the Latvian Republic Day (Latvia)
World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought (International)
June 18
Autistic Pride Day (International)
Human Rights Day (Azerbaijan)
Foundation Day (Benguet)
Human Rights Day (Azerbaijan)
International Sushi Day
National Day (Seychelles)
Queen Mother's Birthday (Cambodia)
Waterloo Day (United Kingdom)
June 19
Day of the Independent Hungary (Hungary)
Feast of Forest (Palawan)
Juneteenth (United States, especially African Americans)
Labour Day (Trinidad and Tobago)
Laguna Day (Laguna)
Never Again Day (Uruguay)
Surigao del Norte Day (Surigao del Norte)
Surigao del Sur Day (Surigao del Sur)
World Sickle Cell Day (International)
World Sauntering Day
June 20
Day of the National Flag (Argentina)
Festival in honor of Summanus (Roman Empire)
Gas Sector Day (Azerbaijan)
Martyrs' Day (Eritrea)
National Ice Cream Soda Day (United States)
National Kouign Amann Day (United States)
National Vanilla Milkshake Day (United States)
West Virginia Day (West Virginia)
World Refugee Day (International)
June 21
Day of the Martyrs (Togo)
Father's Day (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Uganda, United Arab Emirates)
Go Skateboarding Day
National Indigenous Peoples Day (Canada)
National Day (Greenland)
National Peaches 'N' Cream Day (United States)
World Humanist Day (Humanism)
World Hydrography Day
June 22
Anti-Fascist Struggle Day (Croatia)
Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Great Patriotic War (Belarus)
Father's Day (Guernsey, Isle of Man, and Jersey)
Teachers' Day (El Salvador)
June 23
Father's Day (Nicaragua, Poland)
Grand Duke's Official Birthday (Luxembourg)
International Widows Day (international)
National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism (Canada)
Okinawa Memorial Day (Okinawa, Japan)
Saint John's Eve (Roman Catholic Church, Europe):
Bonfires of Saint John (Spain)
First day of Golowan Festival (Cornwall)
Jaaniõhtu (Estonia)
Jāņi (Latvia)
Last day of Drăgaica fair (Buzău, Romania)
Festa de São João do Porto (Portugal)
United Nations Public Service Day (International)
Victory Day (Estonia)
June 24
Army Day or Battle of Carabobo Day (Venezuela)
Bannockburn Day (Scotland)
Day of the Caboclo (Amazonas, Brazil)
Saint John's Day, second day of celebrations.
Enyovden (Bulgaria)
Jaanipäev (Estonia)
Jāņi (Latvia)
Jónsmessa (Iceland)
Midsummer Day (England)
Saint Jonas' Festival or Joninės (Lithuania)
Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day (Quebec, Canada)
Sânziene (western Carpathian Mountains of Romania)
Youth Day (Ukraine)
June 25
Arbor Day (Philippines)
Independence Day (Mozambique)
National Catfish Day (United States)
Statehood Day (Croatia)
Statehood Day (Slovenia)
Statehood Day (Virginia)
Teacher's Day (Guatemala)
World Vitiligo Day
June 26
Army and Navy Day (Azerbaijan)
Flag Day (Romania)
Independence Day (Madagascar)
Independence Day (Somalia)
International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking (International)
International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (International)
National Chocolate Pudding Day (United States)
Ratcatcher's Day (Hamelin, Germany)
Sunthorn Phu Day (Thailand)
World Refrigeration Day (International)
June 27
Canadian Multiculturalism Day (Canada)
Day of Turkmen Workers of Culture and Art (Turkmenistan)
Helen Keller Day (United States)
Independence Day (Djibouti)
Mixed Race Day (Brazil)
National HIV Testing Day (United States)
PTSD Awareness Day (United States)
Seven Sleepers Day or Siebenschläfertag (Germany)
Unity Day (Tajikistan)
June 28
Carolina Day (South Carolina, United States)
Constitution Day (Ukraine)
Family Day (Vietnam)
National Ceviche Day (United States)
National Tapicoa Day (United States)
Poznań Remembrance Day (Poland)
Soviet Occupation Day, Moldova
Stonewall Riots Anniversary (United States)
Tau Day
Vidovdan (Eastern Orthodox Church)
June 29
Feast of Saints Peter and Paul
Haro Wine Festival (Haro, La Rioja, Spain)
Engineer's Day (Ecuador)
Fallen Soldiers' and Missing in Action Memorial Day ()
Independence Day (Seychelles)
Veterans' Day (Netherlands)
June 30
Armed Forces Day (Guatemala)
General Prayer Day (Central African Republic)
Independence Day (Democratic Republic of the Congo)
Navy Day (Israel)
Philippine–Spanish Friendship Day (Philippines)
Revolution Day (Sudan)
June symbols
June's birthstones are pearl, alexandrite and moonstone.
The birth flowers are rose and honeysuckle.
The zodiac signs for the month of June are Gemini (until June 20) and Cancer (from June 21 onwards). Both of these dates are for United States Eastern Daylight Time. For the world UT/GMT the dates are 19–20.
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15786 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July | July | July is the seventh month of the year (between June and August) in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and the fourth of seven months to have a length of 31 days. It was named by the Roman Senate in honour of Roman general Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., it being the month of his birth. Before about 713 B.C. it was called Quintilis, being the fifth month of the 10-month calendar.
It is on average the warmest month in most of the Northern Hemisphere, where it is the second month of summer, and the coldest month in much of the Southern Hemisphere, where it is the second month of winter. The second half of the year commences in July. In the Southern Hemisphere, July is the seasonal equivalent of January in the Northern hemisphere.
"Dog days" are considered to begin in early July in the Northern Hemisphere, when the hot sultry weather of summer usually starts. Spring lambs born in late winter or early spring are usually sold before 1 July.
July symbols
July's birthstone is the ruby, which symbolizes contentment.
Its birth flowers are the Larkspur or the Water Lily.
The zodiac signs for the month of July are Cancer (until July 22) and Leo (July 23 onwards).
Observances
This list does not necessarily imply either official status nor general observance.
Season of Emancipation 14 April to 23 August (Barbados)
Honor America Days: 14 June to 4 July (United States)
Month-long observances
In Catholic tradition, July is the Month of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus.
National Hot Dog Month (United States)
National Ice Cream Month (United States)
Non-Gregorian observances
(All Baha'i, Islamic, and Jewish observances begin at the sundown before the date listed, and end at sundown of the date in question unless otherwise noted.)
List of observances set by the Bahá'í calendar
List of observances set by the Chinese calendar
List of observances set by the Hebrew calendar
List of observances set by the Islamic calendar
List of observances set by the Solar Hijri calendar
Movable observances
Phi Ta Khon (Dan Sai, Loei province, Isan, Thailand) – Dates are selected by village mediums and can take place anywhere between March and July.
Ra o te Ui Ariki (Cook Islands) July 6
Collector Car Appreciation Day (United States)
Senior Citizen's Day (Kiribati)
Shark Week (United States)
Earth Overshoot Day
See also Movable Western Christian observances
See also Movable Eastern Christian observances
First Friday
Fishermen's Holiday (Marshall Islands)
First Saturday
American Independence Day
Día del Amigo (Peru)
International Co-operative Day
International Free Hugs Day
First Saturday and Sunday
Navy Days (Netherlands)
First Sunday
Navy Day (Ukraine)
Youth Day (Singapore)
Sunday closest to 2 July
Alexanderson Day (Sweden)
First full week in July
NAIDOC Week (Australia)
First Monday
CARICOM Day (Guyana)
Heroes' Day (Zambia)
Mother's Day (South Sudan)
National Day (Cayman Islands)
5 July or following Monday if it's a weekend
Tynwald Day (Isle of Man)
Day after first Monday
Unity Day (Zambia)
Second Thursday
National Tree Day (Mexico)
Second Sunday
Father's Day (Uruguay)
Sea Sunday (Western Christianity)
Nearest Sunday to 11 July
National Day of Commemoration (Ireland)
Third Monday
Birthday of Don Luis Muñoz Rivera (Puerto Rico, United States)
Children's Day (Cuba, Panama, and Venezuela)
Galla Bayramy (Turkmenistan)
Marine Day (Japan)
Presidents' Day (Botswana)
Third Sunday
Galla Bayramy (Turkmenistan)
National Ice Cream Day (United States)
Second to last Sunday in July and the following two weeks
Construction Holiday (Quebec)
Third Tuesday
Birthday of Don Luis Muñoz Rivera (Puerto Rico, United States)
Fourth Sunday
Parents' Day (United States)
Friday preceding the Fourth Saturday and the following Sunday
Tobata Gion Yamagasa festival (Tobata, Japan)
Fourth Thursday
National Chili Dog Day (United States)
Last Saturday
Black Saturday (France)
National Dance Day (United States)
Last Sunday
Father's Day (Dominican Republic)
National Tree Day (Australia)
Navy Day (Russia)
Reek Sunday (Ireland)
Thursday before the first Monday
Emancipation Day (Bermuda)
Following Friday
Somer's Day (Bermuda)
Last Friday
National Schools Tree Day (Australia)
System Administrator Appreciation Day
Fixed Gregorian observances
July 1
Armed Forces Day (Singapore)
Canada Day (Canada)
Children's Day (Pakistan)
Communist Party of China Founding Day (People's Republic of China)
Day of Officials and Civil Servants (Hungary)
Doctors' Day (India)
Emancipation Day (Netherlands Antilles)
Engineer's Day (Bahrain, Mexico)
Feast of the Most Precious Blood (removed from official Roman Catholic calendar since 1969)
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day (Hong Kong, China)
Independence Day (Burundi)
Independence Day (Rwanda)
Independence Day (Somalia)
International Tartan Day
July Morning (Bulgaria)
Keti Koti (Emancipation Day) (Suriname)
Madeira Day (Madeira, Portugal)
Moving Day (Quebec) (Canada)
National Creative Ice Cream Flavor Day (United States)
National Gingersnap Day (United States)
Newfoundland and Labrador Memorial Day
Republic Day (Ghana)
Sir Seretse Khama Day (Botswana)
Territory Day (British Virgin Islands)
Van Mahotsav, celebrated until July 7 (India)
July 2
Flag Day (Curaçao) (Kingdom of the Netherlands)
Palio di Provenzano (Siena, Italy)
Police Day (Azerbaijan)
World UFO Day
July 3
The start of the dog days according to the Old Farmer's Almanac but not according to established meaning in most European cultures.
Emancipation Day (United States Virgin Islands)
Independence Day (Belarus)
Stay out of the Sun Day
July 4
Birthday of Queen Sonja (Norway)
Dree Festival, celebrated until July 7 (Apatani people, Arunachal Pradesh, India)
Independence Day (Abkhazia)
Independence Day (United States)
Liberation Day (Northern Mariana Islands)
Liberation Day (Rwanda)
Republic Day (Philippines)
July 5
Armed Forces Day (Venezuela)
Bloody Thursday (International Longshore and Warehouse Union)
Constitution Day (Armenia)
Emancipation Day (New York City, United States)
Independence Day (Algeria)
Independence Day (Cape Verde)
Independence Day (Venezuela)
Saints Cyril and Methodius Feast Day (celebrated as a public holiday in Slovakia)
X-Day (Church of the SubGenius)
July 6
Constitution Day (Cayman Islands)
Day of the Capital (Kazakhstan)
National Fried Chicken Day (United States)
Independence Day (Comoros)
Independence Day/Republic Day, (Malawi)
Jan Hus Day (Czech Republic)
Kupala Night (Poland, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine)
Statehood Day (Lithuania)
Teachers' Day (Peru)
July 7
Independence Day (Solomon Islands)
Ivan Kupala Day (Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine)
Saba Saba Day (Tanzania)
Tanabata (Japan, Gregorian date, some follow the traditional calendar)
World Chocolate Day
July 8
Air Force and Air Defense Forces Day (Ukraine)
Peter and Fevronia Day (Russian Orthodox)
July 9
Arbor Day (Cambodia)
Constitution Day (Australia)
Constitution Day (Palau)
Constitutionalist Revolution Day (São Paulo)
Day of the Employees of the Diplomatic Service (Azerbaijan)
Independence Day (Argentina, South Sudan)
Nunavut Day (Nunavut)
July 10
Armed Forces Day (Mauritania)
Beatles Day (Liverpool and Hamburg)
Independence Day (Bahamas)
Nikola Tesla Day
Statehood Day (Wyoming)
July 11
China National Maritime Day (China)
Day of the Flemish Community (Flemish Community of Belgium)
Eleventh Night (Northern Ireland)
Gospel Day (Kiribati)
Imamat Day (Isma'ilism)
World Population Day (International)
July 12
Birthday of the Heir to the Crown of Tonga (Tonga)
Independence Day (Kiribati, São Tomé and Príncipe)
Malala Day
The Twelfth, also known as Orangemen's Day (Northern Ireland, Newfoundland and Labrador)
July 13
Statehood Day (Montenegro)
July 14
Bastille Day (France and French dependencies)
Birthday of Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, an official flag flying day (Sweden)
Hondurans' Day (Honduras)
Republic Day (Iraq)
July 15
Bon Festival (Kantō region, Japan)
Elderly Men Day (Kiribati)
Festival of Santa Rosalia (Palermo, Sicily)
Sultan's Birthday (Brunei Darussalam)
July 16
Engineer's Day (Honduras)
Holocaust Memorial Day (France)
July 17
International Firgun Day
Constitution Day (Finland)
July 18
Constitution Day (Uruguay)
Nelson Mandela International Day
July 19
Liberation Day (Nicaragua)
Martyrs' Day (Burma)
July 20
Día del Amigo (Argentina)
Engineer's Day (Costa Rica)
Independence Day (Colombia)
Lempira's Day (Honduras)
Tree Planting Day (Central African Republic)
July 21
Belgian National Day
Racial Harmony Day (Singapore)
July 22
Foundation Day in Cleveland
July 23
Birthday of Haile Selassie (Rastafari)
Children's Day (Indonesia)
Flag Day (Abkhazia)
National Hot Dog Day (United States)
National Remembrance Day (Papua New Guinea)
Renaissance Day (Oman)
Revolution Day (Egypt)
July 24
Children's Day (Vanuatu)
Navy Day (Venezuela)
Pioneer Day (Utah) (United States)
Simón Bolívar Day (Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, and Bolivia)
July 25
Guanacaste Day (Costa Rica)
National Day of Galicia (Galicia (Spain))
National Baha'i Day (Jamaica)
Puerto Rico Constitution Day (Puerto Rico)
Republic Day (Tunisia)
Revolution Day (Egypt)
July 26
Day of National Significance (Barbados)
Day of the National Rebellion (Cuba)
Independence Day (Liberia)
Independence Day (Maldives)
Kargil Victory Day (India)
July 27
Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War (North Korea)
Iglesia ni Cristo Day (the Philippines)
José Celso Barbosa Day (Puerto Rico)
Martyrs and Wounded Soldiers Day (Vietnam)
National Korean War Veterans Armistice Day (United States)
National Sleepy Head Day (Finland)
July 28
Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval (Canada)
Fiestas Patrias (Peru)
Liberation Day (San Marino)
Ólavsøka Eve (Faroe Islands)
World Hepatitis Day
July 29
International Tiger Day
National Anthem Day (Romania)
National Thai Language Day (Thailand)
Ólavsøka, opening of the Løgting session (Faroe Islands)
Olsok (Faroe Islands, (Finland, Norway)
July 30
Feast of the Throne (Morocco)
Día del Amigo (Paraguay)
Independence Day (Vanuatu)
Martyrs Day (South Sudan)
July 31
Saint Ignatius of Loyola
Ka Hae Hawaiʻi Day (Hawaii, United States)
Martyrdom Day of Shahid Udham Singh (Haryana and Punjab, India)
Treasury Day (Poland)
Warriors' Day (Malaysia)
See also
List of historical anniversaries
References
External links
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15787 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January%201 | January 1 | January 1 or 1 January is the first day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. There are 364 days remaining until the end of the year (365 in leap years). This day is known as New Year's Day since the day marks the beginning of the year.
Events
Pre-1600
153 BC – For the first time, Roman consuls begin their year in office on January 1.
45 BC – The Julian calendar takes effect as the civil calendar of the Roman Empire, establishing January 1 as the new date of the new year.
42 BC – The Roman Senate posthumously deifies Julius Caesar.
193 – The Senate chooses Pertinax against his will to succeed Commodus as Roman emperor.
404 – Saint Telemachus tries to stop a gladiatorial fight in a Roman amphitheatre, and is stoned to death by the crowd. This act impresses the Christian Emperor Honorius, who issues a historic ban on gladiatorial fights.
417 – Emperor Honorius forces Galla Placidia into marriage to Constantius, his famous general (magister militum) (probable).
1001 – Grand Prince Stephen I of Hungary is named the first King of Hungary by Pope Sylvester II (probable).
1068 – Romanos IV Diogenes marries Eudokia Makrembolitissa and is crowned Byzantine Emperor.
1259 – Michael VIII Palaiologos is proclaimed co-emperor of the Empire of Nicaea with his ward John IV Laskaris.
1438 – Albert II of Habsburg is crowned King of Hungary.
1500 – Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvarez Cabral discovers the coast of Brazil.
1502 – The present-day location of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is first explored by the Portuguese.
1515 – Twenty-year-old Francis, Duke of Brittany, succeeds to the French throne following the death of his father-in-law, Louis XII.
1527 – Croatian nobles elect Ferdinand I, Archduke of Austria as King of Croatia in the 1527 election in Cetin.
1601–1900
1600 – Scotland recognises January 1 as the start of the year, instead of March 25.
1604 – The Masque of Indian and China Knights is performed by courtiers of James VI and I at Hampton Court.
1651 – Charles II is crowned King of Scotland.
1700 – Russia begins using the Anno Domini era instead of the Anno Mundi era of the Byzantine Empire.
1707 – John V is proclaimed King of Portugal and the Algarves in Lisbon.
1739 – Bouvet Island, the world's remotest island, is discovered by French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier.
1772 – The first traveler's cheques, which could be used in 90 European cities, are issued by the London Credit Exchange Company.
1773 – The hymn that became known as "Amazing Grace", then titled "1 Chronicles 17:16–17", is first used to accompany a sermon led by John Newton in the town of Olney, Buckinghamshire, England.
1776 – American Revolutionary War: Norfolk, Virginia is burned by combined Royal Navy and Continental Army action.
1776 – General George Washington hoists the first United States flag, the Grand Union Flag, at Prospect Hill.
1781 – American Revolutionary War: One thousand five hundred soldiers of the 6th Pennsylvania Regiment under General Anthony Wayne's command rebel against the Continental Army's winter camp in Morristown, New Jersey in the Pennsylvania Line Mutiny of 1781.
1788 – First edition of The Times of London, previously The Daily Universal Register, is published.
1801 – The legislative union of Kingdom of Great Britain and Kingdom of Ireland is completed, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is proclaimed.
1801 – Ceres, the largest and first known object in the Asteroid belt, is discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi.
1804 – French rule ends in Haiti. Haiti becomes the first black-majority republic and second independent country in North America after the United States.
1806 – The French Republican Calendar is abolished.
1808 – The United States bans the importation of slaves.
1810 – Major-General Lachlan Macquarie officially becomes Governor of New South Wales.
1822 – The Greek Constitution of 1822 is adopted by the First National Assembly at Epidaurus.
1834 – Most of Germany forms the Zollverein customs union, the first such union between sovereign states.
1847 – The world's first "Mercy" Hospital is founded in Pittsburgh, United States, by a group of Sisters of Mercy from Ireland; the name will go on to grace over 30 major hospitals throughout the world.
1860 – The first Polish stamp is issued, replacing the Russian stamps previously in use.
1861 – Liberal forces supporting Benito Juárez enter Mexico City.
1863 – American Civil War: The Emancipation Proclamation takes effect in Confederate territory.
1877 – Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom is proclaimed Empress of India.
1885 – Twenty-five nations adopt Sandford Fleming's proposal for standard time (and also, time zones).
1890 – Eritrea is consolidated into a colony by the Italian government.
1892 – Ellis Island begins processing immigrants into the United States.
1898 – New York, New York annexes land from surrounding counties, creating the City of Greater New York. The four initial boroughs, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and The Bronx, are joined on January 25 by Staten Island to create the modern city of five boroughs.
1899 – Spanish rule ends in Cuba.
1900 – Nigeria becomes British protectorate with Frederick Lugard as high commissioner.
1901–present
1901 – The Southern Nigeria Protectorate is established within the British Empire.
1901 – The British colonies of New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia federate as the Commonwealth of Australia; Edmund Barton is appointed the first Prime Minister.
1902 – The first American college football bowl game, the Rose Bowl between Michigan and Stanford, is held in Pasadena, California.
1910 – Captain David Beatty is promoted to Rear admiral, and becomes the youngest admiral in the Royal Navy (except for Royal family members) since Horatio Nelson.
1912 – The Republic of China is established.
1914 – The SPT Airboat Line becomes the world's first scheduled airline to use a winged aircraft.
1923 – Britain's Railways are grouped into the Big Four: LNER, GWR, SR, and LMS.
1927 – New Mexican oil legislation goes into effect, leading to the formal outbreak of the Cristero War.
1928 – Boris Bazhanov defects through Iran. He is the only assistant of Joseph Stalin's secretariat to have defected from the Eastern Bloc.
1929 – The former municipalities of Point Grey, British Columbia and South Vancouver, British Columbia are amalgamated into Vancouver.
1932 – The United States Post Office Department issues a set of 12 stamps commemorating the 200th anniversary of George Washington's birth.
1934 – Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay becomes a United States federal prison.
1934 – A "Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring" comes into effect in Nazi Germany.
1942 – The Declaration by United Nations is signed by twenty-six nations.
1945 – World War II: The German Luftwaffe launches Operation Bodenplatte, a massive, but failed, attempt to knock out Allied air power in northern Europe in a single blow.
1947 – Cold War: The American and British occupation zones in Allied-occupied Germany, after World War II, merge to form the Bizone, which later (with the French zone) became part of West Germany.
1947 – The Canadian Citizenship Act 1946 comes into effect, converting British subjects into Canadian citizens. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King becomes the first Canadian citizen.
1948 – The British railway network is nationalized to form British Railways.
1949 – United Nations cease-fire takes effect in Kashmir from one minute before midnight. War between India and Pakistan stops accordingly.
1956 – Sudan achieves independence from Egypt and the United Kingdom.
1957 – George Town, Penang, is made a city by a royal charter of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.
1957 – Lèse majesté in Thailand is strengthened to include "insult" and changed to a crime against national security, after the Thai criminal code of 1956 went into effect.
1958 – The European Economic Community is established.
1959 – Cuban Revolution: Fulgencio Batista, dictator of Cuba, is overthrown by Fidel Castro's forces.
1960 – Cameroon achieves independence from France and the United Kingdom.
1962 – Western Samoa achieves independence from New Zealand; its name is changed to the Independent State of Western Samoa.
1964 – The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is divided into the independent republics of Zambia and Malawi, and the British-controlled Rhodesia.
1965 – The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan is founded in Kabul, Afghanistan.
1970 – The defined beginning of Unix time, at 00:00:00.
1971 – Cigarette advertisements are banned on American television.
1973 – Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom are admitted into the European Economic Community.
1976 – A bomb explodes on board Middle East Airlines Flight 438 over Qaisumah, Saudi Arabia, killing all 81 people on board.
1978 – Air India Flight 855, a Boeing 747, crashes into the Arabian Sea off the coast of Bombay, India, due to instrument failure, spatial disorientation, and pilot error, killing all 213 people on board.
1979 – Normal diplomatic relations are established between the People's Republic of China and the United States.
1981 – Greece is admitted into the European Community.
1982 – Peruvian Javier Pérez de Cuéllar becomes the first Latin American to hold the title of Secretary-General of the United Nations.
1983 – The ARPANET officially changes to using TCP/IP, the Internet Protocol, effectively creating the Internet.
1984 – The original American Telephone & Telegraph Company is divested of its 22 Bell System companies as a result of the settlement of the 1974 United States Department of Justice antitrust suit against AT&T.
1984 – Brunei becomes independent of the United Kingdom.
1985 – The first British mobile phone call is made by Michael Harrison to his father Sir Ernest Harrison, chairman of Vodafone.
1987 – The Isleta Pueblo tribe elect Verna Williamson to be their first female governor.
1988 – The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America comes into existence, creating the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States.
1989 – The Montreal Protocol comes into force, stopping the use of chemicals contributing to ozone depletion.
1990 – David Dinkins is sworn in as New York City's first black mayor.
1993 – Dissolution of Czechoslovakia: Czechoslovakia is divided into the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic.
1994 – The Zapatista Army of National Liberation initiates twelve days of armed conflict in the Mexican state of Chiapas.
1994 – The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) comes into effect.
1995 – The World Trade Organization comes into being.
1995 – The Draupner wave in the North Sea in Norway is detected, confirming the existence of freak waves.
1995 – Austria, Finland and Sweden join the EU.
1998 – Following a currency reform, Russia begins to circulate new rubles to stem inflation and promote confidence.
1999 – Euro currency is introduced in 11 member nations of the European Union (with the exception of the United Kingdom, Denmark, Greece and Sweden; Greece adopts the euro two years later).
2004 – In a vote of confidence, General Pervez Musharraf wins 658 out of 1,170 votes in the Electoral College of Pakistan, and according to Article 41(8) of the Constitution of Pakistan, is "deemed to be elected" to the office of President until October 2007.
2007 – Bulgaria and Romania join the EU.
2007 – Adam Air Flight 574 breaks apart in mid-air and crashes near the Makassar Strait, Indonesia, killing all 102 people on board.
2009 – Sixty-six people die in a nightclub fire in Bangkok, Thailand.
2010 – A suicide car bomber detonates at a volleyball tournament in Lakki Marwat, Pakistan, killing 105 and injuring 100 more.
2011 – A bomb explodes as Coptic Christians in Alexandria, Egypt, leave a new year service, killing 23 people.
2011 – Estonia officially adopts the Euro currency and becomes the 17th Eurozone country.
2013 – At least 60 people are killed and 200 injured in a stampede after celebrations at Félix Houphouët-Boigny Stadium in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
2015 – The Eurasian Economic Union comes into effect, creating a political and economic union between Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
2017 – An attack on a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey, during New Year's celebrations, kills at least 39 people and injures more than 60 others.
Births
Pre-1600
766 – Ali al-Ridha (d. 818) 8th Imam of Twelver Shia Islam
1431 – Pope Alexander VI (d. 1503)
1449 – Lorenzo de' Medici, Italian politician (d. 1492)
1467 – Sigismund I the Old, Polish king (d. 1548)
1484 – Huldrych Zwingli, Swiss pastor and theologian (d. 1531)
1511 – Henry, Duke of Cornwall, first-born child of Henry VIII of England (d. 1511)
1557 – Stephen Bocskay, Prince of Transylvania (d. 1606)
1600 – Friedrich Spanheim, Dutch theologian and academic (d. 1649)
1601–1900
1628 – Christoph Bernhard, German composer and theorist (d. 1692)
1655 – Christian Thomasius, German jurist and philosopher (d. 1728)
1684 – Arnold Drakenborch, Dutch scholar and author (d. 1748)
1704 – Soame Jenyns, English author, poet, and politician (d. 1787)
1711 – Baron Franz von der Trenck, Austrian soldier (d. 1749)
1714 – Giovanni Battista Mancini, Italian soprano and author (d. 1800)
1714 – Kristijonas Donelaitis, Lithuanian pastor and poet (d. 1780)
1735 – Paul Revere, American silversmith and engraver (d. 1818)
1745 – Anthony Wayne, American general and politician (d. 1796)
1752 – Betsy Ross, American seamstress, sewed flags for the Pennsylvania Navy during the Revolutionary War (d. 1836)
1768 – Maria Edgeworth, Anglo-Irish author (d. 1849)
1769 – Marie-Louise Lachapelle, French obstetrician (d. 1821)
1774 – André Marie Constant Duméril, French zoologist and academic (d. 1860)
1779 – William Clowes, English publisher (d. 1847)
1803 – Edward Dickinson, American politician and father of poet Emily Dickinson (d. 1874)
1806 – Lionel Kieseritzky, Estonian-French chess player (d. 1853)
1809 – Achille Guenée, French lawyer and entomologist (d. 1880)
1813 – George Bliss, American politician (d. 1868)
1814 – Hong Xiuquan, Chinese rebellion leader and king (d. 1864)
1818 – William Gamble, Irish-born American general (d. 1866)
1819 – Arthur Hugh Clough, English-Italian poet and academic (d. 1861)
1819 – George Foster Shepley, American general (d. 1878)
1823 – Sándor Petőfi, Hungarian poet and activist (d. 1849)
1833 – Robert Lawson, Scottish-New Zealand architect, designed the Otago Boys' High School and Knox Church (d. 1902)
1834 – Ludovic Halévy, French author and playwright (d. 1908)
1839 – Ouida, English-Italian author and activist (d. 1908)
1848 – John W. Goff, Irish-American lawyer and politician (d. 1924)
1852 – Eugène-Anatole Demarçay, French chemist and academic (d. 1904)
1854 – James George Frazer, Scottish anthropologist and academic (d. 1941)
1854 – Thomas Waddell, Irish-Australian politician, 15th Premier of New South Wales (d. 1940)
1857 – Tim Keefe, American baseball player (d. 1933)
1858 – Heinrich Rauchinger, Kraków-born painter (d. 1942)
1859 – Michael Joseph Owens, American inventor (d. 1923)
1859 – Thibaw Min, Burmese king (d. 1916)
1860 – Michele Lega, Italian cardinal (d. 1935)
1863 – Pierre de Coubertin, French historian and educator, founded the International Olympic Committee (d. 1937)
1864 – Alfred Stieglitz, American photographer and curator (d. 1946)
1864 – Qi Baishi, Chinese painter (d. 1957)
1867 – Mary Acworth Evershed, English astronomer and scholar (d. 1949)
1874 – Frank Knox, American publisher and politician, 46th United States Secretary of the Navy (d. 1944)
1874 – Gustave Whitehead, German-American pilot and engineer (d. 1927)
1877 – Alexander von Staël-Holstein, German sinologist and orientalist (d. 1937)
1878 – Agner Krarup Erlang, Danish mathematician, statistician, and engineer (d. 1929)
1879 – E. M. Forster, English author and playwright (d. 1970)
1879 – William Fox, Hungarian-American screenwriter and producer, founded the Fox Film Corporation and Fox Theatres (d. 1952)
1883 – William J. Donovan, American general, lawyer, and politician (d. 1959)
1884 – Chikuhei Nakajima, Japanese lieutenant, engineer, and politician, founded Nakajima Aircraft Company (d. 1949)
1887 – Wilhelm Canaris, German admiral (d. 1945)
1888 – Georgios Stanotas, Greek general (d. 1965)
1888 – John Garand, Canadian-American engineer, designed the M1 Garand rifle (d. 1974)
1889 – Charles Bickford, American actor (d. 1967)
1890 – Anton Melik, Slovenian geographer and academic (d. 1966)
1891 – Sampurnanand, Indian educator and politician, 3rd Governor of Rajasthan (d. 1969)
1892 – Mahadev Desai, Indian author and activist (d. 1942)
1892 – Artur Rodziński, Polish-American conductor (d. 1958)
1892 – Manuel Roxas, Filipino lawyer and politician, 5th President of the Philippines (d. 1948)
1893 – Mordechai Frizis, Greek colonel (d. 1940)
1894 – Satyendra Nath Bose, Indian physicist and mathematician (d. 1974)
1894 – Edward Joseph Hunkeler, American clergyman (d. 1970)
1895 – J. Edgar Hoover, American law enforcement official; 1st Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (d. 1972)
1900 – Chiune Sugihara, Japanese soldier and diplomat (d. 1986)
1900 – Xavier Cugat, Spanish-American singer-songwriter and actor (d. 1990)
1901–present
1902 – Buster Nupen, Norwegian-South African cricketer and lawyer (d. 1977)
1902 – Hans von Dohnányi, German jurist and political dissident (d. 1945)
1904 – Fazal Ilahi Chaudhry, Pakistani lawyer and politician, 5th President of Pakistan (d. 1982)
1905 – Stanisław Mazur, Ukrainian-Polish mathematician and theorist (d. 1981)
1906 – Manuel Silos, Filipino filmmaker and actor (d. 1988)
1907 – Kinue Hitomi, Japanese sprinter and long jumper (d. 1931)
1909 – Dana Andrews, American actor (d. 1992)
1909 – Stepan Bandera, Ukrainian soldier and politician (d. 1959)
1911 – Audrey Wurdemann, American poet and author (d. 1960)
1911 – Basil Dearden, English director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1971)
1911 – Hank Greenberg, American baseball player (d. 1986)
1911 – Roman Totenberg, Polish-American violinist and educator (d. 2012)
1912 – Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko, Russian mathematician and historian (d. 1995)
1912 – Kim Philby, British spy (d. 1988)
1912 – Nikiforos Vrettakos, Greek poet and academic (d. 1991)
1914 – Noor Inayat Khan, British SOE agent (d. 1944)
1917 – Shannon Bolin, American actress and singer (d. 2016)
1918 – Patrick Anthony Porteous, Scottish colonel, Victoria Cross recipient (d. 2000)
1918 – Willy den Ouden, Dutch swimmer (d. 1997)
1919 – Rocky Graziano, American boxer and actor (d. 1990)
1919 – Carole Landis, American actress (d. 1948)
1919 – Sheila Mercier, British actress, Emmerdale Farm (d. 2019)
1919 – J. D. Salinger, American soldier and author (d. 2010)
1920 – Osvaldo Cavandoli, Italian cartoonist (d. 2007)
1921 – Ismail al-Faruqi, Palestinian-American philosopher and academic (d. 1986)
1921 – César Baldaccini, French sculptor and academic (d. 1998)
1921 – Regina Bianchi, Italian actress (d. 2013)
1922 – Ernest Hollings, American soldier and politician, 106th Governor of South Carolina (d. 2019)
1923 – Valentina Cortese, Italian actress (d. 2019)
1923 – Milt Jackson, American jazz vibraphonist and composer (d. 1999)
1924 – Francisco Macías Nguema, Equatorial Guinean politician, 1st President of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea (d. 1979)
1925 – Matthew Beard, American child actor (d. 1981)
1925 – Paul Bomani, Tanzanian politician and diplomat, 1st Tanzanian Minister of Finance (d. 2005)
1926 – Kazys Petkevičius, Lithuanian basketball player and coach (d. 2008)
1927 – Maurice Béjart, French-Swiss dancer, choreographer, and director (d. 2007)
1927 – James Reeb, American clergyman and political activist (d. 1965)
1927 – Vernon L. Smith, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1927 – Doak Walker, American football player and businessman (d. 1998)
1928 – Ernest Tidyman, American author and screenwriter (d. 1984)
1928 – Gerhard Weinberg, German-American historian, author, and academic
1929 – Larry L. King, American journalist, author, and playwright (d. 2012)
1930 – Frederick Wiseman, American director and producer
1932 – Giuseppe Patanè, Italian conductor (d. 1989)
1933 – James Hormel, American philanthropist and diplomat
1933 – Joe Orton, English dramatist (d. 1967)
1934 – Alan Berg, American lawyer and radio host (d. 1984)
1934 – Lakhdar Brahimi, Algerian politician, Algerian Minister of Foreign Affairs
1935 – Om Prakash Chautala, Indian politician
1936 – James Sinegal, American businessman, co-founded Costco
1938 – Frank Langella, American actor
1939 – Michèle Mercier, French actress
1939 – Phil Read, English motorcycle racer and businessman
1939 – Senfronia Thompson, American politician
1939 – Younoussi Touré, Malian politician, Prime Minister of Mali
1942 – Dennis Archer, American lawyer and politician, 67th Mayor of Detroit
1942 – Anthony Hamilton-Smith, 3rd Baron Colwyn, English dentist and politician
1942 – Country Joe McDonald, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1942 – Alassane Ouattara, Ivorian economist and politician, President of the Ivory Coast
1942 – Gennadi Sarafanov, Russian pilot and cosmonaut (d. 2005)
1943 – Don Novello, American comedian, screenwriter and producer
1943 – Tony Knowles, American soldier and politician, 7th Governor of Alaska
1943 – Vladimir Šeks, Croatian lawyer and politician, 16th Speaker of the Croatian Parliament
1944 – Omar al-Bashir, Sudanese field marshal and politician, 7th President of Sudan
1944 – Barry Beath, Australian rugby league player
1944 – Zafarullah Khan Jamali, Pakistani field hockey player and politician, 13th Prime Minister of Pakistan (d.2020)
1944 – Teresa Torańska, Polish journalist and author (d. 2013)
1944 – Mati Unt, Estonian author, playwright, and director (d. 2005)
1945 – Jacky Ickx, Belgian racing driver
1945 – Victor Ashe, American politician and former United States Ambassador to Poland
1946 – Claude Steele, American social psychologist and academic
1946 – Rivellino, Brazilian footballer and manager
1947 – Jon Corzine, American sergeant and politician, 54th Governor of New Jersey
1948 – Devlet Bahçeli, Turkish economist, academic, and politician, 57th Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey
1948 – Dick Quax, New Zealand runner and politician (d. 2018)
1948 – Pavel Grachev, Russian general and politician, 1st Russian Minister of Defence (d. 2012)
1949 – Borys Tarasyuk, Ukrainian politician and diplomat
1950 – Wayne Bennett, Australian rugby league player and coach
1950 – Tony Currie, English footballer
1952 – Shaji N. Karun, Indian director and cinematographer
1953 – Gary Johnson, American businessman and politician, 29th Governor of New Mexico
1954 – Bob Menendez, American lawyer and politician
1954 – Dennis O'Driscoll, Irish poet and critic (d. 2012)
1954 – Yannis Papathanasiou, Greek engineer and politician, Greek Minister of Finance
1955 – LaMarr Hoyt, American baseball player
1955 – Mary Beard, English classicist, academic and presenter
1956 – Sergei Avdeyev, Russian engineer and astronaut
1956 – Royce Ayliffe, Australian rugby league player
1956 – Christine Lagarde, French lawyer and politician; Managing Director, International Monetary Fund
1956 – Martin Plaza, Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist
1957 – Karen Pence, American political figure Second Lady of the United States
1957 – Evangelos Venizelos, Greek lawyer and politician, Deputy Prime Minister of Greece
1958 – Grandmaster Flash, Barbadian rapper and DJ
1959 – Abdul Ahad Mohmand, Afghan colonel, pilot, and astronaut
1959 – Azali Assoumani, Comorian colonel and politician, President of the Comoros
1959 – Panagiotis Giannakis, Greek basketball player and coach
1961 – Sam Backo, Australian rugby league player
1962 – Anton Muscatelli, Italian-Scottish economist and academic
1963 – Jean-Marc Gounon, French racing driver
1964 – Dedee Pfeiffer, American actress
1966 – Anna Burke, Australian businesswoman and politician, 28th Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives
1966 – Ivica Dačić, Serbian journalist and politician, 95th Prime Minister of Serbia
1966 – Tihomir Orešković, Croatian–Canadian businessman, 11th Prime Minister of Croatia
1967 – Tawera Nikau, New Zealand rugby league player
1968 – Davor Šuker, Croatian footballer
1969 – Verne Troyer, American actor (d. 2018)
1970 – Sergei Kiriakov, Russian footballer and coach
1971 – Bobby Holík, Czech-American ice hockey player and coach
1971 – Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia, Indian politician
1971 – Sammie Henson, American wrestler and coach
1972 – Lilian Thuram, French footballer
1974 – Christian Paradis, Canadian lawyer and politician, 9th Canadian Minister of Industry
1975 – Chris Anstey, Australian basketball player and coach
1975 – Joe Cannon, American soccer player and sportscaster
1975 – Becky Kellar-Duke, Canadian ice hockey player
1975 – Fernando Tatís, Dominican baseball player
1979 – Vidya Balan, Indian actress
1981 – Zsolt Baumgartner, Hungarian racing driver
1981 – Mladen Petrić, Croatian footballer
1982 – David Nalbandian, Argentinian tennis player
1982 – Egidio Arévalo Ríos, Uruguayan footballer
1983 – Melaine Walker, Jamaican hurdler
1983 – Park Sung-hyun, South Korean archer
1983 – Calum Davenport, English footballer
1984 – Paolo Guerrero, Peruvian footballer
1984 – Michael Witt, Australian rugby league player
1985 – Steven Davis, Northern Irish footballer
1985 – Tiago Splitter, Brazilian basketball player
1986 – Pablo Cuevas, Uruguayan tennis player
1986 – Ramses Barden, American football player
1986 – Glen Davis, American Basketball player
1986 – Colin Morgan, Northern Irish actor
1987 – Meryl Davis, American ice dancer
1987 – Patric Hörnqvist, Swedish ice hockey player
1988 – Marcel Gecov, Czech footballer
1989 – Jason Pierre-Paul, American football player
1990 – Julia Glushko, Israeli tennis player
1991 – Darius Slay, American football player
1991 – Xavier Su'a-Filo, American football player
1992 – Nathaniel Peteru, New Zealand rugby league player
1994 – Brendan Elliot, Australian rugby league player
1997 – Keegan Hipgrave, Australian rugby league player
2003 – Daria Trubnikova, Russian rhythmic gymnast
Deaths
Pre-1600
138 – Lucius Aelius, adopted son and intended successor of Hadrian (b. 101)
404 – Telemachus, Christian monk and martyr
898 – Odo I, Frankish king (b. 860)
951 – Ramiro II, king of León and Galicia
1031 – William of Volpiano, Italian abbot (b. 962)
1189 – Henry of Marcy, Cistercian abbot (b. c. 1136)
1204 – Haakon III, king of Norway (b. 1182)
1387 – Charles II, king of Navarre (b. 1332)
1496 – Charles d'Orléans, count of Angoulême (b. 1459)
1515 – Louis XII, king of France (b. 1462)
1559 – Christian III, king of Denmark (b. 1503)
1560 – Joachim du Bellay, French poet and critic (b. 1522)
1601–1900
1617 – Hendrik Goltzius, Dutch painter and illustrator (b. 1558)
1697 – Filippo Baldinucci, Florentine historian and author (b. 1625)
1716 – William Wycherley, English playwright and poet (b. 1641)
1748 – Johann Bernoulli, Swiss mathematician and academic (b. 1667)
1780 – Johann Ludwig Krebs, German organist and composer (b. 1713)
1782 – Johann Christian Bach, German composer (b. 1735)
1789 – Fletcher Norton, 1st Baron Grantley, English lawyer and politician, British Speaker of the House of Commons (b. 1716)
1793 – Francesco Guardi, Italian painter and educator (b. 1712)
1817 – Martin Heinrich Klaproth, German chemist and academic (b. 1743)
1846 – John Torrington, English sailor and explorer (b. 1825)
1853 – Gregory Blaxland, Australian farmer and explorer (b. 1778)
1862 – Mikhail Ostrogradsky, Ukrainian mathematician and physicist (b. 1801)
1881 – Louis Auguste Blanqui, French activist (b. 1805)
1892 – Roswell B. Mason, American lawyer and politician, 25th Mayor of Chicago (b. 1805)
1894 – Heinrich Hertz, German physicist and academic (b. 1857)
1896 – Alfred Ely Beach, American publisher and lawyer, created the Beach Pneumatic Transit (b. 1826)
1901–present
1906 – Hugh Nelson, Scottish-Australian farmer and politician, 11th Premier of Queensland (b. 1833)
1918 – William Wilfred Campbell, Canadian poet and author (b. 1858)
1921 – Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, German lawyer and politician, 5th Chancellor of Germany (b. 1856)
1929 – Mustafa Necati, Turkish civil servant and politician, Turkish Minister of Environment and Urban Planning (b. 1894)
1931 – Martinus Beijerinck, Dutch microbiologist and botanist (b. 1851)
1937 – Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, Indian religious leader, founded the Gaudiya Math (b. 1874)
1940 – Panuganti Lakshminarasimha Rao, Indian author and educator (b. 1865)
1944 – Edwin Lutyens, English architect, designed the Castle Drogo and Thiepval Memorial (b. 1869)
1944 – Charles Turner, Australian cricketer (b. 1862)
1953 – Hank Williams, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1923)
1954 – Duff Cooper, English politician and diplomat, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (b. 1890)
1954 – Leonard Bacon, American poet and critic (b. 1887)
1955 – Arthur C. Parker, American archaeologist and historian (b. 1881)
1960 – Margaret Sullavan, American actress (b. 1909)
1966 – Vincent Auriol, French journalist and politician, 16th President of the French Republic (b. 1884)
1969 – Barton MacLane, American actor, playwright and screenwriter (b. 1902)
1971 – Amphilochius of Pochayiv, Ukrainian saint (b. 1894)
1972 – Maurice Chevalier, French actor and singer (b. 1888)
1978 – Carle Hessay, German-Canadian painter (b. 1911)
1980 – Pietro Nenni, Italian journalist and politician, Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1891)
1981 – Hephzibah Menuhin, American-Australian pianist (b. 1920)
1982 – Victor Buono, American actor (b. 1938)
1984 – Alexis Korner, French-English singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1928)
1992 – Grace Hopper, American computer scientist and admiral, co-developed COBOL (b. 1906)
1994 – Arthur Porritt, Baron Porritt, New Zealand physician and politician, 11th Governor-General of New Zealand (b. 1900)
1994 – Cesar Romero, American actor (b. 1907)
1994 – Edward Arthur Thompson, Irish historian and academic (b. 1914)
1995 – Eugene Wigner, Hungarian-American physicist and mathematician, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1902)
1996 – Arleigh Burke, American admiral (b. 1901)
1996 – Arthur Rudolph, German-American engineer (b. 1906)
1997 – Townes Van Zandt, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1944)
1998 – Helen Wills, American tennis player and coach (b. 1905)
2001 – Ray Walston, American actor (b. 1914)
2002 – Julia Phillips, American film producer and author (b. 1944)
2003 – Joe Foss, American soldier, pilot, and politician, 20th Governor of South Dakota (b. 1915)
2005 – Shirley Chisholm, American educator and politician (b. 1924)
2006 – Harry Magdoff, American economist and journalist (b. 1913)
2007 – Roland Levinsky, South African-English biochemist and academic (b. 1943)
2007 – Tillie Olsen, American short story writer (b. 1912)
2008 – Pratap Chandra Chunder, Indian educator and politician (b. 1919)
2009 – Claiborne Pell, American politician (b. 1918)
2010 – Lhasa de Sela, American-Mexican singer-songwriter (b. 1972)
2012 – Kiro Gligorov, Bulgarian-Macedonian lawyer and politician, 1st President of the Republic of Macedonia (b. 1917)
2012 – Nay Win Maung, Burmese physician, businessman, and activist (b. 1962)
2012 – Tommy Mont, American football player and coach (b. 1922)
2013 – Christopher Martin-Jenkins, English journalist (b. 1945)
2013 – Patti Page, American singer and actress (b. 1927)
2014 – Higashifushimi Kunihide, Japanese monk and educator (b. 1910)
2014 – William Mgimwa, Tanzanian banker and politician, 13th Tanzanian Minister of Finance (b. 1950)
2014 – Juanita Moore, American actress (b. 1914)
2015 – Mario Cuomo, American lawyer and politician, 52nd Governor of New York (b. 1932)
2015 – Donna Douglas, American actress (b. 1932)
2015 – Omar Karami, Lebanese lawyer and politician, 58th Prime Minister of Lebanon (b. 1934)
2015 – Boris Morukov, Russian physician and astronaut (b. 1950)
2016 – Fazu Aliyeva, Russian poet and journalist (b. 1932)
2016 – Dale Bumpers, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 38th Governor of Arkansas (b. 1925)
2016 – Vilmos Zsigmond, Hungarian-American cinematographer and producer (b. 1930)
2017 – Tony Atkinson, British economist (b. 1944)
2017 – Yvon Dupuis, Canadian politician (b. 1926)
2017 – Derek Parfit, British philosopher (b. 1942)
2018 – Robert Mann, American violinist (b. 1920)
2019 – Paul Neville, Australian politician (b. 1940)
2019 – Pegi Young, American singer, songwriter, environmentalist, educator and philanthropist (b. 1952)
2020 – Alexander Frater, British travel writer and journalist (b. 1937)
2020 – Barry McDonald, Australian rugby union player (b. 1940)
2020 – David Stern, American lawyer and businessman (b. 1942)
2020 – Elmira Minita Gordon, Belizean educator and psychologist (b.1930)
2021 – Carlos do Carmo, Portuguese fado singer (b. 1939)
2022 – Dan Reeves, American football player and coach (b. 1944)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Adalard of Corbie
Basil the Great (Eastern Orthodox Church)
Feast of the Circumcision of Christ
Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus (Anglican Communion, Lutheran Church)
Feast of Fools (Medieval Europe)
Fulgentius of Ruspe
Giuseppe Maria Tomasi
Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, the Octave Day of Christmas, considered a holy day of obligation in some countries (Catholic Church); and its related observances:
World Day of Peace
Telemachus
Zygmunt Gorazdowski
January 1 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Earliest day on which Handsel Monday can fall, while January 7 is the latest; celebrated on the first Monday of the year (Scotland)
Second day of Hogmanay (Scotland) December 31-January 1, in some cases until January 2.
The last day of Kwanzaa (African-Americans)
The eighth of the Twelve Days of Christmas (Western Christianity)
Constitution Day (Italy)
Dissolution of Czechoslovakia-related observances:
Day of the Establishment of the Slovak Republic (Slovakia)
Restoration Day of the Independent Czech State (Czech Republic)
Emancipation Day (United States)
Euro Day (European Union)
Flag Day (Lithuania) commemorates raising of the Lithuanian flag on Gediminas' Tower in 1919
Founding Day (Taiwan) commemorates the establishment of the Provisional Government in Nanjing
Global Family Day
Independence Day (Brunei, Cameroon, Haiti, Sudan)
International Nepali Dhoti and Nepali Topi Day
Jump-up Day (Montserrat)
Kalpataru Day (Ramakrishna Movement)
Kamakura Ebisu, January 1–3 (Kamakura, Kanagawa, Japan)
National Bloody Mary Day (United States)
National Tree Planting Day (Tanzania)
New Year's Day (Gregorian calendar)
Japanese New Year
Novy God Day (Russia)
Sjoogwachi (Okinawa Islands)
Polar Bear Swim Day (Canada and United States)
Public Domain Day (multiple countries)
Triumph of the Revolution (Cuba)
References
External links
BBC: On This Day
Historical Events on January 1
Today in Canadian History
Days of the year
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Events
Pre-1600
69 – The Roman legions in Germania Superior refuse to swear loyalty to Galba. They rebel and proclaim Vitellius as emperor.
366 – The Alemanni cross the frozen Rhine in large numbers, invading the Roman Empire.
533 – Mercurius becomes Pope John II, the first pope to adopt a new name upon elevation to the papacy.
1492 – Reconquista: The Emirate of Granada, the last Moorish stronghold in Spain, surrenders.
1601–1900
1680 – Trunajaya rebellion: Amangkurat II of Mataram and his bodyguards execute the rebel leader Trunajaya
1777 – American Revolutionary War: American forces under the command of George Washington repulsed a British attack at the Battle of the Assunpink Creek near Trenton, New Jersey.
1788 – Georgia becomes the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.
1791 – Big Bottom massacre in the Ohio Country, North America, marking the beginning of the Northwest Indian War.
1818 – The British Institution of Civil Engineers is founded by a group of six engineers; Thomas Telford would later become its first president.
1865 – Uruguayan War: The Siege of Paysandú ends as the Brazilians and Coloradans capture Paysandú, Uruguay.
1900 – American statesman and diplomat John Hay announces the Open Door Policy to promote trade with China.
1900 – Chicago Canal opens.
1901–present
1920 – The second Palmer Raid, ordered by the US Department of Justice, results in 6,000 suspected communists and anarchists being arrested and held without trial.
1921 – World premiere of the science fiction play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek R.U.R. in theater in Hradec Králové.
1941 – World War II: The Cardiff Blitz severely damages the cathedral in Cardiff, Wales.
1942 – The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) obtains the conviction of 33 members of a German spy ring headed by Fritz Joubert Duquesne in the largest espionage case in United States history—the Duquesne Spy Ring.
1942 – World War II: Manila is captured by Japanese forces, enabling them to control the Philippines.
1949 – Luis Muñoz Marín is inaugurated as the first democratically elected Governor of Puerto Rico.
1954 – India establishes its highest civilian awards, the Bharat Ratna and the Padma Vibhushan.
1955 – Following the assassination of the Panamanian president José Antonio Remón Cantera, his deputy, José Ramón Guizado, takes power, but is quickly deposed after his involvement in Cantera's death is discovered.
1959 – Luna 1, the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon and to orbit the Sun, is launched by the Soviet Union.
1963 – Vietnam War: The Viet Cong wins its first major victory, at the Battle of Ap Bac.
1967 – Ronald Reagan, past movie actor and future President of the United States, is sworn in as Governor of California.
1971 – The second Ibrox disaster kills 66 fans at a Rangers-Celtic association football (soccer) match.
1974 – United States President Richard Nixon signs a bill lowering the maximum U.S. speed limit to 55 MPH in order to conserve gasoline during an OPEC embargo.
1975 – At the opening of a new railway line, a bomb blast at Samastipur, Bihar, India, fatally wounds Lalit Narayan Mishra, Minister of Railways.
1975 – The Federal Rules of Evidence are approved by the United States Congress.
1976 – The Gale of January 1976 begins, resulting in coastal flooding around the southern North Sea coasts, affecting countries from Ireland to Yugoslavia and causing at least 82 deaths and US$1.3 billion in damage.
1978 – On the orders of the President of Pakistan, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, paramilitary forces opened fire on peaceful protesting workers in Multan, Pakistan; it is known as 1978 massacre at Multan Colony Textile Mills.
1981 – One of the largest investigations by a British police force ends when serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, the "Yorkshire Ripper", is arrested in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
1991 – Sharon Pratt Dixon becomes the first African American woman mayor of a major city and first woman Mayor of the District of Columbia.
1993 – Sri Lankan Civil War: The Sri Lanka Navy kill 35–100 civilians on the Jaffna Lagoon.
2004 – Stardust successfully flies past Comet Wild 2, collecting samples that are returned to Earth.
Births
Pre-1600
869 – Yōzei, Japanese emperor (d. 949)
1462 – Piero di Cosimo, Italian painter (d. 1522)
1509 – Henry of Stolberg, German nobleman (d. 1572)
1601–1900
1642 – Mehmed IV, Ottoman sultan (d. 1693)
1647 – Nathaniel Bacon, English-American rebel leader (d. 1676)
1699 – Osman III, Ottoman sultan (d. 1757)
1713 – Marie Dumesnil, French actress (d. 1803)
1727 – James Wolfe, English general (d. 1759)
1732 – František Brixi, Czech organist and composer (d. 1771)
1777 – Christian Daniel Rauch, German sculptor and educator (d. 1857)
1803 – Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja, Italian mathematician and academic (d. 1869)
1822 – Rudolf Clausius, Polish-German physicist and mathematician (d. 1888)
1827 – Pyotr Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky, Russian geographer and statistician (d. 1914)
1833 – Frederick A. Johnson, American banker and politician (d. 1893)
1836 – Mendele Mocher Sforim, Russian author (d. 1917)
1836 – Queen Emma of Hawaii (d. 1885)
1837 – Mily Balakirev, Russian pianist and composer (d. 1910)
1857 – M. Carey Thomas, American educator and activist (d. 1935)
1860 – Dugald Campbell Patterson, Canadian engineer (d. 1931)
1860 – William Corless Mills, American historian and curator (d. 1928)
1866 – Gilbert Murray, Australian-English playwright and scholar (d. 1957)
1870 – Ernst Barlach, German sculptor and playwright (d. 1938)
1870 – Tex Rickard, American boxing promoter and businessman (d. 1929)
1873 – Antonie Pannekoek, Dutch astronomer and theorist (d. 1960)
1873 – Thérèse of Lisieux, French nun and saint (d. 1897)
1878 – Mannathu Padmanabha Pillai, Indian activist, founded the Nair Service Society (d. 1970)
1884 – Ben-Zion Dinur, Russian-Israeli historian and politician, 4th Israeli Minister of Education (d. 1973)
1885 – Gordon Flowerdew, Canadian lieutenant, Victoria Cross recipient (d. 1918)
1886 – Apsley Cherry-Garrard, English explorer and author (d. 1959)
1889 – Bertram Stevens, Australian accountant and politician, 25th Premier of New South Wales (d. 1973)
1891 – Giovanni Michelucci, Italian architect and urban planner, designed the Firenze Santa Maria Novella railway station (d. 1990)
1892 – Seiichiro Kashio, Japanese tennis player (d. 1962)
1895 – Folke Bernadotte, Swedish diplomat (d. 1948)
1896 – Dziga Vertov, Polish-Russian director and screenwriter (d. 1954)
1896 – Lawrence Wackett, Australian commander and engineer (d. 1982)
1897 – Theodore Plucknett, English legal historian (d. 1965)
1900 – Una Ledingham, British physician, known for research on diabetes in pregnancy (d. 1965)
1901–present
1901 – Bob Marshall, American activist, co-founded The Wilderness Society (d. 1939)
1902 – Dan Keating, Irish Republican Army volunteer (d. 2007)
1903 – Kane Tanaka, Japanese supercentenarian, oldest verified living person
1904 – Walter Heitler, German physicist and chemist (d. 1981)
1905 – Luigi Zampa, Italian director and screenwriter (d. 1991)
1905 – Michael Tippett, English composer and conductor (d. 1998)
1909 – Barry Goldwater, American politician, businessman, and author (d. 1998)
1909 – Riccardo Cassin, Italian mountaineer and author (d. 2009)
1913 – Anna Lee, English-American actress (d. 2004)
1913 – Juanita Jackson Mitchell, American lawyer and activist (d. 1992)
1917 – Vera Zorina, German-Norwegian actress and dancer (d. 2003)
1918 – Willi Graf, German physician and activist (d. 1943)
1919 – Ernest Bender, American Indologist (d. 1996)
1919 – Beatrice Hicks, American engineer (d. 1979)
1920(probable) – Isaac Asimov, American writer and professor of biochemistry (d. 1992)
1921 – Glen Harmon, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 2007)
1926 – Gino Marchetti, American football player (d. 2019)
1928 – Dan Rostenkowski, American politician (d. 2010)
1929 – Tellervo Koivisto, Finnish politician, former First Lady of Finland
1931 – Toshiki Kaifu, Japanese lawyer and politician, 76th Prime Minister of Japan (d. 2022)
1934 – John Hollowbread, English footballer, goalkeeper (d. 2007)
1936 – Roger Miller, American singer-songwriter, musician, and actor (d. 1992)
1938 – David Bailey, English photographer and painter
1938 – Lynn Conway, American computer scientist and electrical engineer
1938 – Robert Smithson, American sculptor and photographer (d. 1973)
1940 – Jim Bakker, American televangelist
1940 – Saud bin Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Saudi Arabian economist and politician, Saudi Arabian Minister of Foreign Affairs (d. 2015)
1942 – Dennis Hastert, American educator and politician, 59th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives
1942 – Thomas Hammarberg, Swedish lawyer and diplomat
1943 – Janet Akyüz Mattei, Turkish-American astronomer (d. 2004)
1944 – Charlie Davis, Trinidadian cricketer
1944 – Norodom Ranariddh, Cambodian field marshal and politician, 1st Prime Minister of Cambodia (d. 2021)
1944 – Péter Eötvös, Hungarian composer and conductor
1947 – Calvin Hill, American football player
1947 – David Shapiro, American poet, historian, and critic
1947 – Jack Hanna, American zoologist and author
1949 – Christopher Durang, American playwright and screenwriter
1949 – Iris Marion Young, American political scientist and academic (d. 2006)
1952 – Indulis Emsis, Latvian biologist and politician, 9th Prime Minister of Latvia
1954 – Henry Bonilla, American broadcaster and politician
1954 – Évelyne Trouillot, Haitian playwright and author
1961 – Craig James, American football player and sportscaster
1961 – Gabrielle Carteris, American actress
1961 – Paula Hamilton, English model
1961 – Robert Wexler, American lawyer and politician
1963 – David Cone, American baseball player and sportscaster
1963 – Edgar Martínez, American baseball player
1964 – Pernell Whitaker, American boxer (d. 2019)
1965 – Francois Pienaar, South African rugby player
1967 – Jón Gnarr, Icelandic actor and politician; 20th Mayor of Reykjavik City
1967 – Tia Carrere, American actress
1968 – Anky van Grunsven, Dutch dressage champion
1968 – Cuba Gooding, Jr., American actor and producer
1969 – Christy Turlington, American model
1969 – István Bagyula, Hungarian pole vaulter
1969 – William Fox-Pitt, English horse rider and journalist
1970 – Eric Whitacre, American composer and conductor
1971 – Renée Elise Goldsberry, American actress
1971 – Taye Diggs, American actor and singer
1972 – Mattias Norström, Swedish ice hockey player and manager
1972 – Rodney MacDonald, Canadian educator and politician, 26th Premier of Nova Scotia
1972 – Shiraz Minwalla, Indian theoretical physicist and string theorist
1974 – Ludmila Formanová, Czech runner
1974 – Tomáš Řepka, Czech footballer
1975 – Reuben Thorne, New Zealand rugby player
1975 – Dax Shepard, American actor
1977 – Brian Boucher, American ice hockey player and sportscaster
1977 – Stefan Koubek, Austrian tennis player
1979 – Jonathan Greening, English footballer
1981 – Maxi Rodríguez, Argentinian footballer
1983 – Kate Bosworth, American actress
1987 – Robert Milsom, English footballer
1988 – Damien Tussac, French-German rugby player
1992 – Paulo Gazzaniga, Argentinian footballer
1992 – Korbin Sims, Australian-Fijian rugby league player
1998 – Timothy Fosu-Mensah, Dutch footballer
1999 – Fernando Tatís Jr., American baseball player
Deaths
Pre-1600
951 – Liu Chengyou, Emperor Yin of the Later Han
951 – Su Fengji, Chinese official and chancellor
1096 – William de St-Calais, Bishop of Durham and chief counsellor of William II of England
1169 – Bertrand de Blanchefort, sixth Grand Master of the Knights Templar (b. c. 1109)
1184 – Theodora Komnene, Duchess of Austria, daughter of Andronikos Komnenos
1298 – Lodomer, Hungarian prelate, Archbishop of Esztergom
1470 – Heinrich Reuß von Plauen, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order
1512 – Svante Nilsson, Sweden politician (b. 1460)
1514 – William Smyth, English bishop and academic (b. 1460)
1543 – Francesco Canova da Milano, Italian composer (b. 1497)
1557 – Pontormo, Italian painter and educator (b. 1494)
1601–1900
1613 – Salima Sultan Begum, Empress of the Mughal Empire (b. 1539)
1614 – Luisa Carvajal y Mendoza, Spanish mystical poet and Catholic martyr (b. 1566)
1726 – Domenico Zipoli, Italian organist and composer (b. 1688)
1763 – John Carteret, 2nd Earl Granville, English statesman (b. 1690)
1850 – Manuel de la Peña y Peña, Mexican lawyer and 20th President (1847) (b. 1789)
1861 – Frederick William IV of Prussia (b. 1795)
1892 – George Biddell Airy, English mathematician and astronomer (b. 1801)
1901–present
1904 – James Longstreet, American general and diplomat (b. 1821)
1913 – Léon Teisserenc de Bort, French meteorologist (b. 1855)
1915 – Karl Goldmark, Hungarian violinist and composer (b. 1830)
1917 – Léon Flameng, French cyclist (b. 1877)
1920 – Paul Adam, French author (b. 1862)
1924 – Sabine Baring-Gould, English author and scholar (b. 1834)
1939 – Roman Dmowski, Polish politician, Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1864)
1941 – Mischa Levitzki, Russian-American pianist and composer (b. 1898)
1946 – Joe Darling, Australian cricketer and politician (b. 1870)
1950 – James Dooley, Irish-Australian politician, 21st Premier of New South Wales (b. 1877)
1951 – William Campion, English colonel and politician, 21st Governor of Western Australia (b. 1870)
1951 – Edith New, English militant suffragette (b. 1877)
1953 – Guccio Gucci, Italian businessman and fashion designer, founder of Gucci (b. 1881)
1960 – Paul Sauvé, Canadian lawyer and politician, 17th Premier of Quebec (b. 1907)
1963 – Dick Powell, American actor, singer, and director (b. 1904)
1963 – Jack Carson, Canadian-American actor (b. 1910)
1974 – Tex Ritter, American actor (b. 1905)
1975 – Siraj Sikder, Bangladesh revolutionary leader (b. 1944)
1977 – Erroll Garner, American pianist and composer (b. 1921)
1986 – Una Merkel, American actress (b. 1903)
1987 – Harekrushna Mahatab, Indian journalist and politician, 1st Chief Minister of Odisha (b. 1899)
1989 – Safdar Hashmi, Indian actor, director, and playwright (b. 1954)
1990 – Alan Hale Jr., American film and television actor (b. 1921)
1990 – Evangelos Averoff, Greek historian and politician, Greek Minister for National Defence (b. 1910)
1994 – Dixy Lee Ray, American biologist and politician; 17th Governor of Washington (b. 1914)
1994 – Pierre-Paul Schweitzer, French lawyer and businessman (b. 1915)
1995 – Nancy Kelly, American actress (b. 1921)
1995 – Siad Barre, Somalian general and politician; 3rd President of Somalia (b. 1919)
1999 – Rolf Liebermann, Swiss-French composer and manager (b. 1910)
1999 – Sebastian Haffner, German journalist and author (b. 1907)
2000 – Elmo Zumwalt, American admiral (b. 1920)
2000 – Patrick O'Brian, English author and translator (b. 1914)
2001 – William P. Rogers, American lieutenant, lawyer, and politician, 55th United States Secretary of State (b. 1913)
2005 – Maclyn McCarty, American geneticist and physician (b. 1911)
2006 – Cecilia Muñoz-Palma, Filipino lawyer and jurist (b. 1913)
2006 – Osa Massen, Danish-American actress (b. 1914)
2007 – A. Richard Newton, Australian-American engineer and academic (b. 1951)
2007 – Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, American historian and author (b. 1941)
2007 – Teddy Kollek, Hungarian-Israeli politician, Mayor of Jerusalem (b. 1911)
2008 – George MacDonald Fraser, Scottish journalist and author (b. 1925)
2008 – Lee S. Dreyfus, American sailor, academic, and politician, 40th Governor of Wisconsin (b. 1926)
2009 – Inger Christensen, Danish poet and author (b. 1935)
2009 – Dnyaneshwar Agashe, Indian businessman and cricketer (b. 1942)
2010 – David R. Ross, Scottish historian and author (b. 1958)
2011 – Anne Francis, American actress (b. 1930)
2011 – Bali Ram Bhagat, Indian politician; 16th Governor of Rajasthan (b. 1922)
2011 – Pete Postlethwaite, English actor (b. 1946)
2012 – Gordon Hirabayashi, American-Canadian sociologist and academic (b. 1918)
2012 – Silvana Gallardo, American actress and producer (b. 1953)
2012 – William P. Carey, American businessman and philanthropist, founded W. P. Carey (b. 1930)
2013 – Gerda Lerner, Austrian-American historian, author, and academic (b. 1920)
2013 – Teresa Torańska, Polish journalist and author (b. 1944)
2014 – Bernard Glasser, American director and producer (b. 1924)
2014 – Elizabeth Jane Howard, English author and screenwriter (b. 1923)
2015 – Tihomir Novakov, Serbian-American physicist and academic (b. 1929)
2016 – Ardhendu Bhushan Bardhan, Indian lawyer and politician (b. 1924)
2016 – Frances Cress Welsing, American psychiatrist and author (b. 1935)
2016 – Nimr al-Nimr, Saudi Arabian religious leader (b. 1959)
2016 – Gisela Mota Ocampo, mayor of Temixco, Morelos, Mexico, assassinated (b. 1982)
2017 – Jean Vuarnet, French ski racer (b. 1933)
2017 – John Berger, English art critic, novelist and painter (b. 1926)
2018 – Guida Maria, Portuguese actress (b. 1950)
2018 – Thomas S. Monson, American religious leader, 16th president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (b. 1927)
2019 – Daryl Dragon, American musician (b. 1942)
2019 – Bob Einstein, American actor and comedian (b. 1942)
2019 – Gene Okerlund, American wrestling announcer (b. 1942)
2022 – Richard Leakey, Kenyan paleontologist and politician (b. 1944)
Holidays and observances
Ancestry Day (Haiti)
Berchtold's Day (Switzerland and Liechtenstein)
Carnival Day (Saint Kitts and Nevis)
Christian feast day:
Basil the Great (Catholic Church and Church of England)
Defendens of Thebes
Earliest day on which the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus is observed, while January 5 is the latest; celebrated on Sunday between January 2 and 5. (Roman Catholic Church, 1960 calendar)
Gregory of Nazianzus (Catholic Church)
Johann Konrad Wilhelm Löhe (Lutheran Church)
Macarius of Alexandria
Seraphim of Sarov (repose) (Eastern Orthodox Church)
Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah (Episcopal Church)
January 2 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Nyinlong (Bhutan)
The first day of Blacks and Whites' Carnival, celebrated until January 7. (southern Colombia)
The first day of the Carnival of Riosucio, celebrated until January 8 every 2 years. (Riosucio)
The ninth of the Twelve Days of Christmas (Western Christianity)
The second day of New Year (a holiday in Kazakhstan, North Macedonia, Mauritius, Montenegro, New Zealand, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine):
New Year Holiday (Scotland), if it is a Sunday, the day moves to January 3
Kaapse Klopse (Cape Town, South Africa)
Victory of Armed Forces Day (Cuba)
References
External links
BBC: On This Day
Historical Events on January 2
Today in Canadian History
Days of the year
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15789 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January%203 | January 3 |
Events
Pre-1600
69 – The Roman legions on the Rhine refuse to declare their allegiance to Galba, instead proclaiming their legate, Aulus Vitellius, as emperor.
250 – Emperor Decius orders everyone in the Roman Empire (except Jews) to make sacrifices to the Roman gods.
1521 – Pope Leo X excommunicates Martin Luther in the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem.
1601–1900
1653 – By the Coonan Cross Oath, the Eastern Church in India cuts itself off from colonial Portuguese tutelage.
1749 – Benning Wentworth issues the first of the New Hampshire Grants, leading to the establishment of Vermont.
1749 – The first issue of Berlingske, Denmark's oldest continually operating newspaper, is published.
1777 – American General George Washington defeats British General Lord Cornwallis at the Battle of Princeton.
1815 – Austria, the United Kingdom, and France form a secret defensive alliance against Prussia and Russia.
1833 – Captain James Onslow, in the Clio, reasserts British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.
1848 – Joseph Jenkins Roberts is sworn in as the first president of Liberia.
1861 – American Civil War: Delaware votes not to secede from the United States.
1868 – Meiji Restoration in Japan: The Tokugawa shogunate is abolished; agents of Satsuma and Chōshū seize power.
1870 – Construction work begins on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, United States.
1871 – In the Battle of Bapaume, an engagement in the Franco-Prussian War, General Louis Faidherbe's forces bring about a Prussian retreat.
1885 – Sino-French War: Beginning of the Battle of Núi Bop.
1901–present
1911 – A magnitude 7.7 earthquake destroys the city of Almaty in Russian Turkestan.
1911 – A gun battle in the East End of London leaves two dead. It sparked a political row over the involvement of then-Home Secretary Winston Churchill.
1913 – An Atlantic coast storm sets the lowest confirmed barometric pressure reading for a non-tropical system in the continental United States.
1920 – Over 640 are killed after a magnitude 6.4 earthquake strikes the Mexican states Puebla and Veracruz.
1933 – Minnie D. Craig becomes the first woman elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first woman to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States.
1944 – World War II: US flying ace Major Greg "Pappy" Boyington is shot down in his Vought F4U Corsair by Captain Masajiro Kawato flying a Mitsubishi A6M Zero.
1946 – Popular Canadian American jockey George Woolf dies in a freak accident during a race; the annual George Woolf Memorial Jockey Award is created to honor him.
1947 – Proceedings of the U.S. Congress are televised for the first time.
1949 – The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the central bank of the Philippines, is established.
1953 – Frances P. Bolton and her son, Oliver from Ohio, become the first mother and son to serve simultaneously in the U.S. Congress.
1956 – A fire damages the top part of the Eiffel Tower.
1957 – The Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch.
1958 – The West Indies Federation is formed.
1959 – Alaska is admitted as the 49th U.S. state.
1961 – Cold War: After a series of economic retaliations against one another, the United States severs diplomatic relations with Cuba.
1961 – The SL-1 nuclear reactor is destroyed by a steam explosion in the only reactor incident in the United States to cause immediate fatalities.
1961 – A protest by agricultural workers in Baixa de Cassanje, Portuguese Angola, turns into a revolt, opening the Angolan War of Independence, the first of the Portuguese Colonial Wars.
1962 – Pope John XXIII excommunicates Fidel Castro.
1976 – The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, comes into force.
1977 – Apple Computer is incorporated.
1990 – United States invasion of Panama: Manuel Noriega, former leader of Panama, surrenders to American forces.
1992 – CommutAir Flight 4821 crashes on approach to Adirondack Regional Airport, in Saranac Lake, New York, killing two people.
1993 – In Moscow, Russia, George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin sign the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).
1994 – Baikal Airlines Flight 130 crashes near Mamoney, Irkutsk, Russia, resulting in 125 deaths.
1999 – The Mars Polar Lander is launched by NASA.
2002 – Israeli–Palestinian conflict: Israeli forces seize the Palestinian freighter Karine A in the Red Sea, finding 50 tons of weapons.
2004 – Flash Airlines Flight 604 crashes into the Red Sea, resulting in 148 deaths, making it one of the deadliest aviation accidents in Egyptian history.
2009 – The first block of the blockchain of the decentralized payment system Bitcoin, called the Genesis block, is established by the creator of the system, Satoshi Nakamoto.
2015 – Boko Haram militants destroy the entire town of Baga in north-east Nigeria, starting the Baga massacre and killing as many as 2,000 people.
2016 – In response to the execution of Nimr al-Nimr, Iran ends its diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia.
2018 – For the first time in history all five major storm surge gates in the Netherlands are closed simultaneously in the wake of a storm.
2019 – Chang'e 4 makes the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon, deploying the Yutu-2 lunar rover.
2020 – Iranian General Qasem Soleimani is killed by an American airstrike near Baghdad International Airport, igniting global concerns of a potential armed conflict.
Births
Pre-1600
106 BC – Cicero, Roman philosopher, lawyer, and politician (d. 43 BC)
1509 – Gian Girolamo Albani, Italian cardinal (d. 1591)
1601–1900
1611 – James Harrington, English political theorist (d. 1677)
1698 – Pietro Metastasio, Italian poet and songwriter (d. 1782)
1710 – Richard Gridley, American soldier and engineer (d. 1796)
1722 – Fredrik Hasselqvist, Swedish biologist and explorer (d. 1752)
1731 – Angelo Emo, Venetian admiral and statesman (d. 1792)
1760 – Veerapandiya Kattabomman, Indian ruler (d. 1799)
1775 – Francis Caulfeild, 2nd Earl of Charlemont (d. 1863)
1778 – Antoni Melchior Fijałkowski, Polish archbishop (d. 1861)
1793 – Lucretia Mott, American activist (d. 1880)
1802 – Charles Pelham Villiers, English lawyer and politician (d. 1898)
1803 – Douglas William Jerrold, English journalist and playwright (d. 1857)
1806 – Henriette Sontag, German soprano and actress (d. 1854)
1810 – Antoine Thomson d'Abbadie, French geographer, ethnologist, linguist, and astronomer (d. 1897)
1816 – Samuel C. Pomeroy, American businessman and politician (d. 1891)
1819 – Charles Piazzi Smyth, Italian-Scottish astronomer and academic (d. 1900)
1831 – Savitribai Phule, Indian poet, educator, and activist (d. 1897)
1836 – Sakamoto Ryōma, Japanese samurai and rebel leader (d. 1867)
1840 – Father Damien, Flemish priest and missionary (d. 1889)
1847 – Ettore Marchiafava, Italian physician (d. 1935)
1853 – Sophie Elkan, Swedish writer (d. 1921)
1855 – Hubert Bland, English businessman (d. 1914)
1861 – Ernest Renshaw, English tennis player (d. 1899)
1861 – William Renshaw, English tennis player (d. 1904)
1862 – Matthew Nathan, English soldier and politician, 13th Governor of Queensland (d. 1939)
1865 – Henry Lytton, English actor (d. 1936)
1870 – Henry Handel Richardson, Australian-English author (d. 1946)
1873 – Ichizō Kobayashi, Japanese businessman and art collector, founded the Hankyu Hanshin Holdings (d. 1957)
1875 – Alexandros Diomidis, Greek banker and politician, 145th Prime Minister of Greece (d. 1950)
1876 – Wilhelm Pieck, German carpenter and politician, 1st President of the German Democratic Republic (d. 1960)
1877 – Josephine Hull, American actress (d. 1957)
1880 – Francis Browne, Irish Jesuit priest and photographer (d. 1960)
1883 – Clement Attlee, English soldier, lawyer, and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1967)
1883 – Duncan Gillis, Canadian discus thrower and hammer thrower (d. 1963)
1884 – Raoul Koczalski, Polish pianist and composer (d. 1948)
1885 – Harry Elkins Widener, American businessman (d. 1912)
1886 – John Gould Fletcher, American poet and author (d. 1950)
1886 – Arthur Mailey, Australian cricketer (d. 1967)
1887 – August Macke, German-French painter (d. 1914)
1892 – J.R.R. Tolkien, English writer, poet, and philologist (d. 1973)
1894 – ZaSu Pitts, American actress (d. 1963)
1897 – Marion Davies, American actress and comedian (d. 1961)
1898 – Carolyn Haywood, American author and illustrator (d. 1990)
1900 – Donald J. Russell, American businessman (d. 1985)
1901–present
1901 – Ngô Đình Diệm, Vietnamese lawyer and politician, 1st President of the Republic of Vietnam (d. 1963)
1905 – Dante Giacosa, Italian engineer (d. 1996)
1905 – Anna May Wong, American actress (d. 1961)
1907 – Ray Milland, Welsh-American actor and director (d. 1986)
1909 – Victor Borge, Danish-American pianist and conductor (d. 2000)
1910 – Frenchy Bordagaray, American baseball player and manager (d. 2000)
1910 – John Sturges, American director and producer (d. 1992)
1912 – Federico Borrell García, Spanish soldier (d. 1936)
1912 – Renaude Lapointe, Canadian journalist and politician (d. 2002)
1912 – Armand Lohikoski, American-Finnish actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2005)
1915 – Jack Levine, American painter and soldier (d. 2010)
1916 – Betty Furness, American actress and television journalist (d. 1994)
1916 – Fred Haas, American golfer (d. 2004)
1917 – Albert Mol, Dutch author and actor (d. 2002)
1917 – Roger Williams Straus, Jr., American journalist and publisher, co-founded Farrar, Straus and Giroux (d. 2004)
1919 – Herbie Nichols, American pianist and composer (d. 1963)
1920 – Siegfried Buback, German lawyer and politician, Attorney General of Germany (d. 1977)
1921 – Isabella Bashmakova, Russian historian of mathematics (d. 2005)
1922 – Bill Travers, English actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 1994)
1923 – Hank Stram, American football coach and sportscaster (d. 2005)
1924 – Otto Beisheim, German businessman and philanthropist, founded Metro AG (d. 2013)
1924 – André Franquin, Belgian author and illustrator (d. 1997)
1924 – Nell Rankin, American soprano and educator (d. 2005)
1924 – Enzo Cozzolini, Italian football player (d. 1962)
1925 – Jill Balcon, English actress (d. 2009)
1926 – W. Michael Blumenthal, American economist and politician, 64th United States Secretary of the Treasury
1926 – George Martin, English composer, conductor, and producer (d. 2016)
1928 – Abdul Rahman Ya'kub, Malaysian lawyer and politician, 3rd Chief Minister of Sarawak (d. 2015)
1929 – Sergio Leone, Italian director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1989)
1929 – Ernst Mahle, German-Brazilian composer and conductor
1929 – Gordon Moore, American businessman, co-founder of Intel Corporation
1930 – Robert Loggia, American actor and director (d. 2015)
1932 – Eeles Landström, Finnish pole vaulter and politician
1933 – Geoffrey Bindman, English lawyer
1933 – Anne Stevenson, American-English poet and author (d. 2020)
1934 – Marpessa Dawn, American-French actress, singer, and dancer (d. 2008)
1934 – Carla Anderson Hills, American lawyer and politician, 5th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
1935 – Raymond Garneau, Canadian businessman and politician
1937 – Glen A. Larson, American director, producer, and screenwriter, created Battlestar Galactica (d. 2014)
1938 – Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell, English academic and politician
1938 – K. Ganeshalingam, Sri Lankan accountant and politician, Mayor of Colombo (d. 2006)
1939 – Arik Einstein, Israeli singer-songwriter and actor (d. 2013)
1939 – Bobby Hull, Canadian ice hockey player
1940 – Leo de Berardinis, Italian actor and director (d. 2008)
1940 – Bernard Blaut, Polish footballer and coach (d. 2007)
1941 – Malcolm Dick, New Zealand rugby player
1942 – John Marsden, Australian lawyer and activist (d. 2006)
1942 – John Thaw, English actor and producer, played Inspector Morse (d. 2002)
1943 – Van Dyke Parks, American singer-songwriter, musician, composer, author, and actor
1944 – Blanche d'Alpuget, Australian author
1944 – Doreen Massey, English geographer and political activist (d. 2016)
1945 – Stephen Stills, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1946 – John Paul Jones, English bass player, songwriter, and producer
1946 – Michalis Kritikopoulos, Greek footballer (d. 2002)
1947 – Fran Cotton, English rugby player
1947 – Zulema, American singer-songwriter (d. 2013)
1948 – Ian Nankervis, Australian footballer
1950 – Victoria Principal, American actress and businesswoman
1950 – Linda Steiner, American journalist and academic
1950 – Vesna Vulović, Serbian plane crash survivor and Guinness World Record holder (d. 2016)
1951 – Linda Dobbs, English lawyer and judge
1951 – Gary Nairn, Australian surveyor and politician, 14th Special Minister of State
1952 – Esperanza Aguirre, Spanish civil servant and politician, 3rd President of the Community of Madrid
1952 – Gianfranco Fini, Italian journalist and politician, Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs
1952 – Jim Ross, American professional wrestling commentator
1953 – Justin Fleming, Australian playwright and author
1953 – Mohammed Waheed Hassan, Maldivian educator and politician, 5th President of the Maldives
1953 – Peter Taylor, English footballer and manager
1956 – Mel Gibson, American-Australian actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
1960 – Russell Spence, English racing driver
1962 – Darren Daulton, American baseball player (d. 2017)
1962 – Gavin Hastings, Scottish rugby player
1963 – Stewart Hosie, Scottish businessman and politician
1963 – Aamer Malik, Pakistani cricketer
1963 – Alex Wheatle, English author and playwright
1963 – New Jack, retired professional wrestler (d. 2021)
1964 – Bruce LaBruce, Canadian director, producer, and screenwriter
1964 – Cheryl Miller, American basketball player and coach
1966 – Chetan Sharma, Indian cricketer
1969 – Jarmo Lehtinen, Finnish racing driver
1969 – Michael Schumacher, German racing driver
1969 – Gerda Weissensteiner, Italian luger and bobsledder
1971 – Cory Cross, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1971 – Lee Il-hwa, South Korean actress
1974 – Robert-Jan Derksen, Dutch golfer
1974 – Alessandro Petacchi, Italian cyclist
1975 – Jason Marsden, American actor
1975 – Thomas Bangalter, French DJ, musician, and producer
1976 – Angelos Basinas, Greek footballer
1976 – Nicholas Gonzalez, American actor and producer
1977 – Lee Bowyer, English footballer and coach
1977 – A. J. Burnett, American baseball player
1978 – Dimitra Kalentzou, Greek basketball player
1980 – Bryan Clay, American decathlete
1980 – Angela Ruggiero, American ice hockey player
1980 – David Tyree, American football player
1980 – Kurt Vile, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1980 – Mary Wineberg, American sprinter
1981 – Eli Manning, American football player
1982 – Peter Clarke, English footballer
1982 – Lasse Nilsson, Swedish footballer
1982 – Park Ji-yoon, South Korean singer and actress
1984 – Billy Mehmet, English-Irish footballer
1985 – Linas Kleiza, Lithuanian basketball player
1985 – Evan Moore, American football player
1986 – Dana Hussain, Iraqi sprinter
1986 – Greg Nwokolo, Indonesian footballer
1986 – Dmitry Starodubtsev, Russian pole vaulter
1987 – Reto Berra, Swiss professional ice hockey goaltender
1987 – Kim Ok-bin, South Korean actress and singer
1988 – Ikechi Anya, Scottish-Nigerian footballer
1988 – Matt Frattin, Canadian ice hockey player
1989 – Kōhei Uchimura, Japanese artistic gymnast
1990 – Yoichiro Kakitani, Japanese footballer
1991 – Jerson Cabral, Dutch footballer
1991 – Özgür Çek, Turkish footballer
1991 – Sébastien Faure, French footballer
1991 – Dane Gagai, Australian rugby league player
1994 – Isaquias Queiroz, Brazilian sprint canoeist
1995 – Kim Jisoo, Korean singer
1996 – Florence Pugh, English actress
1997 – Kyron McMaster, British Virgin Islands hurdler
2001 – Deni Avdija, Israeli-Serbian basketball player
2003 – Greta Thunberg, Swedish environmental activist
Deaths
Pre-1600
236 – Anterus, pope of the Catholic Church
323 – Yuan of Yin, Chinese emperor (b. 276)
1027 – Fujiwara no Yukinari, Japanese calligrapher (b. 972)
1028 – Fujiwara no Michinaga, Japanese nobleman (b. 966)
1098 – Walkelin, Norman bishop of Winchester
1322 – Philip V, king of France (b. 1292)
1437 – Catherine of Valois, queen consort of Henry V (b. 1401)
1501 – Ali-Shir Nava'i, Turkic poet, linguist, and mystic (b. 1441)
1543 – Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, Portuguese explorer and navigator (b. 1499)
1571 – Joachim II Hector, Elector of Brandenburg (b. 1505)
1601–1900
1641 – Jeremiah Horrocks, English astronomer and mathematician (b. 1618)
1656 – Mathieu Molé, French politician (b. 1584)
1670 – George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle, English general and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (b. 1608)
1701 – Louis I, prince of Monaco (b. 1642)
1705 – Luca Giordano, Italian painter and illustrator (b. 1634)
1743 – Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena, Italian painter and architect (b. 1657)
1777 – William Leslie, Scottish captain (b. 1751)
1779 – Claude Bourgelat, French surgeon and lawyer (b. 1712)
1785 – Baldassare Galuppi, Italian composer (b. 1706)
1795 – Josiah Wedgwood, English potter, founded the Wedgwood Company (b. 1730)
1826 – Louis-Gabriel Suchet, French general (b. 1770)
1871 – Kuriakose Elias Chavara, Indian priest and saint (b. 1805)
1875 – Pierre Larousse, French lexicographer and publisher (b. 1817)
1882 – William Harrison Ainsworth, English author (b. 1805)
1895 – James Merritt Ives, American lithographer and businessman, co-founded Currier and Ives (b. 1824)
1901–present
1903 – Alois Hitler, Austrian civil servant (b. 1837)
1911 – Alexandros Papadiamantis, Greek author and poet (b. 1851)
1915 – James Elroy Flecker, English poet, author, and playwright (b. 1884)
1916 – Grenville M. Dodge, American general and politician (b. 1831)
1922 – Wilhelm Voigt, German criminal (b. 1849)
1923 – Jaroslav Hašek, Czech journalist and author (b. 1883)
1927 – Carl David Tolmé Runge, German physicist and mathematician (b. 1856)
1931 – Joseph Joffre, French general (b. 1852)
1933 – Wilhelm Cuno, German lawyer and politician, Chancellor of Germany (b. 1876)
1933 – Jack Pickford, Canadian-American actor, director, and producer (b. 1896)
1943 – Walter James, Australian lawyer and politician, 5th Premier of Western Australia (b. 1863)
1944 – Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Lithuanian poet, critic, and translator (b. 1873)
1945 – Edgar Cayce, American psychic and author (b. 1877)
1945 – Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski, Polish journalist and explorer (b. 1879)
1946 – William Joyce, American-British pro-Axis propaganda broadcaster (b. 1906)
1956 – Alexander Gretchaninov, Russian-American pianist and composer (b. 1864)
1956 – Dimitrios Vergos, Greek wrestler, weightlifter, and shot putter (b. 1886)
1956 – Joseph Wirth, German educator and politician, Chancellor of Germany (b. 1876)
1958 – Cafer Tayyar Eğilmez, Turkish general (b. 1877)
1959 – Edwin Muir, Scottish poet, author, and translator (b. 1887)
1960 – Eric P. Kelly, American journalist, author, and academic (b. 1884)
1962 – Hermann Lux, German footballer and manager (b. 1893)
1965 – Milton Avery, American painter (b. 1885)
1966 – Sammy Younge Jr., American civil rights activist (b. 1944)
1967 – Mary Garden, Scottish-American soprano and actress (b. 1874)
1967 – Reginald Punnett, British scientist (b. 1875)
1967 – Jack Ruby, American businessman and murderer (b. 1911)
1969 – Jean Focas, Greek-French astronomer (b. 1909)
1969 – Tzavalas Karousos, Greek-French actor (b. 1904)
1970 – Gladys Aylward, English missionary and humanitarian (b. 1902)
1972 – Mohan Rakesh, Indian author and playwright (b. 1925)
1975 – Victor Kraft, Austrian philosopher from the Vienna Circle (b. 1880)
1975 – James McCormack, American general (b. 1910)
1977 – William Gropper, American lithographer, cartoonist, and painter (b. 1897)
1979 – Conrad Hilton, American businessman, founded the Hilton Hotels & Resorts (b. 1887)
1980 – Joy Adamson, Austrian-Kenyan painter and conservationist (b. 1910)
1980 – George Sutherland Fraser, Scottish poet and academic (b. 1915)
1981 – Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone (b. 1883)
1988 – Rose Ausländer, Ukrainian-German poet and author (b. 1901)
1989 – Sergei Sobolev, Russian mathematician and academic (b. 1909)
1992 – Judith Anderson, Australian actress (b. 1897)
2002 – Satish Dhawan, Indian engineer (b. 1920)
2005 – Koo Chen-fu, Taiwanese businessman and diplomat (b. 1917)
2005 – Egidio Galea, Maltese Roman Catholic priest, missionary, and educator (b. 1918)
2005 – Jyotindra Nath Dixit, Indian diplomat, 2nd Indian National Security Adviser (b. 1936)
2006 – Bill Skate, Papua New Guinean politician, 5th Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea (b. 1954)
2007 – William Verity, Jr., American businessman and politician, 27th United States Secretary of Commerce (b. 1917)
2008 – Jimmy Stewart, Scottish racing driver (b. 1931)
2008 – Choi Yo-sam, South Korean boxer (b. 1972)
2009 – Betty Freeman, American philanthropist and photographer (b. 1921)
2009 – Pat Hingle, American actor (b. 1923)
2009 – Hisayasu Nagata, Japanese politician (b. 1969)
2010 – Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, Chilean-German composer and academic (b. 1925)
2010 – Mary Daly, American theologian and scholar (b. 1928)
2012 – Vicar, Chilean cartoonist (b. 1934)
2012 – Robert L. Carter, American lawyer and judge (b. 1917)
2012 – Winifred Milius Lubell, American author and illustrator (b. 1914)
2012 – Josef Škvorecký, Czech-Canadian author and publisher (b. 1924)
2013 – Alfie Fripp, English soldier and pilot (b. 1913)
2013 – Ivan Mackerle, Czech cryptozoologist, explorer, and author (b. 1942)
2013 – William Maxson, American general (b. 1930)
2013 – Sergiu Nicolaescu, Romanian actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1930)
2014 – Phil Everly, American singer and guitarist (b. 1939)
2014 – George Goodman, American economist and author (b. 1930)
2014 – Saul Zaentz, American film producer (b. 1921)
2015 – Martin Anderson, American economist and academic (b. 1936)
2015 – Edward Brooke, American captain and politician, 47th Massachusetts Attorney General (b. 1919)
2016 – Paul Bley, Canadian-American pianist and composer (b. 1932)
2016 – Peter Naur, Danish computer scientist, astronomer, and academic (b. 1928)
2016 – Bill Plager, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (b. 1945)
2016 – Igor Sergun, Russian general and diplomat (b. 1957)
2017 – H. S. Mahadeva Prasad, Indian politician (b. 1958)
2018 – Colin Brumby, Australian composer (b. 1933)
2019 – Herb Kelleher, American businessman, co-founder of Southwest Airlines (b. 1931)
2020 – Qasem Soleimani, Iranian major general, commander of the Iranian Quds Force (b. 1957)
2021 – Eric Jerome Dickey, American author (b. 1961)
Holidays and observances
Anniversary of the 1966 Coup d'état (Burkina Faso)
Christian feast day:
Daniel of Padua
Genevieve
Holy Name of Jesus
Kuriakose Elias Chavara (Syro-Malabar Catholic Church)
Pope Anterus
William Passavant (Episcopal Church)
January 3 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Ministry of Religious Affairs Day (Indonesia)
Tamaseseri Festival (Hakozaki Shrine, Fukuoka, Japan)
The tenth of the Twelve Days of Christmas (Western Christianity)
Notes
Perihelion, the point during the year when the Earth is closest to the Sun, occurs on or around this date. In the Northern Hemisphere, ignoring the effects of daylight saving time, the latest sunrise of the year occurs on or around this date.
References
External links
BBC: On This Day
Historical Events on January 3
Today in Canadian History
Days of the year
January | [
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15790 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January%2015 | January 15 |
Events
Pre-1600
69 – Otho seizes power in Rome, proclaiming himself Emperor of Rome, beginning a reign of only three months.
1541 – King Francis I of France gives Jean-François Roberval a commission to settle the province of New France (Canada) and provide for the spread of the "Holy Catholic faith".
1559 – Elizabeth I is crowned Queen of England in Westminster Abbey, London.
1582 – Truce of Yam-Zapolsky: Russia cedes Livonia to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
1601–1900
1759 – The British Museum opens to the public.
1777 – American Revolutionary War: New Connecticut (present-day Vermont) declares its independence.
1782 – Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris addresses the U.S. Congress to recommend establishment of a national mint and decimal coinage.
1815 – War of 1812: American frigate , commanded by Commodore Stephen Decatur, is captured by a squadron of four British frigates.
1818 – A paper by David Brewster is read to the Royal Society, belatedly announcing his discovery of what we now call the biaxial class of doubly-refracting crystals. On the same day, Augustin-Jean Fresnel signs a "supplement" (submitted four days later) on reflection of polarized light.
1822 – Greek War of Independence: Demetrios Ypsilantis is elected president of the legislative assembly.
1865 – American Civil War: Fort Fisher in North Carolina falls to the Union, thus cutting off the last major seaport of the Confederacy.
1867 – Forty people die when ice covering the boating lake at Regent's Park, London, collapses.
1870 – A political cartoon for the first time symbolizes the Democratic Party with a donkey ("A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion" by Thomas Nast for Harper's Weekly).
1876 – The first newspaper in Afrikaans, Die Afrikaanse Patriot, is published in Paarl.
1889 – The Coca-Cola Company, then known as the Pemberton Medicine Company, is incorporated in Atlanta.
1892 – James Naismith publishes the rules of basketball.
1901–present
1908 – The Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority becomes the first Greek-letter organization founded and established by African American college women.
1910 – Construction ends on the Buffalo Bill Dam in Wyoming, United States, which was the highest dam in the world at the time, at .
1911 – Palestinian Arabic-language Falastin newspaper founded.
1919 – Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps at the end of the Spartacist uprising.
1919 – Great Molasses Flood: A wave of molasses released from an exploding storage tank sweeps through Boston, Massachusetts, killing 21 and injuring 150.
1934 – The 8.0 Nepal–Bihar earthquake strikes Nepal and Bihar with a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme), killing an estimated 6,000–10,700 people.
1936 – The first building to be completely covered in glass, built for the Owens-Illinois Glass Company, is completed in Toledo, Ohio.
1937 – Spanish Civil War: Nationalists and Republican both withdraw after suffering heavy losses, ending the Second Battle of the Corunna Road.
1943 – World War II: The Soviet counter-offensive at Voronezh begins.
1943 – The Pentagon is dedicated in Arlington, Virginia.
1947 – The Black Dahlia murder: The dismembered corpse of Elizabeth Short was found in Los Angeles.
1949 – Chinese Civil War: The Communist forces take over Tianjin from the Nationalist government.
1962 – The Derveni papyrus, Europe's oldest surviving manuscript dating to 340 BC, is found in northern Greece.
1962 – Netherlands New Guinea Conflict: Indonesian Navy fast patrol boat RI Macan Tutul commanded by Commodore Yos Sudarso sunk in Arafura Sea by the Dutch Navy.
1966 – The First Nigerian Republic, led by Abubakar Tafawa Balewa is overthrown in a military coup d'état.
1967 – The first Super Bowl is played in Los Angeles. The Green Bay Packers defeat the Kansas City Chiefs 35–10.
1969 – The Soviet Union launches Soyuz 5.
1970 – Nigerian Civil War: Biafran rebels surrender following an unsuccessful 32-month fight for independence from Nigeria.
1970 – Muammar Gaddafi is proclaimed premier of Libya.
1973 – Vietnam War: Citing progress in peace negotiations, President Richard Nixon announces the suspension of offensive action in North Vietnam.
1975 – The Alvor Agreement is signed, ending the Angolan War of Independence and giving Angola independence from Portugal.
1976 – Gerald Ford's would-be assassin, Sara Jane Moore, is sentenced to life in prison.
1977 – Linjeflyg Flight 618 crashes in Kälvesta near Stockholm Bromma Airport in Stockholm, Sweden, killing 22 people.
1981 – Pope John Paul II receives a delegation from the Polish trade union Solidarity at the Vatican led by Lech Wałęsa.
1991 – The United Nations deadline for the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from occupied Kuwait expires, preparing the way for the start of Operation Desert Storm.
1991 – Elizabeth II, in her capacity as Queen of Australia, signs letters patent allowing Australia to become the first Commonwealth realm to institute its own Victoria Cross in its honours system.
2001 – Wikipedia, a free wiki content encyclopedia, goes online.
2005 – ESA's SMART-1 lunar orbiter discovers elements such as calcium, aluminum, silicon, iron, and other surface elements on the Moon.
2009 – US Airways Flight 1549 ditches safely in the Hudson River after the plane collides with birds less than two minutes after take-off. This becomes known as "The Miracle on the Hudson" as all 155 people on board were rescued.
2013 – A train carrying Egyptian Army recruits derails near Giza, Greater Cairo, killing 19 and injuring 120 others.
2015 – The Swiss National Bank abandons the cap on the Swiss franc's value relative to the euro, causing turmoil in international financial markets.
2016 – The Kenyan Army suffers its worst defeat ever in a battle with Al-Shabaab Islamic insurgents in El-Adde, Somalia. An estimated 150 Kenyan soldiers are killed in the battle.
2019 – Somali militants attack the DusitD2 hotel in Nairobi, Kenya killing at least 21 people and injuring 19.
2019 – Theresa May's UK government suffers the biggest government defeat in modern times, when 432 MPs voting against the proposed European Union withdrawal agreement, giving her opponents a majority of 230.
2020 – The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare confirms the first case of COVID-19 in Japan.
2021 – A 6.2-magnitude earthquake hit Indonesia's Sulawesi island killing at least 67 and injuring hundreds.
2022 – The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano erupts, cutting off communications with Tonga and causing a tsunami across the Pacific.
Births
Pre-1600
1432 – Afonso V of Portugal (d. 1481)
1462 – Edzard I, Count of East Frisia, German noble (d. 1528)
1481 – Ashikaga Yoshizumi, Japanese shōgun (d. 1511)
1538 – Maeda Toshiie, Japanese general (d. 1599)
1595 – Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth, English politician (d. 1661)
1601–1900
1622 – Molière, French actor and playwright (d. 1673)
1623 – Algernon Sidney, British philosopher (probable) (d. 1683)
1671 – Abraham de la Pryme, English archaeologist and historian (d. 1704)
1716 – Philip Livingston, American merchant and politician (d. 1778)
1747 – John Aikin, English surgeon and author (d. 1822)
1754 – Richard Martin, Irish activist and politician, co-founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (d. 1834)
1791 – Franz Grillparzer, Austrian author, poet, and playwright (d. 1872)
1795 – Alexander Griboyedov, Russian playwright, composer, and poet (d. 1829)
1803 – Marjorie Fleming, Scottish poet and author (d. 1811)
1809 – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, French economist and politician (d. 1865)
1812 – Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, Norwegian author and scholar (d. 1885)
1815 – William Bickerton, English-American religious leader, third President of the Church of Jesus Christ (d. 1905)
1834 – Samuel Arza Davenport, American lawyer and politician (d. 1911)
1841 – Frederick Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby, English captain and politician, sixth Governor General of Canada (d. 1908)
1842 – Josef Breuer, Austrian physician and psychiatrist (d. 1925)
1842 – Mary MacKillop, Australian nun and saint, co-founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart (d. 1909)
1850 – Leonard Darwin, English soldier, eugenicist, and politician (d. 1943)
1850 – Mihai Eminescu, Romanian journalist, author, and poet (d. 1889)
1850 – Sofia Kovalevskaya, Russian-Swedish mathematician and physicist (d. 1891)
1855 – Jacques Damala, Greek-French soldier and actor (d. 1889)
1858 – Giovanni Segantini, Italian painter (d. 1899)
1859 – Archibald Peake, English-Australian politician, 25th Premier of South Australia (d. 1920)
1863 – Wilhelm Marx, German lawyer and politician, 17th Chancellor of Germany (d. 1946)
1866 – Nathan Söderblom, Swedish archbishop, historian, and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1931)
1869 – Ruby Laffoon, American lawyer and politician, 43rd Governor of Kentucky (d. 1941)
1869 – Stanisław Wyspiański, Polish poet, playwright, and painter (d. 1907)
1870 – Pierre S. du Pont, American businessman and philanthropist (d. 1954)
1872 – Arsen Kotsoyev, Russian author and translator (d. 1944)
1875 – Thomas Burke, American sprinter, coach, and journalist (d. 1929)
1877 – Lewis Terman, American psychologist, eugenicist, and academic (d. 1956)
1878 – Johanna Müller-Hermann, Austrian composer (d. 1941)
1879 – Mazo de la Roche, Canadian author and playwright (d. 1961)
1882 – Henry Burr, Canadian singer, radio performer, and producer (d. 1941)
1882 – Princess Margaret of Connaught (d. 1920)
1885 – Lorenz Böhler, Austrian physician and author (d. 1973)
1885 – Grover Lowdermilk, American baseball player (d. 1968)
1890 – Michiaki Kamada, Japanese admiral (d. 1947)
1891 – Ray Chapman, American baseball player (d. 1920)
1893 – Ivor Novello, Welsh singer-songwriter and actor (d. 1951)
1895 – Artturi Ilmari Virtanen, Finnish chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1973)
1896 – Marjorie Bennett, Australian-American actress (d. 1982)
1901–present
1902 – Nâzım Hikmet, Greek-Turkish author, poet, and playwright (d. 1963)
1902 – Saud of Saudi Arabia (d. 1969)
1903 – Paul A. Dever, American lieutenant and politician, 58th Governor of Massachusetts (d. 1958)
1907 – Janusz Kusociński, Polish runner and soldier (d. 1940)
1908 – Edward Teller, Hungarian-American physicist and academic (d. 2003)
1909 – Jean Bugatti, German-French engineer (d. 1939)
1909 – Gene Krupa, American drummer, composer, and actor (d. 1973)
1912 – Michel Debré, French lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of France (d. 1996)
1913 – Eugène Brands, Dutch painter (d. 2002)
1913 – Lloyd Bridges, American actor (d. 1998)
1913 – Miriam Hyde, Australian pianist and composer (d. 2005)
1913 – Alexander Marinesko, Ukrainian-Russian lieutenant (d. 1963)
1914 – Stefan Bałuk, Polish general (d. 2014)
1914 – Hugh Trevor-Roper, English historian and academic (d. 2003)
1917 – K. A. Thangavelu, Indian film actor and comedian (d. 1994)
1918 – João Figueiredo, Brazilian general and politician, 30th President of Brazil (d. 1999)
1918 – Édouard Gagnon, Canadian cardinal (d. 2007)
1918 – Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egyptian colonel and politician, second President of Egypt (d. 1970)
1919 – Maurice Herzog, French mountaineer and politician, French Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports (d. 2012)
1919 – George Cadle Price, Belizean politician, first Prime Minister of Belize (d. 2011)
1920 – Bob Davies, American basketball player and coach (d. 1990)
1920 – Steve Gromek, American baseball player (d. 2002)
1920 – John O'Connor, American cardinal (d. 2000)
1921 – Babasaheb Bhosale, Indian lawyer and politician, eighth Chief Minister of Maharashtra (d. 2007)
1921 – Frank Thornton, English actor (d. 2013)
1922 – Sylvia Lawler, English geneticist (d. 1996)
1922 – Eric Willis, Australian sergeant and politician, 34th Premier of New South Wales (d. 1999)
1923 – Ivor Cutler, Scottish pianist, songwriter, and poet (d. 2006)
1923 – Lee Teng-hui, Taiwanese economist and politician, fourth President of the Republic of China (d. 2020)
1924 – George Lowe, New Zealand-English mountaineer and explorer (d. 2013)
1925 – Ruth Slenczynska, American pianist and composer
1925 – Ignacio López Tarso, Mexican actor
1926 – Maria Schell, Austrian-Swiss actress (d. 2005)
1927 – Phyllis Coates, American actress
1928 – W. R. Mitchell, English journalist and author (d. 2015)
1929 – Earl Hooker, American guitarist (d. 1970)
1929 – Martin Luther King Jr., American minister and activist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1968)
1930 – Eddie Graham, American wrestler and promoter (d. 1985)
1931 – Lee Bontecou, American painter and sculptor
1932 – Lou Jones, American sprinter (d. 2006)
1933 – Frank Bough, English journalist and radio host (d. 2020)
1933 – Ernest J. Gaines, American author and academic (d. 2019)
1933 – Peter Maitlis, English chemist and academic
1934 – V. S. Ramadevi, Indian civil servant and politician, 13th Governor of Karnataka (d. 2013)
1937 – Margaret O'Brien, American actress and singer
1938 – Ashraf Aman, Pakistani engineer and mountaineer
1938 – Estrella Blanca, Mexican wrestler
1938 – Chuni Goswami, Indian footballer and cricketer (d. 2020)
1939 – Per Ahlmark, Swedish journalist and politician, first Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden (d. 2018)
1939 – Tony Bullimore, British sailor (d. 2018)
1941 – Captain Beefheart, American singer-songwriter, musician, and artist (d. 2010)
1942 – Frank Joseph Polozola, American academic and judge (d. 2013)
1943 – George Ambrum, Australian rugby league player (d. 1986)
1943 – Margaret Beckett, English metallurgist and politician, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
1943 – Stuart E. Eizenstat, American lawyer and diplomat, United States Ambassador to the European Union
1943 – Mike Marshall, American baseball player
1944 – Jenny Nimmo, English author
1945 – Ko Chun-hsiung, Taiwanese actor, director, and politician (d. 2015)
1945 – Vince Foster, American lawyer and political figure (d. 1993)
1945 – William R. Higgins, American colonel (d. 1990)
1945 – Princess Michael of Kent
1945 – David Pleat, English footballer, manager, and sportscaster
1946 – Charles Brown, American actor (d. 2004)
1947 – Mary Hogg, English lawyer and judge
1947 – Andrea Martin, American-Canadian actress, singer, and screenwriter
1948 – Ronnie Van Zant, American singer-songwriter (d. 1977)
1949 – Luis Alvarado, Puerto Rican-American baseball player (d. 2001)
1949 – Alasdair Liddell, English businessman (d. 2012)
1949 – Ian Stewart, Scottish runner
1949 – Howard Twitty, American golfer
1950 – Marius Trésor, French footballer and coach
1952 – Boris Blank, Swiss singer-songwriter
1952 – Andrzej Fischer, Polish footballer
1953 – Randy White, American football player
1954 – Jose Dalisay, Jr., Filipino poet, author, and screenwriter
1955 – Nigel Benson, English author and illustrator
1955 – Andreas Gursky, German photographer
1955 – Khalid Islambouli, Egyptian lieutenant (d. 1982)
1956 – Vitaly Kaloyev, Russian architect
1956 – Mayawati, Indian educator and politician, 23rd Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh
1956 – Marc Trestman, American football player and coach
1957 – David Ige, American politician
1957 – Marty Lyons, American football player and sportscaster
1957 – Andrew Tyrie, English journalist and politician
1957 – Mario Van Peebles, Mexican-American actor and director
1958 – Ken Judge, Australian footballer and coach (d. 2016)
1958 – Boris Tadić, Serbian psychologist and politician, 16th President of Serbia
1959 – Greg Dowling, Australian rugby league player
1959 – Pavle Kozjek, Slovenian mountaineer and photographer (d. 2008)
1961 – Serhiy N. Morozov, Ukrainian footballer and coach
1961 – Yves Pelletier, Canadian actor and director
1964 – Osmo Tapio Räihälä, Finnish composer
1965 – Maurizio Fondriest, Italian cyclist
1965 – Bernard Hopkins, American boxer and coach
1965 – James Nesbitt, Northern Irish actor
1967 – Ted Tryba, American golfer
1968 – Chad Lowe, American actor, director, and producer
1969 – Delino DeShields, American baseball player and manager
1970 – Shane McMahon, American wrestler and businessman
1971 – Regina King, American actress
1972 – Shelia Burrell, American heptathlete
1972 – Christos Kostis, Greek footballer
1972 – Claudia Winkleman, English journalist and critic
1973 – Essam El Hadary, Egyptian footballer
1974 – Séverine Deneulin, international development academic
1975 – Mary Pierce, Canadian-American tennis player and coach
1976 – Doug Gottlieb, American basketball player and sportscaster
1976 – Iryna Lishchynska, Ukrainian runner
1976 – Scott Murray, Scottish rugby player
1976 – Florentin Petre, Romanian footballer and manager
1978 – Eddie Cahill, American actor
1978 – Franco Pellizotti, Italian cyclist
1978 – Ryan Sidebottom, English cricketer
1979 – Drew Brees, American football player
1979 – Michalis Morfis, Cypriot footballer
1979 – Martin Petrov, Bulgarian footballer
1980 – Matt Holliday, American baseball player
1981 – Pitbull, American rapper and producer
1981 – Dylan Armstrong, Canadian shot putter and hammer thrower
1981 – Vanessa Henke, German tennis player
1982 – Francis Zé, Cameroonian footballer
1983 – Hugo Viana, Portuguese footballer
1984 – Ben Shapiro, American author and commentator
1985 – René Adler, German footballer
1985 – Enrico Patrizio, Italian rugby player
1985 – Kenneth Emil Petersen, Danish footballer
1986 – Fred Davis, American football player
1987 – Greg Inglis, Australian rugby league player
1987 – Tsegaye Kebede, Ethiopian runner
1987 – David Knight, English footballer
1987 – Kelleigh Ryan, Canadian fencer
1988 – Daniel Caligiuri, German footballer
1988 – Skrillex, American DJ and producer
1989 – Alexei Cherepanov, Russian ice hockey player (d. 2008)
1989 – Nicole Ross, American Olympic foil fencer
1990 – Robert Trznadel, Polish footballer
1991 – Marc Bartra, Spanish footballer
1991 – Nicolai Jørgensen, Danish footballer
1991 – Darya Klishina, Russian long jumper
1991 – James Mitchell, Australian basketball player
1992 – Joël Veltman, Dutch footballer
1996 – Dove Cameron, American actress and singer
1998 – Alexandra Eade, Australian artistic gymnast
2004 – Grace VanderWaal, American singer-songwriter
Deaths
Pre-1600
69 – Galba, Roman emperor (b. 3 BC)
378 – Chak Tok Ich'aak I, Mayan ruler
570 – Íte of Killeedy, Irish nun and saint (b. 475)
849 – Theophylact, Byzantine emperor (b. 793)
936 – Rudolph of France (b. 880)
950 – Wang Jingchong, Chinese general
1149 – Berengaria of Barcelona, queen consort of Castile (b. 1116)
1568 – Nicolaus Olahus, Romanian archbishop (b. 1493)
1569 – Catherine Carey, lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth I of England (b. 1524)
1584 – Martha Leijonhufvud, Swedish noblewoman (b. 1520)
1601–1900
1623 – Paolo Sarpi, Italian lawyer, historian, and scholar (b. 1552)
1672 – John Cosin, English bishop and academic (b. 1594)
1683 – Philip Warwick, English politician (b. 1609)
1775 – Giovanni Battista Sammartini, Italian organist and composer (b. 1700)
1790 – John Landen, English mathematician and theorist (b. 1719)
1804 – Dru Drury, English entomologist and author (b. 1725)
1813 – Anton Bernolák, Slovak linguist and priest (b. 1762)
1815 – Emma, Lady Hamilton, English-French mistress of Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson (b. 1761)
1855 – Henri Braconnot, French chemist and pharmacist (b. 1780)
1864 – Isaac Nathan, English-Australian composer and journalist (b. 1792)
1866 – Massimo d'Azeglio, Piedmontese-Italian statesman, novelist and painter (b. 1798)
1876 – Eliza McCardle Johnson, American wife of Andrew Johnson, 18th First Lady of the United States (b. 1810)
1893 – Fanny Kemble, English actress (b. 1809)
1896 – Mathew Brady, American photographer and journalist (b. 1822)
1901–present
1905 – George Thorn, Australian politician, sixth Premier of Queensland (b. 1838)
1909 – Arnold Janssen, German priest and missionary (b. 1837)
1916 – Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Russian playwright and translator (b. 1850)
1919 – Karl Liebknecht, German politician (b. 1871)
1919 – Rosa Luxemburg, German economist, theorist, and philosopher (b. 1871)
1926 – Enrico Toselli, Italian pianist and composer (b. 1883)
1929 – George Cope, American painter (b. 1855)
1936 – Henry Forster, 1st Baron Forster, English cricketer and politician, seventh Governor-General of Australia (b. 1866)
1937 – Anton Holban, Romanian author, theoretician, and educator (b. 1902)
1939 – Kullervo Manner, Finnish Speaker of the Parliament, the Prime Minister of the FSWR and the Supreme Commander of the Red Guards (b. 1880)
1945 – Wilhelm Wirtinger, Austrian-German mathematician and theorist (b. 1865)
1948 – Josephus Daniels, American publisher and diplomat, 41st United States Secretary of the Navy (b. 1862)
1950 – Henry H. Arnold, American general (b. 1886)
1951 – Ernest Swinton, British Army officer (b. 1868)
1951 – Nikolai Vekšin, Estonian-Russian captain and sailor (b. 1887)
1952 – Ned Hanlon, Australian sergeant and politician, 26th Premier of Queensland (b. 1887)
1955 – Yves Tanguy, French-American painter (b. 1900)
1959 – Regina Margareten, Hungarian businesswoman (b. 1863)
1964 – Jack Teagarden, American singer-songwriter and trombonist (b. 1905)
1967 – David Burliuk, Ukrainian author and illustrator (b. 1882)
1968 – Bill Masterton, Canadian-American ice hockey player (b. 1938)
1970 – Frank Clement, English race car driver (b. 1886)
1970 – William T. Piper, American engineer and businessman, founded Piper Aircraft (b. 1881)
1972 – Daisy Ashford, English author (b. 1881)
1973 – Coleman Francis, American actor, director, and producer (b. 1919)
1973 – Ivan Petrovsky, Russian mathematician and academic (b. 1901)
1974 – Harold D. Cooley, American lawyer and politician (b. 1897)
1981 – Graham Whitehead, English race car driver (b. 1922)
1982 – Red Smith, American journalist (b. 1905)
1983 – Armin Öpik, Estonian-Australian paleontologist and geologist (b. 1898)
1983 – Shepperd Strudwick, American actor (b. 1907)
1984 – Fazıl Küçük, Cypriot journalist and politician (b. 1906)
1987 – Ray Bolger, American actor, singer, and dancer (b. 1904)
1988 – Seán MacBride, Irish republican activist and politician, Minister for External Affairs, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1904)
1990 – Gordon Jackson, Scottish-English actor (b. 1923)
1990 – Peggy van Praagh, English ballerina, choreographer, and director (b. 1910)
1993 – Sammy Cahn, American songwriter (b. 1913)
1994 – Georges Cziffra, Hungarian-French pianist and composer (b. 1921)
1994 – Harry Nilsson, American singer-songwriter (b. 1941)
1994 – Harilal Upadhyay, Indian author, poet, and astrologist (b. 1916)
1996 – Les Baxter, American pianist and composer (b. 1922)
1996 – Moshoeshoe II of Lesotho (b. 1938)
1998 – Gulzarilal Nanda, Indian economist and politician, Prime Minister of India (b. 1898)
1998 – Junior Wells, American singer-songwriter and harmonica player (b. 1934)
1999 – Betty Box, English film producer (b. 1915)
2000 – Georges-Henri Lévesque, Canadian-Dominican priest and sociologist (b. 1903)
2001 – Leo Marks, English cryptographer, playwright, and screenwriter (b. 1920)
2002 – Michael Anthony Bilandic, American politician, 49th Mayor of Chicago (b. 1923)
2002 – Eugène Brands, Dutch painter (b. 1913)
2003 – Doris Fisher, American singer-songwriter (b. 1915)
2004 – Olivia Goldsmith, American author (b. 1949)
2005 – Victoria de los Ángeles, Spanish soprano and actress (b. 1923)
2005 – Walter Ernsting, German author (b. 1920)
2005 – Elizabeth Janeway, American author and critic (b. 1913)
2005 – Ruth Warrick, American actress (b. 1916)
2006 – Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, Kuwaiti ruler (b. 1926)
2007 – Awad Hamed al-Bandar, Iraqi lawyer and judge (b. 1945)
2007 – Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Iraqi intelligence officer (b. 1951)
2007 – James Hillier, Canadian-American computer scientist and academic, co-invented the electron microscope (b. 1915)
2007 – Pura Santillan-Castrence, Filipino educator and diplomat (b. 1905)
2007 – Bo Yibo, Chinese commander and politician, Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China (b. 1908)
2008 – Robert V. Bruce, American historian, author, and academic (b. 1923)
2008 – Brad Renfro, American actor (b. 1982)
2009 – Lincoln Verduga Loor, Ecuadorian journalist and politician (b. 1917)
2011 – Nat Lofthouse, English footballer and manager (b. 1925)
2011 – Pierre Louis-Dreyfus, French soldier, race car driver, and businessman (b. 1908)
2011 – Susannah York, English actress and activist (b. 1939)
2012 – Ed Derwinski, American soldier and politician, first United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs (b. 1926)
2012 – Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Spanish lawyer and politician, third President of the Xunta of Galicia (b. 1922)
2012 – Carlo Fruttero, Italian journalist and author (b. 1926)
2012 – Samuel Jaskilka, American general (b. 1919)
2012 – Ib Spang Olsen, Danish author and illustrator (b. 1921)
2012 – Hulett C. Smith, American lieutenant and politician, 27th Governor of West Virginia (b. 1918)
2013 – Nagisa Oshima, Japanese director and screenwriter (b. 1932)
2013 – John Thomas, American high jumper (b. 1941)
2014 – Curtis Bray, American football player and coach (b. 1970)
2014 – John Dobson, Chinese-American astronomer and author (b. 1915)
2014 – Roger Lloyd-Pack, English actor (b. 1944)
2015 – Ervin Drake, American songwriter and composer (b. 1919)
2015 – Kim Fowley, American singer-songwriter, producer, and manager (b. 1939)
2015 – Ray Nagel, American football player and coach (b. 1927)
2016 – Francisco X. Alarcón, American poet and educator (b. 1954)
2016 – Ken Judge, Australian footballer and coach (b. 1958)
2016 – Manuel Velázquez, Spanish footballer (b. 1943)
2017 – Jimmy Snuka, Fijian professional wrestler (b. 1943)
2018 – Dolores O'Riordan, Irish pop singer (b. 1971)
2019 – Carol Channing, American actress (b. 1921)
2019 – Ida Kleijnen, Dutch chef (b. 1936)
2020 – Rocky Johnson, Canadian professional wrestler (b. 1944)
2020 – Lloyd Cowan, British athlete and coach (b. 1962)
2022 – Alexa McDonough, first female politician to lead a major provincial political party in Canada, former leader of the federal New Democratic Party.
Holidays and observances
Arbor Day (Egypt)
Armed Forces Day (Nigeria)
Army Day (India)
Christian feast day:
Abeluzius (Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church)
Arnold Janssen
Francis Ferdinand de Capillas (one of Martyr Saints of China)
Ita
Our Lady of the Poor
Macarius of Egypt (Western Christianity)
Maurus and Placidus (Order of Saint Benedict)
Paul the Hermit
January 15 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Earliest day on which Martin Luther King Jr. Day can fall (the 15th being his birthday), while January 21 is the latest; celebrated on the third Monday in January. (United States)
Earliest day on which Sinulog Festival can fall, while January 21 is the latest; celebrated on the third Sunday in January. (Philippines)
John Chilembwe Day (Malawi)
Korean Alphabet Day (North Korea)
Ocean Duty Day (Indonesia])
Sagichō at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū. (Kamakura, Japan)
Teacher's Day (Venezuela)
Black Christ of Esquipulas day
The second day of the sidereal winter solstice festivals in India (see January 14):
Thai Pongal, Tamil harvest festival
References
External links
BBC: On This Day
Historical Events on January 15
Today in Canadian History
Days of the year
January | [
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15791 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January%2026 | January 26 |
Events
Pre-1600
661 – The Rashidun Caliphate is effectively ended with the assassination of Ali, the last caliph.
1531 – The 6.4–7.1 Lisbon earthquake kills about thirty thousand people.
1564 – The Council of Trent establishes an official distinction between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.
1564 – The Grand Duchy of Lithuania defeats the Tsardom of Russia in the Battle of Ula during the Livonian War.
1601–1900
1699 – For the first time, the Ottoman Empire permanently cedes territory to the Christian powers.
1700 – The 8.7–9.2 Cascadia earthquake takes place off the west coast of North America, as evidenced by Japanese records.
1788 – The British First Fleet, led by Arthur Phillip, sails into Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) to establish Sydney, the first permanent European settlement on Australia. Celebrated as Australia Day.
1808 – The Rum Rebellion is the only successful (albeit short-lived) armed takeover of the government in New South Wales.
1837 – Michigan is admitted as the 26th U.S. state.
1841 – James Bremer takes formal possession of Hong Kong Island at what is now Possession Point, establishing British Hong Kong.
1855 – Point No Point Treaty is signed in Washington Territory.
1856 – First Battle of Seattle: Marines from the drive off American Indian attackers after all-day battle with settlers.
1861 – American Civil War: The state of Louisiana secedes from the Union.
1863 – American Civil War: General Ambrose Burnside is relieved of command of the Army of the Potomac after the disastrous Fredericksburg campaign. He is replaced by Joseph Hooker.
1863 – American Civil War: Governor of Massachusetts John Albion Andrew receives permission from the Secretary of War to raise a militia organization for men of African descent.
1870 – Reconstruction Era: Virginia is readmitted to the Union.
1885 – Troops loyal to The Mahdi conquer Khartoum, killing the Governor-General Charles George Gordon.
1901–present
1905 – The world's largest diamond ever, the Cullinan, which weighs , is found at the Premier Mine near Pretoria in South Africa.
1915 – The Rocky Mountain National Park is established by an act of the U.S. Congress.
1918 – Finnish Civil War: A group of Red Guards hangs a red lantern atop the tower of Helsinki Workers' Hall to symbolically mark the start of the war.
1926 – The first demonstration of the television by John Logie Baird.
1930 – The Indian National Congress declares 26 January as Independence Day or as the day for Poorna Swaraj ("Complete Independence") which occurred 17 years later.
1934 – The Apollo Theater reopens in Harlem, New York City.
1934 – German–Polish declaration of non-aggression is signed.
1939 – Spanish Civil War: Catalonia Offensive: Troops loyal to nationalist General Francisco Franco and aided by Italy take Barcelona.
1942 – World War II: The first United States forces arrive in Europe, landing in Northern Ireland.
1945 – World War II: Audie Murphy displays valor and bravery in action for which he will later be awarded the Medal of Honor.
1949 – The Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory sees first light under the direction of Edwin Hubble, becoming the largest aperture optical telescope (until BTA-6 is built in 1976).
1950 – The Constitution of India comes into force, forming a republic. Rajendra Prasad is sworn in as the first President of India. Observed as Republic Day in India.
1952 – Black Saturday in Egypt: rioters burn Cairo's central business district, targeting British and upper-class Egyptian businesses.
1956 – Soviet Union cedes Porkkala back to Finland.
1962 – Ranger 3 is launched to study the Moon. The space probe later misses the moon by 22,000 miles (35,400 km).
1966 – The three Beaumont children disappear from a beach in Glenelg, South Australia, resulting in one of the country's largest-ever police investigations.
1972 – JAT Flight 367 is destroyed by a terrorist bomb, killing 27 of the 28 people on board the DC-9. Flight attendant Vesna Vulović survives with critical injuries.
1974 – Turkish Airlines Flight 301 crashes during takeoff from Izmir Cumaovası Airport (now İzmir Adnan Menderes Airport), killing 66 of the 73 people on board the Fokker F28 Fellowship.
1986 – The Ugandan government of Tito Okello is overthrown by the National Resistance Army, led by Yoweri Museveni.
1991 – Mohamed Siad Barre is removed from power in Somalia, ending centralized government, and is succeeded by Ali Mahdi.
1998 – Lewinsky scandal: On American television, U.S. President Bill Clinton denies having had "sexual relations" with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
2001 – The 7.7 Gujarat earthquake shakes Western India, leaving 13,805–20,023 dead and about 166,800 injured.
2009 – Rioting breaks out in Antananarivo, Madagascar, sparking a political crisis that will result in the replacement of President Marc Ravalomanana with Andry Rajoelina.
2009 – Nadya Suleman gives birth to the world's first surviving octuplets.
2015 – An aircraft crashes at Los Llanos Air Base in Albacete, Spain, killing 11 people and injuring 21 others.
2015 – Syrian civil war: The People's Protection Units (YPG) recaptures the city of Kobanî from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), marking a turning point in the Siege of Kobanî.
2020 – A Sikorsky S-76B flying from John Wayne Airport to Camarillo Airport crashes in Calabasas, 30 miles west of Los Angeles, killing all nine people on board, including former five-time NBA champion Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna Bryant.
2021 – Protesters and farmers storm the Red Fort near Dehli, clashing with police. One protester is killed and more than 80 police officers are injured.
Births
Pre-1600
183 – Lady Zhen, wife of Cao Pi (d. 221)
1436 – Henry Beaufort, 3rd Duke of Somerset, Lancastrian military commander (d. 1464)
1467 – Guillaume Budé, French scholar (d. 1540)
1495 – Emperor Go-Nara of Japan (d. 1557)
1541 – Florent Chrestien, French poet and translator (d. 1596)
1549 – Jakob Ebert, German theologian (d. 1614)
1582 – Giovanni Lanfranco, Italian painter (d. 1647)
1595 – Antonio Maria Abbatini, Italian composer (d. 1679)
1601–1900
1624 – George William, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (d. 1705)
1657 – William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1737)
1708 – William Hayes, English organist, composer, and conductor (d. 1777)
1714 – Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, French sculptor and educator (d. 1785)
1715 – Claude Adrien Helvétius, French philosopher (d. 1771)
1716 – George Germain, 1st Viscount Sackville, English general and politician, Secretary of State for the Colonies (d. 1785)
1722 – Alexander Carlyle, Scottish minister and author (d. 1805)
1763 – Charles XIV John of Sweden (d. 1844)
1781 – Ludwig Achim von Arnim, German poet and author (d. 1831)
1813 – Juan Pablo Duarte, Dominican philosopher and poet (d. 1876)
1824 – Emil Czyrniański, Polish chemist (d. 1888)
1832 – George Shiras, Jr., American lawyer and jurist (d. 1924)
1842 – François Coppée, French poet and author (d. 1908)
1852 – Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, Italian-French explorer (d. 1905)
1857 – 12th Dalai Lama (d. 1875)
1861 – Louis Anquetin, French painter (d. 1932)
1864 – József Pusztai, Slovene-Hungarian poet and journalist (d. 1934)
1866 – John Cady, American golfer (d. 1933)
1877 – Kees van Dongen, Dutch painter (d. 1968)
1878 – Dave Nourse, English-South African cricketer and coach (d. 1948)
1880 – Douglas MacArthur, American general, Medal of Honor recipient (d. 1964)
1885 – Michael Considine, Irish-Australian politician (d. 1959)
1885 – Harry Ricardo, English engineer and academic (d. 1974)
1885 – Per Thorén, Swedish figure skater (d. 1962)
1887 – François Faber, French-Luxembourgian cyclist (d. 1915)
1887 – Marc Mitscher, American admiral and pilot (d. 1947)
1887 – Dimitris Pikionis, Greek architect and academic (d. 1968)
1891 – Frank Costello, Italian-American mob boss (d. 1973)
1891 – August Froehlich, German priest and martyr (d. 1942)
1891 – Wilder Penfield, American-Canadian neurosurgeon and academic (d. 1976)
1892 – Bessie Coleman, American pilot (d. 1926)
1893 – Giuseppe Genco Russo, Italian mob boss (d. 1976)
1899 – Günther Reindorff, Russian-Estonian graphic designer and illustrator (d. 1974)
1900 – Karl Ristenpart, German conductor (d. 1967)
1901–present
1902 – Menno ter Braak, Dutch author (d. 1940)
1904 – Ancel Keys, American physiologist and nutritionist (d. 2004)
1904 – Seán MacBride, Irish lawyer and politician, Irish Minister for External Affairs Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1988)
1905 – Charles Lane, American actor and singer (d. 2007)
1905 – Maria von Trapp, Austrian-American singer (d. 1987)
1907 – Dimitrios Holevas, Greek priest and philologist (d. 2001)
1908 – Jill Esmond, English actress (d. 1990)
1908 – Rupprecht Geiger, German painter and sculptor (d. 2009)
1908 – Stéphane Grappelli, French violinist (d. 1997)
1910 – Jean Image, Hungarian-French animator, director, and screenwriter (d. 1989)
1911 – Polykarp Kusch, German-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1993)
1911 – Norbert Schultze, German composer and conductor (d. 2002)
1913 – Jimmy Van Heusen, American pianist and composer (d. 1990)
1914 – Dürrüşehvar Sultan, Imperial Princess of the Ottoman Empire (d. 2006)
1915 – William Hopper, American actor (d. 1970)
1917 – Louis Zamperini, American runner and captain (d. 2014)
1918 – Philip José Farmer, American author (d. 2009)
1919 – Valentino Mazzola, Italian footballer (d. 1949)
1919 – Bill Nicholson, English footballer and manager (d. 2004)
1919 – Hyun Soong-jong, South Korean politician, 24th Prime Minister of South Korea (d. 2020)
1920 – Hans Holzer, Austrian-American paranormal researcher and author (d. 2009)
1921 – Eddie Barclay, French record producer, founded Barclay Records (d. 2005)
1921 – Akio Morita, Japanese businessman, co-founded Sony (d. 1999)
1922 – Michael Bentine, English actor and screenwriter (d. 1996)
1922 – Seán Flanagan, Irish footballer and politician, 7th Irish Minister for Health (d. 1993)
1922 – Gil Merrick, English footballer (d. 2010)
1923 – Patrick J. Hannifin, American admiral (d. 2014)
1923 – Anne Jeffreys, American actress and singer (d. 2017)
1924 – Alice Babs, Swedish singer and actress (d. 2014)
1924 – Annette Strauss, American philanthropist and politician, Mayor of Dallas (d. 1998)
1925 – David Jenkins, English bishop and theologian (d. 2016)
1925 – Joan Leslie, American actress (d. 2015)
1925 – Paul Newman, American actor, activist, director, race car driver, and businessman, co-founded Newman's Own (d. 2008)
1925 – Ben Pucci, American football player and sportscaster (d. 2013)
1925 – Claude Ryan, Canadian journalist and politician (d. 2004)
1926 – Farman Fatehpuri, Pakistani linguist and scholar (d. 2013)
1926 – Joseph Bacon Fraser, Jr., American architect and businessman, co-founded the Sea Pines Company (d. 2014)
1927 – José Azcona del Hoyo, Honduran businessman and politician, President of Honduras (d. 2005)
1927 – Bob Nieman, American baseball player and scout (d. 1985)
1927 – Hubert Schieth, German footballer and manager (d. 2013)
1928 – Roger Vadim, French actor and director (d. 2000)
1929 – Jules Feiffer, American cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, and educator
1934 – Roger Landry, Canadian businessman and publisher (d. 2020)
1934 – Charles Marowitz, American director, playwright, and critic (d. 2014)
1934 – Huey "Piano" Smith, American pianist and songwriter
1934 – Bob Uecker, American baseball player, sportscaster and actor
1935 – Corrado Augias, Italian journalist and politician
1935 – Henry Jordan, American football player (d. 1977)
1935 – Paula Rego, Portuguese-born British visual artist
1936 – Sal Buscema, American illustrator
1937 – Joseph Saidu Momoh, Sierra Leonean soldier and politician, 2nd President of Sierra Leone (d. 2003)
1938 – Henry Jaglom, English-American director and screenwriter
1940 – Séamus Hegarty, Irish bishop (d. 2019)
1940 – Frank Large, English footballer and cricketer (d. 2003)
1943 – César Gutiérrez, Venezuelan baseball player and manager (d. 2005)
1943 – Jack Warner, Trinidadian businessman and politician
1944 – Angela Davis, American activist, academic, and author
1944 – Jerry Sandusky, American football coach and criminal
1945 – Jacqueline du Pré, English cellist (d. 1987)
1945 – David Purley, English race car driver (d. 1985)
1946 – Christopher Hampton, Portuguese-English director, screenwriter, and playwright
1946 – Gene Siskel, American journalist and film critic (d. 1999)
1946 – Susan Friedlander, American mathematician
1947 – Patrick Dewaere, French actor and composer (d. 1982)
1947 – Les Ebdon, English chemist and academic
1947 – Redmond Morris, 4th Baron Killanin, Irish director, producer, and production manager
1947 – Michel Sardou, French singer-songwriter and actor
1948 – Alda Facio, Costa Rican jurist, writer and teacher
1949 – Jonathan Carroll, American author
1949 – David Strathairn, American actor
1950 – Jörg Haider, Austrian lawyer and politician, Governor of Carinthia (d. 2008)
1951 – David Briggs, Australian guitarist, songwriter, and producer
1951 – Andy Hummel, American singer-songwriter and bass player (d. 2010)
1951 – Anne Mills, English economist and academic
1953 – Alik L. Alik, Micronesian politician, 7th Vice President of the Federated States of Micronesia
1953 – Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Danish politician and diplomat, 39th Prime Minister of Denmark
1953 – Lucinda Williams, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1954 – Kim Hughes, Australian cricketer
1955 – Eddie Van Halen, Dutch-American guitarist, songwriter, and producer (d. 2020)
1957 – Road Warrior Hawk, American wrestler (d. 2003)
1958 – Anita Baker, American singer-songwriter
1958 – Ellen DeGeneres, American comedian, actress, and talk show host
1961 – Wayne Gretzky, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1961 – Tom Keifer, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1962 – Guo Jian, Chinese-Australian painter, sculptor, and photographer
1962 – Tim May, Australian cricketer
1962 – Oscar Ruggeri, Argentinian footballer and manager
1963 – José Mourinho, Portuguese footballer and manager
1963 – Simon O'Donnell, Australian footballer, cricketer, and sportscaster
1963 – Tony Parks, English footballer and manager
1963 – Andrew Ridgeley, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1964 – Adam Crozier, Scottish businessman
1965 – Thomas Östros, Swedish businessman and politician
1965 – Natalia Yurchenko, Russian gymnast and coach
1966 – Kazushige Nagashima, Japanese baseball player and sportscaster
1967 – Anatoly Komm, Russian chef and businessman
1967 – Col Needham, English businessman, co-founded Internet Movie Database
1968 – Jupiter Apple, Brazilian singer-songwriter, film director, and actor (d. 2015)
1969 – George Dikeoulakos, Greek-Romanian basketball player and coach
1970 – Kirk Franklin, American singer-songwriter and producer
1973 – Larissa Lowing, Canadian artistic gymnast
1973 – Melvil Poupaud, French actor, director, and screenwriter
1973 – Brendan Rodgers, Northern Irish footballer and manager
1973 – Mayu Shinjo, Japanese author and illustrator
1977 – Vince Carter, American basketball player
1977 – Justin Gimelstob, American tennis player and coach
1978 – Corina Morariu, American tennis player and sportscaster
1981 – José de Jesús Corona, Mexican footballer
1981 – Gustavo Dudamel, Venezuelan violinist, composer, and conductor
1981 – Juan José Haedo, Argentinian cyclist
1981 – Colin O'Donoghue, Irish actor
1982 – Reggie Hodges, American football player
1983 – Petri Oravainen, Finnish footballer
1983 – Eric Werner, American ice hockey player
1984 – Ryan Hoffman, Australian rugby league player
1984 – Iain Turner, Scottish footballer
1984 – Luo Xuejuan, Chinese swimmer
1985 – Heather Stanning, English rower
1986 – Gerald Green, American basketball player
1986 – Kim Jae-joong, South Korean singer, songwriter, actor, director and designer.
1986 – Mustapha Yatabaré, French-Malian footballer
1987 – Sebastian Giovinco, Italian footballer
1988 – Dimitrios Chondrokoukis, Greek high jumper
1989 – MarShon Brooks, American basketball player
1989 – Emily Hughes, American figure skater
1990 – Sergio Pérez, Mexican race car driver
1990 – Peter Sagan, Slovak professional cyclist
1990 – Nina Zander, German tennis player
1993 – Lana Clelland, Scottish footballer
1993 – Florian Thauvin, French footballer
1995 – Sione Katoa, New Zealand rugby league player
1997 – Gedion Zelalem, German-born American soccer player
2001 – Latalia Bevan, Welsh artistic gymnast
2009 – YaYa Gosselin, American actress
2009 – The Suleman octuplets
Deaths
Pre-1600
738 – John of Dailam, Syrian monk and saint (b. 660)
910 – Luo Yin, Chinese statesman and poet
946 – Eadgyth, Queen consort of Germany (b.c 910)
1186 – Ismat ad-Din Khatun, wife of Saladin
1390 – Adolph IX, Count of Holstein-Kiel (b.c 1327)
1567 – Nicholas Wotton, English courtier and diplomat (b. 1497)
1568 – Lady Catherine Grey, Countess of Hertford (b. 1540)
1601–1900
1620 – Amar Singh I, ruler of Mewar (b. 1559)
1630 – Henry Briggs, English mathematician and astronomer (b. 1556)
1636 – Jean Hotman, Marquis de Villers-St-Paul, French diplomat (b. 1552)
1641 – Lawrence Hyde, English lawyer (b. 1562)
1697 – Georg Mohr, Danish mathematician and theorist (b. 1640)
1744 – Ludwig Andreas von Khevenhüller, Austrian field marshal (b. 1683)
1750 – Albert Schultens, Dutch philologist and academic (b. 1686)
1779 – Thomas Hudson, English painter (b. 1701)
1795 – Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, German harpsichord player and composer (b. 1732)
1799 – Gabriel Christie, Scottish general (b. 1722)
1814 – Manuel do Cenáculo, Portuguese prelate and antiquarian (b. 1724)
1823 – Edward Jenner, English physician and immunologist (b. 1749)
1824 – Théodore Géricault, French painter and lithographer (b. 1791)
1830 – Filippo Castagna, Maltese politician (b. 1765)
1831 – Sangolli Rayanna, Indian soldier (b. 1798)
1831 – Anton Delvig, Russian poet and journalist (b. 1798)
1849 – Thomas Lovell Beddoes, English poet, playwright, and physician (b. 1803)
1855 – Gérard de Nerval, French poet and translator (b. 1808)
1860 – Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, opera singer (b. 1804)
1869 – Duncan Gordon Boyes, English soldier; Victoria Cross recipient (b. 1846)
1870 – Victor de Broglie, French politician, 9th Prime Minister of France (b. 1785)
1885 – Edward Davy, English-Australian physician and engineer (b. 1806)
1885 – Charles George Gordon, English general and politician (b. 1833)
1886 – David Rice Atchison, American general and politician (b. 1807)
1887 – Anandi Gopal Joshi, One of the first female Indian physicians (b. 1865)
1891 – Nicolaus Otto, German engineer, invented the Internal combustion engine (b. 1833)
1893 – Abner Doubleday, American general (b. 1819)
1895 – Arthur Cayley, English mathematician and academic (b. 1825)
1901–present
1904 – Whitaker Wright, English businessman (b. 1846)
1920 – Jeanne Hébuterne, French painter and author (b. 1898)
1932 – William Wrigley, Jr., American businessman, founded the Wrigley Company (b. 1861)
1943 – Harry H. Laughlin, American sociologist and eugenicist (b. 1880)
1943 – Nikolai Vavilov, Russian botanist and geneticist (b. 1887)
1946 – Adriaan van Maanen, Dutch-American astronomer and academic (b. 1884)
1947 – Grace Moore, American soprano and actress (b. 1898)
1948 – Fred Conrad Koch, American biochemist and endocrinologist (born 1876)
1953 – Athanase David, Canadian lawyer and politician (b. 1882)
1962 – Lucky Luciano, Italian-American mob boss (b. 1897)
1968 – Merrill C. Meigs, American publisher (b. 1883)
1973 – Edward G. Robinson, Romanian-American actor (b. 1893)
1976 – João Branco Núncio, Portuguese bullfighter (b. 1901)
1979 – Nelson Rockefeller, American businessman and politician, 41st Vice President of the United States (b. 1908)
1983 – Bear Bryant, American football player and coach (b. 1913)
1985 – Kenny Clarke, American jazz drummer and bandleader (b. 1914)
1986 – Ruben Nirvi, Finnish linguist and professor (b. 1905)
1990 – Lewis Mumford, American sociologist and historian (b. 1895)
1992 – José Ferrer, Puerto Rican-American actor (b. 1912)
1993 – Jan Gies, Dutch businessman and humanitarian (b. 1905)
1993 – Jeanne Sauvé, Canadian journalist and politician, Governor General of Canada (b. 1922)
1996 – Harold Brodkey, American author and academic (b. 1930)
1996 – Frank Howard, American football player and coach (b. 1909)
1996 – Henry Lewis, American bassist and conductor (b. 1932)
1997 – Jeane Dixon, American astrologer and psychic (b. 1904)
2000 – Don Budge, American tennis player and coach (b. 1915)
2000 – Kathleen Hale, English author and illustrator (b. 1898)
2000 – A. E. van Vogt, Canadian-American author (b. 1912)
2001 – Al McGuire, American basketball player and coach (b. 1928)
2003 – Valeriy Brumel, Russian high jumper (b. 1942)
2003 – Hugh Trevor-Roper, English historian and academic (b. 1917)
2003 – George Younger, 4th Viscount Younger of Leckie, Scottish banker and politician, Secretary of State for Scotland (b. 1931)
2004 – Fred Haas, American golfer (b. 1916)
2006 – Khan Abdul Wali Khan, Pakistani politician (b. 1917)
2007 – Gump Worsley, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1929)
2008 – Viktor Schreckengost, American sculptor and designer (b. 1906)
2010 – Louis Auchincloss, American novelist and essayist (b. 1917)
2011 – David Kato Kisule, Ugandan teacher and LGBT rights activist, considered a father of Uganda's gay rights movement (b. 1964)
2011 – Charlie Louvin, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1927)
2012 – Roberto Mieres, Argentinian race car driver (b. 1924)
2013 – Christine M. Jones, American educator and politician (b. 1929)
2013 – Stefan Kudelski, Polish-Swiss engineer, inventor of the Nagra (b. 1929)
2013 – Padma Kant Shukla, Indian physicist and academic (b. 1950)
2013 – Shōtarō Yasuoka, Japanese author (b. 1920)
2014 – Tom Gola, American basketball player, coach, and politician (b. 1933)
2014 – Paula Gruden, Slovenian-Australian poet and translator (b. 1921)
2014 – José Emilio Pacheco, Mexican poet and author (b. 1939)
2015 – Cleven "Goodie" Goudeau, American art director and cartoonist (b. 1932)
2015 – Tom Uren, Australian politician (b. 1921)
2016 – Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, Pakistani military leader, foreign minister, and diplomat (b. 1920)
2016 – Abe Vigoda, American actor (b. 1921)
2017 – Mike Connors, American actor (b. 1925)
2017 – Tam Dalyell, Scottish politician (b. 1932)
2017 – Lindy Delapenha, Jamaican footballer and sports journalist (b. 1927)
2017 – Barbara Hale, American actress (b. 1922)
2017 – Barbara Howard, Canadian sprinter and educator (b. 1920)
2020 – John Altobelli, American college baseball coach (b. 1963)
2020 – Kobe Bryant, American basketball player (b. 1978)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Alberic of Cîteaux
Blessed Gabriele Allegra
Paula
Timothy and Titus
January 26 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Australia Day (Australia)
Duarte Day (Dominican Republic)
Engineer's Day (Panama)
International Customs Day
Liberation Day (Uganda)
Republic Day (India)
References
External links
BBC: On This Day
Historical Events on January 26
Today in Canadian History
Days of the year
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15792 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January%2028 | January 28 |
Events
Pre-1600
98 – On the death of Nerva, Trajan is declared Roman emperor in Cologne, the seat of his government in lower Germany.
814 – The death of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, brings about the accession of his son Louis the Pious as ruler of the Frankish Empire.
1069 – Robert de Comines, appointed Earl of Northumbria by William the Conqueror, rides into Durham, England, where he is defeated and killed by rebels. This incident leads to the Harrying of the North.
1077 – Walk to Canossa: The excommunication of Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, is lifted after he humbles himself before Pope Gregory VII at Canossa in Italy.
1521 – The Diet of Worms begins, lasting until May 25.
1547 – Edward VI, the nine-year-old son of Henry VIII, becomes King of England on his father's death.
1568 – The Edict of Torda prohibits the persecution of individuals on religious grounds in John Sigismund Zápolya's Eastern Hungarian Kingdom.
1573 – Articles of the Warsaw Confederation are signed, sanctioning freedom of religion in Poland.
1591 – Execution of Agnes Sampson, accused of witchcraft in Edinburgh.
1601–1900
1624 – Sir Thomas Warner founds the first British colony in the Caribbean, on the island of Saint Kitts.
1671 – Original city of Panama (founded in 1519) is destroyed by a fire when privateer Henry Morgan sacks and sets fire to it. The site of the previously devastated city is still in ruins (see Panama Viejo).
1724 – The Russian Academy of Sciences is founded in St. Petersburg, Russia, by Peter the Great, and implemented by Senate decree. It is called the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences until 1917.
1754 – Sir Horace Walpole coins the word serendipity in a letter to a friend.
1813 – Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is first published in the United Kingdom.
1846 – The Battle of Aliwal, India, is won by British troops commanded by Sir Harry Smith.
1851 – Northwestern University becomes the first chartered university in Illinois.
1855 – A locomotive on the Panama Canal Railway runs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean for the first time.
1871 – Franco-Prussian War: The Siege of Paris ends in French defeat and an armistice.
1878 – Yale Daily News becomes the first independent daily college newspaper in the United States.
1896 – Walter Arnold of East Peckham, Kent, becomes the first person to be convicted of speeding. He was fined one shilling, plus costs, for speeding at , thereby exceeding the contemporary speed limit of .
1901–present
1902 – The Carnegie Institution of Washington is founded in Washington, D.C. with a $10 million gift from Andrew Carnegie.
1908 – Members of the Portuguese Republican Party fail in their attempted coup d'état against the administrative dictatorship of Prime Minister João Franco.
1909 – United States troops leave Cuba, with the exception of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, after being there since the Spanish–American War.
1915 – An act of the U.S. Congress creates the United States Coast Guard as a branch of the United States Armed Forces.
1918 – Finnish Civil War: The Red Guard rebels seize control of the capital, Helsinki; members of the Senate of Finland go underground.
1919 – The Order of the White Rose of Finland is established by Baron Gustaf Mannerheim, the regent of the Kingdom of Finland.
1920 – Foundation of the Spanish Legion.
1922 – Knickerbocker Storm: Washington, D.C.'s biggest snowfall, causes a disaster when the roof of the Knickerbocker Theatre collapses, killing over 100 people.
1932 – Japanese forces attack Shanghai.
1933 – The name Pakistan is coined by Choudhry Rahmat Ali Khan and is accepted by Indian Muslims who then thereby adopted it further for the Pakistan Movement seeking independence.
1935 – Iceland becomes the first Western country to legalize therapeutic abortion.
1938 – The World Land Speed Record on a public road is broken by Rudolf Caracciola in the Mercedes-Benz W125 Rekordwagen at a speed of .
1941 – Franco-Thai War: Final air battle of the conflict. A Japanese-mediated armistice goes into effect later in the day.
1945 – World War II: Supplies begin to reach the Republic of China over the newly reopened Burma Road.
1956 – Elvis Presley makes his first national television appearance.
1958 – The Lego company patents the design of its Lego bricks, still compatible with bricks produced today.
1960 – The National Football League announces expansion teams for Dallas to start in the 1960 NFL season and Minneapolis-St. Paul for the 1961 NFL season.
1964 – An unarmed United States Air Force T-39 Sabreliner on a training mission is shot down over Erfurt, East Germany, by a Soviet MiG-19.
1965 – The current design of the Flag of Canada is chosen by an act of Parliament.
1977 – The first day of the Great Lakes Blizzard of 1977, which dumps of snow in one day in Upstate New York. Buffalo, Syracuse, Watertown, and surrounding areas are most affected.
1980 – collides with the tanker Capricorn while leaving Tampa, Florida and capsizes, killing 23 Coast Guard crewmembers.
1981 – Ronald Reagan lifts remaining domestic petroleum price and allocation controls in the United States, helping to end the 1979 energy crisis and begin the 1980s oil glut.
1982 – US Army general James L. Dozier is rescued by Italian anti-terrorism forces from captivity by the Red Brigades.
1984 – Tropical Storm Domoina makes landfall in southern Mozambique, eventually causing 214 deaths and some of the most severe flooding so far recorded in the region.
1985 – Supergroup USA for Africa (United Support of Artists for Africa) records the hit single We Are the World, to help raise funds for Ethiopian famine relief.
1986 – Space Shuttle program: STS-51-L mission: Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrates after liftoff, killing all seven astronauts on board.
1988 – In R v Morgentaler the Supreme Court of Canada strikes down all anti-abortion laws.
2002 – TAME Flight 120, a Boeing 727-100, crashes in the Andes mountains in southern Colombia, killing 94.
2006 – The roof of one of the buildings at the Katowice International Fair in Poland collapses due to the weight of snow, killing 65 and injuring more than 170 others.
2021 – A nitrogen leak at a poultry food processing facility in Gainesville, Georgia kills six and injures at least ten.
Births
Pre-1600
598 – Tai Zong, emperor of the Tang Dynasty (d. 649)
1312 – Joan II, queen of Navarre (d. 1349)
1368 – Razadarit, king of Hanthawaddy (d. 1421)
1457 – Henry VII, king of England (d. 1509)
1533 – Paul Luther, German scientist (d. 1593)
1540 – Ludolph van Ceulen, German-Dutch mathematician and academic (d. 1610)
1582 – John Barclay, French-Scottish poet and author (d. 1621)
1600 – Clement IX, pope of the Catholic Church (d. 1669)
1601–1900
1608 – Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Italian physiologist and physicist (d. 1679)
1611 – Johannes Hevelius, Polish astronomer and politician (d. 1687)
1622 – Adrien Auzout, French astronomer and instrument maker (d. 1691)
1693 – Gregor Werner, Austrian composer (d. 1766)
1701 – Charles Marie de La Condamine, French mathematician and geographer (d. 1774)
1706 – John Baskerville, English printer and typographer (d. 1775)
1712 – Tokugawa Ieshige, Japanese shōgun (d. 1761)
1717 – Mustafa III, Ottoman sultan (d. 1774)
1719 – Johann Elias Schlegel, German poet and critic (d. 1749)
1726 – Christian Felix Weiße, German poet and playwright (d. 1802)
1755 – Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, Polish-German physician, anthropologist, and paleontologist (d. 1830)
1784 – George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, Scottish politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1860)
1797 – Charles Gray Round, English lawyer and politician (d. 1867)
1818 – George S. Boutwell, American lawyer and politician, 28th United States Secretary of the Treasury (d. 1905)
1822 – Alexander Mackenzie, Scottish-Canadian politician, 2nd Prime Minister of Canada (d. 1892)
1833 – Charles George Gordon, English general and politician (d. 1885)
1853 – José Martí, Cuban journalist, poet, and theorist (d. 1895)
1853 – Vladimir Solovyov, Russian philosopher, poet, and critic (d. 1900)
1855 – William Seward Burroughs I, American businessman, founded the Burroughs Corporation (d. 1898)
1858 – Tannatt William Edgeworth David, Welsh-Australian geologist and explorer (d. 1934)
1861 – Julián Felipe, Filipino composer and educator (d. 1944)
1863 – Ernest William Christmas, Australian-American painter (d. 1918)
1864 – Charles W. Nash, American businessman, founded Nash Motors (d. 1948)
1865 – Lala Lajpat Rai, Indian author and politician (d. 1928)
1865 – Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg, Finnish lawyer, judge, and politician, 1st President of Finland (d. 1952)
1873 – Colette, French novelist and journalist (d. 1954)
1873 – Monty Noble, Australian cricketer (d. 1940)
1874 – Alex Smith, Scottish golfer (d. 1930)
1875 – Julián Carrillo, Mexican violinist, composer, and conductor (d. 1965)
1878 – Walter Kollo, German composer and conductor (d. 1940)
1880 – Herbert Strudwick, English cricketer and coach (d. 1970)
1884 – Auguste Piccard, Swiss physicist and explorer (d. 1962)
1885 – Vahan Terian, Armenian poet and activist (d. 1920)
1886 – Marthe Bibesco, Romanian-French author and poet (d. 1973)
1886 – Hidetsugu Yagi, Japanese engineer and academic (d. 1976)
1887 – Arthur Rubinstein, Polish-American pianist and educator (d. 1982)
1897 – Valentin Kataev, Russian author and playwright (d. 1986)
1900 – Alice Neel, American painter (d. 1984)
1901–present
1903 – Aleksander Kamiński, Polish author and educator (d. 1978)
1903 – Kathleen Lonsdale, Irish crystallographer and 1st female FRS (d. 1971)
1906 – Pat O'Callaghan, Irish athlete (d. 1991)
1906 – Markos Vafiadis, Greek general and politician (d. 1992)
1908 – Paul Misraki, Turkish-French composer and historian (d. 1998)
1909 – John Thomson, Scottish footballer (d. 1931)
1910 – John Banner, Austrian actor (d. 1973)
1911 – Johan van Hulst, Dutch politician, academic and author, Yad Vashem recipient (d. 2018)
1912 – Jackson Pollock, American painter (d. 1956)
1918 – Harry Corbett, English puppeteer, actor, and screenwriter (d. 1989)
1918 – Trevor Skeet, New Zealand-English lawyer and politician (d. 2004)
1919 – Gabby Gabreski, American colonel and pilot (d. 2002)
1921 – Vytautas Norkus, Lithuanian–American basketball player (d. 2014)
1922 – Anna Gordy Gaye, American songwriter and producer, co-founded Anna Records (d. 2014)
1922 – Robert W. Holley, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1993)
1924 – Marcel Broodthaers, Belgian painter and poet (d. 1976)
1925 – Raja Ramanna, Indian physicist and politician (d. 2004)
1926 – Jimmy Bryan, American race car driver (d. 1960)
1927 – Per Oscarsson, Swedish actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2010)
1927 – Ronnie Scott, English saxophonist (d. 1996)
1927 – Hiroshi Teshigahara, Japanese director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2001)
1927 – Vera Williams, American author and illustrator (d. 2015)
1929 – Acker Bilk, English singer and clarinet player (d. 2014)
1929 – Nikolai Parshin, Russian footballer and manager (d. 2012)
1929 – Claes Oldenburg, Swedish-American sculptor and illustrator
1929 – Edith M. Flanigen, American chemist
1930 – Kurt Biedenkopf, German academic and politician, 54th President of the German Bundesrat (d. 2021)
1930 – Roy Clarke, English screenwriter, comedian and soldier
1933 – Jack Hill, American director and screenwriter
1934 – Juan Manuel Bordeu, Argentinian race car driver (d. 1990)
1935 – David Lodge, English author and critic
1936 – Alan Alda, American actor, director, and writer
1936 – Ismail Kadare, Albanian novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright
1937 – Karel Čáslavský, Czech historian and television host (d. 2013)
1938 – Tomas Lindahl, Swedish-English biologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1938 – Leonid Zhabotinsky, Ukrainian weightlifter and coach (d. 2016)
1939 – John M. Fabian, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut
1940 – Carlos Slim, Mexican businessman and philanthropist, founded Grupo Carso
1942 – Sjoukje Dijkstra, Dutch figure skater
1942 – Erkki Pohjanheimo, Finnish director and producer
1943 – Dick Taylor, English guitarist and songwriter
1944 – Rosalía Mera, Spanish businesswoman, co-founded Inditex and Zara (d. 2013)
1944 – John Tavener, English composer (d. 2013)
1945 – Marthe Keller, Swiss actress and director
1947 – Jeanne Shaheen, American educator and politician, 78th Governor of New Hampshire
1948 – Bob Moses, American drummer
1948 – Charles Taylor, Liberian politician, 22nd President of Liberia
1949 – Mike Moore, New Zealand union leader and politician, 34th Prime Minister of New Zealand (d. 2020)
1949 – Jim Wong-Chu, Canadian poet (d.2017)
1949 – Gregg Popovich, American basketball player and coach
1950 – Barbi Benton, American actress, singer and model
1950 – Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, Bahraini king
1950 – David C. Hilmers, American colonel, physician, and astronaut
1950 – Naila Kabeer, Bangladeshi-English economist and academic
1951 – Brian Bilbray, American politician
1951 – Leonid Kadeniuk, Ukrainian general, pilot, and astronaut (d. 2018)
1951 – Billy Bass Nelson, American R&B/funk bass player
1952 – Richard Glatzer, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2015)
1953 – Colin Campbell, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1954 – Peter Lampe, German theologian and historian
1954 – Bruno Metsu, French footballer and manager (d. 2013)
1954 – Rick Warren, American pastor and author
1955 – Vinod Khosla, Indian-American businessman, co-founded Sun Microsystems
1955 – Nicolas Sarkozy, French lawyer and politician, 23rd President of France
1956 – Richard Danielpour, American composer and educator
1956 – Peter Schilling, German singer-songwriter
1957 – Mark Napier, Canadian ice hockey player and sportscaster
1957 – Nick Price, Zimbabwean-South African golfer
1957 – Frank Skinner, English comedian, actor, and author
1959 – Frank Darabont, American director and producer
1960 – Loren Legarda, Filipino journalist and politician
1961 – Normand Rochefort, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1962 – Sam Phillips, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1964 – David Lawrence, English cricketer
1966 – Seiji Mizushima, Japanese director and producer
1967 – Billy Brownless, Australian footballer and sportscaster
1968 – Sarah McLachlan, Canadian singer-songwriter, pianist, and producer
1968 – Rakim, American rapper
1969 – Giorgio Lamberti, Italian swimmer
1969 – Mo Rocca, American comedian and television journalist
1969 – Linda Sánchez, American lawyer and politician
1972 – Amy Coney Barrett, American jurist, academic, attorney, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
1972 – Mark Regan, English rugby player
1972 – Nicky Southall, English footballer and manager
1972 – Léon van Bon, Dutch cyclist
1974 – Tony Delk, American basketball player and coach
1974 – Jermaine Dye, American baseball player
1974 – Ramsey Nasr, Dutch author and poet
1974 – Magglio Ordóñez, Venezuelan baseball player and politician
1975 – Pedro Pinto, Portuguese-American journalist
1975 – Junior Spivey, American baseball player and coach
1976 – Sireli Bobo, Fijian rugby player
1976 – Mark Madsen, American basketball player and coach
1976 – Rick Ross, American rapper and producer
1976 – Miltiadis Sapanis, Greek footballer
1977 – Sandis Buškevics, Latvian basketball player and coach
1977 – Daunte Culpepper, American football player
1977 – Joey Fatone, American singer, dancer, and television personality
1977 – Takuma Sato, Japanese race car driver
1978 – Gianluigi Buffon, Italian footballer
1978 – Jamie Carragher, English footballer and sportscaster
1978 – Papa Bouba Diop, Senegalese footballer (d. 2020)
1978 – Sheamus, Irish wrestler
1978 – Big Freedia, American musician
1980 – Nick Carter, American singer-songwriter and actor
1980 – Yasuhito Endō, Japanese footballer
1980 – Michael Hastings, American journalist and author (d. 2013)
1980 – Brian Fallon, American singer-songwriter
1981 – Elijah Wood, American actor and producer
1984 – Ben Clucas, English race car driver
1984 – Stephen Gostkowski, American football player
1984 – Andre Iguodala, American basketball player
1984 – Anne Panter, English field hockey player
1985 – J. Cole, American singer
1985 – Daniel Carcillo, Canadian ice hockey player
1985 – Lauris Dārziņš, Latvian ice hockey player
1985 – Arnold Mvuemba, French footballer
1985 – Libby Trickett, Australian swimmer
1986 – Jessica Ennis-Hill, English heptathlete and hurdler
1986 – Nathan Outteridge, Australian sailor
1986 – Asad Shafiq, Pakistani cricketer
1988 – Paul Henry, English footballer
1988 – Seiya Sanada, Japanese wrestler
1989 – Siem de Jong, Dutch footballer
1991 – Carl Klingberg, Swedish ice hockey player
1992 – Sergio Araujo, Argentinian footballer
1995 – Mimi-Isabella Cesar, British rhythmic gymnast
Deaths
Pre-1600
724 – Yazid II, Umayyad caliph (b. 687)
814 – Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor (pleurisy; b. 742)
919 – Zhou Dewei, Chinese general
929 – Gao Jixing, founder of Chinese Jingnan (b. 858)
947 – Jing Yanguang, Chinese general (b. 892)
1061 – Spytihněv II, Duke of Bohemia (b. 1031)
1142 – Yue Fei, Chinese general (b. 1103)
1256 – William II, Count of Holland, King of Germany (b. 1227)
1271 – Isabella of Aragon, Queen of France (b. 1247)
1290 – Dervorguilla of Galloway, Scottish noble, mother of king John Balliol of Scotland (b. c. 1210)
1443 – Robert le Maçon, French diplomat (b. 1365)
1501 – John Dynham, 1st Baron Dynham, English baron and Lord High Treasurer (b. 1433)
1547 – Henry VIII, king of England (b. 1491)
1601–1900
1613 – Thomas Bodley, English diplomat and scholar, founded the Bodleian Library (b. 1545)
1621 – Pope Paul V (b. 1550)
1666 – Tommaso Dingli, Maltese architect and sculptor (b. 1591)
1672 – Pierre Séguier, French politician, Lord Chancellor of France (b. 1588)
1681 – Richard Allestree, English priest and academic (b. 1619)
1687 – Johannes Hevelius, Polish astronomer and politician (b. 1611)
1688 – Ferdinand Verbiest, Flemish Jesuit missionary in China (b. 1623)
1697 – Sir John Fenwick, 3rd Baronet, English general and politician (b. 1645)
1754 – Ludvig Holberg, Norwegian-Danish historian and philosopher (b. 1684)
1782 – Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, French geographer and cartographer (b. 1697)
1832 – Augustin Daniel Belliard, French general (b. 1769)
1859 – F. J. Robinson, 1st Viscount Goderich, English politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1782)
1864 – Émile Clapeyron, French physicist and engineer (b. 1799)
1873 – John Hart, English-Australian politician, 10th Premier of South Australia (b. 1809)
1901–present
1903 – Augusta Holmès, French pianist and composer (b. 1847)
1912 – Gustave de Molinari, Belgian economist and theorist (b. 1819).
1912 – Eloy Alfaro, former president of Ecuador (b. 1906)
1918 – John McCrae, Canadian soldier, physician, and author (b. 1872)
1921 – Mustafa Suphi, Turkish journalist and politician (b. 1883)
1930 – Emmy Destinn, Czech soprano and poet (b. 1878)
1935 – Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, Russian composer and conductor (b. 1859)
1937 – Anastasios Metaxas, Greek architect and target shooter (b. 1862)
1938 – Bernd Rosemeyer, German race car driver (b. 1909)
1939 – W. B. Yeats, Irish poet and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1865)
1942 – Edward Siegler, American gymnast and triathlete (b. 1881)
1945 – Roza Shanina, Russian sergeant and sniper (b. 1924)
1947 – Reynaldo Hahn, Venezuelan-French composer, conductor, and critic (b. 1875)
1948 – Hans Aumeier, German SS officer (b. 1906)
1949 – Jean-Pierre Wimille, French race car driver (b. 1908)
1950 – Nikolai Luzin, Russian mathematician and academic (b. 1883)
1953 – James Scullin, Australian journalist and politician, 9th Prime Minister of Australia (b. 1876)
1953 – Neyzen Tevfik, Turkish philosopher and poet (b. 1879)
1959 – Walter Beall, American baseball player (b. 1899)
1960 – Zora Neale Hurston, American novelist, short story writer, and folklorist (b. 1891)
1963 – Gustave Garrigou, French cyclist (b. 1884)
1965 – Tich Freeman, English cricketer (b. 1888)
1965 – Maxime Weygand, Belgian-French general (b. 1867)
1971 – Donald Winnicott, English paediatrician and psychoanalyst (b. 1896)
1973 – John Banner, Austrian actor (b. 1910)
1976 – Marcel Broodthaers, Belgian painter and poet (b. 1924)
1978 – Ward Moore, American author (b. 1903)
1983 – Billy Fury. English pop star (b. 1940)
1983 – Frank Forde, Australian educator and politician, 15th Prime Minister of Australia (b. 1890)
1986 – Space Shuttle Challenger crew
Gregory Jarvis, American captain, engineer, and astronaut (b. 1944)
Christa McAuliffe, American educator and astronaut (b. 1948)
Ronald McNair, American physicist and astronaut (b. 1950)
Ellison Onizuka, American engineer and astronaut (b. 1946)
Judith Resnik, American colonel, engineer, and astronaut (b. 1949)
Dick Scobee, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1939)
Michael J. Smith, American captain, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1945)
1988 – Klaus Fuchs, German physicist and politician (b. 1911)
1989 – Choekyi Gyaltsen, 10th Panchen Lama (b. 1938)
1993 – Helen Sawyer Hogg, Canadian astronomer and academic (b. 1905)
1996 – Joseph Brodsky, Russian-American poet and essayist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1940)
1996 – Burne Hogarth, American cartoonist and author (b. 1911)
1996 – Jerry Siegel, American author and illustrator, co-created Superman (b. 1914)
1998 – Shotaro Ishinomori, Japanese author and illustrator (b. 1938)
1999 – Valery Gavrilin, Russian composer (b. 1939)
2001 – Ranko Marinković, Croatian author and playwright (b. 1913)
2002 – Gustaaf Deloor, Belgian cyclist and soldier (b. 1913)
2002 – Astrid Lindgren, Swedish author and screenwriter (b. 1907)
2002 – Ayşe Nur Zarakolu, Turkish author and activist (b. 1946)
2003 – Mieke Pullen, Dutch runner (b. 1957)
2004 – Lloyd M. Bucher, American captain (b. 1927)
2005 – Jim Capaldi, English singer-songwriter and drummer (b. 1944)
2007 – Carlo Clerici, Swiss cyclist (b. 1929)
2007 – Robert Drinan, American priest, lawyer, and politician (b. 1920)
2007 – Yelena Romanova, Russian runner (b. 1963)
2007 – Karel Svoboda, Czech composer (b. 1938)
2009 – Billy Powell, American keyboard player and songwriter (b. 1952)
2012 – Roman Juszkiewicz, Polish astronomer and astrophysicist (b. 1952)
2012 – Don Starkell, Canadian adventurer and author (b. 1932)
2013 – Florentino Fernández, Cuban-American boxer and coach (b. 1936)
2013 – Hattie N. Harrison, American educator and politician (b. 1928)
2013 – Oldřich Kulhánek, Czech painter, illustrator, and stage designer (b. 1940)
2014 – John Cacavas, American composer and conductor (b. 1930)
2014 – Harry Gamble, American football player, coach, and manager (b. 1930)
2014 – Dwight Gustafson, American composer and conductor (b. 1930)
2014 – Nigel Jenkins, Welsh poet, journalist, and geographer (b. 1949)
2014 – Jorge Obeid, Argentinian engineer and politician, Governor of Santa Fe (b. 1947)
2015 – Suraj Abdurrahman, Nigerian general, architect, and engineer (b. 1954)
2015 – Yves Chauvin, French chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1930)
2015 – Lionel Gilbert, Australian historian, author, and academic (b. 1924)
2016 – Signe Toly Anderson, American singer (b. 1941)
2016 – Paul Kantner, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1941)
2016 – Franklin Gene Bissell, American football player and coach (b. 1926)
2016 – Buddy Cianci, American lawyer and politician, 32nd Mayor of Providence (b. 1941)
2016 – Bob Tizard, New Zealand lawyer and politician, 6th Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand (b. 1924)
2017 – Alexander Chancellor, British journalist (b. 1940)
2017 – Geoff Nicholls, British musician (b. 1948)
2019 – Pepe Smith, Filipino rock musician (b. 1947)
2021 – Cicely Tyson, American actress (b. 1924)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Joseph Freinademetz
Julian of Cuenca
Thomas Aquinas
January 28 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Army Day (Armenia)
Data Privacy Day
References
External links
BBC: On This Day
Historical Events on January 28
Today in Canadian History
Days of the year
January | [
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15793 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January%2031 | January 31 |
Events
Pre-1600
314 – Pope Sylvester I is consecrated, as successor to the late Pope Miltiades.
1208 – The Battle of Lena takes place between King Sverker II of Sweden and his rival, Prince Eric, whose victory puts him on the throne as King Eric X of Sweden.
1504 – The Treaty of Lyon ends the Italian War, confirming French domination of northern Italy, while Spain receives the Kingdom of Naples.
1578 – Eighty Years' War and Anglo-Spanish War: The Battle of Gembloux is a victory for Spanish forces led by Don John of Austria over a rebel army of Dutch, Flemish, English, Scottish, German, French and Walloons.
1601–1900
1606 – Gunpowder Plot: Four of the conspirators, including Guy Fawkes, are executed for treason by hanging, drawing and quartering, for plotting against Parliament and King James.
1747 – The first venereal diseases clinic opens at London Lock Hospital.
1814 – Gervasio Antonio de Posadas becomes Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (present-day Argentina).
1846 – After the Milwaukee Bridge War, the United States towns of Juneautown and Kilbourntown unify to create the City of Milwaukee.
1848 – John C. Frémont is court-martialed for mutiny and disobeying orders.
1862 – Alvan Graham Clark discovers the white dwarf star Sirius B, a companion of Sirius, through an telescope now located at Northwestern University.
1865 – American Civil War: The United States Congress passes the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, abolishing slavery, and submits it to the states for ratification.
1865 – American Civil War: Confederate General Robert E. Lee becomes general-in-chief of all Confederate armies.
1891 – History of Portugal: The first attempt at a Portuguese republican revolution breaks out in the northern city of Porto.
1900 – Datu Muhammad Salleh is killed in Kampung Teboh, Tambunan, ending the Mat Salleh Rebellion.
1901–present
1901 – Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters premieres at Moscow Art Theatre in Russia.
1915 – World War I: Germany is the first to make large-scale use of poison gas in warfare in the Battle of Bolimów against Russia.
1917 – World War I: Kaiser Wilhelm II orders the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.
1918 – A series of accidental collisions on a misty Scottish night leads to the loss of two Royal Navy submarines with over a hundred lives, and damage to another five British warships.
1918 – Finnish Civil War: The Suinula massacre, which changes the nature of the war in a more hostile direction, takes place in Kangasala.
1919 – The Battle of George Square takes place in Glasgow, Scotland, during a campaign for shorter working hours.
1928 – Leon Trotsky is exiled to Alma-Ata.
1942 – World War II: Allied forces are defeated by the Japanese at the Battle of Malaya and retreat to Singapore.
1943 – World War II: German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrenders to the Soviets at Stalingrad, followed two days later by the remainder of his Sixth Army, ending one of the war's fiercest battles.
1944 – World War II: American forces land on Kwajalein Atoll and other islands in the Japanese-held Marshall Islands.
1944 – World War II: During the Anzio campaign, the 1st Ranger Battalion (Darby's Rangers) is destroyed behind enemy lines in a heavily outnumbered encounter at Battle of Cisterna, Italy.
1945 – US Army private Eddie Slovik is executed for desertion, the first such execution of an American soldier since the Civil War.
1945 – World War II: About 3,000 inmates from the Stutthof concentration camp are forcibly marched into the Baltic Sea at Palmnicken (now Yantarny, Russia) and executed.
1945 – World War II: The end of fighting in the Battle of Hill 170 during the Burma Campaign, in which the British 3 Commando Brigade repulsed a Japanese counterattack on their positions and precipitated a general retirement from the Arakan Peninsula.
1946 – Cold War: Yugoslavia's new constitution, modeling that of the Soviet Union, establishes six constituent republics (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia).
1946 – The Democratic Republic of Vietnam introduces the đồng to replace the French Indochinese piastre at par.
1949 – These Are My Children, the first television daytime soap opera, is broadcast by the NBC station in Chicago.
1950 – President Truman orders the development of thermonuclear weapons.
1951 – United Nations Security Council Resolution 90 relating to the Korean War is adopted.
1953 – A North Sea flood causes over 1,800 deaths in the Netherlands and over 300 in the United Kingdom.
1957 – Eight people (five total crew from two aircraft and three on the ground) in Pacoima, California are killed following the mid-air collision between a Douglas DC-7 airliner and a Northrop F-89 Scorpion fighter jet.
1958 – Cold War: Space Race: The first successful American satellite detects the Van Allen radiation belt.
1961 – Project Mercury: Mercury-Redstone 2: The chimpanzee Ham travels into outer space.
1966 – The Soviet Union launches the unmanned Luna 9 spacecraft as part of the Luna program.
1968 – Vietnam War: Viet Cong guerrillas attack the United States embassy in Saigon, and other attacks, in the early morning hours, later grouped together as the Tet Offensive.
1968 – Nauru gains independence from Australia.
1971 – Apollo program: Apollo 14: Astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell, aboard a Saturn V, lift off for a mission to the Fra Mauro Highlands on the Moon.
1971 – The Winter Soldier Investigation, organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to publicize war crimes and atrocities by Americans and allies in Vietnam, begins in Detroit.
1978 – The Crown of St. Stephen (also known as the Holy Crown of Hungary) goes on public display after being returned to Hungary from the United States, where it was held after World War II.
1988 – Doug Williams becomes the first African-American quarterback to play in a Super Bowl and leads the Washington Redskins to victory in Super Bowl XXII.
1996 – An explosives-filled truck rams into the gates of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka in Colombo, killing at least 86 people and injuring 1,400.
2000 – Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crash: An MD-83, experiencing horizontal stabilizer problems, crashes in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Point Mugu, California, killing all 88 aboard.
2001 – In the Netherlands, a Scottish court convicts Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and acquits another Libyan citizen for their part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.
2001 – Two Japan Airlines planes nearly collide over Suruga Bay in Japan.
2009 – In Kenya, at least 113 people are killed and over 200 injured following an oil spillage ignition in Molo, days after a massive fire at a Nakumatt supermarket in Nairobi killed at least 25 people.
2018 – Both a blue moon and a total lunar eclipse occur.
2019 – Abdullah of Pahang is sworn in as the 16th Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia.
2020 – The United Kingdom's membership within the European Union ceases in accordance with Article 50, after 47 years of being a member state.
2022 – Sue Gray, a senior civil servant in the United Kingdom, publishes an initial version of her report on the Downing Street Partygate controversy.
Births
Pre-1600
1512 – Henry, King of Portugal (d. 1580)
1543 – Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japanese shōgun (d. 1616)
1583 – Peter Bulkley, English and later American Puritan (d. 1659)
1597 – John Francis Regis, French priest and saint (d. 1640)
1601–1900
1607 – James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby (d. 1651)
1624 – Arnold Geulincx, Flemish philosopher and academic (d. 1669)
1673 – Louis de Montfort, French priest and saint (d. 1716)
1686 – Hans Egede, Norwegian missionary and explorer (d. 1758)
1752 – Gouverneur Morris, American lawyer, politician, and diplomat, United States Ambassador to France (d. 1816)
1759 – François Devienne, French flute player and composer (d. 1803)
1769 – André-Jacques Garnerin, French balloonist and the inventor of the frameless parachute (d. 1823)
1785 – Magdalena Dobromila Rettigová, Czech cook book author (d. 1845)
1797 – Franz Schubert, Austrian pianist and composer (d. 1828)
1799 – Rodolphe Töpffer, Swiss teacher, author, painter, cartoonist, and caricaturist (d. 1846)
1820 – William B. Washburn, American politician, 28th Governor of Massachusetts (d. 1887)
1835 – Lunalilo of Hawaii (d. 1874)
1854 – David Emmanuel, Romanian mathematician and academic (d. 1941)
1865 – Henri Desgrange, French cyclist and journalist (d. 1940)
1865 – Shastriji Maharaj, Indian spiritual leader, founded BAPS (d. 1951)
1868 – Theodore William Richards, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1928)
1872 – Zane Grey, American author (d. 1939)
1881 – Irving Langmuir, American chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1957)
1884 – Theodor Heuss, German journalist and politician, 1st President of the Federal Republic of Germany (d. 1963)
1884 – Mammad Amin Rasulzade, Azerbaijani scholar and politician, 1st President of The Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan (d. 1955)
1889 – Frank Foster, English cricketer (d. 1958)
1892 – Eddie Cantor, American singer-songwriter, actor, and dancer (d. 1964)
1894 – Isham Jones, American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader (d. 1956)
1896 – Sofya Yanovskaya, Russian mathematician and historian (d. 1966)
1900 – Betty Parsons, American artist, art dealer and collector (d. 1982)
1901–present
1902 – Nat Bailey, Canadian businessman, founded White Spot (d. 1978)
1902 – Tallulah Bankhead, American actress (d. 1968)
1902 – Alva Myrdal, Swedish sociologist and politician, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1986)
1902 – Julian Steward, American anthropologist (d. 1972)
1905 – John O'Hara, American author, playwright, and screenwriter (d. 1970)
1909 – Miron Grindea, Romanian-English journalist (d. 1995)
1913 – Don Hutson, American football player and coach (d. 1997)
1914 – Jersey Joe Walcott, American boxer and police officer (d. 1994)
1915 – Bobby Hackett, American trumpet player and cornet player (d. 1976)
1915 – Alan Lomax, American historian, author, and scholar (d. 2002)
1915 – Thomas Merton, American monk and author (d. 1968)
1915 – Garry Moore, American comedian and game show host (d. 1993)
1916 – Frank Parker, American tennis player (d. 1997)
1917 – Fred Bassetti, American architect and academic, founded Bassetti Architects (d. 2013)
1919 – Jackie Robinson, American baseball player and sportscaster (d. 1972)
1920 – Stewart Udall, American lawyer and politician, 37th United States Secretary of the Interior (d. 2010)
1920 – Bert Williams, English footballer (d. 2014)
1921 – John Agar, American actor (d. 2002)
1921 – Carol Channing, American actress, singer, and dancer (d. 2019)
1921 – E. Fay Jones, American architect, designed the Thorncrown Chapel (d. 2004)
1921 – Mario Lanza, American tenor and actor (d. 1959)
1922 – Joanne Dru, American actress (d. 1996)
1923 – Norman Mailer, American journalist and author (d. 2007)
1925 – Benjamin Hooks, American minister, lawyer, and activist (d. 2010)
1926 – Tom Alston, American baseball player (d. 1993)
1926 – Chuck Willis, American singer-songwriter (d. 1958)
1927 – Norm Prescott, American animator, producer, and composer, co-founded Filmation Studios (d. 2005)
1928 – Irma Wyman, American computer scientist and engineer (d. 2015)
1929 – Rudolf Mössbauer, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2011)
1929 – Jean Simmons, English-American actress (d. 2010)
1930 – Joakim Bonnier, Swedish race car driver (d. 1972)
1930 – Al De Lory, American composer, conductor, and producer (d. 2012)
1931 – Ernie Banks, American baseball player and coach (d. 2015)
1931 – Christopher Chataway, English runner, journalist, and politician (d. 2014)
1932 – Miron Babiak, Polish sea captain (d. 2013)
1933 – Camille Henry, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (d. 1997)
1933 – Morton Mower, American cardiologist and inventor
1934 – Ernesto Brambilla, Italian motorcycle racer and race car driver (d. 2020)
1934 – Gene DeWeese, American author (d. 2012)
1934 – James Franciscus, American actor and producer (d. 1991)
1934 – Bob Turner, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (d. 2005)
1935 – Kenzaburō Ōe, Japanese author and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1936 – Can Bartu, Turkish former basketball and football player (d. 2019)
1937 – Regimantas Adomaitis, Lithuanian actor
1937 – Andrée Boucher, Canadian educator and politician, 39th Mayor of Quebec City (d. 2007)
1937 – Philip Glass, American composer
1937 – Suzanne Pleshette, American actress (d. 2008)
1938 – Beatrix of the Netherlands
1938 – Lynn Carlin, American actress
1938 – James G. Watt, American lawyer and politician, 43rd United States Secretary of the Interior
1940 – Kitch Christie, South African rugby player and coach (d. 1998)
1940 – Stuart Margolin, American actor and director
1941 – Dick Gephardt, American lawyer and politician
1941 – Gerald McDermott, American author and illustrator (d. 2012)
1941 – Jessica Walter, American actress (d. 2021)
1942 – Daniela Bianchi, Italian actress
1942 – Derek Jarman, English director, stage designer, and author (d. 1994)
1944 – John Inverarity, Australian cricketer and coach
1945 – Rynn Berry, American historian and author (d. 2014)
1945 – Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, English lawyer, judge, and academic
1945 – Joseph Kosuth, American sculptor and theorist
1946 – Terry Kath, American guitarist and singer-songwriter (d. 1978)
1946 – Medin Zhega, Albanian footballer and manager (d. 2012)
1947 – Nolan Ryan, American baseball player
1947 – Matt Minglewood, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist
1947 – Glynn Turman, American actor
1948 – Volkmar Groß, German footballer (d. 2014)
1948 – Muneo Suzuki, Japanese politician
1949 – Johan Derksen, Dutch footballer and journalist
1949 – Norris Church Mailer, American model and educator (d. 2010)
1949 – Ken Wilber, American sociologist, philosopher, and author
1950 – Denise Fleming, American author and illustrator
1950 – Alexander Korzhakov, Russian general and bodyguard
1950 – Janice Rebibo, American-Israeli author and poet (d. 2015)
1951 – Harry Wayne Casey, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and producer
1954 – Faoud Bacchus, Guyanese cricketer
1954 – Adrian Vandenberg, Dutch guitarist and songwriter
1955 – Virginia Ruzici, Romanian tennis player and manager
1956 – Guido van Rossum, Dutch programmer, creator of the Python programming language
1956 – John Lydon, English singer-songwriter
1957 – Shirley Babashoff, American swimmer
1958 – Armin Reichel, German footballer and manager
1959 – Anthony LaPaglia, Australian actor and producer
1959 – Kelly Lynch, American model and actress
1960 – Akbar Ganji, Iranian journalist and author
1960 – Grant Morrison, Scottish author and screenwriter
1960 – Željko Šturanović, Montenegrin politician, 31st Prime Minister of Montenegro (d. 2014)
1961 – Elizabeth Barker, Baroness Barker, English politician
1961 – Fatou Bensouda, Gambian lawyer and judge
1961 – Lloyd Cole, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1963 – Craig Coleman, Australian rugby league player and coach
1963 – Gwen Graham, American lawyer and politician
1964 – Martha MacCallum, American journalist
1964 – Dawn Prince-Hughes, American scientist
1965 – Giorgos Gasparis, Greek basketball player and coach
1965 – Ofra Harnoy, Israeli-Canadian cellist
1965 – Peter Sagal, American author and radio host
1966 – Umar Alisha, Indian journalist and philanthropist
1966 – Thant Myint-U, Myanmar historian, diplomat, conservationist, and former presidential advisor.
1966 – Dexter Fletcher, English actor and director
1967 – Fat Mike, American singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer
1968 – John Collins, Scottish footballer and manager
1968 – Matt King, English actor, producer, and screenwriter
1968 – Ulrica Messing, Swedish politician, 2nd Swedish Minister for Infrastructure
1968 – Patrick Stevens, Belgian sprinter
1969 – Dov Charney, Canadian-American fashion designer and businessman, founded American Apparel
1969 – Daniel Moder, American cinematographer
1970 – Minnie Driver, English singer-songwriter and actress
1970 – Danny Michel, Canadian singer-songwriter and producer
1971 – Patricia Velásquez, Venezuelan model and actress
1973 – Portia de Rossi, Australian-American actress
1974 – Othella Harrington, American basketball player and coach
1974 – Ariel Pestano, Cuban baseball player
1975 – Preity Zinta, Indian actress, producer, and television host
1976 – Traianos Dellas, Greek footballer and manager
1976 – Buddy Rice, American race car driver
1977 – Kerry Washington, American actress
1978 – Fabián Caballero, Argentinian footballer and manager
1979 – Daniel Tammet, English author and educator
1980 – James Adomian, American comedian, actor, and screenwriter
1980 – Gary Doherty, Irish footballer
1980 – Shim Yi-young, South Korean actress
1981 – Julio Arca, Argentinian footballer
1981 – Mark Cameron, Australian cricketer
1981 – Gemma Collins, English media personality and businesswoman
1981 – Justin Timberlake, American singer-songwriter, dancer, and actor
1982 – Maret Ani, Estonian tennis player
1982 – Allan McGregor, Scottish international footballer
1982 – Jānis Sprukts, Latvian ice hockey player
1983 – Fabio Quagliarella, Italian footballer
1984 – Vernon Davis, American football player
1984 – Josh Johnson, Canadian-American baseball player
1984 – Jeremy Wariner, American runner
1984 – Alessandro Zanni, Italian rugby player
1985 – Adam Federici, Australian footballer
1985 – Mario Williams, American football player
1986 – Walter Dix, American sprinter
1986 – Megan Ellison, American film producer, founded Annapurna Pictures
1986 – George Elokobi, Cameroonian footballer
1986 – Yves Ma-Kalambay, Belgian footballer
1986 – Pauline Parmentier, French tennis player
1987 – Marcus Mumford, American-English singer-songwriter
1988 – Brett Pitman, English footballer
1988 – Taijo Teniste, Estonian footballer
1990 – Jacopo Fortunato, Italian footballer
1990 – Jacob Markström, Swedish ice hockey player
1990 – Kota Yabu, Japanese idol, singer-songwriter, model, actor
1990 – Cro, German rapper
1994 – Kenneth Zohore, Danish footballer
1996 – Nikita Dragun, American Youtuber
Deaths
Pre-1600
632 – Máedóc of Ferns, Irish bishop and saint (b. 550)
876 – Hemma of Altdorf, Frankish queen
985 – Ryōgen, Japanese monk and abbot (b. 912)
1030 – William V, duke of Aquitaine (b. 969)
1216 – Theodore II, patriarch of Constantinople
1398 – Sukō, emperor of Japan (b. 1334)
1418 – Mircea I, prince of Wallachia (b. 1355)
1435 – Xuande, emperor of China (b. 1398)
1561 – Bairam Khan, Mughalan general (b. 1501)
1561 – Menno Simons, Dutch minister and theologian (b. 1496)
1580 – Henry, king of Portugal (b. 1512)
1601–1900
1606 – Guy Fawkes, English conspirator, leader of the Gunpowder Plot (b. 1570)
1606 – Ambrose Rookwood, English Gunpowder Plot conspirator (b. 1578)
1606 – Thomas Wintour, English Gunpowder Plot conspirator (b. 1571)
1615 – Claudio Acquaviva, Italian priest, 5th Superior General of the Society of Jesus (b. 1543)
1632 – Jost Bürgi, Swiss clockmaker and mathematician (b. 1552)
1665 – Johannes Clauberg, German philosopher and theologian (b. 1622)
1686 – Jean Mairet, French playwright (b. 1604)
1720 – Thomas Grey, 2nd Earl of Stamford, English politician, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (b. 1654)
1729 – Jacob Roggeveen, Dutch explorer (b. 1659)
1736 – Filippo Juvarra, Italian architect and set designer, designed the Basilica of Superga (b. 1678)
1790 – Thomas Lewis, Irish-born American lawyer and surveyor (b. 1718)
1794 – Mariot Arbuthnot, English admiral and politician, 12th Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia (b. 1711)
1811 – Manuel Alberti, Argentinian priest and journalist (b. 1763)
1815 – José Félix Ribas, Venezuelan soldier (b. 1775)
1828 – Alexander Ypsilantis, Greek general (b. 1792)
1836 – John Cheyne, English physician and author (b. 1777)
1844 – Henri Gatien Bertrand, French general (b. 1773)
1856 – 11th Dalai Lama (b. 1838)
1870 – Cilibi Moise, Moldavian-Romanian journalist and author (b. 1812)
1888 – John Bosco, Italian priest and educator, founded the Salesian Society (b. 1815)
1892 – Charles Spurgeon, English pastor and author (b. 1834)
1900 – John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, Scottish nobleman (b. 1844)
1901–present
1907 – Timothy Eaton, Canadian businessman, founded Eaton's (b. 1834)
1923 – Eligiusz Niewiadomski, Polish painter and critic (b. 1869)
1933 – John Galsworthy, English novelist and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1867)
1942 – Henry Larkin, American baseball player and manager (b. 1860)
1944 – Jean Giraudoux, French author and playwright (b. 1882)
1954 – Edwin Howard Armstrong, American engineer, invented FM radio (b. 1890)
1954 – Vivian Woodward, English captain and footballer (b. 1879)
1955 – John Mott, American activist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1865)
1956 – A. A. Milne, English author, poet, and playwright, created Winnie-the-Pooh (b. 1882)
1958 – Karl Selter, Estonian politician, 14th Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1898)
1960 – Auguste Herbin, French painter (b. 1882)
1961 – Krishna Singh, Indian politician, 1st Chief Minister of Bihar (b. 1887)
1966 – Arthur Percival, English general (b. 1887)
1967 – Eddie Tolan, American sprinter and educator (b. 1908)
1969 – Meher Baba, Indian spiritual master (b. 1894)
1971 – Viktor Zhirmunsky, Russian historian and linguist (b. 1891)
1973 – Ragnar Frisch, Norwegian economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1895)
1974 – Samuel Goldwyn, Polish-American film producer, co-founded Goldwyn Pictures (b. 1882)
1976 – Ernesto Miranda, American criminal (b. 1941)
1976 – Evert Taube, Swedish author and composer (b. 1890)
1985 – Reginald Baker, English-Australian film producer (b. 1896)
1985 – Tatsuzō Ishikawa, Japanese author (b. 1905)
1987 – Yves Allégret, French director and screenwriter (b. 1907)
1989 – William Stephenson, Canadian captain and spy (b. 1896)
1990 – Eveline Du Bois-Reymond Marcus, German zoologist and academic (b. 1901)
1990 – Rashad Khalifa, Egyptian-American biochemist and academic (b. 1935)
1995 – George Abbott, American actor, director, and producer (b. 1887)
1997 – John Joseph Scanlan, Irish-American bishop (b. 1930)
1999 – Giant Baba, Japanese wrestler and trainer, co-founded All Japan Pro Wrestling (b. 1938)
1999 – Norm Zauchin, American baseball player (b. 1929)
2000 – Gil Kane, Latvian-American author and illustrator (b. 1926)
2001 – Gordon R. Dickson, Canadian-American author (b. 1923)
2002 – Gabby Gabreski, American colonel and pilot (b. 1919)
2004 – Eleanor Holm, American swimmer and actress (b. 1913)
2004 – Suraiya, Indian actress and playback singer (b. 1929)
2006 – Moira Shearer, Scottish actress and ballerina (b. 1926)
2007 – Molly Ivins, American journalist and author (b. 1944)
2007 – Adelaide Tambo, South African activist and politician (b. 1929)
2008 – František Čapek, Czechoslovakian canoeist (b. 1914)
2011 – Bartolomeu Anania, Romanian bishop and poet (b. 1921)
2011 – Mark Ryan, English guitarist and playwright (b. 1959)
2012 – Mani Ram Bagri, Indian lawyer and politician (b. 1920)
2012 – Anthony Bevilacqua, American cardinal (b. 1923)
2012 – Tristram Potter Coffin, American author, scholar, and academic (b. 1922)
2012 – Dorothea Tanning, American painter and sculptor (b. 1910)
2013 – Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, Mexican poet and scholar (b. 1923)
2013 – Hassan Habibi, Iranian lawyer and politician, 1st Vice President of Iran (b. 1937)
2014 – Francis M. Fesmire, American cardiologist and physician (b. 1959)
2014 – Anna Gordy Gaye, American songwriter and producer, co-founded Anna Records (b. 1922)
2014 – Abdirizak Haji Hussein, Somalian politician, 4th Prime Minister of Somalia (b. 1924)
2014 – Miklós Jancsó, Hungarian director and screenwriter (b. 1921)
2014 – Joseph Willcox Jenkins, American composer, conductor, and educator (b. 1928)
2014 – Christopher Jones, American actor (b. 1941)
2015 – Vic Howe, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1929)
2015 – Udo Lattek, German footballer, coach, and journalist (b. 1935)
2015 – Lizabeth Scott, American actress (b. 1922)
2015 – Richard von Weizsäcker, German captain and politician, 6th President of Germany (b. 1920)
2016 – Terry Wogan, Irish radio and television host (b. 1938)
2017 – Rob Stewart, Canadian filmmaker (b. 1979)
2018 – Rasual Butler, American professional basketball player (b. 1979)
2018 – Leah LaBelle, American singer (b. 1986)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Domitius (Domice) of Amiens
Francis Xavier Bianchi
Geminianus
John Bosco
Julius of Novara
Blessed Ludovica
Máedóc (Mogue, Aiden)
Marcella
Samuel Shoemaker (Episcopal Church (USA))
Tysul
Ulphia
Wilgils
January 31 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Amartithi (Meherabad, India, followers of Meher Baba)
Independence Day (Nauru), celebrates independence from Australia in 1968.
Street Children's Day (Austria)
References
External links
BBC: On This Day
Historical Events on January 31
Today in Canadian History
Days of the year
January | [
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15794 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%206 | June 6 | The date is most famously associated with D-Day on Tuesday, 6 June 1944, when the Western Allies carried out landing and airborne operations in Normandy to begin Operation Overlord during World War II. D-Day (codenamed Operation Neptune) was the largest seaborne invasion in history. It began the liberation of German-occupied France to lay the foundations of Allied victory over Nazi Germany, finally achieved in May 1945.
Events
Pre-1600
913 – Constantine VII, the 8-year-old illegitimate son of Leo VI the Wise, becomes nominal ruler of the Byzantine Empire under the regency of a seven-man council headed by Patriarch Nicholas Mystikos, appointed by Constantine's uncle Alexander III on his deathbed.
1505 – The M8.2–8.8 Lo Mustang earthquake affects Tibet and Nepal, causing severe damage in Kathmandu and parts of the Indo-Gangetic plain.
1513 – Battle of Novara. In the Italian Wars, Swiss troops defeat the French under Louis II de la Trémoille, forcing them to abandon Milan; Duke Massimiliano Sforza is restored.
1523 – Swedish regent Gustav Vasa is elected King of Sweden and, marking a symbolic end to the Kalmar Union, 6 June is designated the country's national day.
1601–1900
1654 – Swedish Queen Christina abdicated her throne in favour of her cousin Charles Gustav and converted to Catholicism.
1762 – In the Seven Years' War, British forces begin the Siege of Havana and temporarily capture the city.
1813 – The Battle of Stoney Creek, considered a critical turning point in the War of 1812. A British force of 700 under John Vincent defeats an American force twice its size under William Winder and John Chandler.
1822 – Alexis St Martin is accidentally shot in the stomach, leading to William Beaumont's studies on digestion.
1832 – The June Rebellion in Paris is put down by the National Guard.
1844 – The Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) is founded in London.
1859 – Queensland is established as a separate colony from New South Wales. The date is still celebrated as Queensland Day.
1862 – The First Battle of Memphis, a naval engagement fought on the Mississippi results in the capture of Memphis, Tennessee by Union forces from the Confederates.
1882 – The Shewan forces of Menelik II of Ethiopia defeat the Gojjame army in the Battle of Embabo. The Shewans capture Negus Tekle Haymanot of Gojjam, and their victory leads to a Shewan hegemony over the territories south of the Abay River.
1889 – The Great Seattle Fire destroys all of downtown Seattle.
1892 – The Chicago "L" elevated rail system begins operation.
1894 – Governor Davis H. Waite orders the Colorado state militia to protect and support the miners engaged in the Cripple Creek miners' strike.
1901–present
1912 – The eruption of Novarupta in Alaska begins. It is the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century.
1918 – Battle of Belleau Wood in World War I: the U.S. Marine Corps suffers its worst single day's casualties while attempting to recapture the wood at Château-Thierry (the losses are exceeded at the Battle of Tarawa in November 1943).
1925 – The original Chrysler Corporation was founded by Walter Chrysler from the remains of the Maxwell Motor Company.
1933 – The first drive-in theater opens in Camden, New Jersey.
1934 – New Deal: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 into law, establishing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
1942 – The United States Navy's victory over the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway is a major turning point in the Pacific Theater of World War II. All four Japanese fleet carriers taking part—, , and —are sunk, as is the heavy cruiser . The American carrier and the destroyer are also sunk.
1944 – Commencement of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy, with the execution of Operation Neptune—commonly referred to as D-Day—the largest seaborne invasion in history. Nearly 160,000 Allied troops cross the English Channel with about 5,000 landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers participating. By the end of the day, the Allies have landed on five invasion beaches and are pushing inland.
1971 – Soyuz 11 is launched. The mission ends in disaster when all three cosmonauts, Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev are suffocated by uncontrolled decompression of the capsule during re-entry on 29 June.
1975 – British referendum results in continued membership of the European Economic Community, with 67% of votes in favour.
1982 – The Lebanon War begins. Forces under Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon invade southern Lebanon during Operation Peace for the Galilee, eventually reaching as far north as the capital Beirut.
1985 – The grave of "Wolfgang Gerhard" is opened in Embu, Brazil; the exhumed remains are later proven to be those of Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's "Angel of Death"; Mengele is thought to have drowned while swimming in February 1979.
1993 – Punsalmaagiin Ochirbat wins the first presidential election in Mongolia.
2002 – Eastern Mediterranean event. A near-Earth asteroid estimated at ten meters in diameter explodes over the Mediterranean Sea between Greece and Libya. The explosion is estimated to have a force of 26 kilotons, slightly more powerful than the Nagasaki atomic bomb.
2017 – Syrian civil war: The Battle of Raqqa begins with an offensive by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to capture the city from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Births
Pre-1600
1436 – Regiomontanus (Johannes Müller von Königsberg), German mathematician, astronomer, and bishop (d. 1476)
1519 – Andrea Cesalpino, Italian philosopher, physician, and botanist (d. 1603)
1599 – Diego Velázquez (date of baptism), Spanish painter and educator (d. 1660)
1601–1900
1606 – Pierre Corneille, French playwright and producer (d. 1684)
1622 – Claude-Jean Allouez, French-American missionary and explorer (d. 1689)
1714 – Joseph I of Portugal, King of Portugal from 31 July 1750 until his death (d. 1777)
1755 – Nathan Hale, American soldier (d. 1776)
1756 – John Trumbull, American soldier and painter (d. 1843)
1799 – Alexander Pushkin, Russian author and poet (d. 1837)
1810 – Friedrich Wilhelm Schneidewin, German philologist and scholar (d. 1856)
1841 – Eliza Orzeszkowa, Polish author and publisher (d. 1910)
1850 – Karl Ferdinand Braun, German-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate in 1909 for physics (d. 1918)
1857 – Aleksandr Lyapunov, Russian mathematician and physicist (d. 1918)
1862 – Henry Newbolt, English historian, author, and poet (d. 1938)
1868 – Robert Falcon Scott, English sailor and explorer (d. 1912)
1872 – Alix of Hesse, German princess and Russian empress (d. 1918)
1875 – Thomas Mann, German author and critic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1955)
1890 – Ted Lewis, American singer, clarinet player, and bandleader (d. 1971)
1891 – Masti Venkatesha Iyengar, Indian author and academic (d. 1986)
1891 – Erich Marcks, German general in WWII who planned Operation Barbarossa (d. 1944)
1896 – Henry Allingham, English World War I soldier and supercentenarian (d. 2009)
1896 – Italo Balbo, Italian air marshal and fascist politician who played a key role in developing Mussolini's air force (d. 1940)
1897 – Joel Rinne, Finnish actor (d. 1981)
1898 – Jacobus Johannes Fouché, South African politician, 2nd State President of South Africa (d. 1980)
1898 – Ninette de Valois, English ballerina, choreographer, and director (d. 2001)
1900 – Manfred Sakel, Ukrainian-American psychiatrist and physician (d. 1957)
1901–present
1901 – Jan Struther, English author, poet and hymnwriter who created the character Mrs Miniver (d. 1953)
1901 – Sukarno, Indonesian engineer and politician, 1st President of Indonesia (d. 1970)
1902 – Jimmie Lunceford, American saxophonist and bandleader (d. 1947)
1903 – Aram Khachaturian, Armenian composer and conductor (d. 1978)
1906 – Max August Zorn, German mathematician and academic who is noted for Zorn's Lemma (d. 1993)
1907 – Bill Dickey, American baseball player and manager who played in eight World Series, winning seven (d. 1993)
1909 – Isaiah Berlin, Latvian-English historian and philosopher (d. 1997)
1915 – Vincent Persichetti, American pianist and composer (d. 1987)
1916 – Hamani Diori, Nigerien academic and politician, 1st President of Niger (d. 1989)
1917 – Kirk Kerkorian, American businessman, founded the Tracinda Corporation (d. 2015)
1918 – Kenneth Connor, English comedy actor (d. 1993)
1918 – Edwin G. Krebs, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2009)
1919 – Peter Carington, 6th Baron Carrington, English army officer and politician, 6th Secretary General of NATO (d. 2018)
1923 – V. C. Andrews, American author, illustrator, and painter (d. 1986)
1923 – Jean Pouliot, Canadian broadcaster (d. 2004)
1925 – Maxine Kumin, American poet and author (d. 2014)
1925 – Frank Chee Willeto, American soldier and politician, 4th Vice President of the Navajo Nation and a noted code talker during World War II (d. 2013)
1926 – Klaus Tennstedt, German conductor (d. 1998)
1929 – James Barnor, Ghanaian photographer
1929 – Sunil Dutt, Indian actor, director, producer, and politician (d. 2005)
1930 – Frank Tyson, English-Australian cricketer, coach and journalist (d. 2015)
1932 – David Scott, American colonel, engineer, and astronaut who was the commander of Apollo 15
1933 – Heinrich Rohrer, Swiss physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2013)
1934 – Albert II, King of the Belgians from 9 August 1993 to 21 July 2013 (abdicated)
1935 – Jon Henricks, Australian swimmer; winner of two Olympic gold medals in 1956
1936 – D. Ramanaidu, Indian actor, director, and producer, founded Suresh Productions (d. 2015)
1936 – Levi Stubbs, American soul singer; lead vocalist of the Four Tops (d. 2008)
1939 – Louis Andriessen, Dutch pianist and composer (d. 2021)
1939 – Gary U.S. Bonds, American singer-songwriter
1940 – Willie John McBride, Northern Irish rugby player who toured with the British Lions five times
1943 – Richard Smalley, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate in 1996 for chemistry (d. 2005)
1944 – Monty Alexander, Jamaican jazz pianist
1944 – Phillip Allen Sharp, American molecular biologist; 1993 Nobel Prize laureate (Physiology or Medicine)
1944 – Tommie Smith, American sprinter and football player; winner of 1968 Olympic 200m gold medal in a world record time
1946 – Tony Levin, American bass player and songwriter
1947 – David Blunkett, British Labour politician; Home Secretary 2001–2004
1947 – Robert Englund, American actor; best known for Nightmare on Elm Street
1947 – Ada Kok, Dutch butterfly stroke swimmer; winner of three Olympic medals including gold in 1968
1948 – Arlene Harris, American entrepreneur, inventor, investor and policy advocate
1949 – Holly Near, American folk singer and songwriter
1954 – Harvey Fierstein, American actor and playwright; twice a winner at the Tony Awards
1954 – Wladyslaw Zmuda, Polish footballer and manager; 91 caps for Poland and voted Best Young Player at the 1974 FIFA World Cup
1955 – Sam Simon, American director, producer and screenwriter; co-developer of The Simpsons (d. 2015)
1956 – Björn Borg, Swedish tennis player; winner of eleven Grand Slam singles titles including five consecutive Wimbledons
1966 – Sophie Jamal, Canadian endocrinologist involved in scientific misconduct
1967 – Paul Giamatti, American actor and producer
1972 – Natalie Morales, American television journalist and NBC News anchor
1974 – Sonya Walger, British-American actress
1985 – Becky Sauerbrunn, American footballer; twice a winner of the FIFA Women's World Cup, also an Olympic gold medallist
1992 – DeAndre Hopkins, American football player
Deaths
Pre-1600
184 – Qiao Xuan, Chinese official (b. c. 110)
863 – Abu Musa Utamish, vizier to the Abbasid Caliphate
913 – Alexander III, Byzantine emperor (b. 870)
1097 – Agnes of Aquitaine, Queen of Aragon and Navarre
1134 – Norbert of Xanten, German bishop and saint (b. 1060)
1217 – Henry I, King of Castile and Toledo (b. 1204)
1251 – William III of Dampierre, Count of Flanders
1252 – Robert Passelewe, Bishop of Chichester
1480 – Vecchietta, Italian painter, sculptor, and architect (b. 1412)
1548 – João de Castro, Portuguese soldier and politician, Governor of Portuguese India (b. 1500)
1583 – Nakagawa Kiyohide, Japanese daimyo (b. 1556)
1601–1900
1661 – Martino Martini, Italian Jesuit missionary (b. 1614)
1799 – Patrick Henry, American lawyer and politician, 1st Governor of Virginia (b. 1736)
1813 – Antonio Cachia, Maltese architect, engineer and archaeologist (b. 1739)
1832 – Jeremy Bentham, English jurist and philosopher (b. 1748)
1861 – Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, Italian politician, 1st Prime Minister of Italy (b. 1810)
1865 – William Quantrill, leader of a Confederate guerrilla band in the American Civil War (b. 1837)
1878 – Robert Stirling, Scottish minister and engineer, invented the stirling engine (b. 1790)
1881 – Henri Vieuxtemps, Belgian violinist and composer (b. 1820)
1891 – John A. Macdonald, Scottish-Canadian lawyer and politician, 1st Prime Minister of Canada (b. 1815)
1901–present
1916 – Yuan Shikai, Chinese general and politician, 2nd President of the Republic of China (b. 1859)
1922 – Lillian Russell, American actress and singer (b. 1860)
1935 – Julian Byng, 1st Viscount Byng of Vimy, English field marshal and politician, 12th Governor-General of Canada (b. 1862)
1941 – Louis Chevrolet, Swiss-American race car driver and businessman, founded Chevrolet and Frontenac Motor Corporation (b. 1878)
1946 – Gerhart Hauptmann, German novelist, poet, and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1862)
1947 – James Agate, English author and critic (b. 1877)
1948 – Louis Lumière, French film director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1864)
1955 – Max Meldrum, Scottish-Australian painter and educator (b. 1875)
1961 – Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist (b. 1875)
1962 – Yves Klein, French painter (b. 1928)
1962 – Tom Phillis, Australian motorcycle racer (b. 1934)
1963 – William Baziotes, American painter and academic (b. 1912)
1968 – Robert F. Kennedy, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 64th United States Attorney General (b. 1925)
1976 – J. Paul Getty, American businessman, founded the Getty Oil Company (b. 1892)
1979 – Jack Haley, American actor (b. 1897)
1982 – Kenneth Rexroth, American poet and academic (b. 1905)
1983 – Hans Leip, German author, poet, and playwright who wrote the lyrics of Lili Marleen (b. 1893)
1991 – Stan Getz, American saxophonist and jazz innovator (b. 1927)
1994 – Barry Sullivan, American film actor (b. 1912)
1996 – George Davis Snell, American geneticist and immunologist; awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1980 for his studies of histocompatibility (b. 1903)
2005 – Anne Bancroft, American film actress; winner of the 1963 Academy Award for Best Actress for The Miracle Worker (b. 1931)
2006 – Billy Preston, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and actor (b. 1946)
2009 – Jean Dausset, French-Spanish immunologist and academic; awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of the genetic basis of immunological reaction (b. 1916)
2012 – Vladimir Krutov, Russian ice hockey player; together with Igor Larionov and Sergei Makarov, formed the famed KLM Line. (b. 1960)
2013 – Jerome Karle, American crystallographer and academic; awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research into the molecular structure of chemical compounds (b. 1918)
2013 – Esther Williams, American swimmer and actress (b. 1921)
2014 – Lorna Wing, English psychiatrist and physician; pioneered studies of autism (b. 1928)
2015 – Vincent Bugliosi, American lawyer and author; prosecuting attorney in the Tate–LaBianca murders case (b. 1934)
2015 – Ludvík Vaculík, Czech journalist and author; noted for The Two Thousand Words which inspired the Prague Spring (b. 1926)
2016 – Viktor Korchnoi, Russian chess grandmaster; arguably the best player never to become World Chess Champion (b. 1931)
2016 – Peter Shaffer, English playwright and screenwriter; works included Equus and Amadeus (b. 1926)
Holidays and observances
St Claude
Ini Kopuria (Church of England, Episcopal Church, Anglican Church of Melanesia)
St Marcellin Champagnat
St Norbert
D-Day Invasion Anniversary.
Engineer's Day in Taiwan.
Korean Children's Union Foundation Day in North Korea.
Memorial Day in South Korea.
National Day of Sweden, marking the end of the Danish-ruled Kalmar Union and the coronation of King Gustav Vasa.
National Huntington's Disease Awareness Day in the USA.
Queensland Day.
UN Russian Language Day.
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15795 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%207 | June 7 |
Events
Pre-1600
421 – Emperor Theodosius II marries Aelia Eudocia at Constantinople (Byzantine Empire).
879 – Pope John VIII recognizes the Duchy of Croatia under Duke Branimir as an independent state.
1002 – Henry II, a cousin of Emperor Otto III, is elected and crowned King of Germany.
1099 – First Crusade: The Siege of Jerusalem begins.
1420 – Troops of the Republic of Venice capture Udine, ending the independence of the Patria del Friuli.
1494 – Spain and Portugal sign the Treaty of Tordesillas which divides the New World between the two countries.
1601–1900
1628 – The Petition of Right, a major English constitutional document, is granted the Royal Assent by Charles I and becomes law.
1654 – Louis XIV is crowned King of France.
1692 – Port Royal, Jamaica, is hit by a catastrophic earthquake; in just three minutes, 1,600 people are killed and 3,000 are seriously injured.
1776 – Richard Henry Lee presents the "Lee Resolution" to the Continental Congress. The motion is seconded by John Adams and will lead to the United States Declaration of Independence.
1788 – French Revolution: Day of the Tiles: Civilians in Grenoble toss roof tiles and various objects down upon royal troops.
1800 – David Thompson reaches the mouth of the Saskatchewan River in Manitoba.
1810 – The newspaper Gazeta de Buenos Ayres is first published in Argentina.
1832 – The Great Reform Act of England and Wales receives royal assent.
1832 – Asian cholera reaches Quebec, brought by Irish immigrants, and kills about 6,000 people in Lower Canada.
1862 – The United States and the United Kingdom agree in the Lyons–Seward Treaty to suppress the African slave trade.
1863 – During the French intervention in Mexico, Mexico City is captured by French troops.
1866 – One thousand eight hundred Fenian raiders are repelled back to the United States after looting and plundering the Saint-Armand and Frelighsburg areas of Canada East.
1880 – War of the Pacific: The Battle of Arica, the assault and capture of Morro de Arica (Arica Cape), ends the Campaña del Desierto (Desert Campaign).
1892 – Homer Plessy is arrested for refusing to leave his seat in the "whites-only" car of a train; he lost the resulting court case, Plessy v. Ferguson.
1899 – American Temperance crusader Carrie Nation begins her campaign of vandalizing alcohol-serving establishments by destroying the inventory in a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas.
1901–present
1905 – Norway's parliament dissolves its union with Sweden. The vote was confirmed by a national plebiscite on August 13 of that year.
1906 – Cunard Line's is launched from the John Brown Shipyard, Glasgow (Clydebank), Scotland.
1917 – World War I: Battle of Messines: Allied soldiers detonate a series of mines underneath German trenches at Messines Ridge, killing 10,000 German troops.
1919 – Sette Giugno: Nationalist riots break out in Valletta, the capital of Malta. British soldiers fire into the crowd, killing four people.
1929 – The Lateran Treaty is ratified, bringing Vatican City into existence.
1938 – The Douglas DC-4E makes its first test flight.
1938 – Second Sino-Japanese War: The Chinese Nationalist government creates the 1938 Yellow River flood to halt Japanese forces. Five hundred to nine hundred thousand civilians are killed.
1940 – King Haakon VII, Crown Prince Olav and the Norwegian government leave Tromsø and go into exile in London. They return exactly five years later.
1942 – World War II: The Battle of Midway ends in American victory.
1942 – World War II: Aleutian Islands Campaign: Imperial Japanese soldiers begin occupying the American islands of Attu and Kiska, in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska.
1944 – World War II: The steamer Danae, carrying 350 Cretan Jews and 250 Cretan partisans, is sunk without survivors off the shore of Santorini.
1944 – World War II: Battle of Normandy: At Ardenne Abbey, members of the SS Division Hitlerjugend massacre 23 Canadian prisoners of war.
1945 – King Haakon VII of Norway returns from exactly five years in exile during World War II.
1946 – The United Kingdom's BBC returns to broadcasting its television service, which has been off air for seven years because of World War II.
1948 – Anti-Jewish riots in Oujda and Jerada take place.
1948 – Edvard Beneš resigns as President of Czechoslovakia rather than signing the Ninth-of-May Constitution, making his nation a Communist state.
1955 – Lux Radio Theatre signs off the air permanently. The show launched in New York in 1934, and featured radio adaptations of Broadway shows and popular films.
1962 – The Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) sets fire to the University of Algiers library building, destroying about 500,000 books.
1965 – The Supreme Court of the United States hands down its decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, prohibiting the states from criminalizing the use of contraception by married couples.
1967 – Six-Day War: Israeli soldiers enter Jerusalem.
1971 – The United States Supreme Court overturns the conviction of Paul Cohen for disturbing the peace, setting the precedent that vulgar writing is protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
1971 – The Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Division of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service raids the home of Ken Ballew for illegal possession of hand grenades.
1975 – Sony launches Betamax, the first videocassette recorder format.
1977 – Five hundred million people watch the high day of the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II begin on television.
1981 – The Israeli Air Force destroys Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor during Operation Opera.
1982 – Priscilla Presley opens Graceland to the public; the bathroom where Elvis Presley died five years earlier is kept off-limits.
1989 – Surinam Airways Flight 764 crashes on approach to Paramaribo-Zanderij International Airport in Suriname because of pilot error, killing 176 of 187 aboard.
1991 – Mount Pinatubo erupts, generating an ash column high.
2000 – The United Nations defines the Blue Line as the border between Israel and Lebanon.
2017 – A Myanmar Air Force Shaanxi Y-8 crashes into the Andaman Sea near Dawei, Myanmar, killing all 122 aboard.
Births
Pre-1600
1003 – Emperor Jingzong of Western Xia (d. 1048)
1402 – Ichijō Kaneyoshi, Japanese noble (d. 1481)
1422 – Federico da Montefeltro, Italian condottiero (d. 1482)
1502 – John III of Portugal (d. 1557)
1529 – Étienne Pasquier, French lawyer and jurist (d. 1615)
1601–1900
1687 – Gaetano Berenstadt, Italian actor and singer (d. 1734)
1702 – Louis George, Margrave of Baden-Baden (d. 1761)
1757 – Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (d. 1806)
1761 – John Rennie the Elder, Scottish engineer (d. 1821)
1770 – Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, English politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1828)
1778 – Beau Brummell, English cricketer and fashion designer (d. 1840)
1811 – James Young Simpson, Scottish obstetrician (d. 1870)
1831 – Amelia Edwards, English journalist and author (d. 1892)
1837 – Alois Hitler, Austrian civil servant (d. 1903)
1840 – Carlota of Mexico (d. 1927)
1845 – Leopold Auer, Hungarian violinist, composer, and conductor (d. 1930)
1847 – George Washington Ball, American legislator from Iowa (d. 1915)
1848 – Paul Gauguin, French painter and sculptor (d. 1903)
1851 – Ture Malmgren, Swedish journalist and politician (d. 1922)
1861 – Robina Nicol, New Zealand photographer and suffragist (d. 1942)
1862 – Philipp Lenard, Slovak-German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1947)
1863 – Bones Ely, American baseball player and manager (d. 1952)
1868 – Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scottish painter and architect (d. 1928)
1877 – Roelof Klein, Dutch-American rower and engineer (d. 1960)
1879 – Knud Rasmussen, Danish anthropologist and explorer (d. 1933)
1879 – Joan Voûte, Dutch astronomer and academic (d. 1963)
1884 – Ester Claesson, Swedish landscape architect (d. 1931)
1883 – Sylvanus Morley, American archaeologist and scholar (d. 1948)
1886 – Henri Coandă, Romanian engineer, designed the Coandă-1910 (d. 1972)
1888 – Clarence DeMar, American runner and educator (d. 1958)
1892 – Leo Reise, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 1975)
1893 – Gillis Grafström, Swedish figure skater and architect (d. 1938)
1894 – Alexander P. de Seversky, Georgian-American pilot and engineer, co-designed the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt (d. 1974)
1896 – Douglas Campbell, American lieutenant and pilot (d. 1990)
1896 – Robert S. Mulliken, American physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1986)
1896 – Imre Nagy, Hungarian soldier and politician, 44th Prime Minister of Hungary (d. 1958)
1897 – George Szell, Hungarian-American conductor and composer (d. 1970)
1899 – Elizabeth Bowen, Anglo-Irish author and critic (d. 1973)
1901–present
1902 – Georges Van Parys, French composer (d. 1971)
1902 – Herman B Wells, American banker, author, and academic (d. 2000)
1905 – James J. Braddock, American world heavyweight boxing champion (d. 1974)
1906 – Glen Gray, American saxophonist and bandleader (d. 1963)
1907 – Sigvard Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg (d. 2002)
1909 – Virginia Apgar, American anesthesiologist and pediatrician, developed the Apgar test (d. 1974)
1909 – Peter W. Rodino, American captain, lawyer, and politician (d. 2005)
1909 – Jessica Tandy, English-American actress (d. 1994)
1910 – Arthur Gardner, American actor and producer (d. 2014)
1910 – Mike Sebastian, American football player and coach (d. 1989)
1910 – Bradford Washburn, American mountaineer, photographer, and cartographer (d. 2007)
1910 – Marion Post Wolcott, American photographer (d. 1990)
1911 – Brooks Stevens, American engineer and designer, designed the Wienermobile (d. 1995)
1912 – Jacques Hélian, French bandleader (d. 1986)
1917 – Gwendolyn Brooks, American poet (d. 2000)
1917 – Dean Martin, American singer, actor, and producer (d. 1995)
1920 – Georges Marchais, French mechanic and politician (d. 1997)
1923 – Jules Deschênes, Canadian lawyer and judge (d. 2000)
1925 – Ernestina Herrera de Noble, Argentine publisher and executive (d. 2017)
1926 – Jean-Noël Tremblay, Canadian lawyer and politician (d. 2020)
1927 – Paul Salamunovich, American conductor and educator (d. 2014)
1928 – James Ivory, American director, producer, and screenwriter
1929 – John Turner, Canadian lawyer and politician, 17th Prime Minister of Canada (d. 2020)
1931 – Virginia McKenna, English actress and author
1932 – Per Maurseth, Norwegian historian, academic, and politician (d. 2013)
1935 – Harry Crews, American novelist, playwright, short story writer, and essayist (d. 2012)
1936 – Bert Sugar, American author and boxing historian (d. 2012)
1938 – Ian St John, Scottish international footballer and manager (d. 2021)
1939 – Yuli Turovsky, Russian-Canadian cellist, conductor and educator (d. 2013)
1940 – Tom Jones, Welsh singer and actor
1940 – Ronald Pickup, English actor (d. 2021)
1944 – Clarence White, American guitarist and singer (d. 1973)
1945 – Wolfgang Schüssel, Austrian lawyer and politician, 26th Chancellor of Austria
1952 – Liam Neeson, Irish-American actor
1952 – Orhan Pamuk, Turkish-American novelist, screenwriter, and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1954 – Louise Erdrich, American novelist and poet
1958 – Prince, American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and actor (d. 2016)
1959 – Mike Pence, 48th Vice President of the United States, 50th Governor of Indiana
1960 – Bill Prady, American screenwriter and producer
1965 – Damien Hirst, English painter and art collector
1970 – Cafu, Brazilian footballer
1974 – Bear Grylls, English adventurer, author, and television host
1978 – Bill Hader, Two-time Emmy winning American actor, comedian, and screenwriter
1981 – Anna Kournikova, Russian tennis player
1990 – Iggy Azalea, Australian rapper, singer, songwriter, and model
1991 – Fetty Wap, American rapper, singer, and songwriter
1993 – George Ezra, English singer-songwriter
Deaths
Pre-1600
555 – Vigilius, pope of the Catholic Church (b. 500)
862 – Al-Muntasir, Abbasid caliph (b. 837)
929 – Ælfthryth, Countess of Flanders (b. 877)
940 – Qian Hongzun, heir apparent of Wuyue (b. 925)
951 – Lu Wenji, Chinese chancellor (b. 876)
1329 – Robert the Bruce, Scottish king (b. 1274)
1337 – William I, Count of Hainaut (b. 1286)
1341 – An-Nasir Muhammad, Egyptian sultan (b. 1285)
1358 – Ashikaga Takauji, Japanese shōgun (b. 1305)
1394 – Anne of Bohemia, English queen (b. 1366)
1492 – Casimir IV Jagiellon, Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1440 and King of Poland from 1447 (b. 1427)
1594 – Rodrigo Lopez, physician of Queen Elizabeth (b. 1525)
1601–1900
1618 – Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, English politician, Colonial Governor of Virginia (b. 1577)
1660 – George II Rákóczi, Prince of Transylvania (b. 1621)
1711 – Henry Dodwell, Irish scholar and theologian (b. 1641)
1740 – Alexander Spotswood, Moroccan-American colonial and politician, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia (b. 1676)
1779 – William Warburton, English bishop and critic (b. 1698)
1792 – Benjamin Tupper, American general and surveyor (b. 1738)
1810 – Luigi Schiavonetti, Italian engraver and etcher (b. 1765)
1826 – Joseph von Fraunhofer, German optician, physicist, and astronomer (b. 1787)
1840 – Frederick William III of Prussia (b. 1770)
1843 – Friedrich Hölderlin, German lyric poet and author (b. 1770)
1853 – Norbert Provencher, Canadian missionary and bishop (b. 1787)
1854 – Charles Baudin, French admiral (b. 1792)
1859 – David Cox, English painter (b. 1783)
1861 – Patrick Brontë, Anglo-Irish priest and author (b. 1777)
1863 – Antonio Valero de Bernabé, Latin American liberator (b. 1790)
1866 – Chief Seattle, American tribal chief (b. 1780)
1879 – William Tilbury Fox, English dermatologist and academic (b. 1836)
1896 – Pavlos Carrer, Greek composer (b. 1829)
1901–present
1911 – Maurice Rouvier, French politician, Prime Minister of France (b. 1842)
1915 – Charles Reed Bishop, American banker and politician, founded the First Hawaiian Bank (b. 1822)
1916 – Émile Faguet, French author and critic (b. 1847)
1924 – William Pirrie, 1st Viscount Pirrie, Irish businessman and politician, Lord Mayor of Belfast (b. 1847)
1927 – Archie Birkin, English motorcycle racer (b. 1905)
1927 – Edmund James Flynn, Canadian lawyer and politician, 10th Premier of Quebec (b. 1847)
1932 – John Verran, English-Australian politician, 26th Premier of South Australia (b. 1856)
1933 – Dragutin Domjanić, Croatian lawyer, judge, and poet (b. 1875)
1936 – Stjepan Seljan, Croatian explorer (b. 1875)
1937 – Jean Harlow, American actress and singer (b. 1911)
1942 – Alan Blumlein, English engineer (b. 1903)
1945 – Kitaro Nishida, Japanese philosopher and academic (b. 1870)
1954 – Alan Turing, English mathematician and computer scientist (b. 1912)
1956 – John Willcock, Australian politician, 15th Premier of Western Australia (b. 1879)
1965 – Judy Holliday, American actress and singer (b. 1921)
1966 – Jean Arp, German-French sculptor, painter, and poet (b. 1886)
1967 – Anatoly Maltsev, Russian mathematician and academic (b. 1909)
1967 – Dorothy Parker, American poet, short story writer, critic, and satirist (b. 1893)
1968 – Dan Duryea, American actor and singer (b. 1907)
1970 – E. M. Forster, English novelist, short story writer, essayist (b. 1879)
1978 – Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, English chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1897)
1980 – Elizabeth Craig, Scottish journalist and economist (b. 1883)
1980 – Philip Guston, Canadian-American painter and educator (b. 1913)
1980 – Henry Miller, American novelist and essayist (b. 1891)
1985 – Klaudia Taev, Estonian opera singer and educator (b. 1906)
1987 – Cahit Zarifoğlu, Turkish poet and author (b. 1940)
1992 – Bill France Sr., American race car driver and businessman, co-founded NASCAR (b. 1909)
1995 – Hsuan Hua, Chinese monk and educator (b. 1918)
2001 – Víctor Paz Estenssoro, Bolivian politician, 52nd President of Bolivia (b. 1907)
2001 – Betty Neels, English nurse and author (b. 1910)
2002 – Signe Hasso, Swedish-American actress (b. 1915)
2012 – Phillip V. Tobias, South African paleontologist and academic (b. 1925)
2013 – Pierre Mauroy, French educator and politician, Prime Minister of France (b. 1928)
2015 – Christopher Lee, English actor (b. 1922)
Holidays and observances
Antonio Maria Gianelli
Colmán of Dromore
St Gottschalk
Landulf of Yariglia (Asti)
Meriasek
Paul I of Constantinople
Robert of Newminster
Chief Seattle (Lutheran Church)
Blessed Marie-Thérèse de Soubiran La Louvière
Commemoration Day of St John the Forerunner (Armenian Apostolic Church)
Pioneers of the Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil (Episcopal Church (USA))
Battle of Arica Day (Arica y Parinacota Region, Chile)
Flag Day (Peru)
Journalist Day (Argentina)
Anniversary of the Memorandum of the Slovak Nation (Slovakia)
Birthday of Prince Joachim (Denmark)
Sette Giugno (Malta)
Union Dissolution Day (Independence Day of Norway)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15796 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2011 | June 11 |
Events
Pre-1600
173 – Marcomannic Wars: The Roman army in Moravia is encircled by the Quadi, who have broken the peace treaty (171). In a violent thunderstorm emperor Marcus Aurelius defeats and subdues them in the so-called "miracle of the rain".
631 – Emperor Taizong of Tang sends envoys to the Xueyantuo bearing gold and silk in order to seek the release of Chinese prisoners captured during the transition from Sui to Tang.
786 – A Hasanid Alid uprising in Mecca is crushed by the Abbasids at the Battle of Fakhkh.
980 – Vladimir the Great consolidates the Kievan realm from Ukraine to the Baltic Sea. He is proclaimed ruler (knyaz) of all Kievan Rus'.
1011 – Lombard Revolt: Greek citizens of Bari rise up against the Lombard rebels led by Melus and deliver the city to Basil Mesardonites, Byzantine governor (catepan) of the Catepanate of Italy.
1118 – Roger of Salerno, Prince of Antioch, captures Azaz from the Seljuk Turks.
1157 – Albert I of Brandenburg, also called The Bear (Ger: Albrecht der Bär), becomes the founder of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, Germany and the first margrave.
1345 – The megas doux Alexios Apokaukos, chief minister of the Byzantine Empire, is lynched by political prisoners.
1429 – Hundred Years' War: Start of the Battle of Jargeau.
1488 – Battle of Sauchieburn: Fought between rebel Lords and James III of Scotland, resulting in the death of the king.
1509 – Henry VIII of England marries Catherine of Aragon.
1559 – Don Tristan de Luna y Arellano sails for Florida with party of 1,500, intending to settle on gulf coast (Vera Cruz, Mexico).
1594 – Philip II recognizes the rights and privileges of the local nobles and chieftains in the Philippines, which paved way to the stabilization of the rule of the Principalía (an elite ruling class of native nobility in Spanish Philippines).
1601–1900
1748 – Denmark adopts the characteristic Nordic Cross flag later taken up by all other Scandinavian countries.
1770 – British explorer Captain James Cook runs aground on the Great Barrier Reef.
1775 – The American Revolutionary War's first naval engagement, the Battle of Machias, results in the capture of a small British naval vessel.
1776 – The Continental Congress appoints Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston to the Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence.
1788 – Russian explorer Gerasim Izmailov reaches Alaska.
1805 – A fire consumes large portions of Detroit in the Michigan Territory.
1825 – The first cornerstone is laid for Fort Hamilton in New York City.
1837 – The Broad Street Riot occurs in Boston, fueled by ethnic tensions between Yankees and Irish.
1865 – The Naval Battle of the Riachuelo is fought on the rivulet Riachuelo (Argentina), between the Paraguayan Navy on one side and the Brazilian Navy on the other. The Brazilian victory was crucial for the later success of the Triple Alliance (Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina) in the Paraguayan War.
1892 – The Limelight Department, one of the world's first film studios, is officially established in Melbourne, Australia.
1895 – Paris–Bordeaux–Paris, sometimes called the first automobile race in history or the "first motor race", takes place.
1898 – The Hundred Days' Reform, a planned movement to reform social, political, and educational institutions in China, is started by the Guangxu Emperor, but is suspended by Empress Dowager Cixi after 104 days. (The failed reform led to the abolition of the Imperial examination in 1905.)
1901–present
1901 – The boundaries of the Colony of New Zealand are extended by the UK to include the Cook Islands.
1903 – A group of Serbian officers storms the royal palace and assassinates King Alexander I of Serbia and his wife, Queen Draga.
1917 – King Alexander assumes the throne of Greece after his father, Constantine I, is deemed to have abdicated under pressure from allied armies occupying Athens.
1919 – Sir Barton wins the Belmont Stakes, becoming the first horse to win the U.S. Triple Crown.
1920 – During the U.S. Republican National Convention in Chicago, U.S. Republican Party leaders gathered in a room at the Blackstone Hotel to come to a consensus on their candidate for the U.S. presidential election, leading the Associated Press to coin the political phrase "smoke-filled room".
1935 – Inventor Edwin Armstrong gives the first public demonstration of FM broadcasting in the United States at Alpine, New Jersey.
1936 – The London International Surrealist Exhibition opens.
1937 – Great Purge: The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin executes eight army leaders.
1938 – Second Sino-Japanese War: The Battle of Wuhan starts.
1940 – World War II: The Siege of Malta begins with a series of Italian air raids.
1942 – World War II: The United States agrees to send Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union.
1942 – Free French Forces retreat from Bir Hakeim after having successfully delayed the Axis advance.
1944 – , the last battleship built by the United States Navy and future site of the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, is commissioned.
1955 – Eighty-three spectators are killed and at least 100 are injured after an Austin-Healey and a Mercedes-Benz collide at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the deadliest ever accident in motorsports.
1956 – Start of Gal Oya riots, the first reported ethnic riots that target minority Sri Lankan Tamils in the Eastern Province. The total number of deaths is reportedly 150.
1962 – Frank Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin allegedly become the only prisoners to escape from the prison on Alcatraz Island.
1963 – American Civil Rights Movement: Governor of Alabama George Wallace defiantly stands at the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in an attempt to block two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending that school. Later in the day, accompanied by federalized National Guard troops, they are able to register.
1963 – Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burns himself with gasoline in a busy Saigon intersection to protest the lack of religious freedom in South Vietnam.
1963 – John F. Kennedy addresses Americans from the Oval Office proposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would revolutionize American society by guaranteeing equal access to public facilities, ending segregation in education, and guaranteeing federal protection for voting rights.
1964 – World War II veteran Walter Seifert attacks an elementary school in Cologne, Germany, killing at least eight children and two teachers and seriously injuring several more with a home-made flamethrower and a lance.
1968 – Lloyd J. Old identified the first cell surface antigens that could differentiate among different cell types.
1970 – After being appointed on May 15, Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth P. Hoisington officially receive their ranks as U.S. Army Generals, becoming the first women to do so.
1971 – The U.S. Government forcibly removes the last holdouts to the Native American Occupation of Alcatraz, ending 19 months of control.
1978 – Altaf Hussain founds the student political movement All Pakistan Muhajir Students Organisation (APMSO) in Karachi University.
1981 – A magnitude 6.9 earthquake at Golbaf, Iran, kills at least 2,000.
1987 – Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and Bernie Grant are elected as the first black MPs in Great Britain.
1998 – Compaq Computer pays US$9 billion for Digital Equipment Corporation in the largest high-tech acquisition.
2001 – Timothy McVeigh is executed for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing.
2002 – Antonio Meucci is acknowledged as the first inventor of the telephone by the United States Congress.
2004 – Cassini–Huygens makes its closest flyby of the Saturn moon Phoebe.
2007 – Mudslides in Chittagong, Bangladesh, kill 130 people.
2008 – Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper makes a historic official apology to Canada's First Nations in regard to abuses at a Canadian Indian residential school.
2008 – The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is launched into orbit.
2010 – The first African FIFA World Cup kicks off in South Africa.
2012 – More than 80 people die in a landslide triggered by two earthquakes in Afghanistan; an entire village is buried.
2013 – Greece's public broadcaster ERT is shut down by then-prime minister Antonis Samaras. It would open exactly two years later by then-prime minister Alexis Tsipras.
Births
Pre-1600
1403 – John IV, Duke of Brabant (d. 1427)
1456 – Anne Neville, Princess of Wales and Queen of England (d. 1485)
1540 – Barnabe Googe, English poet and translator (d. 1594)
1555 – Lodovico Zacconi, Italian composer and theorist (d. 1627)
1572 – Ben Jonson, English poet, playwright, and critic (d. 1637)
1585 – Evert Horn, Swedish soldier (d. 1615)
1588 – George Wither, English poet (d. 1667)
1601–1900
1620 – John Moore, English businessman and politician, Lord Mayor of London (d. 1702)
1655 – Antonio Cifrondi, Italian painter (d. 1730)
1662 – Tokugawa Ienobu, Japanese shōgun (d. 1712)
1672 – Francesco Antonio Bonporti, Italian priest and composer (d. 1749)
1690 – Giovanni Antonio Giay, Italian composer (d. 1764)
1696 – James Francis Edward Keith, Scottish-Prussian field marshal (d. 1758)
1697 – Francesco Antonio Vallotti, Italian organist and composer (d. 1780)
1704 – Carlos Seixas, Portuguese harpsichord player and composer (d. 1742)
1709 – Joachim Martin Falbe, German painter (d. 1782)
1712 – Benjamin Ingham, American missionary (d. 1772)
1723 – Johann Georg Palitzsch, German astronomer (d. 1788)
1726 – Infanta Maria Teresa Rafaela of Spain (d. 1746)
1741 – Joseph Warren, American physician and general (d. 1775)
1776 – John Constable, English painter and academic (d. 1837)
1796 – François-Louis Cailler, Swiss chocolatier (d. 1852)
1797 – José Trinidad Reyes, Honduran philosopher and theorist (d. 1855)
1807 – James F. Schenck, American admiral (d. 1882)
1815 – Julia Margaret Cameron, Indian-Sri Lankan photographer (d. 1879)
1818 – Alexander Bain, Scottish philosopher and academic (d. 1903)
1829 – Edward Braddon, English-Australian politician, 18th Premier of Tasmania (d. 1904)
1832 – Lucy Pickens, American wife of Francis Wilkinson Pickens (d. 1899)
1834 – Johann Bauschinger, German mechanical engineer and physicist (d. 1893)
1842 – Carl von Linde, German engineer and academic (d. 1934)
1846 – William Louis Marshall, American general and engineer (d. 1920)
1847 – Millicent Fawcett, English academic and activist (d. 1929)
1861 – Alexander Peacock, Australian politician, 20th Premier of Victoria (d. 1933)
1864 – Richard Strauss, German composer and conductor (d. 1949)
1867 – Charles Fabry, French physicist and academic (d. 1945)
1871 – Stjepan Radić, Croatian lawyer and politician (d. 1928)
1876 – Alfred L. Kroeber, American-French anthropologist and ethnologist (d. 1960)
1877 – Renée Vivien, English-French poet and author (d. 1909)
1879 – Roger Bresnahan, American baseball player and manager (d. 1944)
1880 – Jeannette Rankin, American social worker and politician (d. 1973)
1881 – Spiros Xenos, Greek-Swedish painter (d. 1963)
1881 – Mordecai Kaplan, Lithuanian rabbi, founded Reconstructionist Judaism (d. 1983)
1881 – Maggie Gripenberg, Finnish dancer and choreographer (d. 1976)
1888 – Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-American anarchist and convicted criminal (d. 1927)
1889 – Hugo Wieslander, Swedish decathlete (d. 1976)
1894 – Kiichiro Toyoda, Japanese businessman, founded Toyota (d. 1952)
1895 – Nikolai Bulganin, Soviet politician (d. 1975)
1897 – Ram Prasad Bismil, Indian activist, founded the Hindustan Republican Association (d. 1927)
1897 – Reg Latta, Australian rugby league player (d. 1970)
1899 – Yasunari Kawabata, Japanese novelist and short story writer Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1972)
1901–present
1901 – Cap Fear, Canadian football player and rower (d. 1978)
1901 – Benny Wearing, Australian rugby league player (d. 1968)
1902 – Eric Fraser, British illustrator and graphic designer (d. 1983)
1903 – Ernie Nevers, American football player and coach (d. 1976)
1908 – Karl Hein, German hammer thrower (d. 1982)
1908 – Francisco Marto, Portuguese saint (d. 1919)
1909 – Natascha Artin Brunswick, German-American mathematician and photographer (d. 2003)
1910 – Carmine Coppola, American flute player and composer (d. 1991)
1910 – Jacques Cousteau, French biologist, author, and inventor, co-developed the aqua-lung (d. 1997)
1912 – James Algar, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1998)
1912 – William Baziotes, American painter and academic (d. 1963)
1912 – Mohammad Hassan Ganji, Iranian meteorologist and academic (d. 2012)
1913 – Vince Lombardi, American football player, coach, and manager (d. 1970)
1913 – Risë Stevens, American soprano and actress (d. 2013)
1914 – Jan Hendrik van den Berg, Dutch psychiatrist and academic (d. 2012)
1915 – Magda Gabor, Hungarian-American actress (d. 1997)
1915 – Nicholas Metropolis, American mathematician and physicist (d. 1999)
1918 – Ruth Aarons, American table tennis player and manager (d. 1980)
1919 – Suleiman Mousa, Jordanian historian and author (d. 2008)
1919 – Richard Todd, Irish-English actor (d. 2009)
1920 – Hazel Scott, Trinidadian-American singer, actress, and pianist (d. 1981)
1920 – Keith Seaman, Australian lawyer and politician, 29th Governor of South Australia (d. 2013)
1922 – Jean Sutherland Boggs, Peruvian-Canadian historian, academic, and civil servant (d. 2014)
1922 – Michael Cacoyannis, Greek Cypriot director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2011)
1925 – Johnny Esaw, Canadian sportscaster (d. 2013)
1925 – William Styron, American novelist and essayist (d. 2006)
1926 – Carlisle Floyd, American composer and educator (d. 2021)
1927 – Beryl Grey, English ballerina
1927 – John W. O'Malley, American Catholic historian, academic and Jesuit priest
1927 – Kit Pedler, English parapsychologist and author (d. 1981)
1928 – Queen Fabiola of Belgium (d. 2014)
1929 – Ayhan Şahenk, Turkish businessman (d. 2001)
1930 – Charles Rangel, American soldier, lawyer, and politician
1932 – Athol Fugard, South African-American actor, director, and playwright
1932 – Tim Sainsbury, English businessman and politician, Minister of State for Trade
1933 – Gene Wilder, American actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2016)
1937 – Chad Everett, American actor and director (d. 2012)
1937 – Robin Warren, Australian pathologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1939 – Rachael Heyhoe Flint, Baroness Heyhoe Flint, English cricketer and journalist (d. 2017)
1939 – Jackie Stewart, Scottish racing driver and sports presenter
1942 – Parris Glendening, American politician, 59th Governor of Maryland
1943 – Henry Hill, American mobster (d. 2012)
1945 – Adrienne Barbeau, American actress
1948 – Dave Cash, American baseball player and coach
1948 – Lalu Prasad Yadav, Indian politician, 20th Chief Minister of Bihar
1949 – Frank Beard, American drummer and songwriter
1950 – Lynsey de Paul, English singer-songwriter, pianist, producer, cartoonist and actress (d. 2014)
1950 – Graham Russell, English-Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist
1951 – Yasumasa Morimura, Japanese painter and photographer
1952 – Yekaterina Podkopayeva, Russian runner
1952 – Donnie Van Zant, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1953 – Steve Bassam, Baron Bassam of Brighton, English politician
1953 – José Bové, French farmer and politician
1954 – John Dyson, Australian cricketer
1954 – Johnny Neel, American singer-songwriter and keyboard player
1955 – Yuriy Sedykh, Ukrainian hammer thrower (d. 2021)
1955 – Duncan Steel, English-Australian astronomer and author
1956 – Joe Montana, American football player and sportscaster
1959 – Hugh Laurie, English actor and screenwriter
1960 – Mehmet Oz, American surgeon, author, and television host
1962 – Mano Menezes, Brazilian footballer and coach
1963 – Gioia Bruno, American singer-songwriter
1963 – Sandra Schmirler, Canadian curler and sportscaster (d. 2000)
1964 – Jean Alesi, French race car driver
1964 – Kim Gallagher, American runner (d. 2002)
1965 – Georgios Bartzokas, Greek former professional basketball player
1965 – Gavin Hill, New Zealand rugby player
1966 – Bruce Robison, American country music singer-songwriter and guitarist
1967 – Graeme Bachop, New Zealand rugby player
1967 – João Garcia, Portuguese mountaineer
1968 – Alois, Hereditary Prince of Liechtenstein
1968 – Manoa Thompson, Fijian rugby player
1969 – Peter Dinklage, American actor and producer
1969 – Olaf Kapagiannidis, German footballer
1971 – Vladimir Gaidamașciuc, Moldovan footballer
1971 – Liz Kendall, British politician
1971 – Mark Richardson, New Zealand cricketer
1972 – Stephen Kearney, New Zealand rugby league player and coach
1973 – José Manuel Abundis, Mexican footballer and coach
1974 – Fragiskos Alvertis, Greek basketball player, coach, and manager
1976 – Reiko Tosa, Japanese runner
1977 – Geoff Ogilvy, Australian golfer
1978 – Joshua Jackson, Canadian-American actor
1978 – Daryl Tuffey, New Zealand cricketer
1979 – Ali Boussaboun, Moroccan-Dutch footballer
1979 – Amy Duggan, Australian footballer and sportscaster
1980 – Yhency Brazoban, Dominican baseball player
1981 – Emiliano Moretti, Italian footballer
1981 – Kristo Tohver, Estonian footballer and referee
1982 – Vanessa Boslak, French pole vaulter
1982 – Jacques Freitag, South African high jumper
1982 – Joey Graham, American basketball player
1982 – Stephen Graham, American basketball player
1982 – Reni Maitua, Australian rugby league player
1982 – Eldar Rønning, Norwegian skier
1982 – Diana Taurasi, American basketball player
1983 – Chuck Hayes, American basketball player
1983 – José Reyes, Dominican baseball player
1984 – Andy Lee, Irish boxer
1984 – Vágner Love, Brazilian footballer
1985 – Tim Hoogland, German footballer
1986 – Sebastian Bayer, German long jumper
1986 – Shia LaBeouf, American actor
1987 – Marsel İlhan, Turkish tennis player
1987 – Didrik Solli-Tangen, Norwegian singer
1988 – Jesús Fernández Collado, Spanish footballer
1988 – Yui Aragaki, Japanese actress, voice actress, singer-songwriter, model, radio host
1989 – Maya Moore, American basketball player
1990 – Christophe Lemaitre, French sprinter
1991 – Daniel Howell, English YouTuber
1993 – Brittany Boyd, American basketball player
1994 – Ivana Baquero, Spanish actress
1996 – Ayaka Sasaki, Japanese singer
1998 – Charlie Tahan, American actor
1999 – Eartha Cumings, Scottish footballer
Deaths
Pre-1600
323 BC – Alexander the Great, Macedonian king (b. 356 BC)
573 – Emilian of Cogolla, Iberic saint (b. 472)
786 – Al-Husayn ibn Ali al-Abid, anti-Abbasid rebel leader
840 – Junna, emperor of Japan (b. 785)
884 – Shi Jingsi, general of the Tang Dynasty
888 – Rimbert, archbishop of Bremen (b. 830)
1183 – Henry the Young King of England (b. 1155)
1216 – Henry of Flanders, emperor of the Latin Empire (b. c. 1174)
1248 – Adachi Kagemori, Japanese samurai
1253 – Amadeus IV, count of Savoy (b. 1197)
1298 – Yolanda of Poland (b. 1235)
1323 – Bérenger Fredoli, French lawyer and bishop (b. 1250)
1345 – Alexios Apokaukos, chief minister of the Byzantine Empire
1347 – Bartholomew of San Concordio, Italian Dominican canonist and man of letters (b. 1260)
1446 – Henry de Beauchamp, 1st Duke of Warwick (b. 1425)
1479 – John of Sahagun, hermit and saint (b. 1419)
1488 – James III of Scotland (b. 1451)
1557 – John III of Portugal (b. 1502)
1560 – Mary of Guise, queen of James V of Scotland (b. 1515)
1601–1900
1683 – Nikita Pustosvyat, a leader of the Russian Old Believers, beheaded (b. unknown)
1695 – André Félibien, French historian and author (b. 1619)
1712 – Louis Joseph, Duke of Vendôme (b. 1654)
1727 – George I of Great Britain (b. 1660)
1748 – Felice Torelli, Italian painter (b. 1667)
1796 – Samuel Whitbread, English brewer and politician, founded the Whitbread Company (b. 1720)
1847 – John Franklin, English admiral and politician (b. 1786)
1852 – Karl Bryullov, Russian painter (b. 1799)
1859 – Klemens von Metternich, German-Austrian politician, 1st State Chancellor of the Austrian Empire (b. 1773)
1879 – William, Prince of Orange (b. 1840)
1882 – Louis Désiré Maigret, French bishop (b. 1804)
1885 – Matías Ramos Mejía, Argentinian colonel (b. 1810)
1897 – Henry Ayers, English-Australian politician, 8th Premier of South Australia (b. 1821)
1901–present
1903 – Nikolai Bugaev, Russian mathematician and philosopher (b. 1837)
1903 – Alexander I of Serbia (b. 1876)
1903 – Draga Mašin, Serbian wife of Alexander I of Serbia (b. 1864)
1911 – James Curtis Hepburn, American physician and missionary (b. 1815)
1913 – Mahmud Shevket Pasha, Ottoman general and politician, 279th Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire (b. 1856)
1914 – Adolphus Frederick V, Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (b. 1848)
1920 – William F. Halsey, Sr., American captain (b. 1853)
1924 – Théodore Dubois, French organist, composer, and educator (b. 1837)
1927 – William Attewell, English cricketer (b. 1861)
1934 – Lev Vygotsky, Belarusian-Russian psychologist and theorist (b. 1896)
1936 – Robert E. Howard, American author and poet (b. 1906)
1937 – R. J. Mitchell, English engineer, designed the Supermarine Spitfire (b. 1895)
1941 – Daniel Carter Beard, American author and illustrator, founded the Boy Scouts of America (b. 1850)
1955 – Pierre Levegh, French race car driver (b. 1905)
1962 – Chhabi Biswas, Indian actor and director (b. 1900)
1963 – Thích Quảng Đức, Vietnamese monk and martyr (b. 1897)
1965 – Paul B. Coremans, Belgian chemist and academic (b. 1908)
1965 – José Mendes Cabeçadas, Portuguese admiral and politician, 9th President of Portugal (b. 1883)
1970 – Frank Laubach, American missionary and mystic (b. 1884)
1974 – Eurico Gaspar Dutra, Brazilian general and politician, 16th President of Brazil (b. 1883)
1974 – Julius Evola, Italian philosopher and author (b. 1898)
1976 – Jim Konstanty, American baseball player (b. 1917)
1979 – Alice Dalgliesh, Trinidadian-American author and publisher (b. 1893)
1979 – John Wayne, American actor, director, and producer (b. 1907)
1983 – Ghanshyam Das Birla, Indian businessman and politician (b. 1894)
1984 – Enrico Berlinguer, Italian politician (b. 1922)
1986 – Chesley Bonestell, American painter and illustrator (b. 1888)
1991 – Cromwell Everson, South African composer (b. 1925)
1993 – Ray Sharkey, American actor (b. 1952)
1994 – A. Thurairajah, Sri Lankan engineer and academic (b. 1934)
1995 – Rodel Naval, Filipino singer-songwriter and actor (b. 1953)
1996 – George Hees, Canadian politician (b. 1910)
1996 – Brigitte Helm, German-Swiss actress (b. 1908)
1998 – Catherine Cookson, English author (b. 1906)
1999 – DeForest Kelley, American actor and screenwriter (b. 1920)
2001 – Timothy McVeigh, American terrorist (b. 1968)
2001 – Amalia Mendoza, Mexican singer and actress (b. 1923)
2003 – David Brinkley, American journalist and author (b. 1920)
2004 – Egon von Fürstenberg, Swiss fashion designer (b. 1946)
2005 – Vasco Gonçalves, Portuguese general and politician, 103rd Prime Minister of Portugal (b. 1922)
2005 – Anne-Marie Alonzo, Canadian playwright, poet, novelist, critic and publisher (b. 1951)
2006 – Neroli Fairhall, New Zealand archer (b. 1944)
2006 – Bruce Shand, English soldier (b. 1917)
2007 – Imre Friedmann, American biologist and academic (b. 1921)
2007 – Mala Powers, American actress (b. 1931)
2008 – Ove Andersson, Swedish race car driver (b. 1938)
2008 – Võ Văn Kiệt, Vietnamese soldier and politician, 5th Prime Minister of Vietnam (b. 1922)
2011 – Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Israeli physicist and engineer (b. 1947)
2011 – Seth Putnam, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1968)
2012 – Ann Rutherford, Canadian-American actress (b. 1917)
2012 – Teófilo Stevenson, Cuban boxer and engineer (b. 1952)
2013 – Miller Barber, American golfer (b. 1931)
2013 – Carl W. Bauer, American lawyer and politician (b. 1933)
2013 – Robert Fogel, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1926)
2013 – James Grimsley, Jr., American general (b. 1921)
2013 – Rory Morrison, English journalist (b. 1964)
2013 – Kristiāns Pelšs, Latvian ice hockey player (b. 1992)
2013 – Vidya Charan Shukla, Indian politician, Indian Minister of External Affairs (b. 1929)
2014 – Ruby Dee, American actress (b. 1922)
2014 – Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Spanish conductor and composer (b. 1933)
2014 – Susan B. Horwitz, American computer scientist, engineer, and academic (b. 1955)
2014 – Mipham Chokyi Lodro, Tibetan lama and educator (b. 1952)
2014 – Benjamin Mophatlane, South African businessman (b. 1973)
2014 – Carlton Sherwood, American soldier and journalist (b. 1947)
2015 – Jim Ed Brown, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1934)
2015 – Ornette Coleman, American saxophonist, violinist, trumpet player, and composer (b. 1930)
2015 – Ian McKechnie, Scottish footballer and manager (b. 1941)
2015 – Ron Moody, English actor and singer (b. 1924)
2015 – Dusty Rhodes, American wrestler (b. 1945)
2016 – Rudi Altig, German track and road racing cyclist (b. 1937)
2020 – Stella Pevsner, children's author (b. 1921)
Holidays and observances
American Evacuation Day (Libya)
Brazilian Navy commemorative day (Brazil)
Christian feast day:
Barnabas the Apostle
Bartholomew the Apostle (Eastern Christianity)
Blessed Ignatius Maloyan (Armenian Catholic Church)
Paula Frassinetti
Riagail of Bangor
June 11 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Davis Day (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada)
King Kamehameha I Day (Hawaii, United States)
Student Day (Honduras)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15797 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2014 | June 14 |
Events
Pre-1600
1158 – The city of Munich is founded by Henry the Lion on the banks of the river Isar.
1216 – First Barons' War: Prince Louis of France takes the city of Winchester, abandoned by John, King of England, and soon conquers over half of the kingdom.
1276 – While taking exile in Fuzhou, away from the advancing Mongol invaders, the remnants of the Song dynasty court hold the coronation ceremony for Emperor Duanzong.
1285 – Second Mongol invasion of Vietnam: Forces led by Prince Trần Quang Khải of the Trần dynasty destroy most of the invading Mongol naval fleet in a battle at Chuong Duong.
1287 – Kublai Khan defeats the force of Nayan and other traditionalist Borjigin princes in East Mongolia and Manchuria.
1381 – Richard II of England meets leaders of Peasants' Revolt at Mile End. The Tower of London is stormed by rebels who enter without resistance.
1404 – Welsh rebel leader Owain Glyndŵr, having declared himself Prince of Wales, allies himself with the French against King Henry IV of England.
1601–1900
1618 – Joris Veseler prints the first Dutch newspaper Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c. in Amsterdam (approximate date).
1645 – English Civil War: Battle of Naseby: Twelve thousand Royalist forces are beaten by 15,000 Parliamentarian soldiers.
1667 – The Raid on the Medway by the Dutch fleet in the Second Anglo-Dutch War ends. It had lasted for five days and resulted in the worst ever defeat of the Royal Navy.
1690 – King William III of England (William of Orange) lands in Ireland to confront the former King James II.
1775 – American Revolutionary War: the Continental Army is established by the Continental Congress, marking the birth of the United States Armed Forces.
1777 – The Second Continental Congress passes the Flag Act of 1777 adopting the Stars and Stripes as the Flag of the United States.
1789 – Mutiny on the Bounty: mutiny survivors including Captain William Bligh and 18 others reach Timor after a nearly journey in an open boat.
1800 – The French Army of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte defeats the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo in Northern Italy and re-conquers Italy.
1807 – Emperor Napoleon's French Grande Armée defeats the Russian Army at the Battle of Friedland in Poland (modern Russian Kaliningrad Oblast) ending the War of the Fourth Coalition.
1821 – Badi VII, king of Sennar, surrenders his throne and realm to Ismail Pasha, general of the Ottoman Empire, bringing the 300 year old Sudanese kingdom to an end.
1822 – Charles Babbage proposes a difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society.
1830 – Beginning of the French colonization of Algeria: Thirty-four thousand French soldiers begin their invasion of Algiers, landing 27 kilometers west at Sidi Fredj.
1839 – Henley Royal Regatta: the village of Henley-on-Thames, on the River Thames in Oxfordshire, stages its first regatta.
1846 – Bear Flag Revolt begins: Anglo settlers in Sonoma, California, start a rebellion against Mexico and proclaim the California Republic.
1863 – American Civil War: Second Battle of Winchester: A Union garrison is defeated by the Army of Northern Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley town of Winchester, Virginia.
1863 – Second Assault on the Confederate works at the Siege of Port Hudson during the American Civil War.
1872 – Trade unions are legalized in Canada.
1888 – The White Rajahs territories become the British protectorate of Sarawak.
1900 – Hawaii becomes a United States territory.
1900 – The second German Naval Law calls for the Imperial German Navy to be doubled in size, resulting in an Anglo-German naval arms race.
1901–present
1907 – The National Association for Women's Suffrage succeeds in getting Norwegian women the right to vote in parliamentary elections.
1919 – John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown depart from St. John's, Newfoundland on the first nonstop transatlantic flight.
1926 – Brazil leaves the League of Nations.
1937 – Pennsylvania becomes the first (and only) state of the United States to celebrate Flag Day officially as a state holiday.
1937 – U.S. House of Representatives passes the Marihuana Tax Act.
1940 – World War II: The German occupation of Paris begins.
1940 – The Soviet Union presents an ultimatum to Lithuania resulting in Lithuanian loss of independence.
1940 – Seven hundred and twenty-eight Polish political prisoners from Tarnów become the first inmates of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
1941 – June deportation: the first major wave of Soviet mass deportations and murder of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, begins.
1944 – World War II: After several failed attempts, the British Army abandons Operation Perch, its plan to capture the German-occupied town of Caen.
1945 – World War II: Filipino troops of the Philippine Commonwealth Army liberate the captured in Ilocos Sur and start the Battle of Bessang Pass in Northern Luzon.
1949 – Albert II, a rhesus monkey, rides a V-2 rocket to an altitude of 134 km (83 mi), thereby becoming the first mammal and first monkey in space.
1951 – UNIVAC I is dedicated by the U.S. Census Bureau.
1954 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs a bill into law that places the words "under God" into the United States Pledge of Allegiance.
1955 – Chile becomes a signatory to the Buenos Aires copyright treaty.
1959 – Disneyland Monorail System, the first daily operating monorail system in the Western Hemisphere, opens to the public in Anaheim, California.
1959 – Dominican exiles depart from Cuba and land in the Dominican Republic to overthrow the totalitarian government of Rafael Trujillo. All but four are killed or executed.
1962 – The European Space Research Organisation is established in Paris – later becoming the European Space Agency.
1966 – The Vatican announces the abolition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("index of prohibited books"), which was originally instituted in 1557.
1967 – Mariner program: Mariner 5 is launched towards Venus.
1972 – Japan Airlines Flight 471 crashes on approach to Palam International Airport (now Indira Gandhi International Airport) in New Delhi, India, killing 82 of the 87 people on board and four more people on the ground.
1982 – Falklands War: Argentine forces in the capital Stanley conditionally surrender to British forces.
1985 – Five members of the European Economic Community sign the Schengen Agreement establishing a free travel zone with no border controls.
1986 – The Mindbender derails and kills three riders at the Fantasyland (known today as Galaxyland) indoor amusement park at West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta.
1994 – The 1994 Vancouver Stanley Cup riot occurs after the New York Rangers win the Stanley Cup from Vancouver, causing an estimated 1.1 million, leading to 200 arrests and injuries.
2002 – Near-Earth asteroid 2002 MN misses the Earth by , about one-third of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
2014 – A Ukraine military Ilyushin Il-76 airlifter is shot down, killing all 49 people on board.
2017 – A fire in a high-rise apartment building in North Kensington, London, UK, leaves 72 people dead and another 74 injured.
2017 – US Republican House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, and three others, are shot and wounded by a terrorist while practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game.
Births
Pre-1600
1444 – Nilakantha Somayaji, Indian astronomer and mathematician (d. 1544)
1479 – Giglio Gregorio Giraldi, Italian poet and scholar (d. 1552)
1529 – Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria (d. 1595)
1601–1900
1627 – Johann Abraham Ihle, German astronomer (d. 1699)
1691 – Jan Francisci, Slovak organist and composer (d. 1758)
1726 – Thomas Pennant, Welsh ornithologist and historian (d. 1798)
1730 – Antonio Sacchini, Italian composer and educator (d. 1786)
1736 – Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, French physicist and engineer (d. 1806)
1763 – Simon Mayr, German composer and educator (d. 1845)
1780 – Henry Salt, English historian and diplomat, British Consul-General in Egypt (d. 1827)
1796 – Nikolai Brashman, Czech-Russian mathematician and academic (d. 1866)
1798 – František Palacký, Czech historian and politician (d. 1876)
1801 – Heber C. Kimball, American religious leader (d. 1868)
1811 – Harriet Beecher Stowe, American author and activist (d. 1896)
1812 – Fernando Wood, American merchant and politician, 73rd Mayor of New York City (d. 1881)
1819 – Henry Gardner, American merchant and politician, 23rd Governor of Massachusetts (d. 1892)
1820 – John Bartlett, American author and publisher (d. 1905)
1829 – Bernard Petitjean, French Roman Catholic missionary to Japan (d. 1884)
1838 – Yamagata Aritomo, Japanese Field Marshal and politician, 3rd and 9th Prime Minister of Japan (d. 1922)
1840 – William F. Nast, American businessman (d. 1893)
1848 – Bernard Bosanquet, English philosopher and theorist (d. 1923)
1848 – Max Erdmannsdörfer, German conductor and composer (d. 1905)
1855 – Robert M. La Follette, American lawyer and politician, 20th Governor of Wisconsin (d. 1925)
1856 – Andrey Markov, Russian mathematician and theorist (d. 1922)
1862 – John Ulric Nef, Swiss-American chemist and academic (d. 1915)
1864 – Alois Alzheimer, German psychiatrist and neuropathologist (d. 1915)
1868 – Karl Landsteiner, Austrian biologist and physician, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1943)
1868 – Anna B. Eckstein, German peace activist (d. 1947)
1870 – Sophia of Prussia (d. 1932)
1871 – Hermanus Brockmann, Dutch rower (d. 1936)
1871 – Jacob Ellehammer, Danish mechanic and engineer (d. 1946)
1872 – János Szlepecz, Slovene priest and author (d. 1936)
1877 – Jane Bathori, French soprano (d. 1970)
1877 – Ida MacLean, British biochemist, the first woman admitted to the London Chemical Society (d. 1944)
1878 – Léon Thiébaut, French fencer (d. 1943)
1879 – Arthur Duffey, American sprinter and coach (d. 1955)
1884 – John McCormack, Irish tenor and actor (d. 1945)
1884 – Georg Zacharias, German swimmer (d. 1953)
1890 – May Allison, American actress (d. 1989)
1894 – Marie-Adélaïde, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg (d. 1924)
1894 – José Carlos Mariátegui (d. 1930)
1894 – W. W. E. Ross, Canadian geophysicist and poet (d. 1966)
1895 – Jack Adams, Canadian-American ice hockey player, coach, and manager (d. 1968)
1898 – Theobald Wolfe Tone FitzGerald, Irish Army Officer and painter (d. 1962)
1900 – Ruth Nanda Anshen, American writer, editor, and philosopher (d. 2003)
1900 – June Walker, American stage and film actress (d. 1966)
1901–present
1903 – Alonzo Church, American mathematician and logician (d. 1995)
1903 – Rose Rand, Austrian-American logician and philosopher from the Vienna Circle (d. 1980)
1904 – Margaret Bourke-White, American photographer and journalist (d. 1971)
1905 – Steve Broidy, American businessman (d. 1991)
1905 – Arthur Davis, American animator and director (d. 2000)
1907 – Nicolas Bentley, English author and illustrator (d. 1978)
1907 – René Char, French poet and author (d. 1988)
1909 – Burl Ives, American actor and singer (d. 1995)
1910 – Rudolf Kempe, German pianist and conductor (d. 1976)
1913 – Joe Morris, English-Canadian lieutenant and trade union leader (d. 1996)
1916 – Dorothy McGuire, American actress (d. 2001)
1917 – Lise Nørgaard, Danish journalist, author, and screenwriter
1917 – Gilbert Prouteau, French poet and director (d. 2012)
1917 – Atle Selberg, Norwegian-American mathematician and academic (d. 2007)
1918 – Fred Baur, American chemist and founder of Pringles (d. 2008)
1919 – Gene Barry, American actor (d. 2009)
1919 – Sam Wanamaker, American actor and director (d. 1993)
1921 – Martha Greenhouse, American actress (d. 2013)
1923 – Judith Kerr, German-English author and illustrator (d. 2019)
1923 – Green Wix Unthank, American soldier, lawyer, and judge (d. 2013)
1924 – James Black, Scottish pharmacologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2010)
1925 – Pierre Salinger, American journalist and politician, 11th White House Press Secretary (d. 2004)
1926 – Don Newcombe, American baseball player (d. 2019)
1928 – Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Argentinian-Cuban physician, author, guerrilla leader and politician (d. 1967)
1929 – Cy Coleman, American pianist and composer (d. 2004)
1929 – Alan Davidson, Australian cricketer (d. 2021)
1929 – Johnny Wilson, Canadian-American ice hockey player and coach (d. 2011)
1931 – Marla Gibbs, American actress and comedian
1931 – Ross Higgins, Australian actor (d. 2016)
1931 – Junior Walker, American saxophonist (d. 1995)
1933 – Jerzy Kosiński, Polish-American novelist and screenwriter (d. 1991)
1933 – Vladislav Rastorotsky, Russian gymnast and coach (d. 2017)
1936 – Renaldo Benson, American singer-songwriter (d. 2005)
1936 – Irmelin Sandman Lilius, Finnish author, poet, and translator
1938 – Julie Felix, American-English singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2020)
1939 – Steny Hoyer, American lawyer and politician
1939 – Peter Mayle, English author and screenwriter (d. 2018)
1939 – Colin Thubron, English journalist and author
1942 – Jonathan Raban, English author and academic
1942 – Roberto García-Calvo Montiel, Spanish judge (d. 2008)
1943 – Harold Wheeler, American composer, conductor, and producer
1944 – Laurie Colwin, American novelist and short story writer (d. 1992)
1945 – Rod Argent, English singer-songwriter and keyboard player
1945 – Carlos Reichenbach, Brazilian director and producer (d. 2012)
1945 – Richard Stebbins, American sprinter and educator
1946 – Robert Louis-Dreyfus, French-Swiss businessman (d. 2009)
1946 – Tõnu Sepp, Estonian instrument maker and educator
1946 – Donald Trump, American businessman, television personality and 45th President of the United States
1947 – Roger Liddle, Baron Liddle, English politician
1947 – Barry Melton, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1947 – Paul Rudolph, Canadian singer, guitarist, and cyclist
1948 – Laurence Yep, American author and playwright
1949 – Jim Lea, English singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer
1949 – Roger Powell, English-Australian scientist and academic
1949 – Antony Sher, South African-British actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2021)
1949 – Harry Turtledove, American historian and author
1949 – Alan White, English drummer and songwriter
1950 – Rowan Williams, Welsh archbishop and theologian
1951 – Paul Boateng, English lawyer and politician, British High Commissioner to South Africa
1951 – Danny Edwards, American golfer
1952 – Pat Summitt, American basketball player and coach (d. 2016)
1954 – Will Patton, American actor
1955 – Paul O'Grady, English television host, producer, and drag performer
1955 – Kirron Kher, Indian theatre, film & television actress, TV talk show host, politician and Member of Parliament
1959 – Marcus Miller, American bass player, composer, and producer
1960 – Tonie Campbell, American hurdler
1961 – Boy George, English singer-songwriter and producer
1961 – Dušan Kojić, Serbian singer-songwriter and bass player
1961 – Sam Perkins, American basketball player
1967 – Dedrick Dodge, American football player and coach
1968 – Faizon Love, Cuban-American actor and screenwriter
1969 – Éric Desjardins, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1969 – Steffi Graf, German tennis player
1970 – Heather McDonald, American comedian, actress, and author
1971 – Bruce Bowen, American basketball player and sportscaster
1971 – Ramon Vega, Swiss footballer
1972 – Rick Brunson, American basketball player and coach
1972 – Matthias Ettrich, German computer scientist and engineer, founded KDE
1972 – Claude Henderson, South African cricketer
1972 – Danny McFarlane, Jamaican hurdler and sprinter
1973 – Sami Kapanen, Finnish-American ice hockey player and manager
1976 – Alan Carr, English comedian, actor, and screenwriter
1976 – Massimo Oddo, Italian footballer and manager
1977 – Boeta Dippenaar, South African cricketer
1977 – Chris McAlister, American football player
1977 – Joe Worsley, English rugby player and coach
1978 – Steve Bégin, Canadian ice hockey player
1978 – Diablo Cody, American director, producer, and screenwriter
1978 – Annia Hatch, Cuban-American gymnast and coach
1978 – Nikola Vujčić, Croatian former professional basketball player
1979 – Shannon Hegarty, Australian rugby league player
1981 – Elano, Brazilian footballer and manager
1982 – Jamie Green, English racing driver
1982 – Nicole Irving, Australian swimmer
1982 – Lang Lang, Chinese pianist
1983 – Trevor Barry, Bahamian high jumper
1983 – Louis Garrel, French actor, director, and screenwriter
1984 – Lorenzo Booker, American football player
1984 – Mark Cosgrove, Australian cricketer
1984 – Siobhán Donaghy, English singer-songwriter
1984 – Yury Prilukov, Russian swimmer</ref>
1985 – Oleg Medvedev. Russian luger
1985 – Andy Soucek, Spanish racing driver
1986 – Rhe-Ann Niles-Mapp, Barbadian netball player
1986 – Matt Read, Canadian ice hockey player
1987 – Andrew Cogliano, Canadian ice hockey player
1987 – Mohamed Diamé, Senegalese footballer
1988 – Adrián Aldrete, Mexican footballer
1988 – Kevin McHale, American actor, singer, dancer and radio personality
1989 – Lucy Hale, American actress and singer-songwriter
1989 – Brad Takairangi, Australian-Cook Islands rugby league player
1990 – Patrice Cormier, Canadian ice hockey player
1991 – Kostas Manolas, Greek footballer
1991 – Jesy Nelson, English singer
1992 – Devante Smith-Pelly, Canadian ice hockey player
1993 – Gunna, American rapper
1994 – Moon Taeil, South Korean singer
1997 – David Bangala, French football defender
1999 – Chou Tzuyu, Taiwanese singer
Deaths
Pre-1600
809 – Ōtomo no Otomaro, Japanese general (b. 731)
847 – Methodius I, patriarch of Constantinople
957 – Guadamir, bishop of Vic (Spain)
976 – Aron, Bulgarian nobleman
1161 – Emperor Qinzong of the Song dynasty (b. 1100)
1349 – Günther von Schwarzburg, German king (b. 1304)
1381 – Simon Sudbury, English archbishop (b. 1316)
1497 – Giovanni Borgia, 2nd Duke of Gandía, Italian son of Pope Alexander VI (b. 1474)
1516 – John III of Navarre (b. 1469)
1544 – Antoine, Duke of Lorraine (b. 1489)
1548 – Carpentras, French composer (b. 1470)
1583 – Shibata Katsuie, Japanese samurai (b. 1522)
1594 – Jacob Kroger, German goldsmith, hanged in Edinburgh for stealing the jewels of Anne of Denmark.
1594 – Orlande de Lassus, Flemish composer and educator (b. 1532)
1601–1900
1662 – Henry Vane the Younger, English-American politician, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (b. 1613)
1674 – Marin le Roy de Gomberville, French author and poet (b. 1600)
1679 – Guillaume Courtois, French painter and illustrator (b. 1628)
1746 – Colin Maclaurin, Scottish mathematician (b. 1698)
1794 – Francis Seymour-Conway, 1st Marquess of Hertford, English courtier and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (b. 1718)
1800 – Louis Desaix, French general (b. 1768)
1800 – Jean-Baptiste Kléber, French general (b. 1753)
1801 – Benedict Arnold, American general during the American Revolution later turned British spy (b. 1741)
1825 – Pierre Charles L'Enfant, French-American architect and engineer, designed Washington, D.C. (b. 1754)
1837 – Giacomo Leopardi, Italian poet and philosopher (b. 1798)
1864 – Leonidas Polk, American general and bishop (b. 1806)
1877 – Mary Carpenter, English educational and social reformer (b. 1807)
1883 – Edward FitzGerald, English poet and author (b. 1809)
1886 – Alexander Ostrovsky, Russian director and playwright (b. 1823)
1898 – Dewitt Clinton Senter, American politician, 18th Governor of Tennessee (b. 1830)
1901–present
1907 – William Le Baron Jenney, American architect and engineer, designed the Home Insurance Building (b. 1832)
1907 – Bartolomé Masó, Cuban soldier and politician (b. 1830)
1908 – Frederick Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby, English captain and politician, 6th Governor General of Canada (b. 1841)
1914 – Adlai Stevenson I, American lawyer and politician, 23rd Vice President of the United States (b. 1835)
1916 – João Simões Lopes Neto, Brazilian author (b. 1865)
1920 – Max Weber, German sociologist and economist (b. 1864)
1923 – Isabelle Bogelot, French philanthropist (b. 1838)
1926 – Mary Cassatt, American-French painter (b. 1843)
1927 – Ottavio Bottecchia, Italian cyclist (b. 1894)
1927 – Jerome K. Jerome, English author (b. 1859)
1928 – Emmeline Pankhurst, English activist and academic (b. 1857)
1932 – Dorimène Roy Desjardins, Canadian businesswoman, co-founded Desjardins Group (b. 1858)
1933 – Justinien de Clary, French target shooter (b. 1860)
1936 – G. K. Chesterton, English essayist, poet, playwright, and novelist (b. 1874)
1936 – Hans Poelzig, German architect, painter, and designer, designed the IG Farben Building (b. 1869)
1946 – John Logie Baird, Scottish-English physicist and engineer (b. 1888)
1946 – Jorge Ubico, 21st President of Guatemala (b. 1878)
1953 – Tom Cole, Welsh-American racing driver (b. 1922)
1968 – Salvatore Quasimodo, Italian novelist and poet, Nobel Prize Laureate (b. 1901)
1972 – Dündar Taşer, Turkish soldier and politician (b. 1925)
1977 – Robert Middleton, American actor (b. 1911)
1977 – Alan Reed, American actor, original voice of Fred Flintstone (b.1907)
1979 – Ahmad Zahir, Afghan singer-songwriter (b. 1946)
1980 – Charles Miller, American saxophonist and flute player (b. 1939)
1986 – Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator (b. 1899)
1986 – Alan Jay Lerner, American composer and songwriter (b. 1918)
1987 – Stanisław Bareja, Polish actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1929)
1990 – Erna Berger, German soprano and actress (b. 1900)
1991 – Peggy Ashcroft, English actress (b. 1907)
1994 – Lionel Grigson, English pianist, composer, and educator (b. 1942)
1994 – Henry Mancini, American composer and conductor (b. 1924)
1994 – Marcel Mouloudji, French singer and actor (b. 1922)
1995 – Els Aarne, Ukrainian-Estonian pianist, composer, and educator (b. 1917)
1995 – Rory Gallagher, Irish singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1949)
1995 – Roger Zelazny, American author and poet (b. 1937)
1996 – Noemí Gerstein, Argentinian sculptor and illustrator (b. 1908)
1997 – Richard Jaeckel, American actor (b. 1926)
1999 – Bernie Faloney, American-Canadian football player and sportscaster (b. 1932)
2000 – Attilio Bertolucci, Italian poet and author (b. 1911)
2002 – June Jordan, American author and activist (b. 1936)
2003 – Dale Whittington, American race car driver (b. 1959)
2004 – Ulrich Inderbinen, Swiss mountaineer and guide (b. 1900)
2005 – Carlo Maria Giulini, Italian conductor and director (b. 1914)
2005 – Mimi Parent, Canadian-Swiss painter (b. 1924)
2006 – Monty Berman, English director, producer, and cinematographer (b. 1905)
2006 – Jean Roba, Belgian author and illustrator (b. 1930)
2007 – Ruth Graham, Chinese-American author, poet, and painter (b. 1920)
2007 – Robin Olds, American general and pilot (b. 1922)
2007 – Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Austrian politician, 9th President of Austria (b. 1918)
2009 – Bob Bogle, American musician (b. 1934)
2009 – William McIntyre, Canadian soldier, lawyer, and judge (b. 1918)
2012 – Peter Archer, Baron Archer of Sandwell, English lawyer and politician, Solicitor General for England and Wales (b. 1926)
2012 – Bob Chappuis, American football player and soldier (b. 1923)
2012 – Margie Hyams, American pianist and vibraphone player (b. 1920)
2012 – Karl-Heinz Kämmerling, German pianist and academic (b. 1930)
2012 – Carlos Reichenbach, Brazilian director and producer (b. 1945)
2012 – Gitta Sereny, Austrian-English historian, journalist, and author (b. 1921)
2013 – Elroy Schwartz, American screenwriter and producer (b. 1923)
2014 – Alberto Cañas Escalante, Costa Rican journalist and politician (b. 1920)
2014 – Isabelle Collin Dufresne, French actress (b. 1935)
2014 – Robert Lebeck, German photographer and journalist (b. 1929)
2014 – James E. Rogers, American lawyer, businessman, and academic (b. 1938)
2015 – Richard Cotton, Australian geneticist and academic (b. 1940)
2015 – Anne Nicol Gaylor, American activist, co-founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation (b. 1926)
2015 – Qiao Shi, Chinese politician (b. 1924)
2016 – Ann Morgan Guilbert, American actress and singer (b. 1928)
2016 – Gilles Lamontagne, Canadian politician, Lieutenant Governor of Quebec (b. 1919)
2020 – Sushant Singh Rajput, Indian film actor (b. 1986)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Burchard of Meissen
Caomhán of Inisheer
Elisha (Roman Catholic and Lutheran)
Fortunatus of Naples (Roman Catholic)
Blessed Francisca de Paula de Jesus (Nhá Chica)
Joseph the Hymnographer (Roman Catholic: Orthodox April 3)
Methodios I of Constantinople
Quintian of Rodez (Rodez)
Richard Baxter (Church of England)
Valerius and Rufinus
June 14 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Commemoration of the Soviet Deportation related observances:
Baltic Freedom Day (United States)
Mourning and Commemoration Day or Leinapäev (Estonia)
Mourning and Hope Day (Lithuania)
Day of Memory for Repressed People (Armenia)
Flag Day (United States)
Freedom Day (Malawi)
Liberation Day (Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands)
World Blood Donor Day
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15798 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2017 | June 17 |
Events
Pre-1600
653 – Pope Martin I is arrested and taken to Constantinople, due to his opposition to monothelitism.
1128 – Geoffrey V of Anjou, known as Plantagenet, marries Matilda, daughter of Henry I, King of England, and widow of the Emperor Henry V.
1242 – Following the Disputation of Paris, twenty-four carriage loads of Jewish religious manuscripts were burnt in Paris.
1397 – The Kalmar Union is formed under the rule of Margaret I of Denmark.
1462 – Vlad III the Impaler attempts to assassinate Mehmed II (The Night Attack at Târgovişte), forcing him to retreat from Wallachia.
1497 – Battle of Deptford Bridge: Forces under King Henry VII defeat troops led by Michael An Gof.
1565 – Matsunaga Hisahide assassinates the 13th Ashikaga shōgun, Ashikaga Yoshiteru.
1579 – Sir Francis Drake claims a land he calls Nova Albion (modern California) for England.
1596 – The Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz discovers the Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen.
1601–1900
1631 – Mumtaz Mahal dies during childbirth. Her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I, will spend the next 17 years building her mausoleum, the Taj Mahal.
1665 – Battle of Montes Claros: Portugal definitively secured independence from Spain in the last battle of the Portuguese Restoration War.
1673 – French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet reach the Mississippi River and become the first Europeans to make a detailed account of its course.
1767 – Samuel Wallis, a British sea captain, sights Tahiti and is considered the first European to reach the island.
1773 – Cúcuta, Colombia, is founded by Juana Rangel de Cuéllar.
1775 – American Revolutionary War: Colonists inflict heavy casualties on British forces while losing the Battle of Bunker Hill.
1789 – In France, the Third Estate declares itself the National Assembly.
1794 – Foundation of Anglo-Corsican Kingdom.
1795 – The burghers of Swellendam expel the Dutch East India Company magistrate and declare a republic.
1839 – In the Kingdom of Hawaii, Kamehameha III issues the edict of toleration which gives Roman Catholics the freedom to worship in the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaii Catholic Church and the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace are established as a result.
1843 – The Wairau Affray, the first serious clash of arms between Māori and British settlers in the New Zealand Wars, takes place.
1861 – American Civil War: Battle of Vienna, Virginia.
1863 – American Civil War: Battle of Aldie in the Gettysburg Campaign.
1876 – American Indian Wars: Battle of the Rosebud: One thousand five hundred Sioux and Cheyenne led by Crazy Horse beat back General George Crook's forces at Rosebud Creek in Montana Territory.
1877 – American Indian Wars: Battle of White Bird Canyon: The Nez Perce defeat the U.S. Cavalry at White Bird Canyon in the Idaho Territory.
1885 – The Statue of Liberty arrives in New York Harbor.
1898 – The United States Navy Hospital Corps is established.
1900 – Boxer Rebellion: Western Allied and Japanese forces capture the Taku Forts in Tianjin, China.
1901–present
1901 – The College Board introduces its first standardized test, the forerunner to the SAT.
1910 – Aurel Vlaicu pilots an A. Vlaicu nr. 1 on its first flight.
1922 – Portuguese naval aviators Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral complete the first aerial crossing of the South Atlantic.
1929 – The town of Murchison, New Zealand Is rocked by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake killing 17. At the time it was New Zealand's worst natural disaster.
1930 – U.S. President Herbert Hoover signs the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act into law.
1932 – Bonus Army: Around a thousand World War I veterans amass at the United States Capitol as the U.S. Senate considers a bill that would give them certain benefits.
1933 – Union Station massacre: In Kansas City, Missouri, four FBI agents and captured fugitive Frank Nash are gunned down by gangsters attempting to free Nash.
1939 – Last public guillotining in France: Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, is executed in Versailles outside the Saint-Pierre prison.
1940 – World War II: is attacked and sunk by the Luftwaffe near Saint-Nazaire, France. At least 3,000 are killed in Britain's worst maritime disaster.
1940 – World War II: The British Army's 11th Hussars assault and take Fort Capuzzo in Libya, Africa from Italian forces.
1940 – The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fall under the occupation of the Soviet Union.
1944 – Iceland declares independence from Denmark and becomes a republic.
1948 – United Airlines Flight 624, a Douglas DC-6, crashes near Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, killing all 43 people on board.
1952 – Guatemala passes Decree 900, ordering the redistribution of uncultivated land.
1953 – Cold War: East Germany Workers Uprising: In East Germany, the Soviet Union orders a division of troops into East Berlin to quell a rebellion.
1958 – The Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing, in the process of being built to connect Vancouver and North Vancouver (Canada), collapses into the Burrard Inlet killing 18 ironworkers and injuring others.
1960 – The Nez Perce tribe is awarded $4 million for of land undervalued at four cents/acre in the 1863 treaty.
1963 – The United States Supreme Court rules 8–1 in Abington School District v. Schempp against requiring the reciting of Bible verses and the Lord's Prayer in public schools.
1963 – A day after South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm announced the Joint Communiqué to end the Buddhist crisis, a riot involving around 2,000 people breaks out. One person is killed.
1967 – Nuclear weapons testing: China announces a successful test of its first thermonuclear weapon.
1971 – U.S. President Richard Nixon in a televised press conference called drug abuse "America's public enemy number one", starting the War on drugs.
1972 – Watergate scandal: Five White House operatives are arrested for burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee during an attempt by members of the administration of President Richard M. Nixon to illegally wiretap the political opposition as part of a broader campaign to subvert the democratic process.
1985 – Space Shuttle program: STS-51-G mission: Space Shuttle Discovery launches carrying Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the first Arab and first Muslim in space, as a payload specialist.
1987 – With the death of the last individual of the species, the dusky seaside sparrow becomes extinct.
1991 – Apartheid: The South African Parliament repeals the Population Registration Act which required racial classification of all South Africans at birth.
1992 – A "joint understanding" agreement on arms reduction is signed by U.S. President George Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin (this would be later codified in START II).
1994 – Following a televised low-speed highway chase, O. J. Simpson is arrested for the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.
2015 – Nine people are killed in a mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
2017 – A series of wildfires in central Portugal kill at least 64 people and injure 204 others.
2021 – Juneteenth National Independence Day, was signed into law by President Joe Biden, to become the first federal holiday established since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.
Births
Pre-1600
801 – Drogo of Metz, Frankish bishop (d. 855)
1239 – Edward I, English king (d. 1307)
1530 – François de Montmorency, French nobleman (d. 1579)
1571 – Thomas Mun, English writer on economics (d. 1641)
1601–1900
1603 – Joseph of Cupertino, Italian mystic and saint (d. 1663)
1604 – John Maurice, Dutch nobleman (d. 1679)
1610 – Birgitte Thott, Danish scholar, writer and translator (b. 1662)
1631 – Gauharara Begum, Mughal princess (d. 1706)
1682 – Charles XII, Swedish king (d. 1718)
1691 – Giovanni Paolo Panini, Italian painter and architect (d. 1765)
1693 – Johann Georg Walch, German theologian and author (d. 1775)
1704 – John Kay, English engineer, invented the Flying shuttle (d. 1780)
1714 – César-François Cassini de Thury, French astronomer and cartographer (d. 1784)
1718 – George Howard, English field marshal and politician, Governor of Minorca (d. 1796)
1778 – Gregory Blaxland, English-Australian explorer (d. 1853)
1800 – William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, English-Irish astronomer and politician (d. 1867)
1808 – Henrik Wergeland, Norwegian poet, playwright, and linguist (d. 1845)
1810 – Ferdinand Freiligrath, German poet and translator (d. 1876)
1811 – Jón Sigurðsson, Icelandic scholar and politician (d. 1879)
1818 – Charles Gounod, French composer and academic (d. 1893)
1818 – Sophie of Württemberg, queen of the Netherlands (d. 1877)
1821 – E. G. Squier, American archaeologist and journalist (d. 1888)
1832 – William Crookes, English chemist and physicist (d. 1919)
1833 – Manuel González Flores, Mexican general and president (d. 1893)
1858 – Eben Sumner Draper, American businessman and politician, 44th Governor of Massachusetts (d. 1914)
1861 – Pete Browning, American baseball player (d. 1905)
1861 – Omar Bundy, American general (d. 1940)
1863 – Charles Michael, duke of Mecklenburg (d. 1934)
1865 – Susan La Flesche Picotte, Native American physician (d. 1915)
1867 – Flora Finch, English-American actress (d. 1940)
1867 – John Robert Gregg, Irish-born American educator, publisher, and humanitarian (d. 1948)
1867 – Henry Lawson, Australian poet and author (d. 1922)
1871 – James Weldon Johnson, American author, journalist, and activist (d. 1938)
1876 – William Carr, American rower (d. 1942)
1876 – Edward Anthony Spitzka, American anatomist and author (d. 1922)
1880 – Carl Van Vechten, American author and photographer (d. 1964)
1881 – Tommy Burns, Canadian boxer and promoter (d. 1955)
1882 – Adolphus Frederick VI, Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (d. 1918)
1882 – Igor Stravinsky, Russian pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1971)
1888 – Heinz Guderian, German general (d. 1954)
1897 – Maria Izilda de Castro Ribeiro, Brazilian girl, popular saint (d. 1911)
1898 – M. C. Escher, Dutch illustrator (d. 1972)
1898 – Carl Hermann, German physicist and academic (d. 1961)
1898 – Joe McKelvey, Executed Irish republican (d. 1922)
1898 – Harry Patch, English soldier and firefighter (d. 2009)
1900 – Martin Bormann, German politician (d. 1945)
1900 – Evelyn Irons, Scottish journalist and war correspondent (d. 2000)
1901–present
1902 – Sammy Fain, American pianist and composer (d. 1989)
1902 – Alec Hurwood, Australian cricketer (d. 1982)
1903 – Ruth Graves Wakefield, American chef, created the chocolate chip cookie (d. 1977)
1904 – Ralph Bellamy, American actor (d. 1991)
1904 – J. Vernon McGee, American pastor and theologian (d. 1988)
1904 – Patrice Tardif, Canadian farmer and politician (d. 1989)
1907 – Maurice Cloche, French director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1990)
1909 – Elmer L. Andersen, American businessman and politician, 30th Governor of Minnesota (d. 2004)
1909 – Ralph E. Winters, Canadian-American film editor (d. 2004)
1910 – Red Foley, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1968)
1910 – George Hees, Canadian football player and politician (d. 1996)
1914 – John Hersey, American journalist and author (d. 1993)
1915 – David "Stringbean" Akeman, American singer and banjo player (d. 1973)
1915 – Marcel Cadieux, Canadian civil servant and diplomat, Canadian Ambassador to the United States (d. 1981)
1916 – Terry Gilkyson, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1999)
1917 – Dufferin Roblin, Canadian politician, 14th Premier of Manitoba (d. 2010)
1918 – Ajahn Chah, Thai monk and educator (d. 1992)
1919 – William Kaye Estes, American psychologist and academic (d. 2011)
1919 – John Moffat, Scottish lieutenant and pilot (d. 2016)
1919 – Beryl Reid, English actress (d. 1996)
1920 – Jacob H. Gilbert, American lawyer and politician (d. 1981)
1920 – Setsuko Hara, Japanese actress (d. 2015)
1920 – François Jacob, French biologist and geneticist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2013)
1920 – Peter Le Cheminant, English air marshal and politician, Lieutenant Governor of Guernsey (d. 2018)
1922 – John Amis, English journalist and critic (d. 2013)
1923 – Elroy Hirsch, American football player (d. 2004)
1923 – Arnold S. Relman, American physician and academic (d. 2014)
1923 – Dale C. Thomson, Canadian historian and academic (d. 1999)
1925 – Alexander Shulgin, American pharmacologist and chemist (d. 2014)
1927 – Martin Böttcher, German composer and conductor (d. 2019)
1927 – Wally Wood, American author, illustrator, and publisher (d. 1981)
1928 – Juan María Bordaberry, President of Uruguay (d. 2011)
1929 – Bud Collins, American journalist and sportscaster (d. 2016)
1929 – Tigran Petrosian, Armenian chess player (d. 1984)
1930 – Cliff Gallup, American rock & roll guitarist (d. 1988)
1930 – Brian Statham, English cricketer (d. 2000)
1931 – John Baldessari, American painter and illustrator (d. 2020)
1932 – Derek Ibbotson, English runner (d. 2017)
1932 – John Murtha, American colonel and politician (d. 2010)
1933 – Harry Browne, American soldier and politician (d. 2006)
1933 – Christian Ferras, French violinist (d. 1982)
1933 – Maurice Stokes, American basketball player (d. 1970)
1936 – Vern Harper, Canadian tribal leader and activist (d. 2018)
1936 – Ken Loach, English director, producer, and screenwriter
1937 – Peter Fitzgerald, Irish footballer and manager (d. 2013)
1937 – Ted Nelson, American sociologist and philosopher
1937 – Clodovil Hernandes, Brazilian fashion designer, television presenter and politician (d. 2009)
1940 – George Akerlof, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1940 – Bobby Bell, American football player
1940 – Chuck Rainey, American bassist
1941 – Nicholas C. Handy, English chemist and academic (d. 2012)
1942 – Mohamed ElBaradei, Egyptian politician, Vice President of Egypt, Nobel Prize laureate
1942 – Doğu Perinçek, Turkish lawyer and politician
1942 – Roger Steffens, American actor and producer
1943 – Newt Gingrich, American historian and politician, 58th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives
1943 – Barry Manilow, American singer-songwriter and producer
1943 – Chantal Mouffe, Belgian theorist and author
1943 – Burt Rutan, American engineer and pilot
1944 – Randy Johnson, American football player (d. 2009)
1944 – Chris Spedding, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1945 – Tommy Franks, American general
1945 – Ken Livingstone, English politician, 1st Mayor of London
1945 – Eddy Merckx, Belgian cyclist and sportscaster
1945 – Art Bell, American broadcaster and author (d. 2018)
1946 – Peter Rosei, Austrian author, poet, and playwright
1947 – Christopher Allport, American actor (d. 2008)
1947 – Timothy Wright, American gospel singer, pastor (d. 2009)
1947 – Linda Chavez, American journalist and author
1947 – George S. Clinton, American composer and songwriter
1947 – Gregg Rolie, American rock singer-songwriter and keyboard player
1947 – Paul Young, English singer-songwriter (d. 2000)
1948 – Dave Concepción, Venezuelan baseball player and manager
1948 – Jacqueline Jones, American historian and academic
1948 – Aurelio López, Mexican baseball player and politician (d. 1992)
1948 – Karol Sikora, English physician and academic
1949 – Snakefinger, English singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1987)
1949 – John Craven, English economist and academic
1949 – Russell Smith, American country singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2019)
1950 – Lee Tamahori, New Zealand film director
1951 – Starhawk, American author and activist
1951 – John Garrett, Canadian ice hockey player and sportscaster
1951 – Joe Piscopo, American actor, comedian, and screenwriter
1952 – Mike Milbury, American ice hockey player, coach, and manager
1952 – Estelle Morris, Baroness Morris of Yardley, English educator and politician, Secretary of State for Education
1953 – Vernon Coaker, English educator and politician, Shadow Secretary of State for Defence
1953 – Juan Muñoz, Spanish sculptor and storyteller (d. 2001)
1954 – Mark Linn-Baker, American actor and director
1955 – Mati Laur, Estonian historian, author, and academic
1955 – Bob Sauvé, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1955 – Cem Hakko, Turkish fashion designer and businessman
1956 – Iain Milne, Scottish rugby player
1957 – Philip Chevron, Irish singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2013)
1957 – Martin Dillon, American tenor and educator (d. 2005)
1957 – Uģis Prauliņš, Latvian composer
1958 – Pierre Berbizier, French rugby player and coach
1958 – Jello Biafra, American singer-songwriter and producer
1958 – Bobby Farrelly, American director, producer, and screenwriter
1958 – Sam Hamad, Syrian-Canadian academic and politician
1958 – Jon Leibowitz, American lawyer and politician
1958 – Daniel McVicar, American actor
1959 – Carol Anderson, American author and historian
1959 – Lawrence Haddad, South African-English economist and academic
1959 – Nikos Stavropoulos, Greek basketball player and coach
1960 – Adrián Campos, Spanish race car driver (d. 2021)
1960 – Thomas Haden Church, American actor
1961 – Kōichi Yamadera, Japanese actor and singer
1962 – Michael Monroe, Finnish singer-songwriter and saxophonist
1963 – Greg Kinnear, American actor, television presenter, and producer
1964 – Rinaldo Capello, Italian race car driver
1964 – Michael Gross, German swimmer
1964 – Steve Rhodes, English cricketer and coach
1965 – Dermontti Dawson, American football player and coach
1965 – Dan Jansen, American speed skater and sportscaster
1965 – Dara O'Kearney, Irish runner and poker player
1966 – Mohammed Ghazy Al-Akhras, Iraqi journalist and author
1966 – Tory Burch, American fashion designer and philanthropist
1966 – Ken Clark, American football player (d. 2013)
1966 – Diane Modahl, English runner
1966 – Jason Patric, American actor
1967 – Dorothea Röschmann, German soprano and actress
1967 – Eric Stefani, American keyboard player and composer
1968 – Steve Georgallis, Australian rugby league player and coach
1968 – Minoru Suzuki, Japanese wrestler and mixed martial artist
1969 – Paul Tergat, Kenyan runner
1969 – Geoff Toovey, Australian rugby league player and coach
1969 – Ilya Tsymbalar, Ukrainian-Russian footballer and manager (d. 2013)
1970 – Stéphane Fiset, Canadian ice hockey player
1970 – Will Forte, American actor, comedian, and screenwriter
1970 – Jason Hanson, American football player
1970 – Popeye Jones, American basketball player and coach
1970 – Michael Showalter, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
1970 – Alan Dowson, English football manager and former professional player
1971 – Paulina Rubio, Mexican pop singer
1971 – Mildred Fox, Irish politician
1973 – Leander Paes, Indian tennis player
1974 – Evangelia Psarra, Greek archer
1975 – Joshua Leonard, American actor, director, and screenwriter
1975 – Juan Carlos Valerón, Spanish footballer
1975 – Phiyada Akkraseranee, Thai actress and model
1976 – Scott Adkins, English actor and martial artist
1976 – Sven Nys, Belgian cyclist
1977 – Bartosz Brożek, Polish philosopher and jurist
1977 – Tjaša Jezernik, Slovenian tennis player
1977 – Mark Tauscher, American football player and sportscaster
1978 – Isabelle Delobel, French ice dancer
1978 – Travis Roche, Canadian ice hockey player
1979 – Nick Rimando, American soccer player
1979 – Tyson Apostol, American television personality
1979 – Young Maylay, American rapper, producer, and voice actor
1980 – Elisa Rigaudo, Italian race walker
1980 – Jeph Jacques, American author and illustrator
1980 – Venus Williams, American tennis player
1981 – Kyle Boller, American football player
1981 – Shane Watson, Australian cricketer
1982 – Alex Rodrigo Dias da Costa, Brazilian footballer
1982 – Marek Svatoš, Slovak ice hockey player (d. 2016)
1982 – Stanislava Hrozenská, Slovak tennis player
1982 – Stefan Hodgetts, English racing driver
1982 – Arthur Darvill, English actor
1982 – Jodie Whittaker, English actress
1983 – Lee Ryan, English singer/actor
1983 – Vlasis Kazakis, Greek footballer
1984 – Michael Mathieu, Bahamian sprinter
1984 – Si Tianfeng, Chinese race walker
1985 – Özge Akın, Turkish sprinter
1985 – Marcos Baghdatis, Cypriot tennis player
1985 – Rafael Sóbis, Brazilian footballer
1986 – Apoula Edel, Armenian footballer
1986 – Helen Glover, English rower
1987 – Kendrick Lamar, American rapper
1987 – Nozomi Tsuji, Japanese singer and actress
1988 – Andrew Ogilvy, Australian basketball player
1988 – Shaun MacDonald, Welsh footballer
1988 – Stephanie Rice, Australian swimmer
1989 – Georgios Tofas, Cypriot footballer
1989 – Simone Battle, American singer and actress (d. 2014)
1990 – Jordan Henderson, English footballer
1990 – Josh Mansour, Australian rugby league player
1991 – Daniel Tupou, Australian-Tongan rugby league player
1994 – Amari Cooper, American football player
1995 – Clément Lenglet, French footballer
1997 – KJ Apa, New Zealand actor
Deaths
Pre-1600
656 – Uthman, caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate (b. 579)
676 – Adeodatus, pope of the Catholic Church
811 – Sakanoue no Tamuramaro, Japanese shōgun (b. 758)
850 – Tachibana no Kachiko, Japanese empress (b. 786)
900 – Fulk, French archbishop and chancellor
1025 – Bolesław I the Brave, Polish king (b. 967)
1091 – Dirk V, count of Holland (b. 1052)
1207 – Daoji, Chinese buddhist monk (b. 1130)
1219 – David of Scotland, 8th Earl of Huntingdon
1361 – Ingeborg of Norway, princess consort and regent of Sweden (b. 1301)
1400 – Jan of Jenštejn, archbishop of Prague (b. 1348)
1463 – Catherine of Portugal, Portuguese princess (b. 1436)
1501 – John I Albert, Polish king (b. 1459)
1565 – Ashikaga Yoshiteru, Japanese shōgun (b. 1536)
1601–1900
1631 – Mumtaz Mahal, Mughal princess (b. 1593)
1649 – Injo of Joseon, Korean king (b. 1595)
1674 – Jijabai, Dowager Queen, mother of Shivaji (b. 1598)
1694 – Philip Howard, English cardinal (b. 1629)
1696 – John III Sobieski, Polish king (b. 1629)
1719 – Joseph Addison, English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician (b. 1672)
1734 – Claude Louis Hector de Villars, French general and politician, French Secretary of State for War (b. 1653)
1740 – Sir William Wyndham, 3rd Baronet, English politician, Chancellor of the Exchequer (b. 1687)
1762 – Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, French poet and playwright (b. 1674)
1771 – Daskalogiannis, Greek rebel leader (b. 1722)
1775 – John Pitcairn, Scottish-English soldier (b. 1722)
1797 – Mohammad Khan Qajar, Persian tribal chief (b. 1742)
1813 – Charles Middleton, 1st Baron Barham, Scottish-English admiral and politician (b. 1726)
1821 – Martín Miguel de Güemes, Argentinian general and politician (b. 1785)
1839 – Lord William Bentinck, English general and politician, 14th Governor-General of India (b. 1774)
1866 – Joseph Méry, French poet and author (b. 1798)
1889 – Lozen, Chiracaua Apache warrior woman (b. ~1840)
1898 – Edward Burne-Jones, English soldier and painter (b. 1833)
1901–present
1904 – Nikolay Bobrikov, Russian soldier and politician, Governor-General of Finland (b. 1839)
1914 – Julien Félix, French military officer and aviator (b. 1869)
1936 – Julius Seljamaa, Estonian journalist, politician, and diplomat, Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1883)
1939 – Allen Sothoron, American baseball player, coach, and manager (b. 1893)
1939 – Eugen Weidmann, German criminal (b. 1908)
1940 – Arthur Harden, English biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1865)
1941 – Johan Wagenaar, Dutch organist and composer (b. 1862)
1942 – Charles Fitzpatrick, Canadian lawyer and politician, 5th Chief Justice of Canada (b. 1853)
1952 – Jack Parsons, American chemist and engineer (b. 1914)
1954 – Danny Cedrone, American guitarist and bandleader (b. 1920)
1956 – Percival Perry, 1st Baron Perry, English businessman (b. 1878)
1956 – Paul Rostock, German surgeon and academic (b. 1892)
1956 – Bob Sweikert, American race car driver (b. 1926)
1957 – Dorothy Richardson, English journalist and author (b. 1873)
1957 – J. R. Williams, Canadian-American cartoonist (b. 1888)
1961 – Jeff Chandler, American actor (b. 1918)
1963 – Aleksander Kesküla, Estonian politician (b. 1882)
1968 – José Nasazzi, Uruguayan footballer and manager (b. 1901)
1974 – Refik Koraltan, Turkish lawyer and politician, 8th Speaker of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (b. 1889)
1975 – James Phinney Baxter III, American historian and academic (b. 1893)
1979 – Hubert Ashton, English cricketer and politician (b. 1898)
1979 – Duffy Lewis, American baseball player and manager (b. 1888)
1981 – Richard O'Connor, Indian-English general (b. 1889)
1981 – Zerna Sharp, American author and educator (b. 1889)
1982 – Roberto Calvi, Italian banker (b. 1920)
1983 – Peter Mennin, American composer and educator (b. 1923)
1985 – John Boulting, English director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1913)
1986 – Kate Smith, American singer (b. 1907)
1987 – Dick Howser, American baseball player, coach, and manager (b. 1936)
1996 – Thomas Kuhn, American historian and philosopher (b. 1922)
1996 – Curt Swan, American illustrator (b. 1920)
1999 – Basil Hume, English cardinal (b. 1923)
2000 – Ismail Mahomed, South African lawyer and jurist, 17th Chief Justice of South Africa (b. 1931)
2001 – Donald J. Cram, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1919)
2001 – Thomas Winning, Scottish cardinal (b. 1925)
2002 – Willie Davenport, American sprinter and hurdler (b. 1943)
2002 – Fritz Walter, German footballer (b. 1920)
2004 – Gerry McNeil, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1926)
2006 – Bussunda, Brazilian comedian (b. 1962)
2007 – Gianfranco Ferré, Italian fashion designer (b. 1944)
2007 – Serena Wilson, American dancer and choreographer (b. 1933)
2008 – Cyd Charisse, American actress and dancer (b. 1922)
2009 – Ralf Dahrendorf, German-English sociologist and politician (b. 1929)
2009 – Darrell Powers, American sergeant (b. 1923)
2011 – Rex Mossop, Australian rugby player and sportscaster (b. 1928)
2012 – Stéphane Brosse, French mountaineer (b. 1971)
2012 – Patricia Brown, American baseball player (b. 1931)
2012 – Nathan Divinsky, Canadian mathematician and chess player (b. 1925)
2012 – Rodney King, American victim of police brutality (b. 1965)
2012 – Fauzia Wahab, Pakistani actress and politician (b. 1956)
2013 – Michael Baigent, New Zealand-English theorist and author (b. 1948)
2013 – Atiqul Haque Chowdhury, Bangladeshi playwright and producer (b. 1930)
2013 – Pierre F. Côté, Canadian lawyer and civil servant (b. 1927)
2013 – Bulbs Ehlers, American basketball player (b. 1923)
2013 – James Holshouser, American politician, 68th Governor of North Carolina (b. 1934)
2014 – Patsy Byrne, English actress (b. 1933)
2014 – Éric Dewailly, Canadian epidemiologist and academic (b. 1954)
2014 – Stanley Marsh 3, American businessman and philanthropist (b. 1938)
2014 – Arnold S. Relman, American physician and academic (b. 1923)
2014 – Larry Zeidel, Canadian-American ice hockey player and sportscaster (b. 1928)
2015 – Ron Clarke, Australian runner and politician, Mayor of the Gold Coast (b. 1937)
2015 – John David Crow, American football player and coach (b. 1935)
2015 – Süleyman Demirel, Turkish engineer and politician, 9th President of Turkey (b. 1924)
2015 – Roberto M. Levingston, Argentinian general and politician, 36th President of Argentina (b. 1920)
2015 – Clementa C. Pinckney, American minister and politician (b. 1973)
2017 – Baldwin Lonsdale, president of Vanuatu (b. 1948)
2019 – Gloria Vanderbilt, American artist, author actress, fashion designer, heiress and socialite (b. 1924)
2021 – Kenneth Kaunda, Zambian educator and politician, first president of Zambia (b. 1924)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Albert Chmielowski
Botolph (England and Scandinavia)
Gondulphus of Berry
Hervé
Hypatius of Bithynia (Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Churches)
Rainerius
Samuel and Henrietta Barnett (Church of England)
June 17 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Father's Day (El Salvador, Guatemala)
Icelandic National Day, celebrates the independence of Iceland from Kingdom of Denmark in 1944.
National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Forest Fires (Portugal)
Occupation of the Latvian Republic Day (Latvia)
World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought (international)
Zemla Intifada Day (Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15799 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2025 | June 25 |
Events
Pre-1600
524 – The Franks are defeated by the Burgundians in the Battle of Vézeronce.
841 – In the Battle of Fontenay-en-Puisaye, forces led by Charles the Bald and Louis the German defeat the armies of Lothair I of Italy and Pepin II of Aquitaine.
1258 – War of Saint Sabas: In the Battle of Acre, the Venetians defeat a larger Genoese fleet sailing to relieve Acre.
1530 – At the Diet of Augsburg the Augsburg Confession is presented to the Holy Roman Emperor by the Lutheran princes and Electors of Germany.
1601–1900
1658 – Spanish forces fail to retake Jamaica at the Battle of Rio Nuevo during the Anglo-Spanish War.
1678 – Venetian Elena Cornaro Piscopia is the first woman awarded a doctorate of philosophy when she graduates from the University of Padua.
1741 – Maria Theresa is crowned Queen of Hungary.
1786 – Gavriil Pribylov discovers St. George Island of the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea.
1788 – Virginia becomes the tenth state to ratify the United States Constitution.
1848 – A photograph of the June Days uprising becomes the first known instance of photojournalism.
1876 – Battle of the Little Bighorn and the death of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.
1900 – The Taoist monk Wang Yuanlu discovers the Dunhuang manuscripts, a cache of ancient texts that are of great historical and religious significance, in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China.
1901–present
1906 – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania millionaire Harry Thaw shoots and kills prominent architect Stanford White.
1910 – The United States Congress passes the Mann Act, which prohibits interstate transport of women or girls for “immoral purposes”; the ambiguous language would be used to selectively prosecute people for years to come.
1910 – Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird is premiered in Paris, bringing him to prominence as a composer.
1913 – American Civil War veterans begin arriving at the Great Reunion of 1913.
1935 – Colombia–Soviet Union relations are established.
1938 – Dr. Douglas Hyde is inaugurated as the first President of Ireland.
1940 – World War II: The French armistice with Nazi Germany comes into effect.
1941 – World War II: The Continuation War between the Soviet Union and Finland, supported by Nazi Germany, began.
1943 – The Holocaust: Jews in the Częstochowa Ghetto in Poland stage an uprising against the Nazis.
1943 – The left-wing German Jewish exile Arthur Goldstein is murdered in Auschwitz.
1944 – World War II: The Battle of Tali-Ihantala, the largest battle ever fought in the Nordic countries, begins.
1944 – World War II: United States Navy and British Royal Navy ships bombard Cherbourg to support United States Army units engaged in the Battle of Cherbourg.
1944 – The final page of the comic Krazy Kat is published, exactly two months after its author George Herriman died.
1947 – The Diary of a Young Girl (better known as The Diary of Anne Frank) is published.
1948 – The United States Congress passes the Displaced Persons Act to allow World War II refugees to immigrate to the United States above quota restrictions.
1950 – The Korean War begins with the invasion of South Korea by North Korea.
1960 – Cold War: Two cryptographers working for the United States National Security Agency left for vacation to Mexico, and from there defected to the Soviet Union.
1975 – Mozambique achieves independence from Portugal.
1975 – Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declares a state of internal emergency in India.
1976 – Missouri Governor Kit Bond issues an executive order rescinding the Extermination Order, formally apologizing on behalf of the state of Missouri for the suffering it had caused to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
1978 – The rainbow flag representing gay pride is flown for the first time during the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade.
1981 – Microsoft is restructured to become an incorporated business in its home state of Washington.
1991 – The breakup of Yugoslavia begins when Slovenia and Croatia declare their independence from Yugoslavia.
1993 – Kim Campbell is sworn in as the first female Prime Minister of Canada.
1996 – The Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia kills 19 U.S. servicemen.
1997 – An uncrewed Progress spacecraft collides with the Russian space station Mir.
1997 – The National Hockey League approved expansion franchises for Nashville (1998), Atlanta (1999), Columbus (2000), and Minneapolis-Saint Paul (2000).
1998 – In Clinton v. City of New York, the United States Supreme Court decides that the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 is unconstitutional.
2017 – The World Health Organization estimates that Yemen has over 200,000 cases of cholera.
2021 – Derek Chauvin is sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison for the murder of George Floyd.
Births
Pre-1600
1242 – Beatrice of England (d. 1275)
1328 – William de Montagu, 2nd Earl of Salisbury, English commander (d. 1397)
1371 – Joanna II of Naples (d. 1435)
1484 – Bartholomeus V. Welser, German banker (d. 1561)
1526 – Elisabeth Parr, Marchioness of Northampton (d. 1565)
1560 – Wilhelm Fabry, German surgeon (d. 1634)
1568 – Gunilla Bielke, Queen of Sweden (d. 1597)
1601–1900
1612 – John Albert Vasa, Polish cardinal (d. 1634)
1709 – Francesco Araja, Italian composer (d. 1762)
1715 – Joseph Foullon de Doué, French soldier and politician, Controller-General of Finances (d. 1789)
1755 – Natalia Alexeievna of Russia (d. 1776)
1799 – David Douglas, Scottish-English botanist and explorer (d. 1834)
1814 – Gabriel Auguste Daubrée, French geologist and engineer (d. 1896)
1825 – James Farnell, Australian politician, 8th Premier of New South Wales (d. 1888)
1852 – Antoni Gaudí, Spanish architect, designed the Park Güell (d. 1926)
1858 – Georges Courteline, French author and playwright (d. 1929)
1860 – Gustave Charpentier, French composer and conductor (d. 1956)
1863 – Émile Francqui, Belgian soldier and diplomat (d. 1935)
1864 – Walther Nernst, German chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1941)
1866 – Eloísa Díaz, Chilean doctor and Chile's first female physician (d. 1950)
1874 – Rose O'Neill, American cartoonist, illustrator, artist, and writer (d. 1944)
1884 – Géza Gyóni, Hungarian soldier and poet (d. 1917)
1884 – Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, German-French art collector and historian (d. 1979)
1886 – Henry H. Arnold, American general (d. 1950)
1887 – George Abbott, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1995)
1887 – Frigyes Karinthy, Hungarian author, poet, and journalist (d. 1938)
1892 – Shirō Ishii, Japanese microbiologist and general (d. 1959)
1894 – Hermann Oberth, Romanian-German physicist and engineer (d. 1989)
1898 – Kay Sage, American painter and poet (d. 1963)
1900 – Marta Abba, Italian actress (d. 1988)
1900 – Zinaida Aksentyeva, Ukrainian/Soviet astronomer (d. 1969)
1900 – Georgia Hale, American silent film actress and real estate investor (d. 1985)
1900 – Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, English admiral and politician, 44th Governor-General of India (d. 1979)
1901–present
1901 – Harold Roe Bartle, American businessman and politician, 47th Mayor of Kansas City (d. 1974)
1902 – Yasuhito, Prince Chichibu of Japan (d. 1953)
1903 – George Orwell, British novelist, essayist, and critic (d. 1950)
1903 – Anne Revere, American actress (d. 1990)
1905 – Rupert Wildt, German-American astronomer and academic (d. 1976)
1907 – J. Hans D. Jensen, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1973)
1908 – Willard Van Orman Quine, American philosopher and academic (d. 2000)
1911 – William Howard Stein, American chemist and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1980)
1912 – William T. Cahill, American lawyer and politician, 46th Governor of New Jersey (d. 1996)
1913 – Cyril Fletcher, English actor and screenwriter (d. 2005)
1915 – Whipper Billy Watson, Canadian-American wrestler and trainer (d. 1990)
1917 – Nils Karlsson, Swedish skier (d. 2012)
1917 – Claude Seignolle, French author (d. 2018)
1918 – P. H. Newby, English soldier and author (d. 1997)
1920 – Lassie Lou Ahern, American actress (d. 2018)
1921 – Celia Franca, English-Canadian ballerina and choreographer, founded the National Ballet of Canada (d. 2007)
1922 – Johnny Smith, American guitarist and songwriter (d. 2013)
1923 – Sam Francis, American soldier and painter (d. 1994)
1923 – Dorothy Gilman, American author (d. 2012)
1923 – Jamshid Amouzegar, 43rd Prime Minister of Iran (d. 2016)
1924 – Sidney Lumet, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2011)
1924 – Dimitar Isakov, Bulgarian football player
1924 – Madan Mohan, Iraqi-Indian composer and director (d. 1975)
1924 – William J. Castagna, American lawyer and judge (d. 2020)
1925 – Clifton Chenier, American singer-songwriter and accordion player (d. 1987)
1925 – June Lockhart, American actress
1925 – Clay Evans, American Baptist pastor (d. 2019)
1925 – Robert Venturi, American architect and academic (d. 2018)
1925 – Virginia Patton, American actress and businesswoman
1926 – Margaret Anstee, English diplomat (d. 2016)
1926 – Ingeborg Bachmann, Austrian author and poet (d. 1973)
1926 – Kep Enderby, Australian lawyer, judge, and politician, 23rd Attorney-General for Australia (d. 2015)
1926 – Stig Sollander, Swedish Alpine skier (d. 2019)
1927 – Antal Róka, Hungarian runner (d. 1970)
1927 – Chuck Smith, American pastor, founded the Calvary Chapel (d. 2013)
1927 – Arnold Wolfendale, English astronomer and academic (d. 2020)
1928 – Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov, Russian-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2017)
1928 – John A. Wickham Jr., United States Army general
1928 – Michel Brault, Canadian director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2013)
1928 – Peyo, Belgian author and illustrator, created The Smurfs (d. 1992)
1928 – Bill Russo, American pianist and composer (d. 2003)
1928 – Alex Toth, American animator and screenwriter (d. 2006)
1929 – Eric Carle, American author and illustrator (d. 2021)
1929 – Francesco Marchisano, Italian cardinal (d. 2014)
1931 – V. P. Singh, Indian lawyer and politician, 7th Prime Minister of India (d. 2008)
1932 – Peter Blake, English painter and illustrator
1932 – George Sluizer, French-Dutch director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2014)
1933 – Álvaro Siza Vieira, Portuguese architect, designed the Porto School of Architecture
1934 – Jean Geissinger, American baseball player (d. 2014)
1934 – Jack W. Hayford, American minister and author
1934 – Beatriz Sheridan, Mexican actress and director (d. 2006)
1935 – Ray Butt, English television producer and director (d. 2013)
1935 – Salihu Ibrahim, Nigerian Army Officer (d. 2018)
1935 – Taufiq Ismail, Indonesian poet and activist
1935 – Larry Kramer, American author, playwright, and activist, co-founded Gay Men's Health Crisis (d. 2020)
1935 – Don Demeter, American professional baseball player (d. 2021)
1935 – Tony Lanfranchi, English racing driver (d. 2004)
1935 – Judy Howe, American artistic gymnast
1935 – Charles Sheffield, English-American mathematician, physicist, and author (d. 2002)
1936 – B. J. Habibie, Indonesian engineer and politician, 3rd President of Indonesia (d. 2019)
1936 – Bert Hölldobler, German biologist and entomologist
1937 – Eddie Floyd, American R&B/soul singer-songwriter
1937 – Derek Foster, Baron Foster of Bishop Auckland, English politician (d. 2019)
1937 – Doreen Wells, English ballerina and actress
1939 – Allen Fox, American tennis player and coach
1940 – Judy Amoore, Australian runner
1940 – Mary Beth Peil, American actress and singer
1940 – A. J. Quinnell, English-Maltese author (d. 2005)
1940 – Clint Warwick, English bass player (d. 2004)
1941 – Denys Arcand, Canadian director, producer, and screenwriter
1941 – John Albert Raven, Scottish academic and ecologist
1942 – Nikiforos Diamandouros, Greek academic and politician
1942 – Willis Reed, American basketball player, coach, and manager
1942 – Michel Tremblay, Canadian author and playwright
1944 – Robert Charlebois, Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor
1944 – Gary David Goldberg, American screenwriter and producer (d. 2013)
1945 – Carly Simon, American singer-songwriter
1945 – Baba Gana Kingibe, Nigerian politician
1945 – Harry Womack, American singer (d. 1974)
1946 – Roméo Dallaire, Dutch-Canadian general and politician
1946 – Allen Lanier, American guitarist and songwriter (d. 2013)
1946 – Ian McDonald, English guitarist and saxophonist (d. 2022)
1947 – John Hilton, English table tennis player
1947 – John Powell, American discus thrower
1947 – Jimmie Walker, American actor and comedian
1949 – Richard Clarke, Irish archbishop
1949 – Patrick Tambay, French racing driver
1949 – Yoon Joo-sang, South Korean actor
1950 – Marcello Toninelli, Italian author and screenwriter
1951 – Eva Bayer-Fluckiger, Swiss mathematician and academic
1952 – Péter Erdő, Hungarian cardinal
1952 – Tim Finn, New Zealand singer-songwriter
1952 – Martin Gerschwitz, German singer-songwriter and keyboard player
1952 – Alan Green, Northern Irish sportscaster
1952 – Kristina Abelli Elander, Swedish artist
1953 – Olivier Ameisen, French-American cardiologist and educator (d. 2013)
1953 – Ian Davis, Australian cricketer
1954 – Mario Lessard, Canadian ice hockey player
1954 – David Paich, American singer-songwriter, keyboard player, and producer
1954 – Lina Romay, Spanish actress (d. 2012)
1954 – Daryush Shokof, Iranian director, producer, and screenwriter
1954 – Sonia Sotomayor, American lawyer and jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
1955 – Vic Marks, English cricketer and sportscaster
1956 – Anthony Bourdain, American chef and author (d. 2018)
1956 – Frank Paschek, German long jumper
1956 – Boris Trajkovski, Macedonian politician, 2nd President of the Republic of Macedonia (d. 2004)
1956 – Craig Young, Australian rugby player and coach
1957 – Greg Millen, Canadian ice hockey player and sportscaster
1958 – George Becali, Romanian businessman, politician
1959 – Lutz Dombrowski, German long jumper and educator
1959 – Jari Puikkonen, Finnish ski jumper
1959 – Bobbie Vaile, Australian astrophysicist and astronomer (d. 1996)
1960 – Alastair Bruce of Crionaich, English-Scottish journalist and author
1960 – Brian Hayward, Canadian ice hockey player and sportscaster
1960 – Craig Johnston, South African-Australian footballer and photographer
1960 – Laurent Rodriguez, French rugby player
1961 – Timur Bekmambetov, Kazakh director, producer, and screenwriter
1961 – Ricky Gervais, English comedian, actor, director, producer and singer
1963 – John Benjamin Hickey, American actor
1963 – Yann Martel, Spanish-Canadian author
1963 – Doug Gilmour, Canadian ice hockey player and manager
1963 – George Michael, English singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2016)
1963 – Mike Stanley, American baseball player
1964 – Dell Curry, American basketball player and coach
1964 – Phil Emery, Australian cricketer
1964 – Johnny Herbert, English racing driver and sportscaster
1964 – John McCrea, American singer-songwriter and musician
1964 – Greg Raymer, American poker player and lawyer
1965 – Napole Polutele, French politician
1965 – Kerri Pottharst, Australian beach volleyball player
1965 – Joseph Hii Teck Kwong, Malaysian bishop
1966 – Dikembe Mutombo, Congolese-American basketball player
1967 – Tracey Spicer, Australian journalist
1968 – Adrian Garvey, Zimbabwean-South African rugby player
1968 – Vaios Karagiannis, Greek footballer and manager
1969 – Hunter Foster, American actor and singer
1969 – Zim Zum, American guitarist and songwriter
1969 – Kevin Kelley, American football coach
1970 – Ariel Gore, American journalist and author
1970 – Roope Latvala, Finnish guitarist
1970 – Erki Nool, Estonian decathlete and politician
1970 – Aaron Sele, American baseball player and scout
1971 – Karen Darke, English cyclist and author
1971 – Jason Gallian, Australian-English cricketer and educator
1971 – Rod Kafer, Australian rugby player and sportscaster
1971 – Neil Lennon, Northern Irish-Scottish footballer and manager
1971 – Michael Tucker, American baseball player
1972 – Carlos Delgado, Puerto Rican-American baseball player and coach
1972 – Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, Libyan engineer and politician
1973 – Milan Hnilička, Czech ice hockey player
1973 – Jamie Redknapp, English footballer and coach
1974 – Nisha Ganatra, Canadian director, producer, and screenwriter
1974 – Glen Metropolit, Canadian ice hockey player
1975 – Kiur Aarma, Estonian journalist and producer
1975 – Linda Cardellini, American actress
1975 – Albert Costa, Spanish tennis player and coach
1975 – Vladimir Kramnik, Russian chess player
1975 – Michele Merkin, American model and television host
1976 – José Cancela, Uruguayan footballer
1976 – Carlos Nieto, Argentinian-Italian rugby player
1976 – Neil Walker, American swimmer
1978 – Aramis Ramírez, Dominican-American baseball player
1979 – Richard Hughes, Scottish footballer
1979 – Busy Philipps, American actress
1981 – Simon Ammann, Swiss ski jumper
1982 – Rain, South Korean singer and actor
1982 – Mikhail Youzhny, Russian tennis player
1983 – Marc Janko, Austrian footballer
1984 – Lauren Bush, American model and fashion designer
1985 – Karim Matmour, Algerian footballer
1986 – Aya Matsuura, Japanese singer and actress
1988 – Jhonas Enroth, Swedish ice hockey player
1988 – Miguel Layún, Mexican footballer
1988 – Therese Johaug, Norwegian cross-country skier
1990 – Andi Eigenmann, Filipino actress
1996 – Pietro Fittipaldi, Brazilian-American race car driver
1996 – Sione Mata'utia, Australian rugby league player
1996 – Lele Pons, Latina-American Internet personality
1998 – Kyle Chalmers, Australian swimmer
Deaths
Pre-1600
635 – Gao Zu, Chinese emperor (b. 566)
841 – Gerard of Auvergne, Frankish nobleman
841 – Ricwin of Nantes, Frankish nobleman
891 – Sunderolt, German archbishop
931 – An Chonghui, Chinese general
1014 – Æthelstan Ætheling, son of Æthelred the Unready
1031 – Sheng Zong, Chinese emperor (b. 972)
1134 – Niels, king of Denmark (b. 1065)
1218 – Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester, French politician, Lord High Steward (b. 1160)
1291 – Eleanor of Provence, queen of England (b. 1223)
1337 – Frederick III, king of Sicily (b. 1272)
1394 – Dorothea of Montau, German hermitess (b. 1347)
1483 – Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, English courtier and translator (b. 1440)
1483 – Richard Grey, half brother of Edward V of England (b. 1458)
1522 – Franchinus Gaffurius, Italian composer and theorist (b. 1451)
1533 – Mary Tudor, queen of France (b. 1496)
1579 – Hatano Hideharu, Japanese warlord (b. 1541)
1593 – Michele Mercati, Italian physician and archaeologist (b. 1541)
1601–1900
1634 – John Marston, English poet and playwright (b. 1576)
1638 – Juan Pérez de Montalbán, Spanish author, poet, and playwright (b. 1602)
1665 – Sigismund Francis, archduke of Austria (b. 1630)
1669 – François de Vendôme, duke of Beaufort (b. 1616)
1671 – Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Italian priest and astronomer (b. 1598)
1673 – Charles de Batz-Castelmore d'Artagnan, French captain (b. 1611)
1686 – Simon Ushakov, Russian painter and educator (b. 1626)
1715 – Jean-Baptiste du Casse, French admiral and politician (b. 1646)
1767 – Georg Philipp Telemann, German composer and theorist (b. 1681)
1798 – Thomas Sandby, English cartographer, painter, and architect (b. 1721)
1822 – E. T. A. Hoffmann, German composer, critic, and jurist (b. 1776)
1835 – Ebenezer Pemberton, American educator (b. 1746)
1838 – François-Nicolas-Benoît Haxo, French general and engineer (b. 1774)
1861 – Abdülmecid I, Ottoman sultan (b. 1823)
1866 – Alexander von Nordmann, Finnish biologist and paleontologist (b. 1803)
1868 – Carlo Matteucci, Italian physicist and neurophysiologist (b. 1811)
1870 – David Heaton, American lawyer and politician (b. 1823)
1875 – Antoine-Louis Barye, French sculptor (b. 1796)
1876 – James Calhoun, American lieutenant (b. 1845)
1876 – Boston Custer, American civilian army contractor (b. 1848)
1876 – George Armstrong Custer, American general (b. 1839)
1876 – Thomas Custer, American officer, Medal of Honor recipient (b. 1845)
1876 – Myles Keogh, Irish-American officer (b. 1840)
1882 – François Jouffroy, French sculptor (b. 1806)
1884 – Hans Rott, Austrian organist and composer (b. 1858)
1886 – Jean-Louis Beaudry, Canadian businessman and politician, 11th Mayor of Montreal (b. 1809)
1894 – Marie François Sadi Carnot, French engineer and politician, 5th President of France (b. 1837)
1901–present
1906 – Stanford White, American architect, designed the Washington Square Arch (b. 1853)
1912 – Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Dutch-British painter (b. 1836)
1916 – Thomas Eakins, American painter, photographer, and sculptor (b. 1844)
1917 – Géza Gyóni, Hungarian soldier and poet (b. 1884)
1918 – Jake Beckley, American baseball player and coach (b. 1867)
1922 – Satyendranath Dutta, Indian poet and author (b. 1882)
1937 – Colin Clive, British actor (b. 1900)
1939 – Richard Seaman, English race car driver (b. 1913)
1943 – Arthur Goldstein, German Jewish left-wing activist (c. 1887)
1944 – Dénes Berinkey, Hungarian jurist and politician, 18th Prime Minister of Hungary (b. 1871)
1944 – Lucha Reyes, Mexican singer and actress (b. 1906)
1947 – Jimmy Doyle, American boxer (b. 1924)
1948 – William C. Lee, American general (b. 1895)
1949 – Buck Freeman, American baseball player (b. 1871)
1949 – James Steen, American water polo player (b. 1876)
1950 – Maurice O'Sullivan, Irish police officer and author (b. 1904)
1958 – Alfred Noyes, English author, poet, and playwright (b. 1880)
1959 – Charles Starkweather, American spree killer (b. 1938)
1960 – Tommy Corcoran, American baseball player and manager (b. 1869)
1968 – Tony Hancock, English comedian and actor (b. 1924)
1971 – John Boyd Orr, 1st Baron Boyd-Orr, Scottish physician, biologist, and politician, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1880)
1972 – Jan Matulka, Czech-American painter and illustrator (b. 1890)
1974 – Cornelius Lanczos, Hungarian mathematician and physicist (b. 1893)
1976 – Johnny Mercer, American singer-songwriter, co-founded Capitol Records (b. 1909)
1977 – Olave Baden-Powell, British Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting leader (b. 1889)
1977 – Endre Szervánszky, Hungarian pianist and composer (b. 1911)
1979 – Dave Fleischer, American animator, director, and producer (b. 1894)
1979 – Philippe Halsman, Latvian-American photographer (b. 1906)
1981 – Felipe Cossío del Pomar, Peruvian painter and political activist (b. 1888)
1983 – Alberto Ginastera, Argentinian pianist and composer (b. 1916)
1984 – Michel Foucault, French historian and philosopher (b. 1926)
1988 – Hillel Slovak, Israeli-American guitarist and songwriter (b. 1962)
1990 – Ronald Gene Simmons, American sergeant and murderer (b. 1940)
1992 – Jerome Brown, American football player (b. 1965)
1995 – Warren E. Burger, Fifteenth Chief Justice of the United States (b. 1907)
1995 – Ernest Walton, Irish physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1903)
1996 – Arthur Snelling, English civil servant and diplomat, British Ambassador to South Africa (b. 1914)
1997 – Jacques Cousteau, French oceanographer and explorer (b. 1910)
2002 – Jean Corbeil, Canadian politician, 29th Canadian Minister of Labour (b. 1934)
2003 – Lester Maddox, American businessman and politician, 75th Governor of Georgia (b. 1915)
2004 – Morton Coutts, New Zealand inventor (b. 1904)
2005 – John Fiedler, American actor and voice artist (b. 1925)
2005 – Kâzım Koyuncu, Turkish singer-songwriter and activist (b. 1971)
2006 – Jaap Penraat, Dutch-American humanitarian (b. 1918)
2007 – J. Fred Duckett, American journalist and educator (b. 1933)
2007 – Jeeva, Indian director, cinematographer, and screenwriter (b. 1963)
2008 – Lyall Watson, South African anthropologist and ethologist (b. 1939)
2009 – Farrah Fawcett, American actress and producer (b. 1947)
2009 – Michael Jackson, American singer-songwriter, producer, dancer, and actor (b. 1958)
2009 – Sky Saxon, American singer-songwriter (b. 1937)
2010 – Alan Plater, English playwright and screenwriter (b. 1935)
2010 – Richard B. Sellars, American businessman and philanthropist (b. 1915)
2011 – Annie Easley, American computer scientist and mathematician (b. 1933)
2011 – Goff Richards, English composer and conductor (b. 1944)
2011 – Margaret Tyzack, English actress (b. 1931)
2012 – Shigemitsu Dandō, Japanese academic and jurist (b. 1913)
2012 – Campbell Gillies, Scottish jockey (b. 1990)
2012 – George Randolph Hearst, Jr., American businessman (b. 1927)
2012 – Lucella MacLean, American baseball player (b. 1921)
2012 – Edgar Ross, American boxer (b. 1949)
2013 – George Burditt, American screenwriter and producer (b. 1923)
2013 – Catherine Gibson, Scottish swimmer (b. 1931)
2013 – Robert E. Gilka, American photographer and journalist (b. 1916)
2013 – Harry Parker, American rower and coach (b. 1935)
2013 – Mildred Ladner Thompson, American journalist (b. 1918)
2013 – Green Wix Unthank, American soldier and judge (b. 1923)
2014 – Nigel Calder, English journalist, author, and screenwriter (b. 1931)
2014 – Ana María Matute, Spanish author and academic (b. 1925)
2014 – Ivan Plyushch, Ukrainian agronomist and politician (b. 1941)
2015 – Patrick Macnee, English actor (b. 1922)
2015 – Nerses Bedros XIX Tarmouni, Egyptian-Armenian patriarch (b. 1940)
2016 – Adam Small, South African writer of apartheid-period (b. 1936)
2018 – Richard Benjamin Harrison, American businessman and reality television personality (b. 1941)
2018 – David Goldblatt, South African photographer of apartheid-period (b. 1930)
Holidays and observances
Arbor Day (Philippines)
Christian feast day:
David of Munktorp
Eurosia
Maximus (Massimo) of Turin
Philipp Melanchthon (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America)
Presentation of the Augsburg Confession (Lutheran)
Prosper of Aquitaine
Prosper of Reggio
William of Montevergine
June 25 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Independence Day, celebrates the independence of Mozambique from Portugal in 1975.
National Catfish Day (United States)
Statehood Day (Slovenia)
Statehood Day (Virginia)
Teacher's Day (Guatemala)
World Vitiligo Day
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15800 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2026 | June 26 |
Events
Pre-1600
4 – Augustus adopts Tiberius.
221 – Roman emperor Elagabalus adopts his cousin Alexander Severus as his heir and receives the title of Caesar.
363 – Roman emperor Julian is killed during the retreat from the Sasanian Empire.
684 – Pope Benedict II is chosen.
699 – En no Ozuno, a Japanese mystic and apothecary who will later be regarded as the founder of a folk religion Shugendō, is banished to Izu Ōshima.
1243 – Mongols defeat the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Köse Dağ.
1295 – Przemysł II crowned king of Poland, following Ducal period. The white eagle is added to the Polish coat of arms.
1407 – Ulrich von Jungingen becomes Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights.
1409 – Western Schism: The Roman Catholic Church is led into a double schism as Petros Philargos is crowned Pope Alexander V after the Council of Pisa, joining Pope Gregory XII in Rome and Pope Benedict XII in Avignon.
1460 – Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, and Edward, Earl of March, land in England with a rebel army and march on London.
1483 – Richard III becomes King of England.
1522 – Ottomans begin the second Siege of Rhodes.
1541 – Francisco Pizarro is assassinated in Lima by the son of his former companion and later antagonist, Diego de Almagro the younger. Almagro is later caught and executed.
1579 – Livonian campaign of Stephen Báthory begins.
1601–1900
1718 – Alexei Petrovich, Tsarevich of Russia, Peter the Great's son, mysteriously dies after being sentenced to death by his father for plotting against him.
1723 – After a siege and bombardment by cannon, Baku surrenders to the Russians.
1740 – A combined force of Spanish, free blacks and allied Indians defeat a British garrison at the Siege of Fort Mose near St. Augustine during the War of Jenkins' Ear.
1794 – French Revolutionary Wars: Battle of Fleurus marked the first successful military use of aircraft.
1830 – William IV becomes king of Britain and Hanover.
1843 – Treaty of Nanking comes into effect, Hong Kong Island is ceded to the British "in perpetuity".
1848 – End of the June Days Uprising in Paris.
1857 – The first investiture of the Victoria Cross in Hyde Park, London.
1886 – Henri Moissan isolated elemental Fluorine for the first time.
1889 – Bangui is founded by Albert Dolisie and Alfred Uzac in what was then the upper reaches of the French Congo.
1901–present
1906 – The first Grand Prix motor race is held at Le Mans.
1909 – The Science Museum in London comes into existence as an independent entity.
1917 – World War I: The American Expeditionary Forces begin to arrive in France. They will first enter combat four months later.
1918 – World War I: Allied forces under John J. Pershing and James Harbord defeat Imperial German forces under Wilhelm, German Crown Prince in the Battle of Belleau Wood.
1924 – The American occupation of the Dominican Republic ends after eight years.
1927 – The Cyclone roller coaster opens on Coney Island.
1934 – United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Federal Credit Union Act, which establishes credit unions.
1936 – Initial flight of the Focke-Wulf Fw 61, the first practical helicopter.
1940 – World War II: Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union presents an ultimatum to Romania requiring it to cede Bessarabia and the northern part of Bukovina.
1941 – World War II: Soviet planes bomb Kassa, Hungary (now Košice, Slovakia), giving Hungary the impetus to declare war the next day.
1942 – The first flight of the Grumman F6F Hellcat.
1944 – World War II: San Marino, a neutral state, is mistakenly bombed by the RAF based on faulty information, leading to 35 civilian deaths.
1944 – World War II: The Battle of Osuchy in Osuchy, Poland, one of the largest battles between Nazi Germany and Polish resistance forces, ends with the defeat of the latter.
1945 – The United Nations Charter is signed by 50 Allied nations in San Francisco, California.
1948 – Cold War: The first supply flights are made in response to the Berlin Blockade.
1948 – William Shockley files the original patent for the grown-junction transistor, the first bipolar junction transistor.
1948 – Shirley Jackson's short story The Lottery is published in The New Yorker magazine.
1952 – The Pan-Malayan Labour Party is founded in Malaya, as a union of statewide labour parties.
1953 – Lavrentiy Beria, head of MVD, is arrested by Nikita Khrushchev and other members of the Politburo.
1955 – The South African Congress Alliance adopts the Freedom Charter at the Congress of the People in Kliptown.
1959 – Swedish boxer Ingemar Johansson becomes world champion of heavy weight boxing, by defeating American Floyd Patterson on technical knockout after two minutes and three seconds in the third round at Yankee Stadium.
1960 – The former British Protectorate of British Somaliland gains its independence as Somaliland.
1960 – Madagascar gains its independence from France.
1963 – Cold War: U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, underlining the support of the United States for democratic West Germany shortly after Soviet-supported East Germany erected the Berlin Wall.
1967 – Karol Wojtyła (later John Paul II) made a cardinal by Pope Paul VI.
1974 – The Universal Product Code is scanned for the first time to sell a package of Wrigley's chewing gum at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
1975 – Two FBI agents and a member of the American Indian Movement are killed in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota; Leonard Peltier is later convicted of the murders in a controversial trial.
1977 – Elvis Presley held his final concert in Indianapolis, Indiana at Market Square Arena.
1978 – Air Canada Flight 189, flying to Toronto, overruns the runway and crashes into the Etobicoke Creek ravine. Two of the 107 passengers on board perish.
1981 – Dan-Air Flight 240, flying to East Midlands Airport, crashes in Nailstone, Leicestershire. All three crew members perish.
1988 – The first crash of an Airbus A320 occurs when Air France Flight 296 crashes at Mulhouse–Habsheim Airfield in Habsheim, France, during an air show, killing three of the 136 people on board.
1991 – Yugoslav Wars: The Yugoslav People's Army begins the Ten-Day War in Slovenia.
1995 – Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani deposes his father Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar, in a bloodless coup d'état.
1997 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the Communications Decency Act violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
1997 – J. K. Rowling publishes the first of her Harry Potter novel series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in United Kingdom.
2000 – The Human Genome Project announces the completion of a "rough draft" sequence.
2003 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Lawrence v. Texas that gender-based sodomy laws are unconstitutional.
2006 – Mari Alkatiri, the first Prime Minister of East Timor, resigns after weeks of political unrest.
2007 – Pope Benedict XVI reinstates the traditional laws of papal election in which a successful candidate must receive two-thirds of the votes.
2008 – A suicide bomber dressed as an Iraqi policeman detonates an explosive vest, killing 25 people.
2012 – The Waldo Canyon fire descends into the Mountain Shadows neighborhood in Colorado Springs burning 347 homes in a matter of hours and killing two people.
2013 – Riots in China's Xinjiang region kill at least 36 people and injure 21 others.
2013 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5–4, that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and in violation of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
2015 – Five different terrorist attacks in France, Tunisia, Somalia, Kuwait, and Syria occurred on what was dubbed Bloody Friday by international media. Upwards of 750 people were either killed or injured in these uncoordinated attacks.
2015 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5–4, that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marriage under the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Births
Pre-1600
12 BC – Agrippa Postumus, Roman son of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and Julia the Elder (d. 14)
1399 – John, Count of Angoulême (d. 1467)
1575 – Anne Catherine of Brandenburg (d. 1612)
1581 – San Pedro Claver, Spanish Jesuit saint (d. 1654)
1600 – Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, Spanish-born bishop and viceroy of New Spain (d. 1659)
1601–1900
1681 – Hedvig Sophia of Sweden (d. 1708)
1689 – Edward Holyoke, American pastor and academic (d. 1769)
1694 – Georg Brandt, Swedish chemist and mineralogist (d. 1768)
1699 – Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, French businesswoman (d. 1777)
1702 – Philip Doddridge, English hymn-writer and educator (d. 1751)
1703 – Thomas Clap, American minister and academic (d. 1767)
1726 – Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia (d. 1796)
1730 – Charles Messier, French astronomer and academic (d. 1817)
1764 – Jan Paweł Łuszczewski, Polish politician (d. 1812)
1786 – Sunthorn Phu, Thai poet (d. 1855)
1796 – Jan Paweł Lelewel, Polish painter and engineer (d. 1847)
1798 – Wolfgang Menzel, German poet and critic (d. 1873)
1817 – Branwell Brontë, English painter and poet (d. 1848)
1819 – Abner Doubleday, American general (d. 1893)
1821 – Bartolomé Mitre, Argentinian soldier, journalist, and politician, 6th President of Argentina (d. 1906)
1824 – William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Irish-Scottish physicist and engineer (d. 1907)
1835 – Thomas W. Knox, American journalist and author (d. 1896)
1839 – Sam Watkins, American soldier and author (d. 1901)
1852 – Daoud Corm, Lebanese painter (d. 1930)
1854 – Robert Laird Borden, Canadian lawyer and politician, 8th Prime Minister of Canada (d. 1937)
1865 – Bernard Berenson, Lithuanian-American historian and author (d. 1959)
1866 – George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, English archaeologist and banker (d. 1923)
1869 – Martin Andersen Nexø, Danish journalist and author (d. 1954)
1878 – Leopold Löwenheim, German mathematician and logician (d. 1957)
1880 – Mitchell Lewis, American actor (d. 1956)
1881 – Ya'akov Cohen, Israeli linguist, poet, and playwright (d. 1960)
1892 – Pearl S. Buck, American novelist, essayist, short story writer Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1973)
1893 – Dorothy Fuldheim, American journalist and news anchor(d. 1989)
1895 – George Hainsworth, Canadian ice hockey player and politician (d. 1950)
1898 – Willy Messerschmitt, German engineer and businessman (d. 1978)
1898 – Chesty Puller, US general (d. 1971)
1899 – Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia (d. 1918)
1901–present
1901 – Stuart Symington, American lieutenant and politician, 1st United States Secretary of the Air Force (d. 1988)
1902 – Hugues Cuénod, Swiss tenor and educator (d. 2010)
1903 – Big Bill Broonzy, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1958)
1904 – Frank Scott Hogg, Canadian astronomer and academic (d. 1951)
1904 – Peter Lorre, Slovak-American actor and singer (d. 1964)
1905 – Lynd Ward, American author and illustrator (d. 1985)
1906 – Alberto Rabagliati, Italian singer (d. 1974)
1906 – Viktor Schreckengost, American sculptor and educator (d. 2008)
1907 – Debs Garms, American baseball player (d. 1984)
1908 – Salvador Allende, Chilean physician and politician, 29th President of Chile (d. 1973)
1909 – Colonel Tom Parker, Dutch-American talent manager (d. 1997)
1909 – Wolfgang Reitherman, German-American animator, director, and producer (d. 1985)
1911 – Babe Didrikson Zaharias, American golfer and basketball player (d. 1956)
1911 – Bronisław Żurakowski, Polish pilot and engineer (d. 2009)
1913 – Aimé Césaire, French poet, author, and politician (d. 2008)
1913 – Maurice Wilkes, English computer scientist and physicist (d. 2010)
1914 – Laurie Lee, English author and poet (d. 1997)
1914 – Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark, European royalty (d. 2001)
1915 – Paul Castellano, American gangster (d. 1985)
1915 – George Haigh, English professional footballer (d. 2019)
1915 – Charlotte Zolotow, American author and poet (d. 2013)
1916 – Virginia Satir, American psychotherapist and author (d. 1988)
1916 – Giuseppe Taddei, Italian actor and singer (d. 2010)
1917 – Idriz Ajeti, Albanian albanologist (d. 2019)
1918 – Leo Rosner, Polish-born Austrian Jewish musician (d. 2008)
1918 – Raleigh Rhodes, American combat fighter pilot (d. 2007)
1918 – J. B. Fuqua, American entrepreneur and philanthropist (d. 2006)
1919 – Richard Neustadt, American political scientist and academic (d. 2003)
1919 – Jimmy Newberry, American pitcher (d. 1983)
1919 – George Athan Billias, American historian (d. 2018)
1919 – Donald M. Ashton, English art director (d. 2004)
1920 – Jean-Pierre Roy, Canadian-American baseball player, manager, and sportscaster (d. 2014)
1921 – Violette Szabo, French-British secret agent (d. 1945)
1921 – Robert Everett, American computer scientist (d. 2018)
1922 – Walter Farley, American author (d. 1989)
1922 – Eleanor Parker, American actress (d. 2013)
1922 – Enzo Apicella, English artist, cartoonist, designer, and restaurateur (d. 2018)
1923 – Franz-Paul Decker, German conductor (d. 2014)
1923 – Ed Bearss, American military historian and author (d. 2020)
1924 – Kostas Axelos, Greek-French philosopher and author (d. 2010)
1924 – James W. McCord Jr., CIA officer (d. 2017)
1925 – Pavel Belyayev, Russian soldier, pilot, and astronaut (d. 1970)
1925 – Wolfgang Unzicker, German chess player (d. 2006)
1925 – Jean Frydman, French resistant and businessman (d. 2021)
1926 – Kenny Baker, American fiddler (d. 2011)
1926 – Mahendra Bhatnagar, Indian poet (d. 2020)
1926 – Fernando Mönckeberg Barros, Chilean surgeon
1926 – Dinu Zamfirescu, Romanian politician
1927 – Robert Kroetsch, Canadian author and poet (d. 2011)
1928 – Jacob Druckman, American composer and academic (d. 1996)
1928 – Yoshiro Nakamatsu, Japanese inventor
1928 – Bill Sheffield, American politician; 5th Governor of Alaska
1928 – Samuel Belzberg, Canadian businessman and philanthropist (d. 2018)
1929 – June Bronhill, Australian soprano and actress (d. 2005)
1929 – Fred Bruemmer, Latvian-Canadian photographer and author (d. 2013)
1929 – Milton Glaser, American illustrator and graphic designer (d. 2020)
1930 – Jackie Fargo, American wrestler and trainer (d. 2013)
1930 – Wolfgang Schwanitz, East German secret police
1931 – Colin Wilson, English philosopher and author (d. 2013)
1931 – Robert Colbert, American actor
1932 – Dame Marguerite Pindling, Bahamian politician; Governor-General of the Bahamas
1932 – Don Valentine, American venture capitalist (d. 2019)
1933 – Claudio Abbado, Italian conductor (d. 2014)
1933 – Gene Green, American baseball player (d. 1981)
1933 – David Winnick, English politician
1934 – Dave Grusin, American pianist and composer
1934 – Toru Goto, Japanese swimmer
1935 – Carlo Facetti, Italian race car driver
1935 – Sandro Riminucci, Italian basketball player
1936 – Benjamin Adekunle, Nigerian general (d. 2014)
1936 – Hal Greer, American basketball player (d. 2018)
1936 – Robert Maclennan, Baron Maclennan of Rogart, Scottish politician (d. 2020)
1936 – Edith Pearlman, American short story writer
1936 – Jean-Claude Turcotte, Canadian cardinal (d. 2015)
1936 – Nancy Willard, American author and poet (d. 2017)
1937 – Robert Coleman Richardson, American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2013)
1937 – Reggie Workman, American bassist and composer
1938 – Neil Abercrombie, American sociologist and politician, 7th Governor of Hawaii
1938 – Billy Davis Jr., American pop-soul singer
1938 – Gerald North, American climatologist and academic
1939 – Chuck Robb, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 64th Governor of Virginia
1939 – Zainuddin Maidin, Malaysian politician (d. 2018)
1941 – Yves Beauchemin, Canadian author and academic
1942 – J.J. Dillon, American wrestler and manager
1942 – Gilberto Gil, Brazilian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and politician, Brazilian Minister of Culture
1943 – Georgie Fame, English singer, pianist, and keyboard player
1943 – Warren Farrell, American author and educator
1944 – Gennady Zyuganov, Russian politician
1945 – Dwight York, American singer
1946 – Candace Pert, American neuroscientist and pharmacologist (d. 2013)
1949 – Fredric Brandt, American dermatologist and author (d. 2015)
1949 – Adrian Gurvitz, English singer-songwriter and producer
1949 – Mary Styles Harris, American biologist and geneticist
1951 – Gary Gilmour, Australian cricketer and manager (d. 2014)
1952 – Gordon McQueen, Scottish footballer and manager
1952 – Olive Morris, Jamaican-English civil rights activist (d. 1979)
1954 – Luis Arconada, Spanish footballer
1955 – Mick Jones, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1955 – Gedde Watanabe, American actor
1956 – Chris Isaak, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor
1956 – Catherine Samba-Panza, interim president of the Central African Republic
1956 – Patrick Mercer, English colonel and politician
1957 – Al Hunter Ashton, English actor and screenwriter (d. 2007)
1957 – Philippe Couillard, Canadian surgeon and politician, 31st Premier of Quebec
1957 – Patty Smyth, American singer-songwriter and musician
1959 – Mark McKinney, Canadian actor and screenwriter
1960 – Mark Durkan, Irish politician
1961 – Greg LeMond, American cyclist
1961 – Terri Nunn, American singer-songwriter and actress
1962 – Jerome Kersey, American basketball player and coach (d. 2015)
1963 – Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russian-Swiss businessman and philanthropist
1963 – Mark McClellan, American economist and politician
1963 – Harriet Wheeler, English singer-songwriter
1964 – Tommi Mäkinen, Finnish race car driver
1966 – Dany Boon, French actor, director, and screenwriter
1966 – Kirk McLean, Canadian ice hockey player
1966 – Jürgen Reil, American drummer
1967 – Inha Babakova, Ukrainian high jumper
1967 – Olivier Dahan, French director and screenwriter
1968 – Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, Icelandic lecturer and politician, 6th President of Iceland
1968 – Paolo Maldini, Italian footballer
1968 – Shannon Sharpe, American football player
1969 – Colin Greenwood, English bass player and songwriter
1969 – Ingrid Lempereur, Belgian swimmer
1969 – Geir Moen, Norwegian sprinter
1969 – Mike Myers, American baseball player
1970 – Paul Thomas Anderson, American director, producer, and screenwriter
1970 – Paul Bitok, Kenyan runner
1970 – Irv Gotti, American record producer, co-founded Murder Inc Records
1970 – Sean Hayes, American actor
1970 – Matt Letscher, American actor and playwright
1970 – Adam Ndlovu, Zimbabwean footballer (d. 2012)
1970 – Chris O'Donnell, American actor
1970 – Nick Offerman, American actor
1971 – Max Biaggi, Italian motorcycle racer
1972 – Jai Taurima, Australian long jumper and police officer
1973 – Gretchen Wilson, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1974 – Derek Jeter, American baseball player
1974 – Jason Kendall, American baseball player
1975 – Chris Armstrong, Canadian ice hockey player
1975 – Terry Skiverton, English footballer and manager
1976 – Ed Jovanovski, Canadian ice hockey player
1976 – Pommie Mbangwa, Zimbabwean cricketer and sportscaster
1976 – Chad Pennington, American football player and sportscaster
1976 – Dave Rubin, American political commentator
1977 – Quincy Lewis, American basketball player
1979 – Ryō Fukuda, Japanese race car driver
1979 – Walter Herrmann, Argentinian basketball player
1979 – Ryan Tedder, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and producer
1980 – Hamílton Hênio Ferreira Calheiros, Togolese footballer
1980 – Michael Jackson, English footballer
1980 – Jason Schwartzman, American singer-songwriter, drummer, and actor
1980 – Chris Shelton, American baseball player
1980 – Michael Vick, American football player
1981 – Natalya Antyukh, Russian sprinter and hurdler
1981 – Paolo Cannavaro, Italian footballer
1981 – Kanako Kondō, Japanese voice actress and singer
1981 – Takashi Toritani, Japanese baseball player
1982 – Zuzana Kučová, Slovak tennis player
1983 – Vinícius Rodrigues Almeida, Brazilian footballer
1983 – Nick Compton, South African-English cricketer
1983 – Toyonoshima Daiki, Japanese sumo wrestler
1983 – Felipe Melo, Brazilian footballer
1983 – Antonio Rosati, Italian footballer
1984 – Indila, French singer
1984 – José Juan Barea, Puerto Rican-American basketball player
1984 – Yankuba Ceesay, Gambian footballer
1984 – Elijah Dukes, American baseball player
1984 – Raymond Felton, American basketball player
1984 – Priscah Jeptoo, Kenyan runner
1984 – Jūlija Tepliha, Latvian figure skater
1984 – Deron Williams, American basketball player
1984 – Preslava, Bulgarian singer
1985 – Ogyen Trinley Dorje, Tibetan spiritual leader, 17th Karmapa Lama
1986 – Duvier Riascos, Colombian footballer
1987 – Carlos Iaconelli, Brazilian race car driver
1987 – Samir Nasri, French footballer
1988 – Oliver Stang, German footballer
1988 – Andrew Bachelor, Canadian-American actor, comedian, director, producer, writer and social media personality
1990 – Belaynesh Oljira, Ethiopian runner
1990 – Igor Subbotin, Estonian footballer
1991 – Houssem Chemali, French footballer
1991 – Diego Falcinelli, Italian footballer
1991 – Dustin Martin, Australian rules footballer
1992 – Joel Campbell, Costa Rican footballer
1992 – Rudy Gobert, French basketball player
1992 – Jennette McCurdy, American actress and singer-songwriter
1993 – Ariana Grande, American singer-songwriter, dancer, and actress
1994 – Hollie Arnold, English javelin thrower
1994 – Leonard Carow, German actor
1997 – Baek Ye-rin, South Korean singer
1997 – Callum Taylor, English cricketer
2002 – Chandler Smith, American racing driver
2005 – Princess Alexia of the Netherlands
2009 – Yesha Camile, Filipino child actress
Deaths
Pre-1600
116 BC – Ptolemy VIII, king of Egypt
363 – Julian the Apostate, Roman emperor (b. 332)
405 – Vigilius, bishop of Trent (b. 353)
822 – Saichō, Japanese Buddhist monk (b. 767)
969 – George El Mozahem, Egyptian martyr (b. 940)
985 – Ramiro III, king of León
1090 – Jaromír, bishop of Prague
1095 – Robert, bishop of Hereford
1265 – Anne of Bohemia, duchess of Silesia (b. 1203 or 1204)
1274 – Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Persian scientist and writer (b. 1201)
1487 – John Argyropoulos, Byzantine philosopher and scholar (b. 1415)
1541 – Francisco Pizarro, Spanish explorer and politician, Governor of New Castile (b. c. 1471)
1574 – Gabriel, comte de Montgomery, captain of the Scottish Guard of Henry II of France (b. 1530)
1601–1900
1677 – Francesco Buonamici, Italian architect, painter and engraver (b. 1596)
1688 – Ralph Cudworth, English philosopher and academic (b. 1617)
1752 – Giulio Alberoni, Spanish cardinal (b. 1664)
1757 – Maximilian Ulysses Browne, Austrian field marshal (b. 1705)
1784 – Caesar Rodney, American lawyer and politician, 4th Governor of Delaware (b. 1728)
1793 – Gilbert White, English ornithologist and ecologist (b. 1720)
1795 – Johannes Jährig, German linguist and translator (b. 1747)
1798 – James Dickey, Irish revolutionary (b. 1776)
1808 – Ludwik Tyszkiewicz, Polish poet and politician (b. 1748)
1810 – Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, French inventor, co-invented the hot air balloon (b. 1740)
1830 – George IV of the United Kingdom (b. 1762)
1836 – Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, French soldier and composer (b. 1760)
1856 – Max Stirner, German philosopher and author (b. 1806)
1870 – Armand Barbès, French lawyer and politician (b. 1809)
1878 – Mercedes of Orléans (b. 1860)
1879 – Richard H. Anderson, American general (b. 1821)
1883 – Edward Sabine, Irish-English astronomer, geophysicist, and ornithologist (b. 1788)
1901–present
1918 – Peter Rosegger, Austrian poet and author (b. 1843)
1922 – Albert I, Prince of Monaco (b. 1848)
1927 – Armand Guillaumin, French painter (b. 1841)
1932 – Adelaide Ames, American astronomer and academic (b. 1900)
1938 – James Weldon Johnson, American poet, lawyer and politician (b. 1871)
1938 – Daria Pratt, American golfer (b. 1859)
1939 – Ford Madox Ford, English novelist, poet, and critic (b. 1873)
1943 – Karl Landsteiner, Austrian biologist and physician, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1868)
1945 – Emil Hácha, Czech lawyer and politician, 3rd President of Czechoslovakia (b. 1872)
1946 – Max Kögel, German SS officer (b. 1895)
1946 – Yōsuke Matsuoka, Japanese politician, Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1880)
1947 – R. B. Bennett, Canadian lawyer and politician, 11th Prime Minister of Canada (b. 1870)
1949 – Kim Koo, South Korean educator and politician, 13th President of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea (b. 1876)
1955 – Engelbert Zaschka, German engineer (b. 1895)
1956 – Clifford Brown, American trumpet player and composer (b. 1930)
1956 – Richie Powell, American pianist (b. 1931)
1957 – Alfred Döblin, Polish-German physician and author (b. 1878)
1957 – Malcolm Lowry, English novelist and poet (b. 1909)
1958 – George Orton, Canadian runner and hurdler (b. 1873)
1958 – Andrija Štampar, Croatian physician and scholar (b. 1888)
1964 – Léo Dandurand, American-Canadian businessman (b. 1889)
1967 – Françoise Dorléac, French actress and singer (b. 1942)
1975 – Josemaría Escrivá, Spanish priest and saint (b. 1902)
1979 – Akwasi Afrifa, Ghanaian soldier and politician, 3rd Head of State of Ghana (b. 1936)
1989 – Howard Charles Green, Canadian lawyer and politician, 27th Canadian Minister of Public Works (b. 1895)
1990 – Anni Blomqvist, Finnish author (b. 1909)
1992 – Buddy Rogers, American wrestler (b. 1921)
1993 – Roy Campanella, American baseball player and coach (b. 1921)
1993 – William H. Riker, American political scientist and academic (b. 1920)
1994 – Jahanara Imam, Bangladeshi author and activist (b. 1929)
1996 – Veronica Guerin, Irish journalist (b. 1958)
1996 – Necmettin Hacıeminoğlu, Turkish linguist and academic (b. 1932)
1997 – Don Hutson, American football player and coach (b. 1913)
1998 – Hacı Sabancı, Turkish businessman and philanthropist (b. 1935)
2002 – Jay Berwanger, American football player (b. 1914)
2002 – Arnold Brown, English-Canadian 11th General of The Salvation Army (b. 1913)
2003 – Marc-Vivien Foé, Cameroon footballer (b. 1975)
2003 – Denis Thatcher, English soldier and businessman (b. 1915)
2003 – Strom Thurmond, American general, lawyer, and politician, 103rd Governor of South Carolina (b. 1902)
2004 – Ott Arder, Estonian poet and translator (b. 1950)
2004 – Yash Johar, Indian film producer, founded Dharma Productions (b. 1929)
2004 – Naomi Shemer, Israeli singer-songwriter (b. 1930)
2005 – Tõnno Lepmets, Estonian basketball player (b. 1938)
2005 – Richard Whiteley, English journalist and game show host (b. 1943)
2006 – Tommy Wonder, Dutch magician (b. 1953)
2007 – Liz Claiborne, Belgian-American fashion designer, founded Liz Claiborne (b. 1929)
2007 – Joey Sadler, New Zealand rugby player (b. 1914)
2010 – Algirdas Brazauskas, Lithuanian engineer and politician, 2nd President of Lithuania (b. 1932)
2010 – Harald Keres, Estonian physicist and academic (b. 1912)
2011 – Edith Fellows, American actress (b. 1923)
2011 – Jan van Beveren, Dutch footballer and coach (b. 1948)
2012 – Sverker Åström, Swedish diplomat, Swedish Permanent Representative to the United Nations (b. 1915)
2012 – Pat Cummings, American basketball player (b. 1956)
2012 – Nora Ephron, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1941)
2012 – Mario O'Hara, Filipino director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1944)
2012 – Doris Singleton, American actress (b. 1919)
2013 – Henrik Otto Donner, Finnish trumpet player and composer (b. 1939)
2013 – Edward Huggins Johnstone, Brazilian-American sergeant and judge (b. 1922)
2013 – Byron Looper, American politician (b. 1964)
2013 – Justin Miller, American baseball player (b. 1977)
2013 – Marc Rich, Belgian-American businessman (b. 1934)
2014 – Howard Baker, American lawyer, politician, and diplomat, 12th White House Chief of Staff (b. 1925)
2014 – Bill Frank, American-Canadian football player (b. 1938)
2014 – Rollin King, American businessman, co-founded Southwest Airlines (b. 1931)
2014 – Bob Mischak, American football player and coach (b. 1932)
2014 – Julius Rudel, Austrian-American conductor (b. 1921)
2014 – Mary Rodgers, American composer and author (b. 1931)
2015 – Yevgeny Primakov, Ukrainian-Russian journalist and politician, 32nd Prime Minister of Russia (b. 1929)
2015 – Chris Thompson, American screenwriter and producer (b. 1952)
2019 – Beth Chapman, American reality Television star, Bounty Hunter (b. 1967)
2020 – Milton Glaser, American graphic designer (b. 1929)
2021 – Mike Gravel, American politician (b. 1930)
Holidays and observances
Day of the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan
Christian feast day:
Anthelm of Belley
David the Dendrite
Hermogius
Isabel Florence Hapgood (Episcopal Church)
Jeremiah (Lutheran)
John and Paul
José María Robles Hurtado (one of Saints of the Cristero War)
Josemaría Escrivá
Mar Abhai (Syriac Orthodox Church)
Pelagius of Córdoba
Vigilius of Trent
June 26 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Flag Day (Romania)
Independence Day, celebrates the independence of Madagascar from France in 1960. (Madagascar)
Independence Day, celebrates the independence of Somaliland from United Kingdom in 1960. (Somaliland)
International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking (International)
International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (International)
Ratcatcher's Day (Hamelin, Germany)
Sunthorn Phu Day (Thailand)
World Refrigeration Day (International)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15801 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2027 | June 27 |
Events
Pre-1600
1358 – The Republic of Ragusa is founded.
1497 – Cornish rebels Michael An Gof and Thomas Flamank are executed at Tyburn, London, England.
1499 – Americo Vespucci, on Spanish financed trip, sights coast south of Cape Cassipore.
1556 – The thirteen Stratford Martyrs are burned at the stake near London for their Protestant beliefs.
1601–1900
1743 – In the Battle of Dettingen, George II becomes the last reigning British monarch to participate in a battle.
1760 – Anglo-Cherokee War: Cherokee warriors defeat British forces at the Battle of Echoee near present-day Otto, North Carolina.
1806 – British forces take Buenos Aires during the first of the British invasions of the River Plate.
1844 – Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, and his brother Hyrum Smith, are killed by a mob at the Carthage, Illinois jail.
1864 – American Civil War: Confederate forces defeat Union forces during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain during the Atlanta Campaign.
1895 – The inaugural run of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue from Washington, D.C., to New York City, the first U.S. passenger train to use electric locomotives.
1898 – The first solo circumnavigation of the globe is completed by Joshua Slocum from Briar Island, Nova Scotia.
1901–present
1905 – During the Russo-Japanese War, sailors start a mutiny aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin.
1914 – The Illinois Monument is dedicated at Cheatham Hill in what is now the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park.
1927 – Prime Minister of Japan Tanaka Giichi convenes an eleven-day conference to discuss Japan's strategy in China. The Tanaka Memorial, a forged plan for world domination, is later claimed to be a secret report leaked from this conference.
1928 – The Rovaniemi township decree was promulgated, as a result of which Rovaniemi seceded from the old rural municipality as its own market town on January 1, 1929.
1941 – Romanian authorities launch one of the most violent pogroms in Jewish history in the city of Iași, resulting in the murder of at least 13,266 Jews.
1941 – World War II: German troops capture the city of Białystok during Operation Barbarossa.
1944 – World War II: Mogaung is the first place in Burma to be liberated from the Japanese by British 'Chindits', supported by the Chinese.
1946 – In the Canadian Citizenship Act, the Parliament of Canada establishes the definition of Canadian citizenship.
1950 – The United States decides to send troops to fight in the Korean War.
1954 – The Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, the Soviet Union's first nuclear power station, opens in Obninsk, near Moscow.
1954 – The FIFA World Cup quarterfinal match between Hungary and Brazil, highly anticipated to be exciting, instead turns violent, with three players ejected and further fighting continuing after the game.
1957 – Hurricane Audrey makes landfall near the Texas–Louisiana border, killing over 400 people, mainly in and around Cameron, Louisiana.
1973 – The President of Uruguay Juan María Bordaberry dissolves Parliament and establishes a dictatorship.
1974 – U.S. president Richard Nixon visits the Soviet Union.
1976 – Air France Flight 139 (Tel Aviv-Athens-Paris) is hijacked en route to Paris by the PFLP and redirected to Entebbe, Uganda.
1977 – France grants independence to Djibouti.
1980 – The 'Ustica massacre': Itavia Flight 870 crashes in the sea while en route from Bologna to Palermo, Italy, killing all 81 on board.
1981 – The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issues its "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China", laying the blame for the Cultural Revolution on Mao Zedong.
1982 – Space Shuttle Columbia launched from the Kennedy Space Center on the final research and development flight mission, STS-4.
1988 – The Gare de Lyon rail accident in Paris, France, kills 56 people.
1988 – Villa Tunari massacre: Bolivian anti-narcotics police kill nine to 12 and injure over a hundred protesting coca-growing peasants.
1991 – Two days after it had declared independence, Slovenia is invaded by Yugoslav troops, tanks, and aircraft, starting the Ten-Day War.
1994 – Members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult release sarin gas in Matsumoto, Japan. Seven people are killed, 660 injured.
2007 – Tony Blair resigns as British Prime Minister, a position he had held since 1997. His Chancellor, Gordon Brown succeeds him.
2007 – The Brazilian Military Police invades the favelas of Complexo do Alemão in an episode which is remembered as the Complexo do Alemão massacre.
2008 – In a highly scrutinized election President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe is re-elected in a landslide after his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai had withdrawn a week earlier, citing violence against his party's supporters.
2013 – NASA launches the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, a space probe to observe the Sun.
2014 – At least fourteen people are killed when a Gas Authority of India Limited pipeline explodes in the East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, India.
2015 – Formosa Fun Coast fire: A dust fire occurs at a recreational water park in Taiwan, killing 15 people and injuring 497 others, 199 critically.
2017 – A series of powerful cyberattacks using the Petya malware target websites of Ukrainian organizations and counterparts with Ukrainian connections around the globe.
Births
Pre-1600
850 – Ibrahim II of Ifriqiya, Aghlabid emir (d. 902)
1350 – Manuel II Palaiologos, Byzantine emperor (d. 1425)
1430 – Henry Holland, 3rd Duke of Exeter, Lancastrian leader (d. 1475)
1462 – Louis XII, king of France (d. 1515)
1464 – Ernst II of Saxony, Archbishop of Magdeburg (1476–1513) (d. 1513)
1497 – Ernest I, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (d. 1546)
1550 – Charles IX, king of France (d. 1574)
1596 – Maximilian, Prince of Dietrichstein (d. 1655)
1601–1900
1696 – William Pepperrell, American merchant and soldier (d. 1759)
1717 – Louis-Guillaume Le Monnier, French botanist and physicist (d. 1799)
1767 – Alexis Bouvard, French astronomer and academic (d. 1843)
1805 – Napoléon Coste, French guitarist and composer (d. 1883)
1806 – Augustus De Morgan, English mathematician and logician (d. 1871)
1812 – Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy Waterston, American writer (d. 1899)
1817 – Louise von François, German author (d. 1893)
1828 – Bryan O'Loghlen, Irish-Australian politician, 13th Premier of Victoria (d. 1905)
1838 – Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Indian journalist, author, and poet (d. 1894)
1838 – Paul Mauser, German weapon designer, designed the Gewehr 98 (d. 1914)
1846 – Charles Stewart Parnell, Irish politician (d. 1891)
1850 – Jørgen Pedersen Gram, Danish mathematician and academic (d. 1919)
1850 – Lafcadio Hearn, Greek-Japanese historian and author (d. 1904)
1862 – May Irwin, Canadian-American actress and singer (d. 1938)
1865 – John Monash, Australian engineer and general (d. 1931)
1869 – Kate Carew, American illustrator and journalist (d. 1961)
1869 – Emma Goldman, Lithuanian-Canadian philosopher and activist (d. 1940)
1869 – Hans Spemann, German embryologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1941)
1870 – Frank Rattray Lillie, American zoologist and embryologist (d. 1947)
1872 – Heber Doust Curtis, American astronomer (d. 1942)
1872 – Paul Laurence Dunbar, American author, poet, and playwright (d. 1906)
1880 – Helen Keller, American author, academic, and activist (d. 1968)
1882 – Eduard Spranger, German philosopher and academic (d. 1963)
1884 – Gaston Bachelard, French philosopher and poet (d. 1962)
1885 – Pierre Montet, French historian and academic (d. 1966)
1885 – Guilhermina Suggia, Portuguese cellist (d. 1950)
1886 – Charlie Macartney, Australian cricketer and soldier (d. 1958)
1888 – Lewis Bernstein Namier, Polish-English historian and academic (d. 1960)
1888 – Antoinette Perry, American actress and director (d. 1946)
1892 – Paul Colin, French illustrator (d. 1985)
1899 – Juan Trippe, American businessman, founded Pan American World Airways (d. 1981)
1900 – Dixie Brown, British boxer (d. 1957)
1901–present
1901 – Merle Tuve, American geophysicist and academic (d. 1982)
1905 – Armand Mondou, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 1976)
1906 – Vernon Watkins, Welsh-American poet and painter (d. 1967)
1907 – John McIntire, American actor (d. 1991)
1908 – João Guimarães Rosa, Brazilian physician and author (d. 1967)
1911 – Marion M. Magruder, American Marine officer, commander of the VMF(N)-533 squadron. (d. 1997)
1912 – E. R. Braithwaite, Guyanese novelist, writer, teacher, and diplomat (d. 2016)
1913 – Elton Britt, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1972)
1913 – Philip Guston, American painter and academic (d. 1980)
1913 – Willie Mosconi, American pool player (d. 1993)
1914 – Robert Aickman, English author and activist, co-founded the Inland Waterways Association (d. 1981)
1914 – Helena Benitez, Filipina academic and administrator (d. 2016)
1914 – Giorgio Almirante, Italian journalist and politician (d. 1988)
1915 – Grace Lee Boggs, American philosopher, author, and activist (d. 2015)
1915 – Aideu Handique, Indian actress (d. 2002)
1915 – John Alexander Moore, American zoologist and academic (d. 2002)
1916 – Robert Normann, Norwegian guitarist (d. 1998)
1918 – Adolph Kiefer, American swimmer (d. 2017)
1919 – M. Carl Holman, American author, educator, poet, and playwright (d. 1988)
1919 – Amala Shankar, Indian danseuse (d. 2020)
1920 – Fernando Riera, Chilean football player and manager (d. 2010)
1921 – Muriel Pavlow, English actress (d. 2019)
1922 – George Walker, American composer (d. 2018)
1923 – Jacques Berthier, French organist and composer (d. 1994)
1923 – Elmo Hope, American pianist and composer (d. 1967)
1924 – Bob Appleyard, English cricketer and businessman (d. 2015)
1925 – Leonard Lerman, American geneticist and biologist (d. 2012)
1925 – Doc Pomus, American singer-songwriter (d. 1991)
1925 – Wayne Terwilliger, American second baseman, coach, and manager (d. 2021)
1927 – Bob Keeshan, American actor and producer (d. 2004)
1928 – James Lincoln Collier, American journalist and author
1928 – Rudy Perpich, American dentist and politician, 34th Governor of Minnesota (d. 1995)
1929 – Dick the Bruiser, American football player and wrestler (d. 1991)
1929 – Peter Maas, American journalist and author (d. 2001)
1930 – Ross Perot, American businessman and politician (d. 2019)
1930 – Tommy Kono, Japanese American weightlifter (d. 2016)
1931 – Charles Bronfman, Canadian-American businessman and philanthropist
1931 – Martinus J. G. Veltman, Dutch physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2021)
1932 – Eddie Kasko, American baseball player and manager (d. 2020)
1932 – Anna Moffo, American operatic soprano (d. 2006)
1932 – Hugh Wood, English composer (d. 2021)
1936 – Lucille Clifton, American author and poet (d. 2010)
1936 – Shirley Anne Field, English actress
1937 – Joseph P. Allen, American physicist and astronaut
1937 – Otto Herrigel, Namibian lawyer and politician (d. 2013)
1937 – Kirkpatrick Sale, American author and scholar
1938 – Bruce Babbitt, American lawyer and politician, 47th United States Secretary of the Interior
1938 – David Hope, Baron Hope of Craighead, Scottish lieutenant and judge
1938 – Konrad Kujau, German illustrator (d. 2000)
1939 – R. D. Burman, Indian singer-songwriter (d. 1994)
1939 – Neil Hawke, Australian cricketer and footballer (d. 2000)
1940 – Ian Lang, Baron Lang of Monkton, Scottish politician, Secretary of State for Scotland
1941 – Bill Baxley, American lawyer and politician, 24th Lieutenant Governor of Alabama
1941 – James P. Hogan, English-Irish author (d. 2010)
1941 – Krzysztof Kieślowski, Polish director and screenwriter (d. 1996)
1942 – Bruce Johnston, American singer-songwriter and producer
1942 – Frank Mills, Canadian pianist and composer
1942 – Danny Schechter, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2015)
1943 – Ravi Batra, Indian-American economist and academic
1944 – Angela King, English environmentalist and author, co-founded Common Ground
1944 – Patrick Sercu, Belgian cyclist (d. 2019)
1945 – Joey Covington, American drummer, songwriter, and producer (d. 2013)
1945 – Norma Kamali, American fashion designer
1948 – Camile Baudoin, American guitarist
1949 – Vera Wang, American fashion designer
1951 – Ulf Andersson, Swedish chess player
1951 – Julia Duffy, American actress
1951 – Gilson Lavis, English drummer and portrait artist
1951 – Mary McAleese, Irish academic and politician, 8th President of Ireland
1952 – Madan Bhandari, Nepalese politician (d. 1993)
1953 – Igor Gräzin, Estonian academic and politician
1953 – Alice McDermott, American novelist
1954 – Richard Ibbotson, English admiral
1955 – Isabelle Adjani, French actress
1956 – Heiner Dopp, German field hockey player and politician
1957 – Gabriella Dorio, Italian runner
1958 – Lisa Germano, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1958 – Jeffrey Lee Pierce, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1996)
1959 – Dan Jurgens, American author and illustrator
1959 – Lorrie Morgan, American singer
1960 – Craig Hodges, American basketball player and coach
1960 – Michael Mayer, American theatre director
1960 – Robert King, English harpsichordist and conductor
1960 – Jeremy Swift, English actor
1962 – Michael Ball, English actor and singer
1962 – Sunanda Pushkar, India-born Canadian businesswoman (d. 2014)
1963 – Wendy Alexander, Scottish politician, Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning
1963 – Johnny Benson Jr., American race car driver
1964 – Stephan Brenninkmeijer, Dutch director, producer, and screenwriter
1964 – Chuck Person, American basketball player and coach
1965 – Simon Sebag Montefiore, English journalist, historian, and author
1965 – S. Manikavasagam, Malaysian politician and social activist
1965 – Óscar Vega, Spanish boxer
1966 – J. J. Abrams, American director, producer, and screenwriter
1966 – Jörg Bergen, German footballer and manager
1966 – Jeff Conine, American baseball player and sportscaster
1966 – Aigars Kalvītis, Latvian politician, businessman, and former Prime Minister of Latvia
1967 – Sylvie Fréchette, Canadian swimmer and coach
1967 – George Hamilton, Northern Irish police officer
1967 – Vasiliy Kaptyukh, Belarusian discus thrower
1967 – Phil Kearns, Australian rugby player and sportscaster
1968 – Kelly Ayotte, American lawyer and politician, New Hampshire Attorney General
1969 – Viktor Petrenko, Ukrainian figure skater
1970 – Régine Cavagnoud, French skier (d. 2001)
1970 – John Eales, Australian rugby player and businessman
1970 – Jim Edmonds, American baseball player and sportscaster
1970 – Jo Frost, English nanny, television personality, and author
1971 – Serginho, Brazilian footballer
1972 – Dawud Wharnsby, Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1973 – Abbath Doom Occulta, Norwegian musician
1973 – Simon Archer, English badminton player
1974 – Christian Kane, American singer-songwriter and actor
1974 – Christopher O'Neill, English-American businessman
1975 – Ace Darling, American wrestler
1975 – Bianca Del Rio, American drag queen & comedian
1975 – Sarah Evanetz, Canadian swimmer
1975 – Tobey Maguire, American actor
1975 – Daryle Ward, American baseball player
1976 – Johnny Estrada, American baseball player
1976 – Leigh Nash, American singer-songwriter
1977 – Arkadiusz Radomski, Polish footballer
1978 – Apparat, German musician
1980 – Hugo Campagnaro, Argentinian footballer
1980 – Jennifer Goodridge, American keyboard player
1980 – Alexander Peya, Austrian tennis player
1980 – Kevin Pietersen, South African-English cricketer
1980 – Craig Terrill, American football player
1981 – Andrew Embley, Australian footballer
1983 – Jim Johnson, American baseball player
1983 – Dale Steyn, South African cricketer
1983 – Nikola Rakočević, Serbian actor
1984 – Khloé Kardashian, American model, businesswoman, and radio host
1984 – D.J. King, Canadian ice hockey player
1984 – Gökhan Inler, Swiss footballer
1985 – James Hook, Welsh rugby player
1985 – Svetlana Kuznetsova, Russian tennis player
1985 – Nico Rosberg, German race car driver
1986 – Sam Claflin, British actor
1986 – Drake Bell, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor
1986 – Bryan Fletcher, American skier
1986 – LaShawn Merritt, American sprinter
1987 – India de Beaufort, English actress
1987 – Ed Westwick, English actor
1988 – Stefani Bismpikou, Greek gymnast
1988 – Matthew Spiranovic, Australian footballer
1988 – Kate Ziegler, American swimmer
1989 – Hana Birnerová, Czech tennis player
1989 – Matthew Lewis, English actor
1992 – Ahn So-hee, South Korean singer and actress
1992 – Karthika Nair, Indian film actress
1993 – Johanna Talihärm, Estonian biathlete
1993 – Alberto Campbell-Staines, Australian athlete
1994 – Anita Husarić, Bosnian tennis player
1995 – Monté Morris, American basketball player
Deaths
Pre-1600
992 – Conan I of Rennes, Duke of Brittany
1162 – Odo II, Duke of Burgundy (b. 1118)
1194 – King Sancho VI of Navarre (b. 1132)
1296 – Floris V, Count of Holland (b. 1254)
1458 – Alfonso V of Aragon (b. 1396)
1497 – Michael An Gof, rebel leader
1497 – Thomas Flamank, rebel leader
1574 – Giorgio Vasari, Italian historian, painter, and architect (b. 1511)
1601–1900
1601 – Henry Norris, 1st Baron Norreys (b. 1525)
1603 – Jan Dymitr Solikowski, Polish archbishop (b. 1539)
1627 – John Hayward, English historian, journalist, and politician (b. 1564)
1636 – Date Masamune, Japanese strongman (b. 1567)
1654 – Johannes Valentinus Andreae, German theologian (b. 1586)
1655 – Eleonora Gonzaga, Holy Roman Empress (b. 1598)
1672 – Roger Twysden, English historian and politician (b. 1597)
1720 – Guillaume Amfrye de Chaulieu, French poet and author (b. 1639)
1729 – Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, French harpsichord player and composer (b. 1665)
1794 – Wenzel Anton, Prince of Kaunitz-Rietberg (b. 1711)
1794 – Philippe de Noailles, French general (b. 1715)
1827 – Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, German theologian and academic (b. 1754)
1829 – James Smithson, English chemist and mineralogist (b. 1765)
1831 – Sophie Germain, French mathematician and physicist (b. 1776)
1831 – Konstantin Pavlovich, grand duke of Russia and the son of Emperor Paul I of Russia (b. 1779)
1839 – Ranjit Singh, founder of the Sikh Empire (b. 1780)
1844 – Hyrum Smith, American religious leader (b. 1800)
1844 – Joseph Smith, American religious leader, founded the Latter Day Saint movement (b. 1805)
1878 – Sidney Breese, American jurist and politician (b. 1800)
1894 – Giorgio Costantino Schinas, Maltese architect and civil engineer (b. 1834)
1896 – John Berryman, English soldier, Victoria Cross recipient (b. 1825)
1901–present
1905 – Harold Mahony, Scottish-Irish tennis player (b. 1867)
1907 – Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, American educator, co-founded Radcliffe College (b. 1822)
1911 – Victor Surridge, English motorcycle racer (b. 1882)
1912 – George Bonnor, Australian cricketer (b. 1855)
1917 – Karl Allmenröder, German soldier and pilot (b. 1896)
1919 – Peter Sturholdt, American boxer (b. 1885)
1920 – Adolphe-Basile Routhier, Canadian lawyer and judge (b. 1839)
1934 – Francesco Buhagiar, Maltese politician, 2nd Prime Minister of Malta (b. 1876)
1935 – Eugene Augustin Lauste, French-American inventor (b. 1857)
1944 – Milan Hodža, Czech journalist and politician, 10th Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia (b. 1878)
1946 – Wanda Gág, American author and illustrator (b. 1893)
1948 – Dorothea Bleek, South African anthropologist and philologist (b. 1873)
1949 – Frank Smythe, English botanist and mountaineer (b. 1900)
1950 – Milada Horáková, Czech politician, victim of judicial murder (b. 1901)
1952 – Max Dehn, German-American mathematician and academic (b. 1878)
1957 – Hermann Buhl, Austrian soldier and mountaineer (b. 1924)
1960 – Lottie Dod, English tennis player, golfer, and archer (b. 1871)
1962 – Paul Viiding, Estonian author, poet, and critic (b. 1904)
1967 – Jaan Lattik, Estonian pastor and politician, 9th Minister of Foreign Affairs of Estonia (b. 1878)
1970 – Daniel Kinsey, American hurdler and scholar (b. 1902)
1975 – G.I. Taylor, English mathematician and physicist (b. 1886)
1977 – Arthur Perdue, American businessman (b. 1885)
1986 – George Nēpia, New Zealand rugby player and referee (b. 1905)
1987 – Billy Snedden, Australian lawyer and politician, 17th Attorney-General for Australia (b. 1926)
1989 – A. J. Ayer, English philosopher and academic (b. 1910)
1991 – Milton Subotsky, American-English screenwriter and producer (b. 1921)
1996 – Albert R. Broccoli, American film producer (b. 1909)
1998 – Gilles Rocheleau, Canadian businessman and politician (b. 1935)
1999 – Georgios Papadopoulos, Greek colonel and politician, 169th Prime Minister of Greece (b. 1919)
2000 – Pierre Pflimlin, French lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of France (b. 1907)
2001 – Tove Jansson, Finnish author, illustrator, and painter (b. 1914)
2001 – Jack Lemmon, American actor (b. 1925)
2001 – Joan Sims, English actress (b. 1930)
2002 – John Entwistle, English singer-songwriter, bass guitarist, and producer (b. 1944)
2002 – Robert L. J. Long, American admiral (b. 1920)
2003 – David Newman, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1937)
2004 – George Patton IV, American general (b. 1923)
2004 – Darrell Russell, American race car driver (b. 1968)
2005 – Shelby Foote, American historian and author (b. 1916)
2005 – Ray Holmes, English lieutenant and pilot (b. 1914)
2005 – John T. Walton, American businessman, co-founded the Children's Scholarship Fund (b. 1946)
2006 – Eileen Barton, American singer (b. 1924)
2006 – Ángel Maturino Reséndiz, Mexican serial killer (b. 1960)
2007 – William Hutt, Canadian actor (b. 1920)
2008 – Sam Manekshaw, Indian field marshal (b. 1914)
2009 – Gale Storm, American actress (b. 1922)
2010 – Corey Allen, American film and television actor, writer, director, and producer (b. 1934)
2011 – Mike Doyle, English footballer (b. 1946)
2012 – Stan Cox, English runner (b. 1918)
2012 – Rosemary Dobson, Australian poet and illustrator (b. 1920)
2013 – Stefano Borgonovo, Italian footballer (b. 1964)
2013 – Ian Scott, English-New Zealand painter (b. 1945)
2014 – Edmond Blanchard, Canadian jurist and politician (b. 1954)
2014 – Allen Grossman, American poet, critic, and academic (b. 1932)
2014 – Leslie Manigat, Haitian educator and politician, 43rd President of Haiti (b. 1930)
2014 – Violet Milstead, Canadian World War II aviator and bush pilot (b. 1919)
2014 – Rachid Solh, Lebanese politician, 48th Prime Minister of Lebanon (b. 1926)
2015 – Zvi Elpeleg, Polish-Israeli diplomat, author, and academic (b. 1926)
2015 – Knut Helle, Norwegian historian and professor (b. 1930)
2015 – Chris Squire, English musician (bass guitarist), singer and songwriter, member of the rock band Yes (b. 1948)
2016 – Bud Spencer, Italian swimmer, actor, and screenwriter (b. 1929)
2017 – Peter L. Berger, Austrian sociologist (b. 1929)
2018 – Joe Jackson, American manager, father of Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson (b. 1928)
2018 – Liz Jackson, Australian journalist and former barrister (b. 1951)
2018 – William McBride, Australian obstetrician (b. 1927)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Arialdo
Crescens, one of the Seventy disciples
Cyril of Alexandria (Coptic Church, Roman Catholic Church, Anglican Communion and Lutheran Church)
Ladislaus I of Hungary
Our Lady of Perpetual Help
Sampson the Hospitable
Zoilus
June 27 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Canadian Multiculturalism Day (Canada)
Commemoration Day for the Victims of the Communist Regime (Czech Republic)
Day of Turkmen Workers of Culture and Art and poetry of Magtymguly Pyragy (Turkmenistan)
Helen Keller Day (United States)
Independence Day, celebrates the independence of Djibouti from France in 1977.
Mixed Race Day (Brazil)
National HIV Testing Day (United States)
National PTSD Awareness Day (United States)
Seven Sleepers' Day or Siebenschläfertag (Germany)
Unity Day (Tajikistan)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15802 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2028 | June 28 | In common years it is always in ISO week 26.
Events
Pre-1600
1098 – Fighters of the First Crusade defeat Kerbogha of Mosul.
1360 – Muhammed VI becomes the tenth Nasrid king of Granada after killing his brother-in-law Ismail II.
1461 – Edward, Earl of March, is crowned King Edward IV of England.
1519 – Charles V is elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
1575 – Sengoku period of Japan: The combined forces of Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu are victorious in the Battle of Nagashino.
1601–1900
1635 – Guadeloupe becomes a French colony.
1651 – The Battle of Berestechko between Poland and Ukraine starts.
1745 – A New England colonial army captures the French fortifications at Louisbourg (New Style).
1776 – American Revolutionary War: The Battle of Sullivan's Island ends with the American victory, leading to the commemoration of Carolina Day.
1776 – American Revolutionary War: Thomas Hickey, Continental Army private and bodyguard to General George Washington, is hanged for mutiny and sedition.
1778 – American Revolutionary War: The American Continentals engage the British in the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse resulting in standstill and British withdrawal under cover of darkness.
1797 – French troops disembark in Corfu, beginning the French rule in the Ionian Islands.
1807 – Second British invasion of the Río de la Plata; John Whitelocke lands at Ensenada on an attempt to recapture Buenos Aires and is defeated by the locals.
1838 – Coronation of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom.
1841 – The Paris Opera Ballet premieres Giselle in the Salle Le Peletier.
1855 – Sigma Chi fraternity is founded in North America.
1859 – The first conformation dog show is held in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
1865 – The Army of the Potomac is disbanded.
1870 – The US Congress establishes the first federal holidays (New Year Day, July 4th, Thanksgiving, and Christmas).
1880 – Australian bushranger Ned Kelly is captured at Glenrowan.
1881 – The Austro–Serbian Alliance of 1881 is secretly signed.
1882 – The Anglo-French Convention of 1882 marks the territorial boundaries between Guinea and Sierra Leone.
1894 – Labor Day becomes an official US holiday.
1895 – The United States Court of Private Land Claims rules James Reavis’s claim to Barony of Arizona is "wholly fictitious and fraudulent."
1896 – An explosion in the Newton Coal Company's Twin Shaft Mine in Pittston, Pennsylvania results in a massive cave-in that kills 58 miners.
1901–present
1902 – The U.S. Congress passes the Spooner Act, authorizing President Theodore Roosevelt to acquire rights from Colombia for the Panama Canal.
1904 – The runs aground on Hasselwood Rock in the North Atlantic northwest of Ireland. More than 635 people die during the sinking.
1911 – The Nakhla meteorite, the first one to suggest signs of aqueous processes on Mars, falls to Earth, landing in Egypt.
1914 – Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie are assassinated in Sarajevo; this is the casus belli of World War I.
1917 – World War I: Greece joins the Allied powers.
1919 – The Treaty of Versailles is signed, ending the state of war between Germany and the Allies of World War I.
1921 – Serbian King Alexander I proclaims the new constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, known thereafter as the Vidovdan Constitution.
1922 – The Irish Civil War begins with the shelling of the Four Courts in Dublin by Free State forces.
1926 – Mercedes-Benz is formed by Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz merging their two companies.
1936 – The Japanese puppet state of Mengjiang is formed in northern China.
1940 – Romania cedes Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union after facing an ultimatum.
1942 – World War II: Nazi Germany starts its strategic summer offensive against the Soviet Union, codenamed Case Blue.
1945 – Poland's Soviet-allied Provisional Government of National Unity is formed over a month after V-E Day.
1948 – Cold War: The Tito–Stalin Split results in the expulsion of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia from the Cominform.
1948 – Boxer Dick Turpin beats Vince Hawkins at Villa Park in Birmingham to become the first black British boxing champion in the modern era.
1950 – Korean War: Suspected communist sympathizers (between 60,000 and 200,000) are executed in the Bodo League massacre.
1950 – Korean War: Packed with its own refugees fleeing Seoul and leaving their 5th Division stranded, South Korean forces blow up the Hangang Bridge in an attempt to slow North Korea's offensive. The city falls later that day.
1950 – Korean War: North Korean Army conducts the Seoul National University Hospital massacre.
1956 – In Poznań, workers from HCP factory go to the streets, sparking one of the first major protests against communist government both in Poland and Europe.
1964 – Malcolm X forms the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
1969 – Stonewall riots begin in New York City, marking the start of the Gay Rights Movement.
1973 – Elections are held for the Northern Ireland Assembly, which will lead to power-sharing between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland for the first time.
1976 – The Angolan court sentences US and UK mercenaries to death sentences and prison terms in the Luanda Trial.
1978 – The United States Supreme Court, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke bars quota systems in college admissions.
1981 – A powerful bomb explodes in Tehran, killing 73 officials of the Islamic Republican Party.
1982 – Aeroflot Flight 8641 crashes in Mazyr, Belarus, killing 132 people.
1987 – For the first time in military history, a civilian population is targeted for chemical attack when Iraqi warplanes bombed the Iranian town of Sardasht.
1989 – On the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Slobodan Milošević delivers the Gazimestan speech at the site of the historic battle.
1997 – Holyfield–Tyson II: Mike Tyson is disqualified in the third round for biting a piece off Evander Holyfield's ear.
2001 – Slobodan Milošević is extradited to the ICTY in The Hague to stand trial.
2004 – Iraq War: Sovereign power is handed to the interim government of Iraq by the Coalition Provisional Authority, ending the U.S.-led rule of that nation.
2009 – Honduran president Manuel Zelaya is ousted by a local military coup following a failed request to hold a referendum to rewrite the Honduran Constitution. This was the start of the 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis.
2016 – A terrorist attack in Turkey's Istanbul Atatürk Airport kills 42 people and injures more than 230 others.
Births
Pre-1600
751 – Carloman I, king of the Franks (d. 771)
1243 – Emperor Go-Fukakusa of Japan (d. 1304)
1444 – Charlotte, Queen of Cyprus (d. 1487)
1476 – Pope Paul IV (d. 1559)
1490 – Albert of Brandenburg, German archbishop (d. 1545)
1491 – Henry VIII of England (d. 1547)
1503 – Giovanni della Casa, Italian author and poet (d. 1556)
1547 – Cristofano Malvezzi, Italian organist and composer (d. 1599)
1557 – Philip Howard, 20th Earl of Arundel, English nobleman (d. 1595)
1560 – Giovanni Paolo Lascaris, Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller (d. 1657)
1573 – Henry Danvers, 1st Earl of Danby, English noble (d. 1644)
1577 – Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish painter and diplomat (d. 1640)
1582 – William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, English politician (d. 1662)
1601–1900
1604 – Heinrich Albert, German composer and poet (d. 1651)
1641 – Marie Casimire Louise de La Grange d'Arquien, consort to King John III Sobieski (d. 1716)
1653 – Muhammad Azam Shah, Mughal emperor (d. 1707)
1703 – John Wesley, English cleric and theologian (d. 1791)
1712 – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Swiss philosopher and polymath (d. 1778)
1719 – Étienne François, duc de Choiseul, French general and politician, Prime Minister of France (d. 1785)
1734 – Jean-Jacques Beauvarlet-Charpentier, French organist and composer (d. 1794)
1742 – William Hooper, American physician, lawyer, and politician (d. 1790)
1824 – Paul Broca, French physician, anatomist, and anthropologist (d. 1880)
1825 – Emil Erlenmeyer, German chemist (d. 1909)
1831 – Joseph Joachim, Austrian violinist, composer, and conductor (d. 1907)
1836 – Emmanuel Rhoides, Greek journalist and author (d. 1904)
1844 – John Boyle O'Reilly, Irish-born poet, journalist and fiction writer (d. 1890)
1852 – Charles Cruft, English showman, founded Crufts Dog Show (d. 1938)
1867 – Luigi Pirandello, Italian dramatist, novelist, and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1936)
1873 – Alexis Carrel, French surgeon and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1944)
1875 – Henri Lebesgue, French mathematician and academic (d. 1941)
1879 – Wilhelm Steinkopf, German chemist (d. 1949)
1880 – John Meyers, American swimmer and water polo player (d. 1971)
1883 – Pierre Laval, French soldier and politician, 101st Prime Minister of France (d. 1945)
1884 – Lamina Sankoh, Sierra Leonean banker and politician (d. 1964)
1888 – George Challenor, Barbadian cricketer (d. 1947)
1888 – Stefi Geyer, Hungarian violinist and educator (d. 1956)
1891 – Esther Forbes, American historian and author (d. 1968)
1891 – Carl Spaatz, American general (d. 1974)
1892 – Carl Panzram, American serial killer (d. 1930)
1893 – August Zamoyski, Polish-French sculptor (d. 1970)
1894 – Jessie Baetz, Canadian-American artist, composer and pianist (d. 1974 or later)
1894 – Francis Hunter, American tennis player (d. 1981)
1901–present
1902 – Richard Rodgers, American playwright and composer (d. 1979)
1906 – Maria Goeppert Mayer, Polish-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1972)
1907 – Jimmy Mundy, American saxophonist and composer (d. 1983)
1907 – Yvonne Sylvain, First female Haitian physician (d. 1989)
1909 – Eric Ambler, English author and screenwriter (d. 1998)
1912 – Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, German physicist and philosopher (d. 2007)
1913 – Franz Antel, Austrian director and producer (d. 2007)
1913 – George Lloyd, English soldier and composer (d. 1998)
1913 – Walter Oesau, German colonel and pilot (d. 1944)
1914 – Aribert Heim, Austrian SS physician and Nazi war criminal (d. 1992)
1917 – A. E. Hotchner, American author and playwright (d. 2020)
1918 – William Whitelaw, 1st Viscount Whitelaw, Scottish-English politician, Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1999)
1919 – Joseph P. Lordi, American government official (d. 1983)
1920 – Clarissa Eden, Spouse of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 2021)
1921 – P. V. Narasimha Rao, Indian lawyer and politician, 9th Prime Minister of India (d. 2004)
1922 – Hans Frauenfelder, American physicist and biophysicist
1923 – Pete Candoli, American trumpet player (d. 2008)
1923 – Adolfo Schwelm Cruz, Argentinian racing driver (d. 2012)
1923 – Gaye Stewart, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 2010)
1924 – Kalevi Keihänen, Finnish entrepreneur (d. 1995)
1926 – George Booth, American cartoonist
1926 – Mel Brooks, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
1926 – Robert Ledley, American academic and inventor (d. 2012)
1927 – Correlli Barnett, English historian and author
1927 – Frank Sherwood Rowland, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2012)
1928 – Hans Blix, Swedish politician and diplomat, 33rd Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs
1928 – Patrick Hemingway, American writer
1928 – Harold Evans, English-American historian and journalist (d. 2020)
1928 – Peter Heine, South African cricketer (d. 2005)
1928 – Cyril Smith, English politician (d. 2010)
1929 – Alfred Miodowicz, Polish politician (d.2021)
1930 – William C. Campbell, Irish-American biologist and parasitologist, Nobel Prize laureate
1930 – Itamar Franco, Brazilian engineer and politician, 33rd President of Brazil (d. 2011)
1930 – Jack Gold, English director and producer (d. 2015)
1931 – Hans Alfredson, Swedish actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2017)
1931 – Junior Johnson, American race car driver (d. 2019)
1931 – Lucien Victor, Belgian cyclist (d. 1995)
1932 – Pat Morita, American actor (d. 2005)
1933 – Gusty Spence, Northern Irish loyalist and politician (d. 2011)
1934 – Robert Carswell, Baron Carswell, Northern Irish lawyer and judge, Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland
1934 – Roy Gilchrist, Jamaican cricketer (d. 2001)
1934 – Bette Greene, American journalist and author (d. 2020)
1934 – Carl Levin, American lawyer and politician (d.2021)
1934 – Georges Wolinski, Tunisian-French journalist and cartoonist (d. 2015)
1935 – John Inman, English actor (d. 2007)
1936 – Chuck Howley, American football player
1937 – George Knudson, Canadian golfer (d. 1989)
1937 – Fernand Labrie, Canadian endocrinologist and academic (d. 2019)
1937 – Ron Luciano, American baseball player and umpire (d. 1995)
1938 – John Byner, American actor and comedian
1938 – Leon Panetta, American lawyer and politician, 23rd United States Secretary of Defense
1938 – S. Sivamaharajah, Sri Lankan Tamil newspaper publisher and politician (d. 2006)
1938 – Simon Douglas-Pennant, 7th Baron Penrhyn, British baron
1939 – Klaus Schmiegel, German chemist
1940 – Karpal Singh, Malaysian lawyer and politician (d. 2014)
1940 – Muhammad Yunus, Bangladeshi economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1941 – Al Downing, American baseball player and sportscaster
1941 – Joseph Goguen, American computer scientist and academic, developed the OBJ language (d. 2006)
1941 – David Johnston, Canadian academic, lawyer, and politician, 28th Governor General of Canada
1942 – Chris Hani, South African politician (d. 1993)
1942 – Hans-Joachim Walde, German decathlete (d. 2013)
1942 – Frank Zane, American professional bodybuilder and author
1943 – Jens Birkemose, Danish painter
1943 – Donald Johanson, American paleontologist and academic
1943 – Klaus von Klitzing, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1945 – Ken Buchanan, Scottish boxer
1945 – David Knights, English bass player and producer
1945 – Raul Seixas, Brazilian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 1989)
1945 – Türkan Şoray, Turkish actress, director, and screenwriter
1946 – Robert Asprin, American soldier and author (d. 2008)
1946 – Bruce Davison, American actor and director
1946 – David Duckham, English rugby player
1946 – Robert Xavier Rodríguez, American classical composer
1946 – Jaime Guzmán, Chilean lawyer and politician (d. 1991)
1946 – Gilda Radner, American actress and comedian (d. 1989)
1947 – Mark Helprin, American novelist and journalist
1947 – Laura Tyson, American economist and academic
1948 – Kathy Bates, American actress
1948 – Sergei Bodrov, Russian-American director, producer, and screenwriter
1948 – Deborah Moggach, English author and screenwriter
1948 – Daniel Wegner, Canadian-American psychologist and academic (d. 2013)
1949 – Don Baylor, American baseball player and coach (d. 2017)
1950 – Philip Fowke, English pianist and educator
1950 – Mauricio Rojas, Chilean-Swedish economist and politician
1950 – Chris Speier, American baseball player and coach
1951 – Mick Cronin, Australian rugby league player and coach
1951 – Mark Shand, English conservationist and author (d. 2014)
1951 – Lalla Ward, English actress and author
1952 – Enis Batur, Turkish poet and author
1952 – Pietro Mennea, Italian sprinter and politician (d. 2013)
1952 – Jean-Christophe Rufin, French physician and author
1954 – A. A. Gill, Scottish author and critic (d. 2016)
1954 – Alice Krige, South African actress
1955 – Shirley Cheriton, British actress
1956 – Amira Hass, Israeli journalist and author
1956 – Noel Mugavin, Australian footballer and coach
1957 – Lance Nethery, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1957 – Georgi Parvanov, Bulgarian historian and politician, 4th President of Bulgaria
1957 – Mike Skinner, American race car driver
1957 – Jim Spanarkel, American basketball player and sportscaster
1958 – Donna Edwards, American lawyer and politician
1958 – Félix Gray, Tunisian-French singer-songwriter
1959 – Clint Boon, English singer and keyboard player
1959 – John Shelley, British illustrator
1960 – John Elway, American football player and manager
1960 – Roland Melanson, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1961 – Jeff Malone, American basketball player and coach
1962 – Anișoara Cușmir-Stanciu, Romanian long jumper
1962 – Artur Hajzer, Polish mountaineer (d. 2013)
1962 – Ann-Louise Skoglund, Swedish hurdler
1963 – Peter Baynham, Welsh actor, producer, and screenwriter
1963 – Charlie Clouser, American keyboard player, songwriter, and producer
1964 – Christina Ashcroft, Canadian sport shooter
1964 – Mark Grace, American baseball player and sportscaster
1964 – Bernie McCahill, New Zealand rugby player
1964 – Dan Stains, Australian rugby league player and coach
1964 – Steve Williamson, English saxophonist and composer
1965 – Jessica Hecht, American actress
1965 – Tiaan Strauss, South African rugby player
1966 – Peeter Allik, Estonian painter and illustrator (d. 2019)
1966 – Bobby Bare Jr., American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1966 – John Cusack, American actor and screenwriter
1966 – Mary Stuart Masterson, American actress
1967 – Leona Aglukkaq, Canadian politician, 7th Canadian Minister of Health
1967 – Gil Bellows, Canadian actor and producer
1967 – Zhong Huandi, Chinese runner
1967 – Lars Riedel, German discus thrower
1968 – Chayanne, Puerto Rican-American singer-songwriter and actor
1969 – Tichina Arnold, American actress and singer
1969 – Stéphane Chapuisat, Swiss footballer
1969 – Fabrizio Mori, Italian hurdler
1970 – Mushtaq Ahmed, Pakistani cricketer and coach
1970 – Tom Merritt, American journalist
1970 – Mike White, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
1971 – Lorenzo Amoruso, Italian footballer
1971 – Fabien Barthez, French footballer
1971 – Bobby Hurley, American basketball player and coach
1971 – Ron Mahay, American baseball player and scout
1971 – Elon Musk, South African-born American entrepreneur
1971 – Aileen Quinn, American actress and singer
1972 – Ngô Bảo Châu, Vietnamese-French mathematician and academic
1972 – Chris Leslie, English politician, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer
1972 – Geeta Tripathee, Nepali poet, lyricist and literary critic
1972 – Alessandro Nivola, American actor
1973 – Adrián Annus, Hungarian hammer thrower
1973 – Corey Koskie, Canadian baseball player
1974 – Rob Dyrdek, American skateboarder, entrepreneur, and reality television star
1975 – Jon Nödtveidt, Swedish singer-songwriter, and guitarist (d. 2006)
1976 – Shinobu Asagoe, Japanese tennis player
1976 – Seth Wescott, American snowboarder
1977 – Chris Spurling, American baseball player
1977 – Mark Stoermer, American bass player, songwriter, and producer
1977 – Harun Tekin, Turkish singer and guitarist
1978 – Simon Larose, Canadian tennis player
1979 – Randy McMichael, American football player
1979 – Neil Shanahan, Irish racing driver (d. 1999)
1979 – Florian Zeller, French author and playwright
1980 – Jevgeni Novikov, Estonian footballer
1981 – Savage, New Zealand rapper
1981 – Michael Crafter, Australian singer-songwriter
1981 – Guillermo Martínez, Cuban javelin thrower
1981 – Brandon Phillips, American baseball player
1982 – Ibrahim Camejo, Cuban long jumper
1985 – Phil Bardsley, English footballer
1985 – Colt Hynes, American baseball player
1986 – Kellie Pickler, American singer-songwriter
1987 – Sonata Tamošaitytė, Lithuanian hurdler
1987 – Terrence Williams, American basketball player
1989 – Jason Clark, Australian rugby league player
1989 – Andrew Fifita, Australian rugby league player
1989 – David Fifita, Australian rugby league player
1989 – Julia Zlobina, Russian-Azerbaijani figure skater
1989 – Markiplier, American internet personality
1989 – Nicole Rottmann, Austrian tennis player
1991 – Seohyun, South Korean singer, dancer, and actress
1991 – Kevin De Bruyne, Belgian footballer
1991 – Kang Min-hyuk, South Korean singer, drummer, and actor
1992 – Oscar Hiljemark, Swedish footballer
1992 – Elaine Thompson, Jamaican sprinter
1993 – Bradley Beal, American basketball player
1994 – Hussein, Crown Prince of Jordan
1994 – Emily Blue, American singer-songwriter
1996 – Donna Vekić, Croatian tennis player
1996 – Larissa Werbicki, Canadian rower
1997 – Tadasuke Makino, Japanese racing driver
1999 – Markéta Vondroušová, Czech tennis player
2002 – Marta Kostyuk, Ukrainian tennis player
Deaths
Pre-1600
202 – Yuan Shao, Chinese warlord
548 – Theodora I, Byzantine empress
572 – Alboin, King of the Lombards
683 – Leo II, pope of the Catholic Church (b. 611)
767 – Paul I, pope of the Catholic Church (b. 700)
975 – Cyneweard, bishop of Wells
1031 – Taira no Tadatsune, Japanese governor
1061 – Floris I, count of Holland
1175 – Andrey Bogolyubsky, Russian Grand Prince (b. 1111)
1189 – Matilda of England, Duchess of Saxony, (b. 1156)
1194 – Xiao Zong, Chinese emperor (b. 1127)
1385 – Andronikos IV, Byzantine emperor (b. 1348)
1497 – James Tuchet, 7th Baron Audley, English rebel leader (b. c. 1463)
1575 – Yonekura Shigetsugu, Japanese samurai
1586 – Primož Trubar, Slovenian author and reformer (b. 1508)
1598 – Abraham Ortelius, Flemish cartographer and geographer (b. 1527)
1601–1900
1607 – Domenico Fontana, Italian architect (b. 1543)
1716 – George FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Northumberland, English general and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Berkshire (b. 1665)
1757 – Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, queen consort of Frederick William I (b. 1687)
1798 – John Henry Colclough, Irish revolutionary (b. c. 1769)
1813 – Gerhard von Scharnhorst, Prussian general and politician, Prussian Minister of War (b. 1755)
1834 – Joseph Bové, Russian architect, designed the Triumphal Arch of Moscow (b. 1784)
1836 – James Madison, American academic and politician, 4th President of the United States (b. 1751)
1880 – Texas Jack Omohundro, American soldier and hunter (b. 1846)
1881 – Jules Armand Dufaure, French politician, 33rd Prime Minister of France (b. 1798)
1889 – Maria Mitchell, American astronomer and academic (b. 1818)
1892 – Alexandros Rizos Rangavis, Greek poet and politician, Greek Foreign Minister (b. 1810)
1901–present
1913 – Manuel Ferraz de Campos Sales, Brazilian lawyer and politician, 4th President of Brazil (b. 1841)
1914 – Sophie, duchess of Hohenberg (b. 1868)
1914 – Franz Ferdinand, archduke of Austria (b. 1863)
1915 – Victor Trumper, Australian cricketer (b. 1877)
1917 – Ștefan Luchian, Romanian painter and educator (b. 1868)
1922 – Velimir Khlebnikov, Russian poet and playwright (b. 1885)
1925 – Georgina Febres-Cordero, Venezuelan nun (b. 1861)
1929 – Edward Carpenter, English poet and philosopher (b. 1844)
1936 – Alexander Berkman, American author and activist (d. 1870)
1939 – Douglas H. Johnston, governor of the Chickasaw Nation (b. 1856)
1940 – Italo Balbo, Italian air marshal and politician (b. 1896)
1944 – Friedrich Dollmann, German general (b. 1882)
1945 – Yunus Nadi Abalıoğlu, Turkish journalist (b. 1879)
1947 – Stanislav Kostka Neumann, Czech writer, poet and journalist (b. 1875)
1960 – Jake Swirbul, American businessman, co-founded the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation (b. 1898)
1962 – Mickey Cochrane, American baseball player and manager (b. 1903)
1962 – Cy Morgan, American baseball player (b. 1878)
1965 – Red Nichols, American cornet player, bandleader, and composer (b. 1905)
1966 – Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, Turkish historian and politician, 21st Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey (b. 1890)
1971 – Franz Stangl, Austrian SS officer (b. 1908)
1974 – Vannevar Bush, American engineer and academic (b. 1890)
1975 – Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis, Greek architect (b. 1913)
1975 – Rod Serling, American screenwriter and producer (b. 1924)
1978 – Clifford Dupont, English-Rhodesian lawyer and politician, 1st President of Rhodesia (b. 1905)
1980 – José Iturbi, Spanish pianist and conductor (b. 1895)
1981 – Terry Fox, Canadian runner and activist (b. 1958)
1983 – Alf Francis, German-English motor racing mechanic and racing car constructor (b. 1918)
1984 – Yigael Yadin, Israeli archaeologist, general, and politician (b. 1917)
1985 – Lynd Ward, American author and illustrator (b. 1905)
1989 – Joris Ivens, Dutch journalist, director, and producer (b. 1898)
1992 – Guy Nève, Belgian racing driver (b. 1955)
1992 – Mikhail Tal, Latvian chess player (b. 1936)
1995 – Petri Walli, Finnish singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1969)
1999 – Vere Bird, first Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda (b. 1910)
2000 – Nils Poppe, Swedish actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1908)
2001 – Mortimer J. Adler, American philosopher and author (b. 1902)
2003 – Joan Lowery Nixon, American journalist and author (b. 1927)
2004 – Anthony Buckeridge, English author (b. 1912)
2005 – Brenda Howard, American activist (b. 1946)
2005 – Michael P. Murphy, American lieutenant, Medal of Honor recipient (b. 1976)
2006 – Jim Baen, American publisher, founded Baen Books (b. 1943)
2006 – Peter Rawlinson, Baron Rawlinson of Ewell, English lawyer and politician, Attorney General for England and Wales (b. 1919)
2006 – George Unwin, English pilot and commander (b. 1913)
2007 – Eugene B. Fluckey, American admiral, Medal of Honor recipient (b. 1913)
2007 – Kiichi Miyazawa, Japanese lawyer and politician, 78th Prime Minister of Japan (b. 1919)
2009 – A. K. Lohithadas, Indian director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1955)
2009 – Billy Mays, American TV personality (b. 1958)
2010 – Robert Byrd, American lawyer and politician (b. 1917)
2012 – Richard Isay, American psychiatrist and author (b. 1934)
2012 – Leontine T. Kelly, American bishop (b. 1920)
2012 – Robert Sabatier, French author and poet (b. 1923)
2012 – Doris Sams, American baseball player (b. 1927)
2013 – Ted Hood, American sailor and architect (b. 1927)
2013 – Tamás Katona, Hungarian historian and politician (b. 1932)
2013 – Kenneth Minogue, New Zealand-Australian political scientist and academic (b. 1930)
2013 – F. D. Reeve, American author and academic (b. 1928)
2013 – David Rubitsky, American sergeant (b. 1917)
2014 – Seymour Barab, American cellist and composer (b. 1921)
2014 – Jim Brosnan, American baseball player (b. 1929)
2014 – On Kawara, Japanese painter (b. 1933)
2014 – Meshach Taylor, American actor (b. 1947)
2015 – Jack Carter, American actor and comedian (b. 1922)
2015 – Jope Seniloli, Fijian politician, Vice-President of Fiji (b. 1939)
2015 – Wally Stanowski, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1919)
2016 – Scotty Moore, American guitarist (b. 1931)
2016 – Pat Summitt, American women's college basketball head coach (b. 1952)
2016 – Buddy Ryan, American football coach (b. 1931)
2018 – Harlan Ellison, American writer (b. 1934)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Basilides and Potamiana
Irenaeus of Lyon (Western Christianity)
Heimerad
Blessed Maria Pia Mastena
Paulus I
Vincenza Gerosa
June 28 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Constitution Day (Ukraine)
Earliest day on which Vardavar can fall, while August 1 is the latest; celebrated on the 14th weeks after Easter (Armenia)
Family Day (Vietnam)
Poznań Remembrance Day (Poland)
Vidovdan, celebrating St. Vitus and an important day in Serbian history. (Eastern Orthodox Church)
Tau Day, a day similar to Pi Day celebrating the number Tau, which is equivalent to 2*Pi.
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15803 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July%2020 | July 20 |
Events
Pre-1600
70 – Siege of Jerusalem: Titus, son of emperor Vespasian, storms the Fortress of Antonia north of the Temple Mount. The Roman army is drawn into street fights with the Zealots.
792 – Kardam of Bulgaria defeats Byzantine Emperor Constantine VI at the Battle of Marcellae.
911 – Rollo lays siege to Chartres.
1189 – Richard I of England officially invested as Duke of Normandy.
1225 – Treaty of San Germano is signed at San Germano between Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX. A Dominican named Guala is responsible for the negotiations.
1398 – The Battle of Kellistown was fought on this day between the forces of the English led by Roger Mortimer, 4th Earl of March against the O'Byrnes and O'Tooles under the command of Art Óg mac Murchadha Caomhánach, the most powerful Chieftain in Leinster.
1402 – Ottoman-Timurid Wars: Battle of Ankara: Timur, ruler of Timurid Empire, defeats forces of the Ottoman Empire sultan Bayezid I.
1592 – During the first Japanese invasion of Korea, Japanese forces led by Toyotomi Hideyoshi captured Pyongyang, although they were ultimately unable to hold it.
1601–1900
1705 – A fire in Oulu, Finland almost completely destroyed the fourth district, which covered the southern part of the city and was by far the largest of the city districts.
1715 – Seventh Ottoman–Venetian War: The Ottoman Empire captures Nauplia, the capital of the Republic of Venice's "Kingdom of the Morea", thereby opening the way to the swift Ottoman reconquest of the Morea.
1738 – Canadian explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye reaches the western shore of Lake Michigan.
1799 – Tekle Giyorgis I begins his first of six reigns as Emperor of Ethiopia.
1807 – Nicéphore Niépce is awarded a patent by Napoleon for the Pyréolophore, the world's first internal combustion engine, after it successfully powered a boat upstream on the river Saône in France.
1810 – Citizens of Bogotá, New Granada declare independence from Spain.
1831 – Seneca and Shawnee people agree to relinquish their land in western Ohio for 60,000 acres west of the Mississippi River.
1848 – The first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, a two-day event, concludes.
1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Peachtree Creek: Near Atlanta, Georgia, Confederate forces led by General John Bell Hood unsuccessfully attack Union troops under General William T. Sherman.
1866 – Austro-Prussian War: Battle of Lissa: The Austrian Navy, led by Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, defeats the Italian Navy near the island of Vis in the Adriatic Sea.
1871 – British Columbia joins the confederation of Canada.
1885 – The Football Association legalizes professionalism in association football under pressure from the British Football Association.
1900 – An airship designed and constructed by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin of Germany made its first flight near Friedrichshafen.
1901–present
1903 – The Ford Motor Company ships its first automobile.
1906 – In Finland, a new electoral law was ratified, guaranteeing the country the first and equal right to vote in the world. Finnish women were the first in Europe to receive the right to vote.
1917 – World War I: The Corfu Declaration, which leads to the creation of the post-war Kingdom of Yugoslavia, is signed by the Yugoslav Committee and Kingdom of Serbia.
1920 – The Greek Army takes control of Silivri after Greece is awarded the city by the Paris Peace Conference; by 1923 Greece effectively lost control to the Turks.
1922 – The League of Nations awards mandates of Togoland to France and Tanganyika to the United Kingdom.
1932 – In the Preußenschlag, German President Hindenburg places Prussia directly under the rule of the national government.
1934 – Labor unrest in the U.S.: Police in Minneapolis fire upon striking truck drivers, during the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, killing two and wounding sixty-seven.
1934 – West Coast waterfront strike: In Seattle, police fire tear gas on and club 2,000 striking longshoremen. The governor of Oregon calls out the National Guard to break a strike on the Portland docks.
1935 – Switzerland: A Royal Dutch Airlines plane en route from Milan to Frankfurt crashes into a Swiss mountain, killing thirteen.
1936 – The Montreux Convention is signed in Switzerland, authorizing Turkey to fortify the Dardanelles and Bosphorus but guaranteeing free passage to ships of all nations in peacetime.
1938 – The United States Department of Justice files suit in New York City against the motion picture industry charging violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act in regards to the studio system. The case would eventually result in a break-up of the industry in 1948.
1940 – Denmark leaves the League of Nations.
1940 – California opens its first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway.
1941 – Soviet leader Joseph Stalin consolidates the Commissariats of Home Affairs and National Security to form the NKVD and names Lavrentiy Beria its chief.
1944 – World War II: Adolf Hitler survives an assassination attempt led by German Army Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.
1949 – The Israel–Syria Mixed Armistice Commission brokers the last of four ceasefire agreements to end the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
1950 – Cold War: In Philadelphia, Harry Gold pleads guilty to spying for the Soviet Union by passing secrets from atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs.
1951 – King Abdullah I of Jordan is assassinated by a Palestinian while attending Friday prayers in Jerusalem.
1954 – Germany: Otto John, head of West Germany's secret service, defects to East Germany.
1960 – Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) elects Sirimavo Bandaranaike Prime Minister, the world's first elected female head of government.
1960 – The Polaris missile is successfully launched from a submarine, the , for the first time.
1961 – French military forces break the Tunisian siege of Bizerte.
1964 – Vietnam War: Viet Cong forces attack the capital of Định Tường Province, Cái Bè, killing 11 South Vietnamese military personnel and 40 civilians (30 of whom are children).
1968 – The first International Special Olympics Summer Games are held at Soldier Field in Chicago, with about 1,000 athletes with intellectual disabilities.
1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 11's crew successfully makes the first manned landing on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility. Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon six and a half hours later.
1969 – A cease fire is announced between Honduras and El Salvador, six days after the beginning of the "Football War".
1974 – Turkish invasion of Cyprus: Forces from Turkey invade Cyprus after a coup d'état, organised by the dictator of Greece, against president Makarios.
1976 – The American Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.
1977 – The Central Intelligence Agency releases documents under the Freedom of Information Act revealing it had engaged in mind-control experiments.
1977 – The Johnstown flood of 1977 kills 84 people and causes millions of dollars in damages.
1981 – Somali Airlines Flight 40 crashes in the Balad District of Somalia, killing 40 people.
1982 – Hyde Park and Regent's Park bombings: The Provisional IRA detonates two bombs in Hyde Park and Regent's Park in central London, killing eight soldiers, wounding forty-seven people, and leading to the deaths of seven horses.
1985 – The government of Aruba passes legislation to secede from the Netherlands Antilles.
1989 – Burma's ruling junta puts opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest.
1992 – Václav Havel resigns as president of Czechoslovakia.
1997 – The fully restored (a.k.a. Old Ironsides) celebrates its 200th birthday by setting sail for the first time in 116 years.
1999 – The Chinese Communist Party begins a persecution campaign against Falun Gong, arresting thousands nationwide.
2005 – The Civil Marriage Act legalizes same-sex marriage in Canada.
2012 – James Holmes opened fire at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 and injuring 70 others.
2012 – Syrian civil war: The People's Protection Units (YPG) capture the cities of Amuda and Efrîn without resistance.
2013 – Seventeen government soldiers are killed in an attack by FARC revolutionaries in the Colombian department of Arauca.
2013 – Syrian civil war: The Battle of Ras al-Ayn ends with the expulsion of Islamist forces from the city by the People's Protection Units (YPG).
2015 – A huge explosion in the mostly Kurdish border town of Suruç, Turkey, targeting the Socialist Youth Associations Federation, kills at least 31 people and injures over 100.
2015 – The United States and Cuba resume full diplomatic relations after five decades.
2017 – O. J. Simpson is granted parole to be released from prison after serving nine years of a 33-year sentence after being convicted of armed robbery in Las Vegas.
2021 – American buissnesman Jeff Bezos flys to space aboard New Shepard NS-16 operated by his Private spaceflight company Blue Origin.
Births
Pre-1600
682 – Taichō, Japanese monk and scholar (d. 767)
1304 – Petrarch, Italian poet and scholar (d. 1374)
1313 – John Tiptoft, 2nd Baron Tibetot (d. 1367)
1346 – Margaret, Countess of Pembroke, daughter of King Edward III of England (d. 1361)
1470 – John Bourchier, 1st Earl of Bath, English noble (d. 1539)
1519 – Pope Innocent IX (d. 1591)
1537 – Arnaud d'Ossat, French cardinal (d. 1604)
1583 – Alban Roe, English Benedictine martyr (d. 1642)
1591 – Anne Hutchinson, English Puritan preacher (d. 1643)
1592 – Johan Björnsson Printz, governor of New Sweden (d. 1663)
1601–1900
1601 – Robert Wallop, English politician (d. 1667)
1620 – Nikolaes Heinsius the Elder, Dutch poet and scholar (d. 1681)
1649 – William Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland (d. 1709)
1754 – Antoine Destutt de Tracy, French philosopher and academic (d. 1836)
1757 – Garsevan Chavchavadze, Georgian politician and diplomat (d. 1811)
1762 – Jakob Haibel, Austrian tenor and composer (d. 1826)
1774 – Auguste de Marmont, French general (d. 1852)
1789 – Mahmud II, Ottoman sultan (d. 1839)
1804 – Richard Owen, English biologist, anatomist, and paleontologist (d. 1892)
1822 – Gregor Mendel, Austro-German monk, geneticist and botanist (d. 1884)
1838 – Augustin Daly, American playwright and manager (d. 1899)
1838 – William Paine Lord, American lawyer and politician, 9th Governor of Oregon (d. 1911)
1838 – Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, English civil servant and politician, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (d. 1928)
1847 – Max Liebermann, German painter and academic (d. 1935)
1849 – Robert Anderson Van Wyck, American lawyer and politician, 91st Mayor of New York City (d. 1918)
1852 – Theo Heemskerk, Dutch lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of the Netherlands (d. 1932)
1854 – Philomène Belliveau, Canadian artist (d. 1940)
1864 – Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Swedish poet, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1931)
1864 – Ruggero Oddi, Italian physiologist and anatomist (d. 1913)
1868 – Miron Cristea, Romanian cleric and politician, 38th Prime Minister of Romania (d. 1939)
1873 – Alberto Santos-Dumont, Brazilian pilot (d. 1932)
1876 – Otto Blumenthal, German mathematician and academic (d. 1944)
1877 – Tom Crean, Irish sailor and explorer (d. 1938)
1882 – Olga Hahn-Neurath, Austrian mathematician and philosopher (d. 1937)
1889 – John Reith, 1st Baron Reith, Scottish broadcaster, co-founded BBC (d. 1971)
1890 – Verna Felton, American actress (d. 1966)
1890 – Julie Vinter Hansen, Danish-Swiss astronomer and academic (d. 1960)
1890 – Giorgio Morandi, Italian painter (d. 1964)
1893 – George Llewelyn Davies, English soldier (d. 1915)
1895 – László Moholy-Nagy, Hungarian painter, photographer, and sculptor (d. 1946)
1897 – Tadeusz Reichstein, Polish-Swiss chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1996)
1900 – Maurice Leyland, English cricketer and coach (d. 1967)
1901–present
1901 – Vehbi Koç, Turkish businessman and philanthropist, founded Koç Holding (d. 1996)
1901 – Eugenio Lopez Sr., Filipino businessman and founder of the Lopez Group of Companies (d. 1975)
1901 – Heinie Manush, American baseball player and manager (d. 1971)
1902 – Leonidas Berry, American gastroenterologist (d. 1995)
1905 – Joseph Levis, American foil fencer (d. 2005)
1909 – Eric Rowan, South African cricketer (d. 1993)
1910 – Vilém Tauský, Czech-English conductor and composer (d. 2004)
1911 – Baqa Jilani, Indian cricketer (d. 1941)
1911 – José Zabala-Santos, Filipino author and illustrator (d. 1985)
1912 – George Johnston, Australian journalist and author (d. 1970)
1914 – Dobri Dobrev, Bulgarian philanthropist (d. 2018)
1914 – Charilaos Florakis, Greek politician (d. 2005)
1914 – Ersilio Tonini, Italian cardinal (d. 2013)
1918 – Cindy Walker, American singer-songwriter and dancer (d. 2006)
1919 – Edmund Hillary, New Zealand mountaineer and explorer (d. 2008)
1919 – Jacquemine Charrott Lodwidge, English writer (d. 2012)
1920 – Elliot Richardson, American lieutenant and politician, 11th United States Secretary of Defense (d. 1999)
1921 – Henri Alleg, English-French journalist and author (d. 2013)
1922 – Alan Stephenson Boyd, American lawyer and politician, 1st United States Secretary of Transportation (d. 2020)
1923 – Stanisław Albinowski, Polish economist and journalist (d. 2005)
1924 – Lola Albright, American actress and singer (d. 2017)
1924 – Thomas Berger, American author and playwright (d. 2014)
1924 – Mort Garson, Canadian-American songwriter and composer (d. 2008)
1925 – Jacques Delors, French economist and politician, 8th President of the European Commission
1925 – Frantz Fanon, French–Algerian psychiatrist and philosopher (d. 1961)
1927 – Barbara Bergmann, American economist and academic (d. 2015)
1927 – Heather Chasen, English actress (d. 2020)
1927 – Michael Gielen, Austrian conductor and composer (d. 2019)
1927 – Ian P. Howard, English-Canadian psychologist and academic (d. 2013)
1928 – Józef Czyrek, Polish economist and politician, Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs (d. 2013)
1928 – Belaid Abdessalam, Prime Minister of Algeria (d. 2020)
1929 – Hazel Hawke, Australian social worker and pianist, 23rd Spouse of the Prime Minister of Australia (d. 2013)
1929 – Mike Ilitch, American businessman, co-founded Little Caesars (d. 2017)
1929 – Rajendra Kumar, Pakistani-Indian actor and producer (d. 1999)
1929 – David Tonkin, Australian politician, 38th Premier of South Australia (d. 2000)
1930 – Giannis Agouris, Greek journalist and author (d. 2006)
1930 – Chuck Daly, American basketball player and coach (d. 2009)
1930 – William H. Goetzmann, American historian and author (d. 2010)
1930 – Sally Ann Howes, English-American singer and actress (d. 2021)
1931 – Tony Marsh, English race car driver (d. 2009)
1932 – Nam June Paik, American artist (d. 2006)
1932 – Otto Schily, German lawyer and politician, German Minister of the Interior
1933 – Buddy Knox, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1999)
1933 – Cormac McCarthy, American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter
1933 – Rex Williams, English snooker player
1935 – Peter Palumbo, Baron Palumbo, English businessman and art collector
1936 – Alistair MacLeod, Canadian novelist and short story writer (d. 2014)
1936 – Barbara Mikulski, American social worker and politician
1938 – Deniz Baykal, Turkish lawyer and politician, Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey
1938 – Roger Hunt, English footballer (d. 2021)
1938 – Tony Oliva, Cuban-American baseball player and coach
1938 – Diana Rigg, English actress (d. 2020)
1938 – Natalie Wood, American actress (d. 1981)
1939 – Judy Chicago, American feminist artist
1941 – Don Chuy, American football player (d. 2014)
1941 – Periklis Korovesis, Greek author and journalist (d. 2020)
1941 – Kurt Raab, German actor, screenwriter, and production designer (d. 1988)
1942 – Pete Hamilton, American race car driver (d. 2017)
1943 – Chris Amon, New Zealand race car driver (d. 2016)
1943 – Bob McNab, English footballer
1943 – Adrian Păunescu, Romanian poet, journalist, and politician (d. 2010)
1943 – Wendy Richard, English actress (d. 2009)
1944 – Mel Daniels, American basketball player and coach (d. 2015)
1944 – W. Cary Edwards, American politician (d. 2010)
1944 – Olivier de Kersauson, French sailor
1944 – T. G. Sheppard, American country music singer-songwriter
1945 – Charles Bowden, American non-fiction author, journalist and essayist (d. 2014)
1945 – Kim Carnes, American singer-songwriter
1945 – Larry Craig, American soldier and politician
1945 – John Lodge, English singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer
1945 – Bo Rein, American football player and coach (d. 1980)
1946 – Randal Kleiser, American actor, director, and producer
1947 – Gerd Binnig, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1947 – Carlos Santana, Mexican-American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1948 – Muse Watson, American actor and producer
1950 – Edward Leigh, English lawyer and politician
1950 – Lucille Lemay, Canadian archer
1951 – Jeff Rawle, English actor and screenwriter
1953 – Dave Evans, Welsh-Australian singer-songwriter
1953 – Thomas Friedman, American journalist and author
1953 – Marcia Hines, American-Australian singer and actress
1954 – Moira Harris, American actress
1954 – Jay Jay French, American guitarist and producer
1955 – Desmond Douglas, Jamaican-English table tennis player
1955 – René-Daniel Dubois, Canadian actor and playwright
1955 – Jem Finer, English banjo player and songwriter
1956 – Paul Cook, English drummer
1956 – Thomas N'Kono, Cameroonian footballer
1956 – Jim Prentice, Canadian lawyer and politician, 16th Premier of Alberta (d. 2016)
1958 – Mick MacNeil, Scottish keyboard player and songwriter
1959 – Radney Foster, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1960 – Claudio Langes, Italian race car driver
1960 – Prvoslav Vujčić, Serbian-Canadian poet and philosopher
1960 – Sudesh Berry, Indian actor
1961 – Óscar Elías Biscet, Cuban physician and activist, founded the Lawton Foundation
1962 – Carlos Alazraqui, American actor, producer, and screenwriter
1962 – Giovanna Amati, Italian race car driver
1962 – Julie Bindel, English journalist, author, and academic
1963 – Frank Whaley, American actor, director, and screenwriter
1964 – Chris Cornell, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2017)
1964 – Terri Irwin, American-Australian zoologist and author
1964 – Sebastiano Rossi, Italian footballer
1964 – Bernd Schneider, German race car driver
1965 – Jess Walter, American journalist and author
1966 – Stone Gossard, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1966 – Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexican lawyer and politician, 57th President of Mexico
1967 – Courtney Taylor-Taylor, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1968 – Jimmy Carson, American ice hockey player
1968 – Hami Mandıralı, Turkish footballer and manager
1968 – Kool G Rap, American hip-hop artist
1969 – Josh Holloway, American actor
1969 – Kreso Kovacec, Croatian-German footballer
1969 – Giovanni Lombardi, Italian cyclist
1969 – Joon Park, South Korean-American singer
1969 – Tobi Vail, American singer and guitarist
1971 – Charles Johnson, American baseball player
1971 – Sandra Oh, Canadian actress
1972 – Jamie Ainscough, Australian rugby league player
1972 – Jozef Stümpel, Slovak ice hockey player
1972 – Erik Ullenhag, Swedish jurist and politician
1972 – Vitamin C, American singer-songwriter
1973 – Omar Epps, American actor
1973 – Haakon, Crown Prince of Norway
1973 – Peter Forsberg, Swedish ice hockey player and manager
1973 – Nixon McLean, Caribbean cricketer
1973 – Roberto Orci, Mexican-American screenwriter and producer
1973 – Claudio Reyna, American soccer player
1975 – Ray Allen, American basketball player and actor
1975 – Judy Greer, American actress and producer
1975 – Erik Hagen, Norwegian footballer
1975 – Birgitta Ohlsson, Swedish journalist and politician, 5th Swedish Minister for European Union Affairs
1975 – Jason Raize, American singer and actor (d.2004)
1975 – Yusuf Şimşek, Turkish footballer and manager
1976 – Erica Hill, American journalist
1976 – Debashish Mohanty, Indian cricketer and coach
1976 – Andrew Stockdale, Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist
1976 – Alex Yoong, Malaysian race car driver
1977 – Kiki Musampa, Congolese footballer
1977 – Yves Niaré, French shot putter (d. 2012)
1977 – Alessandro Santos, Brazilian-Japanese footballer
1978 – Pavel Datsyuk, Russian ice hockey player
1978 – Will Solomon, American basketball player
1978 – Elliott Yamin, American singer-songwriter
1978 – Ieva Zunda, Latvian runner and hurdler
1979 – Miklós Fehér, Hungarian footballer (d. 2004)
1979 – Charlotte Hatherley, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1979 – David Ortega, Spanish swimmer
1980 – Tesfaye Bramble, English-Montserratian footballer
1980 – Gisele Bündchen, Brazilian model, fashionista, and businesswoman
1981 – Viktoria Ladõnskaja, Estonian journalist and politician
1982 – Antoine Vermette, Canadian ice hockey player
1984 – Alexi Casilla, Dominican baseball player
1984 – Matt Gilroy, American ice hockey player
1985 – John Francis Daley, American actor and screenwriter
1985 – Harley Morenstein, Canadian actor and YouTube personality
1985 – David Mundy, Australian footballer
1986 – Osric Chau, Canadian actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
1987 – Nicola Benedetti, Scottish violinist
1987 – Niall McGinn, Irish footballer
1988 – Julianne Hough, American singer-songwriter, actress, and dancer
1988 – Stephen Strasburg, American baseball player
1988 – Shahram Mahmoudi, Iranian volleyball player
1989 – Javier Cortés, Mexican footballer
1989 – Cristian Pasquato, Italian footballer
1990 – Lars Unnerstall, German footballer
1991 – Chiyoshōma Fujio, Mongolian sumo wrestler
1991 – Ryan James, Australian rugby league player
1991 – Kira Kazantsev, Miss America 2015
1991 – Philipp Reiter, German mountaineer and runner
1991 – Tawan Vihokratana, Thai actor, host, and model
1993 – Steven Adams, New Zealand basketball player
1993 – Nick Cousins, Canadian ice hockey player
1995 – Moses Leota, New Zealand rugby league player
1996 – Ben Simmons, Australian basketball player
1999 – Pop Smoke, American rapper and singer (d. 2020)
Deaths
Pre-1600
518 – Amantius, Byzantine grand chamberlain and Monophysite martyr
833 – Ansegisus, Frankish abbot and saint
985 – Boniface VII, antipope of Rome
1031 – Robert II, king of France (b. 972)
1156 – Toba, emperor of Japan (b. 1103)
1320 – Oshin, king of Armenia (b. 1282)
1332 – Thomas Randolph, 1st Earl of Moray, regent of Scotland
1387 – Robert IV, French nobleman (b. 1356)
1398 – Roger Mortimer, 4th Earl of March, Welsh nobleman (b. 1374)
1405 – Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, fourth son of King Robert II of Scotland (approximate, b. 1343)
1453 – Enguerrand de Monstrelet, French historian and author (b. 1400)
1454 – John II, king of Castile and León (b. 1405)
1514 – György Dózsa, Transylvanian peasant revolt leader (b. 1470)
1524 – Claude, queen consort of France (b. 1499)
1526 – García Jofre de Loaísa, Spanish explorer (b. 1490)
1600 – William More, English courtier (b. 1520)
1601–1900
1616 – Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, Irish nobleman and rebel soldier (b. 1550)
1704 – Peregrine White, English-American farmer and soldier (b. 1620)
1752 – Johann Christoph Pepusch, German-English composer and theorist (b. 1667)
1816 – Gavrila Derzhavin, Russian poet and politician (b. 1743)
1866 – Bernhard Riemann, German mathematician and academic (b. 1826)
1897 – Jean Ingelow, English poet and author (b. 1820)
1901–present
1901 – William Cosmo Monkhouse, English poet and critic (b. 1840)
1903 – Leo XIII, pope of the Catholic Church (b. 1810)
1908 – Demetrius Vikelas, Greek businessman and author (b. 1835)
1908 – Karl Bernhard Zoeppritz, German geophysicist and seismologist (b. 1881)
1910 – Anderson Dawson, Australian politician, 14th Premier of Queensland (b. 1863)
1917 – Ignaz Sowinski, Galician architect (b. 1858)
1922 – Andrey Markov, Russian mathematician and theorist (b. 1856)
1923 – Pancho Villa, Mexican general and politician, Governor of Chihuahua (b. 1878)
1926 – Felix Dzerzhinsky, Russian educator and politician (b. 1877)
1927 – Ferdinand I, king of Romania (b. 1865)
1928 – Kostas Karyotakis, Greek poet and author (b. 1896)
1932 – René Bazin, French author and academic (b. 1853)
1937 – Olga Hahn-Neurath, Austrian mathematician and philosopher from the Vienna Circle (b. 1882)
1937 – Guglielmo Marconi, Italian physicist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1874)
1941 – Lew Fields, American actor and producer (b. 1867)
1944 – Ludwig Beck, German general (b. 1880)
1944 – Mildred Harris, American actress (b. 1901)
1945 – Paul Valéry, French author and poet (b. 1871)
1951 – Abdullah I, king of Jordan (b. 1882)
1953 – Dumarsais Estimé, Haitian lawyer and politician, 33rd President of Haiti (b. 1900)
1953 – Jan Struther, English author and hymn-writer (b. 1901)
1955 – Calouste Gulbenkian, Armenian businessman and philanthropist (b. 1869)
1956 – James Alexander Calder, Canadian educator and politician, Canadian Minister of Militia and Defence (b. 1868)
1959 – William D. Leahy, American admiral and diplomat, United States Ambassador to France (b. 1875)
1965 – Batukeshwar Dutt, Indian activist (b. 1910)
1968 – Bray Hammond, American historian and author (b. 1886)
1970 – Iain Macleod, English journalist and politician, Chancellor of the Exchequer (b. 1913)
1972 – Geeta Dutt, Indian singer and actress (b. 1930)
1973 – Bruce Lee, American actor and martial artist (b. 1940)
1973 – Robert Smithson, American photographer and sculptor (b. 1938)
1974 – Allen Jenkins, American actor and singer (b. 1900)
1974 – Kamal Dasgupta, Bengali music director, composer and folk artist. (b. 1912)
1976 – Joseph Rochefort, American captain and cryptanalyst (b. 1900)
1977 – Gary Kellgren, American record producer, co-founded Record Plant (b. 1939)
1980 – Maria Martinez, San Ildefonso Pueblo (Native American) potter (b. 1887)
1981 – Kostas Choumis, Greek-Romanian footballer (b. 1913)
1983 – Frank Reynolds, American soldier and journalist (b. 1923)
1987 – Richard Egan, American soldier and actor (b. 1921)
1989 – Forrest H. Anderson, American judge and politician, 17th Governor of Montana (b. 1913)
1990 – Herbert Turner Jenkins, American police officer (b. 1907)
1993 – Vince Foster, American lawyer and political figure (b. 1945)
1994 – Paul Delvaux, Belgian painter (b. 1897)
1997 – M. E. H. Maharoof, Sri Lankan politician (b. 1939)
1998 – June Byers, American wrestler (b. 1922)
1999 – Sandra Gould, American actress (b. 1916)
2002 – Michalis Kritikopoulos, Greek footballer (b. 1946)
2003 – Nicolas Freeling, English author (b. 1927)
2004 – Lala Mara, Fijian politician (b. 1931)
2004 – Valdemaras Martinkėnas, Lithuanian footballer and coach (b. 1965)
2005 – James Doohan, Canadian-American actor (b. 1920)
2005 – Finn Gustavsen, Norwegian journalist and politician (b. 1926)
2005 – Kayo Hatta, American director and cinematographer (b. 1958)
2006 – Ted Grant, South African-English theorist and activist (b. 1913)
2006 – Gérard Oury, French actor, director, and producer (b. 1919)
2007 – Tammy Faye Messner, American Christian evangelist and talk show host (b. 1942)
2008 – Artie Traum, American guitarist, songwriter, and producer (b. 1943)
2008 – Dinko Šakić, Croatian concentration camp commander (b. 1921)
2009 – Vedat Okyar, Turkish footballer (b. 1945)
2009 – Mark Rosenzweig, American psychologist and academic (b. 1922)
2011 – Lucian Freud, German-English painter and illustrator (b. 1922)
2012 – Alastair Burnet, English journalist (b. 1928)
2012 – Jack Davis, American hurdler (b. 1930)
2012 – José Hermano Saraiva, Portuguese historian, jurist, and politician, Portuguese Minister of Education (b. 1919)
2013 – Pierre Fabre, French pharmacist and businessman, founded Laboratoires Pierre Fabre (b. 1926)
2013 – Khurshed Alam Khan, Indian politician, 2nd Governor of Goa (b. 1919)
2013 – Augustus Rowe, Canadian physician and politician (b. 1920)
2013 – Helen Thomas, American journalist and author (b. 1920)
2014 – Victor G. Atiyeh, American businessman and politician, 32nd Governor of Oregon (b. 1923)
2014 – Constantin Lucaci, Romanian sculptor and educator (b. 1923)
2014 – Bob McNamara, American football player (b. 1931)
2014 – Klaus Schmidt, German archaeologist and academic (b. 1953)
2015 – Wayne Carson, American singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1943)
2015 – Fred Else, English footballer and manager (b. 1933)
2015 – Dieter Moebius, Swiss-German keyboard player and producer (b. 1944)
2016 – Radu Beligan, Romanian actor, director, and essayist (b. 1918)
2017 – Chester Bennington, American singer (b. 1976)
2020 – Michael Brooks, political commentator (b. 1983)
Holidays and observances
Birthday of Crown Prince Haakon Magnus (Norway)
Christian feast day:
Ansegisus
Apollinaris of Ravenna
Aurelius
Ealhswith (or Elswith)
Elijah
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Ross Tubman (Episcopal Church (USA))
John Baptist Yi (one of The Korean Martyrs)
Margaret the Virgin
Thorlac (relic translation)
Wilgefortis (cult suppressed)
July 20 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Día del Amigo (Argentina, Brazil)
Engineer's Day (Costa Rica)
Independence Day, celebrates the independence declaration of Colombia from Spain in 1810.
International Chess Day
Lempira Day (Honduras)
Tree Planting Day (Central African Republic)
References
External links
Days of the year
July | [
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15804 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July%2025 | July 25 |
Events
Pre-1600
306 – Constantine I is proclaimed Roman emperor by his troops.
315 – The Arch of Constantine is completed near the Colosseum in Rome to commemorate Constantine I's victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge.
677 – Climax of the Siege of Thessalonica by the Slavs in a three-day assault on the city walls.
864 – The Edict of Pistres of Charles the Bald orders defensive measures against the Vikings.
1137 – Eleanor of Aquitaine marries Prince Louis, later King Louis VII of France, at the Cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux.
1139 – Battle of Ourique: The Almoravids, led by Ali ibn Yusuf, are defeated by Prince Afonso Henriques who is proclaimed King of Portugal.
1261 – The city of Constantinople is recaptured by Nicaean forces under the command of Alexios Strategopoulos, re-establishing the Byzantine Empire.
1278 – The naval Battle of Algeciras takes place in the context of the Spanish Reconquista resulting in a victory for the Emirate of Granada and the Maranid Dynasty over the Kingdom of Castile.
1467 – The Battle of Molinella: The first battle in Italy in which firearms are used extensively.
1536 – Sebastián de Belalcázar on his search of El Dorado founds the city of Santiago de Cali.
1538 – The city of Guayaquil is founded by the Spanish Conquistador Francisco de Orellana and given the name Muy Noble y Muy Leal Ciudad de Santiago de Guayaquil.
1547 – Henry II of France is crowned.
1554 – Mary I marries Philip II of Spain at Winchester Cathedral.
1567 – Don Diego de Losada founds the city of Santiago de Leon de Caracas, modern-day Caracas, the capital city of Venezuela.
1591 – The Duke of Parma is defeated near the Dutch city of Nijmegen by an Anglo-Dutch force led by Maurice of Orange.
1593 – Henry IV of France publicly converts from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism.
1601–1900
1609 – The English ship Sea Venture, en route to Virginia, is deliberately driven ashore during a storm at Bermuda to prevent its sinking; the survivors go on to found a new colony there.
1668 – A magnitude 8.5 earthquake strikes eastern China, killing over 42,000 people.
1693 – Ignacio de Maya founds the Real Santiago de las Sabinas, now known as Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo León, Mexico.
1718 – At the behest of Tsar Peter the Great, the construction of the Kadriorg Palace, dedicated to his wife Catherine, begins in Tallinn.
1722 – Dummer's War begins along the Maine-Massachusetts border.
1755 – British governor Charles Lawrence and the Nova Scotia Council order the deportation of the Acadians.
1759 – French and Indian War: In Western New York, British forces capture Fort Niagara from the French, who subsequently abandon Fort Rouillé.
1783 – American Revolutionary War: The war's last action, the Siege of Cuddalore, is ended by a preliminary peace agreement.
1788 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completes his Symphony No. 40 in G minor (K550).
1792 – The Brunswick Manifesto is issued to the population of Paris promising vengeance if the French royal family is harmed.
1797 – Horatio Nelson loses more than 300 men and his right arm during the failed conquest attempt of Tenerife (Spain).
1799 – Napoleon Bonaparte defeats a numerically superior Ottoman army under Mustafa Pasha at the Battle of Abukir.
1814 – War of 1812: An American attack on Canada is repulsed.
1824 – Costa Rica annexes Guanacaste from Nicaragua.
1837 – The first commercial use of an electrical telegraph is successfully demonstrated in London by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone.
1853 – Joaquin Murrieta, the famous Californio bandit known as the "Robin Hood of El Dorado", is killed.
1861 – American Civil War: The United States Congress passes the Crittenden–Johnson Resolution, stating that the war is being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.
1866 – The United States Congress passes legislation authorizing the rank of General of the Army. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant becomes the first to be promoted to this rank.
1868 – The Wyoming Territory is established.
1869 – The Japanese daimyōs begin returning their land holdings to the emperor as part of the Meiji Restoration reforms. (Traditional Japanese Date: June 17, 1869).
1894 – The First Sino-Japanese War begins when the Japanese fire upon a Chinese warship.
1897 – American author Jack London embarks on a sailing trip to take part in the Klondike's gold rush, from which he wrote his first successful stories.
1898 – Spanish–American War: The American invasion of Spanish-held Puerto Rico begins, as United States Army troops under General Nelson A. Miles land and secure the port at Guánica.
1901–present
1908 – Ajinomoto is founded. Kikunae Ikeda of the Tokyo Imperial University discovers that a key ingredient in kombu soup stock is monosodium glutamate (MSG), and patents a process for manufacturing it.
1909 – Louis Blériot makes the first flight across the English Channel in a heavier-than-air machine from Calais to Dover, England, United Kingdom in 37 minutes.
1915 – RFC Captain Lanoe Hawker becomes the first British pursuit aviator to earn the Victoria Cross.
1917 – Sir Robert Borden introduces the first income tax in Canada as a "temporary" measure (lowest bracket is 4% and highest is 25%).
1925 – Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) is established.
1934 – The Nazis assassinate Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in a failed coup attempt.
1940 – General Henri Guisan orders the Swiss Army to resist German invasion and makes surrender illegal.
1942 – The Norwegian Manifesto calls for nonviolent resistance to the German occupation.
1943 – World War II: Benito Mussolini is forced out of office by the Grand Council of Fascism and is replaced by Pietro Badoglio.
1944 – World War II: Operation Spring is one of the bloodiest days for the First Canadian Army during the war.
1946 – The Crossroads Baker device is the first underwater nuclear weapon test.
1956 – Forty-five miles south of Nantucket Island, the Italian ocean liner collides with the in heavy fog and sinks the next day, killing 51.
1957 – The Tunisian King Muhammad VIII al-Amin is replaced by President Habib Bourguiba.
1958 – The African Regroupment Party holds its first congress in Cotonou.
1961 – Cold War: In a speech John F. Kennedy emphasizes that any attack on Berlin is an attack on NATO.
1965 – Bob Dylan goes electric at the Newport Folk Festival, signaling a major change in folk and rock music.
1969 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon declares the Nixon Doctrine, stating that the United States now expects its Asian allies to take care of their own military defense. This is the start of the "Vietnamization" of the war.
1973 – Soviet Mars 5 space probe is launched.
1976 – Viking program: Viking 1 takes the famous Face on Mars photo.
1978 – Puerto Rican police shoot two nationalists in the Cerro Maravilla murders.
1978 – Birth of Louise Joy Brown, the first human to have been born after conception by in vitro fertilisation, or IVF.
1979 – In accord with the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, Israel begins its withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula.
1983 – Black July: Thirty-seven Tamil political prisoners at the Welikada high security prison in Colombo are massacred by the fellow Sinhalese prisoners.
1984 – Salyut 7 cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to perform a space walk.
1993 – Israel launches a massive attack against Lebanon in what the Israelis call Operation Accountability, and the Lebanese call the Seven-Day War.
1993 – The Saint James Church massacre occurs in Kenilworth, Cape Town, South Africa.
1994 – Israel and Jordan sign the Washington Declaration, that formally ends the state of war that had existed between the nations since 1948.
1995 – A gas bottle explodes in Saint Michel station of line B of the RER (Paris regional train network). Eight are killed and 80 wounded.
1996 – In a military coup in Burundi, Pierre Buyoya deposes Sylvestre Ntibantunganya.
2000 – Concorde Air France Flight 4590 crashes at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, killing 113 people.
2007 – Pratibha Patil is sworn in as India's first female president.
2010 – WikiLeaks publishes classified documents about the War in Afghanistan, one of the largest leaks in U.S. military history.
2018 – As-Suwayda attacks: Coordinated attacks occur in Syria.
2019 – National extreme heat records set this day in the UK, Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany during the July 2019 European heat wave.
Births
Pre-1600
975 – Thietmar, bishop of Merseburg (died 1018)
1016 – Casimir I the Restorer, duke of Poland (died 1058)
1109 – Afonso I, king of Portugal (died 1185)
1165 – Ibn Arabi, Andalusian Sufi mystic, poet, and philosopher (died 1240)
1261 – Arthur II, Duke of Brittany (died 1312)
1291 – Hawys Gadarn, Welsh noblewoman (died 1353)
1336 – Albert I, Duke of Bavaria (died 1404)
1394 – James I, king of Scotland (died 1437)
1404 – Philip I, Duke of Brabant (died 1430)
1421 – Henry Percy, 3rd Earl of Northumberland, English politician (died 1461)
1450 – Jakob Wimpfeling, Renaissance humanist (died 1528)
1486 – Albrecht VII, Duke of Mecklenburg (died 1547)
1498 – Hernando de Aragón, Archbishop of Zaragoza (died 1575)
1532 – Alphonsus Rodriguez, Jesuit lay brother and saint (died 1617)
1556 – George Peele, English translator, poet, and dramatist (died 1596)
1562 – Katō Kiyomasa, Japanese warlord (died 1611)
1573 – Christoph Scheiner, German astronomer and Jesuit (died 1650)
1581 – Brian Twyne, English archivist (died 1644)
1601–1900
1605 – Theodore Haak, German scholar (died 1690)
1633 – Joseph Williamson, English politician (died 1701)
1654 – Agostino Steffani, Italian composer and diplomat (died 1728)
1657 – Philipp Heinrich Erlebach, German composer (died 1714)
1658 – Archibald Campbell, 1st Duke of Argyll, Scottish general (died 1703)
1683 – Pieter Langendijk, Dutch playwright and poet (died 1756)
1750 – Henry Knox, American general and politician, 1st United States Secretary of War (died 1806)
1753 – Santiago de Liniers, 1st Count of Buenos Aires, French-Spanish captain and politician, 10th Viceroy of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (died 1810)
1797 – Princess Augusta of Hesse-Kassel (died 1889)
1806 – Maria Weston Chapman, American abolitionist (died 1885)
1839 – Francis Garnier, French captain and explorer (died 1873)
1844 – Thomas Eakins, American painter, sculptor, and photographer (died 1916)
1847 – Paul Langerhans, German pathologist, physiologist and biologist (died 1888)
1848 – Arthur Balfour, Scottish-English lieutenant and politician, 33rd Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (died 1930)
1857 – Frank J. Sprague, American naval officer and inventor (died 1934)
1865 – Jac. P. Thijsse, Dutch botanist and conservationist (died 1945)
1866 – Frederick Blackman, English physiologist and academic (died 1947)
1867 – Max Dauthendey, German author and painter (died 1918)
1867 – Alexander Rummler, American painter (died 1959)
1869 – Platon, Estonian bishop and saint (died 1919)
1870 – Maxfield Parrish, American painter and illustrator (died 1966)
1875 – Jim Corbett, Indian hunter, environmentalist, and author (died 1955)
1878 – Masaharu Anesaki, Japanese philosopher and scholar (died 1949)
1882 – George S. Rentz, American commander (died 1942)
1883 – Alfredo Casella, Italian pianist, composer, and conductor (died 1947)
1886 – Edward Cummins, American golfer (died 1926)
1894 – Walter Brennan, American actor (died 1974)
1894 – Gavrilo Princip, Bosnian Serb revolutionary (died 1918)
1895 – Ingeborg Spangsfeldt, Danish actress (died 1968)
1896 – Jack Perrin, American actor and stuntman (died 1967)
1896 – Josephine Tey, Scottish author and playwright (died 1952)
1901–present
1901 – Ruth Krauss, American author and poet (died 1993)
1901 – Mohammed Helmy, Egyptian physician and Righteous Among the Nations (d.1982)
1901 – Lila Lee, American actress and singer (died 1973)
1902 – Eric Hoffer, American philosopher and author (died 1983)
1905 – Elias Canetti, Bulgarian-Swiss novelist, playwright, and memoirist, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1994)
1905 – Georges Grignard, French race car driver (died 1977)
1905 – Denys Watkins-Pitchford, English author and illustrator (died 1990)
1906 – Johnny Hodges, American saxophonist and clarinet player (died 1970)
1908 – Bill Bowes, English cricketer (died 1987)
1908 – Ambroise-Marie Carré, French priest and author (died 2004)
1908 – Jack Gilford, American actor (died 1990)
1914 – Woody Strode, American football player and actor (died 1994)
1915 – S. U. Ethirmanasingham, Sri Lankan businessman and politician
1915 – Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., American lieutenant and pilot (died 1944)
1916 – Lucien Saulnier, Canadian lawyer and politician (died 1989)
1917 – Fritz Honegger, Swiss lawyer and politician (died 1999)
1918 – Jane Frank, American painter and sculptor (died 1986)
1920 – Rosalind Franklin, English biophysicist, chemist, and academic (died 1958)
1921 – Adolph Herseth, American soldier and trumpet player (died 2013)
1921 – Lionel Terray, French mountaineer (died 1965)
1923 – Estelle Getty, American actress (died 2008)
1923 – Edgar Gilbert, American mathematician and theorist (died 2013)
1923 – Maria Gripe, Swedish journalist and author (died 2007)
1924 – Frank Church, American lawyer and politician (died 1984)
1924 – Scotch Taylor, South African cricketer and hockey player (died 2004)
1925 – Benny Benjamin, American R&B drummer (died 1969)
1925 – Jerry Paris, American actor and director (died 1986)
1925 – Dick Passwater, American race car driver (died 2020)
1925 – Jutta Zilliacus, Finnish journalist and politician
1926 – Whitey Lockman, American baseball player, coach, and manager (died 2009)
1926 – Bernard Thompson, British television producer and director (died 1998)
1926 – Beatriz Segall, Brazilian actress (died 2018)
1927 – Daniel Ceccaldi, French actor, director, and screenwriter (died 2003)
1927 – Midge Decter, American journalist and author
1927 – Sadiq Hussain Qureshi, Pakistani politician, 10th Governor of Punjab (died 2000)
1927 – Jean-Marie Seroney, Kenyan activist and politician (died 1982)
1928 – Dolphy, Filipino actor, singer, and producer (died 2012)
1928 – Mario Montenegro, Filipino actor (died 1988)
1928 – Nils Taube, Estonian-English businessman (died 2008)
1929 – Judd Buchanan, Canadian businessman and politician, 36th Canadian Minister of Public Works
1929 – Somnath Chatterjee, Indian lawyer and politician, 14th Speaker of the Lok Sabha (died 2018)
1929 – Eddie Mazur, Canadian ice hockey player (died 1995)
1930 – Murray Chapple, New Zealand cricketer and manager (died 1985)
1930 – Maureen Forrester, Canadian actress and singer (died 2010)
1930 – Alice Parizeau, Polish-Canadian journalist and criminologist (died 1990)
1930 – Herbert Scarf, American economist and academic (died 2015)
1930 – Annie Ross, Scottish-American singer and actress (died 2020)
1931 – James Butler, English sculptor and educator
1932 – Paul J. Weitz, American astronaut (died 2017)
1934 – Don Ellis, American trumpet player and composer (died 1978)
1934 – Claude Zidi, French director and screenwriter
1935 – Barbara Harris, American actress and singer (died 2018)
1935 – Adnan Khashoggi, Saudi Arabian businessman (died 2017)
1935 – Gilbert Parent, Canadian educator and politician, 33rd Speaker of the House of Commons of Canada (died 2009)
1935 – John Robinson, American football player and coach
1935 – Larry Sherry, American baseball player and coach (died 2006)
1935 – Lars Werner, Swedish lawyer and politician (died 2013)
1936 – Gerry Ashmore, English race car driver
1936 – Glenn Murcutt, English-Australian architect and academic
1937 – Colin Renfrew, Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, English archaeologist and academic
1939 – S. Ramadoss, Indian politician
1940 – Richard Ballantine, American-English journalist and author (died 2013)
1941 – Manny Charlton, Spanish-born Scottish rock musician and songwriter
1941 – Nate Thurmond, American basketball player (died 2016)
1941 – Emmett Till, American lynching victim (died 1955)
1942 – Bruce Woodley, Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist
1943 – Jim McCarty, English singer and drummer
1943 – Erika Steinbach, Polish-German politician
1944 – Sally Beauman, English journalist and author (died 2016)
1946 – José Areas, Nicaraguan drummer
1946 – Nicole Farhi, French fashion designer and sculptor
1946 – John Gibson, American radio host
1946 – Rita Marley, Cuban-Jamaican singer
1946 – P. Selvarasa, Sri Lankan politician
1946 – Ljupka Dimitrovska, Macedonian-Croatian pop singer (died 2016)
1948 – Steve Goodman, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (died 1984)
1950 – Mark Clarke, English singer-songwriter and bass player
1951 – Jack Thompson, American lawyer and activist
1951 – Verdine White, American bass player and producer
1952 – Eduardo Souto de Moura, Portuguese architect, designed the Estádio Municipal de Braga
1953 – Joseph A. Tunzi, Chicago based author, foremost expert on Elvis Presley
1953 – Robert Zoellick, American banker and politician, 14th United States Deputy Secretary of State
1954 – Ken Greer, Canadian guitarist, keyboard player, and producer
1954 – Sheena McDonald, Scottish journalist
1954 – Walter Payton, American football player and race car driver (died 1999)
1954 – Jochem Ziegert, German footballer and manager
1955 – Iman, Somalian-English model and actress
1955 – Randall Bewley, American guitarist and songwriter (died 2009)
1956 – Frances Arnold, American scientist and engineer
1957 – Mark Hunter, English politician
1957 – Steve Podborski, Canadian skier
1958 – Alexei Filippenko, American astrophysicist and academic
1958 – Thurston Moore, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1959 – Fyodor Cherenkov, Russian footballer and manager (died 2014)
1959 – Geoffrey Zakarian, American chef and author
1960 – Alain Robidoux, Canadian snooker player
1960 – Justice Howard, American photographer
1960 – Māris Martinsons, Latvian film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor
1962 – Carin Bakkum, Dutch tennis player
1962 – Doug Drabek, American baseball player and coach
1963 – Denis Coderre, Canadian politician, 44th Mayor of Montreal
1963 – Julian Hodgson, Welsh chess player
1964 – Anne Applebaum, American journalist and author
1964 – Tony Granato, American ice hockey player and coach
1964 – Breuk Iversen, American designer and journalist
1965 – Marty Brown, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1965 – Illeana Douglas, American actress, director, producer, and screenwriter
1965 – Dale Shearer, Australian rugby league player
1966 – Daryl Halligan, New Zealand rugby player and sportscaster
1966 – Maureen Herman, American bass player
1966 – Diana Johnson, English politician
1967 – Matt LeBlanc, American actor and producer
1967 – Ruth Peetoom, Dutch minister and politician
1967 – Tommy Skjerven, Norwegian footballer and referee
1968 – Rudi Bryson, South African cricketer
1968 – Shi Tao, Chinese journalist and poet
1969 – Jon Barry, American basketball player and sportscaster
1969 – Annastacia Palaszczuk, Australian politician, 39th Premier of Queensland
1971 – Roger Creager, American singer-songwriter
1971 – Tracy Murray, American basketball player
1971 – Billy Wagner, American baseball player and coach
1972 – David Penna, Australian rugby league player and coach
1973 – Dani Filth, English singer-songwriter
1973 – Kevin Phillips, English footballer
1973 – Igli Tare, Albanian footballer
1974 – Lauren Faust, American animator, producer, and screenwriter
1974 – Julia Laffranque, Estonian lawyer and judge
1974 – Kenzo Suzuki, Japanese rugby player and wrestler
1975 – Jody Craddock, English footballer and coach
1975 – Jean-Claude Darcheville, Guianan-French footballer
1975 – El Zorro, Mexican wrestler
1975 – Brian Gibson, American bass player
1975 – Evgeni Nabokov, Russian ice hockey player
1976 – Marcos Assunção, Brazilian footballer
1976 – Jovica Tasevski-Eternijan, Macedonian poet and critic
1976 – Javier Vázquez, Puerto Rican-American baseball player
1977 – Kenny Thomas, American basketball player
1978 – Gerard Warren, American football player
1978 – Louise Joy Brown, first human to be born via IVF
1979 – Ali Carter, English snooker player
1979 – Tom Lungley, English cricketer and umpire
1980 – Shawn Riggans, American baseball player
1980 – Toni Vilander, Finnish race car driver
1980 – David Wachs, American actor and producer
1980 – Scott Waldrom, New Zealand rugby player
1981 – Conor Casey, American soccer player
1981 – Constantinos Charalambidis, Cypriot footballer
1981 – Yūichi Komano, Japanese footballer
1981 – Mac Lethal, American rapper and producer
1981 – Jani Rita, Finnish ice hockey player
1982 – Brad Renfro, American actor and musician (died 2008)
1982 – Jason Dundas, Australian TV host
1983 – Nenad Krstić, Serbian basketball player
1984 – Loukas Mavrokefalidis, Greek basketball player
1985 – James Lafferty, American actor and athlete
1985 – Nelson Piquet Jr., Brazilian race car driver
1985 – Hugo Rodallega, Colombian footballer
1986 – Abraham Gneki Guié, Ivorian footballer
1986 – Hulk, Brazilian footballer
1987 – Richard Bachman, American ice hockey player
1987 – Mitchell Burgzorg, Dutch footballer and rapper
1987 – Fernando, Brazilian footballer
1987 – Jax Jones, English DJ, singer and songwriter
1987 – Eran Zahavi, Israeli footballer
1988 – John Goossens, Dutch footballer
1988 – Tom Hiariej, Dutch footballer
1988 – Stacey Kemp, English skater
1988 – Paulinho, Brazilian footballer
1988 – Anthony Stokes, Irish footballer
1989 – Natalia Vieru, Russian basketball player
1990 – Thodoris Karapetsas, Greek footballer
1991 – Hasan Piker, Twitch streamer
1991 – Toni Duggan, English footballer
1992 – Sergei Simonov, Russian ice hockey player (died 2016)
1997 – Nat Butcher, Australian rugby league player
Deaths
Pre-1600
306 – Constantius Chlorus, Roman emperor (born 250)
885 – Ragenold, margrave of Neustria
1011 – Ichijō, emperor of Japan (born 980)
1190 – Sibylla, queen of Jerusalem
1195 – Herrad of Landsberg, abbess, author, and illustrator (born c. 1130)
1409 – Martin I, king of Sicily (born 1376)
1471 – Thomas à Kempis, German priest and mystic
1472 – Charles of Artois, French nobleman (born 1394)
1492 – Innocent VIII, pope of the Catholic Church (born 1432)
1564 – Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor (born 1503)
1572 – Isaac Luria, Ottoman rabbi and mystic (born 1534)
1601–1900
1608 – Pomponio Nenna, Italian composer (born 1556)
1616 – Andreas Libavius, German physician and chemist (born 1550)
1643 – Robert Pierrepont, 1st Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull, English general and politician (born 1584)
1681 – Urian Oakes, English-American minister and educator (born 1631)
1790 – Johann Bernhard Basedow, German educator and reformer (born 1723)
1790 – William Livingston, American soldier and politician, 1st Governor of New Jersey (born 1723)
1791 – Isaac Low, American merchant and politician (born 1735)
1794 – André Chénier, Greek-French poet and author (born 1762)
1794 – Jean-Antoine Roucher, French poet and author (born 1745)
1794 – Friedrich von der Trenck, Prussian adventurer and author (born 1726)
1826 – Kondraty Ryleyev, Russian poet and publisher (born 1795)
1831 – Maria Szymanowska, Polish composer and pianist (born 1789)
1834 – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English philosopher, poet, and critic (born 1772)
1842 – Dominique Jean Larrey, French physician and surgeon (born 1766)
1843 – Charles Macintosh, Scottish chemist and inventor of waterproof fabric (born 1766)
1861 – Jonas Furrer, Swiss lawyer and politician, President of the Swiss Confederation (born 1805)
1865 – James Barry, English soldier and surgeon (born 1799)
1887 – John Taylor, American religious leader, 3rd President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (born 1808)
1901–present
1934 – François Coty, French businessman, founded Coty, Inc. (born 1874)
1934 – Engelbert Dollfuss, Austrian politician, 14th Chancellor of Austria (born 1892)
1934 – Nestor Makhno, Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary (born 1888)
1942 – Fred Englehardt, American triple jumper (born 1879)
1952 – Herbert Murrill, English organist and composer (born 1909)
1958 – Otto Lasanen, Finnish wrestler (born 1891)
1959 – Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, Polish-born Irish rabbi and author (born 1888)
1962 – Thibaudeau Rinfret, Canadian lawyer and jurist, 9th Chief Justice of Canada (born 1879)
1963 – Ugo Cerletti, Italian neurologist and academic (born 1877)
1966 – Frank O'Hara, American poet and critic (born 1926)
1967 – Konstantinos Parthenis, Egyptian-Greek painter (born 1878)
1971 – John Meyers, American swimmer and water polo player (born 1880)
1971 – Leroy Robertson, American composer and educator (born 1896)
1973 – Amy Jacques Garvey, Jamaican-American journalist and activist (born 1895)
1973 – Louis St. Laurent, Canadian lawyer and politician, 12th Prime Minister of Canada (born 1882)
1977 – Shivrampant Damle, Indian educationist (born 1900)
1980 – Vladimir Vysotsky, Russian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor (born 1938)
1981 – Rosa A. González, Puerto Rican nurse, author, feminist, and activist (born 1889)
1982 – Hal Foster, Canadian-American author and illustrator (born 1892)
1984 – Bryan Hextall, Canadian ice hockey player (born 1913)
1984 – Big Mama Thornton, American singer-songwriter (born 1926)
1986 – Vincente Minnelli, American director and screenwriter (born 1903)
1988 – Judith Barsi, American child actress (born 1978)
1989 – Steve Rubell, American businessman, co-owner of Studio 54 (born 1943)
1991 – Lazar Kaganovich, Soviet politician (born 1893)
1992 – Alfred Drake, American actor and singer (born 1914)
1995 – Charlie Rich, American singer-songwriter (born 1932)
1997 – Ben Hogan, American golfer (born 1912)
1998 – Evangelos Papastratos, Greek businessman, co-founded Papastratos (born 1910)
2000 – Rudi Faßnacht, German footballer, coach, and manager (born 1934)
2002 – Abdel Rahman Badawi, Egyptian philosopher and poet (born 1917)
2003 – Ludwig Bölkow, German engineer (born 1912)
2003 – John Schlesinger, English actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (born 1926)
2004 – John Passmore, Australian philosopher and academic (born 1914)
2005 – Albert Mangelsdorff, German trombonist (born 1928)
2006 – Ezra Fleischer, Romanian-Israeli poet and philologist (born 1928)
2007 – Bernd Jakubowski, German footballer and manager (born 1952)
2008 – Jeff Fehring, Australian footballer (born 1955)
2008 – Tracy Hall, American chemist and academic (born 1919)
2008 – Randy Pausch, American computer scientist and educator (born 1960)
2009 – Vernon Forrest, American boxer (born 1971)
2009 – Stanley Middleton, English author (born 1919)
2009 – Harry Patch, English soldier (born 1898)
2011 – Michael Cacoyannis, Cypriot-Greek director, producer, and screenwriter (born 1922)
2012 – B. R. Ishara, Indian director and screenwriter (born 1934)
2012 – Barry Langford, English director and producer (born 1926)
2012 – Greg Mohns, American-Canadian football player and coach (born 1950)
2012 – Franz West, Austrian painter and sculptor (born 1947)
2013 – Walter De Maria, American sculptor, illustrator, and composer (born 1935)
2013 – William J. Guste, American lawyer and politician (born 1922)
2013 – Hugh Huxley, English-American biologist and academic (born 1924)
2014 – Bel Kaufman, German-American author and academic (born 1911)
2014 – Richard Larter, Australian painter and illustrator (born 1929)
2015 – Jacques Andreani, French diplomat, French ambassador to the United States (born 1929)
2015 – R. S. Gavai, Indian lawyer and politician, 18th Governor of Kerala (born 1929)
2015 – Bob Kauffman, American basketball player and coach (born 1946)
2016 – Tim LaHaye, American Christian minister and author (born 1926)
2016 – Tom Peterson, American television personality (born 1930)
2017 – Michael Johnson, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (born 1944)
2018 – Sergio Marchionne, Italian-Canadian businessman (born 1952)
2019 – Beji Caid Essebsi, 4th President and 9th Prime Minister of Tunisia (born 1926)
2020 – Peter Green, English blues rock guitarist, singer-songwriter and founder of Fleetwood Mac (born 1946)
2020 – Lou Henson, American college basketball coach (born 1932)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Anne (Eastern Christianity)
Christopher (Western Christianity)
Cucuphas
Glodesind
James the Great (Western Christianity)
John I Agnus
Julian of Le Mans (translation)
Magnerich of Trier
July 25 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Earliest day on which Father's Day can fall, while July 31 is the latest; celebrated on last Sunday in July. (Dominican Republic)
Earliest day on which National Tree Planting Day can fall, while July 31 is the latest; celebrated on last Sunday in July. (Australia)
Earliest day on which Navy Day can fall, while July 31 is the latest; celebrated on last Sunday in July. (Russia)
Guanacaste Day (Costa Rica)
National Baha'i Day (Jamaica)
National Day of Galicia (Galicia)
Puerto Rico Constitution Day (Puerto Rico)
Republic Day (Tunisia)
References
External links
Days of the year
July | [
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15805 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2010 | June 10 |
Events
Pre-1600
671 – Emperor Tenji of Japan introduces a water clock (clepsydra) called Rokoku. The instrument, which measures time and indicates hours, is placed in the capital of Ōtsu.
1190 – Third Crusade: Frederick I Barbarossa drowns in the river Saleph while leading an army to Jerusalem.
1329 – The Battle of Pelekanon results in a Byzantine defeat by the Ottoman Empire.
1523 – Copenhagen is surrounded by the army of Frederick I of Denmark, as the city will not recognise him as the successor of Christian II of Denmark.
1539 – Council of Trent: Pope Paul III sends out letters to his bishops, delaying the Council due to war and the difficulty bishops had traveling to Venice.
1596 – Willem Barents and Jacob van Heemskerk discover Bear Island.
1601–1900
1619 – Thirty Years' War: Battle of Záblatí, a turning point in the Bohemian Revolt.
1624 – Signing of the Treaty of Compiègne between France and the Netherlands.
1692 – Salem witch trials: Bridget Bishop is hanged at Gallows Hill near Salem, Massachusetts, for "certaine Detestable Arts called Witchcraft and Sorceries".
1719 – Jacobite risings: Battle of Glen Shiel.
1782 – King Buddha Yodfa Chulaloke (Rama I) of Siam (modern day Thailand) is crowned.
1786 – A landslide dam on the Dadu River created by an earthquake ten days earlier collapses, killing 100,000 in the Sichuan province of China.
1793 – The Jardin des Plantes museum opens in Paris. A year later, it becomes the first public zoo.
1793 – French Revolution: Following the arrests of Girondin leaders, the Jacobins gain control of the Committee of Public Safety installing the revolutionary dictatorship.
1805 – First Barbary War: Yusuf Karamanli signs a treaty ending the hostilities between Tripolitania and the United States.
1829 – The first Boat Race between the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge takes place on the Thames in London.
1838 – Myall Creek massacre: Twenty-eight Aboriginal Australians are murdered.
1854 – The United States Naval Academy graduates its first class of students.
1861 – American Civil War: Battle of Big Bethel: Confederate troops under John B. Magruder defeat a much larger Union force led by General Ebenezer W. Pierce in Virginia.
1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Brice's Crossroads: Confederate troops under Nathan Bedford Forrest defeat a much larger Union force led by General Samuel D. Sturgis in Mississippi.
1868 – Mihailo Obrenović III, Prince of Serbia is assassinated.
1871 – Sinmiyangyo: Captain McLane Tilton leads 109 US Marines in a naval attack on Han River forts on Kanghwa Island, Korea.
1878 – League of Prizren is established, to oppose the decisions of the Congress of Berlin and the Treaty of San Stefano, as a consequence of which the Albanian lands in the Balkans were being partitioned and given to the neighbor states of Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Greece.
1886 – Mount Tarawera in New Zealand erupts, killing 153 people and burying the famous Pink and White Terraces. Eruptions continue for three months creating a large, 17 km long fissure across the mountain peak.
1898 – Spanish–American War: In the Battle of Guantánamo Bay, U.S. Marines begin the American invasion of Spanish-held Cuba.
1901–present
1916 – The Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire was declared by Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca.
1918 – The Austro-Hungarian battleship sinks off the Croatian coast after being torpedoed by an Italian MAS motorboat; the event is recorded by camera from a nearby vessel.
1924 – Fascists kidnap and kill Italian Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti in Rome.
1935 – Dr. Robert Smith takes his last drink, and Alcoholics Anonymous is founded in Akron, Ohio, United States, by him and Bill Wilson.
1935 – Chaco War ends: A truce is called between Bolivia and Paraguay who had been fighting since 1932.
1940 – World War II: Fascist Italy declares war on France and the United Kingdom, beginning an invasion of southern France.
1940 – World War II: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounces Italy's actions in his "Stab in the Back" speech at the graduation ceremonies of the University of Virginia.
1940 – World War II: Military resistance to the German occupation of Norway ends.
1942 – World War II: The Lidice massacre is perpetrated as a reprisal for the assassination of Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich.
1944 – World War II: Six hundred forty-two men, women and children massacred at Oradour-sur-Glane, France.
1944 – World War II: In Distomo, Boeotia, Greece, 218 men, women and children are massacred by German troops.
1944 – In baseball, 15-year-old Joe Nuxhall of the Cincinnati Reds becomes the youngest player ever in a major-league game.
1945 – Australian Imperial Forces land in Brunei Bay to liberate Brunei.
1947 – Saab produces its first automobile.
1957 – John Diefenbaker leads the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada to a stunning upset in the 1957 Canadian federal election, ending 22 years of Liberal Party government.
1963 – The Equal Pay Act of 1963, aimed at abolishing wage disparity based on sex, was signed into law by John F. Kennedy as part of his New Frontier Program.
1964 – United States Senate breaks a 75-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, leading to the bill's passage.
1967 – The Six-Day War ends: Israel and Syria agree to a cease-fire.
1977 – James Earl Ray escapes from Brushy Mountain State Prison in Petros, Tennessee. He is recaptured three days later.
1980 – The African National Congress in South Africa publishes a call to fight from their imprisoned leader Nelson Mandela.
1982 – Lebanon War: The Syrian Arab Army defeats the Israeli Defense Forces in the Battle of Sultan Yacoub.
1990 – British Airways Flight 5390 lands safely at Southampton Airport after a blowout in the cockpit causes the captain to be partially sucked from the cockpit. There are no fatalities.
1991 – Eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard is kidnapped in South Lake Tahoe, California; she would remain a captive until 2009.
1994 – China conducts a nuclear test for DF-31 warhead at Area C (Beishan), Lop Nur, its prominence being due to the Cox Report.
1996 – Peace talks begin in Northern Ireland without the participation of Sinn Féin.
1997 – Before fleeing his northern stronghold, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot orders the killing of his defense chief Son Sen and 11 of Sen's family members.
1999 – Kosovo War: NATO suspends its airstrikes after Slobodan Milošević agrees to withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo.
2001 – Pope John Paul II canonizes Lebanon's first female saint, Saint Rafqa.
2002 – The first direct electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans is carried out by Kevin Warwick in the United Kingdom.
2003 – The Spirit rover is launched, beginning NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission.
2009 – James Wenneker von Brunn, who was 88-years-old, opened fire inside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and fatally shot Museum Special Police Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns. Other security guards returned fire, wounding von Brunn, who was apprehended.
2019 – An Agusta A109E Power crashed onto the AXA Equitable Center on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, New York City, which sparked a fire on the top of the building. The pilot of the helicopter was killed.
Births
Pre-1600
867 – Emperor Uda of Japan (d. 931)
940 – Abu al-Wafa' Buzjani, Persian mathematician and astronomer (d. 998)
1213 – Fakhr-al-Din Iraqi, Persian poet and philosopher (d. 1289)
1465 – Mercurino Gattinara, Italian statesman and jurist (d. 1530)
1513 – Louis, Duke of Montpensier (1561–1582) (d. 1582)
1557 – Leandro Bassano, Italian painter (d. 1622)
1601–1900
1632 – Esprit Fléchier, French bishop and author (d. 1710)
1688 – James Francis Edward Stuart, claimant to the English and Scottish throne (d. 1766)
1713 – Princess Caroline of Great Britain (d. 1757)
1716 – Carl Gustaf Ekeberg, Swedish physician and explorer (d. 1784)
1753 – William Eustis, American physician and politician, 12th Governor of Massachusetts (d. 1825)
1804 – Hermann Schlegel, German ornithologist and herpetologist (d. 1884)
1819 – Gustave Courbet, French-Swiss painter and sculptor (d. 1877)
1825 – Sondre Norheim, Norwegian-American skier (d. 1897)
1832 – Edwin Arnold, English poet and journalist (d. 1904)
1832 – Nicolaus Otto, German engineer (d. 1891)
1832 – Stephen Mosher Wood, American lieutenant and politician (d. 1920)
1835 – Rebecca Latimer Felton, American educator and politician (d. 1930)
1839 – Ludvig Holstein-Ledreborg, Danish lawyer and politician, 19th Prime Minister of Denmark (d. 1912)
1840 – Theodor Philipsen, Danish painter (d. 1920)
1843 – Heinrich von Herzogenberg, Austrian composer and conductor (d. 1900)
1854 – Sarah Grand, Irish feminist writer (d. 1943)
1859 – Emanuel Nobel, Swedish-Russian businessman (d. 1932)
1862 – Mrs. Leslie Carter, American actress (d. 1937)
1863 – Louis Couperus, Dutch author and poet (d. 1923)
1864 – Ninian Comper, Scottish architect (d. 1960)
1865 – Frederick Cook, American physician and explorer (d. 1940)
1878 – Margarito Bautista, Nahua-Mexican evangelizer, theologian, and religious founder (d. 1961)
1880 – André Derain, French painter and sculptor (d. 1954)
1882 – Nils Økland, Norwegian Esperantist and teacher (d. 1969)
1884 – Leone Sextus Tollemache, English captain (d. 1917)
1886 – Sessue Hayakawa, Japanese actor and producer (d. 1973)
1891 – Al Dubin, Swiss-American songwriter (d. 1945)
1895 – Hattie McDaniel, American actress (d. 1952)
1897 – Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia (d. 1918)
1898 – Princess Marie-Auguste of Anhalt (d. 1983)
1899 – Stanisław Czaykowski, Polish racing driver (d. 1933)
1901–present
1901 – Frederick Loewe, Austrian-American composer (d. 1988)
1904 – Lin Huiyin, Chinese architect and poet (d. 1955)
1907 – Fairfield Porter, American painter and critic (d. 1975)
1907 – Dicky Wells, American jazz trombonist (d. 1985)
1909 – Lang Hancock, Australian soldier and businessman (d. 1992)
1910 – Frank Demaree, American baseball player and manager (d. 1958)
1910 – Howlin' Wolf, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1976)
1911 – Ralph Kirkpatrick, American harpsichord player and musicologist (d. 1984)
1911 – Terence Rattigan, English playwright and screenwriter (d. 1977)
1912 – Jean Lesage, Canadian lawyer and politician, 11th Premier of Quebec (d. 1980)
1913 – Tikhon Khrennikov, Russian pianist and composer (d. 2007)
1913 – Benjamin Shapira, German-Israeli biochemist and academic (d. 1993)
1914 – Oktay Rıfat Horozcu, Turkish poet and playwright (d. 1988)
1915 – Saul Bellow, Canadian-American novelist, essayist and short story writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2005)
1916 – Peride Celal, Turkish author (d. 2013)
1916 – William Rosenberg, American entrepreneur, founded Dunkin' Donuts (d. 2002)
1918 – Patachou, French singer and actress (d. 2015)
1918 – Barry Morse, English-Canadian actor and director (d. 2008)
1919 – Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Palestinian physician and politician (d. 2007)
1919 – Kevin O'Flanagan, Irish footballer, rugby player, and physician (d. 2006)
1921 – Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (d. 2021)
1921 – Jean Robic, French cyclist (d. 1980)
1922 – Judy Garland, American actress and singer (d. 1969)
1922 – Bill Kerr, South African-Australian actor (d. 2014)
1922 – Mitchell Wallace, Australian rugby league player (d. 2016)
1923 – Paul Brunelle, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1994)
1923 – Robert Maxwell, Czech-English captain, publisher, and politician (d. 1991)
1924 – Friedrich L. Bauer, German mathematician, computer scientist, and academic (d. 2015)
1925 – Leo Gravelle, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 2013)
1925 – Nat Hentoff, American historian, author, and journalist (d. 2017)
1925 – James Salter, American novelist and short-story writer (d. 2015)
1926 – Bruno Bartoletti, Italian conductor (d. 2013)
1926 – Lionel Jeffries, English actor, screenwriter and film director (d. 2010)
1927 – Claudio Gilberto Froehlich, Brazilian zoologist
1927 – László Kubala, Hungarian footballer, coach, and manager (d. 2002)
1927 – Lin Yang-kang, Chinese politician, 29th Vice Premier of the Republic of China (d. 2013)
1927 – Johnny Orr, American basketball player and coach (d. 2013)
1927 – Eugene Parker, American astrophysicist and academic
1928 – Maurice Sendak, American author and illustrator (d. 2012)
1929 – James McDivitt, American general, pilot, and astronaut
1929 – Ian Sinclair, Australian farmer and politician, 42nd Australian Minister for Defence
1929 – Thomas Taylor, Baron Taylor of Blackburn, British Labour Party politician (d. 2016)
1929 – E. O. Wilson, American biologist, author, and academic
1930 – Aranka Siegal, Czech-American author and Holocaust survivor
1930 – Carmen Cozza, American baseball and football player (d. 2018)
1930 – Chen Xitong, Chinese politician, 8th Mayor of Beijing (d. 2013)
1931 – Bryan Cartledge, English academic and diplomat, British Ambassador to Russia
1931 – João Gilberto, Brazilian singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2019)
1932 – Pierre Cartier, French mathematician and academic
1933 – Chuck Fairbanks, American football player and coach (d. 2013)
1934 – Peter Gibson, English lawyer and judge
1934 – Tom Pendry, Baron Pendry, English politician
1935 – Vic Elford, English racing driver
1935 – Lu Jiaxi, Chinese self-taught mathematician (d. 1983)
1935 – Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Japanese author and illustrator (d. 2015)
1938 – Rahul Bajaj, Indian businessman and politician
1938 – Violetta Villas, Belgian-Polish singer-songwriter and actress (d. 2011)
1938 – Vasanti N. Bhat-Nayak, Indian mathematician and academic (d. 2009)
1940 – Augie Auer, American-New Zealand meteorologist (d. 2007)
1940 – John Stevens, English drummer (d. 1994)
1941 – Mickey Jones, American drummer (d. 2018)
1941 – Shirley Owens, American singer
1941 – Jürgen Prochnow, German actor
1941 – David Walker, Australian racing driver
1942 – Gordon Burns, Northern Irish journalist
1942 – Chantal Goya, French singer and actress
1942 – Arthur Hamilton, Lord Hamilton, Scottish lawyer and judge
1942 – Preston Manning, Canadian politician
1943 – Simon Jenkins, English journalist and author
1944 – Ze'ev Friedman, Polish-Israeli weightlifter (d. 1972)
1944 – Rick Price, English rock bass player
1947 – Michel Bastarache, Canadian businessman, lawyer, and jurist
1947 – Ken Singleton, American baseball player and sportscaster
1947 – Robert Wright, English air marshal
1950 – Elías Sosa, Dominican-American baseball player
1951 – Dan Fouts, American football player and sportscaster
1951 – Tony Mundine, Australian boxer
1951 – Burglinde Pollak, German pentathlete
1952 – Kage Baker, American author (d. 2010)
1953 – Eileen Cooper, English painter and academic
1953 – John Edwards, American lawyer and politician
1953 – Garry Hynes, Irish director and producer
1953 – Christine St-Pierre, Canadian journalist and politician
1954 – Moya Greene, Canadian businesswoman
1954 – Rich Hall, American actor, producer, and screenwriter
1955 – Annette Schavan, German theologian and politician
1955 – Andrew Stevens, American actor and producer
1957 – Nicola Palazzo, Italian writer
1958 – Yu Suzuki, Japanese game designer and producer
1959 – Carlo Ancelotti, Italian footballer and manager
1959 – Ernie C, American heavy metal guitarist, songwriter, and producer
1959 – Eliot Spitzer, American lawyer and politician, 54th Governor of New York
1960 – Nandamuri Balakrishna, Indian film actor and politician
1961 – Kim Deal, American singer-songwriter and musician
1961 – Maxi Priest, English singer-songwriter
1962 – Gina Gershon, American actress, singer and author
1962 – Anderson Bigode Herzer, Brazilian poet and author (d. 1982)
1962 – Wong Ka Kui, Hong Kong singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1993)
1962 – Tzi Ma, Hong Kong American character actor
1962 – Brent Sutter, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1963 – Brad Henry, American lawyer and politician, 26th Governor of Oklahoma
1963 – Jeanne Tripplehorn, American actress
1965 – Susanne Albers, German computer scientist and academic
1965 – Elizabeth Hurley, English model, actress, and producer
1965 – Joey Santiago, American alternative rock musician
1966 – David Platt, English footballer and manager
1967 – Emma Anderson, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1967 – Darren Robinson, American rapper (d. 1995)
1967 – Elizabeth Wettlaufer, Canadian nurse and serial killer
1968 – Bill Burr, American comedian and actor
1968 – Derek Dooley, American football player and coach
1969 – Craig Hancock, Australian rugby league player
1969 – Ronny Johnsen, Norwegian footballer
1969 – Kate Snow, American journalist
1970 – Mike Doughty, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1970 – Katsuhiro Harada, Japanese game designer, director, and producer
1970 – Alex Santos, Filipino journalist
1970 – Shane Whereat, Australian rugby league player
1970 – Sarah Wixey, Welsh sport shooter
1971 – JoJo Hailey, American singer
1971 – Bobby Jindal, American journalist and politician, 55th Governor of Louisiana
1971 – Bruno Ngotty, French footballer
1971 – Erik Rutan, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1971 – Kyle Sandilands, Australian radio and television host
1972 – Steven Fischer, American director and producer
1972 – Radmila Šekerinska, Macedonian politician, Prime Minister of the Republic of Macedonia
1972 – Eric Upashantha, Sri Lankan cricketer
1973 – Faith Evans, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actress
1973 – Flesh-n-Bone, American rapper and actor
1973 – Pokey Reese, American baseball player
1974 – Dustin Lance Black, American screenwriter, director, film and television producer, and LGBT rights activist
1975 – Henrik Pedersen, Danish footballer
1976 – Alari Lell, Estonian footballer
1976 – Esther Ouwehand, Dutch politician
1976 – Stefan Postma, Dutch footballer and coach
1976 – Hadi Saei, Iranian martial artist
1977 – Adam Darski (Nergal), Polish singer-songwriter and guitarist
1977 – Mike Rosenthal, American football player and coach
1978 – Raheem Brock, American football player
1979 – Evgeni Borounov, Russian ice dancer and coach
1979 – Kostas Louboutis, Greek footballer
1980 – Jessica DiCicco, American actress and voice actress
1980 – Matuzalém, Brazilian footballer
1980 – Ovie Mughelli, American football player
1980 – Dmitri Uchaykin, Russian ice hockey player (d. 2013)
1980 – Daniele Seccarecci, Italian bodybuilder (d. 2013)
1981 – Mat Jackson, English racing driver
1981 – Albie Morkel, South African cricketer
1981 – Andrey Yepishin, Russian sprinter
1982 – Tara Lipinski, American figure skater
1982 – Princess Madeleine, Duchess of Hälsingland and Gästrikland
1982 – Ana Lúcia Souza, Brazilian ballerina and journalist
1983 – Jade Bailey, Barbadian athlete
1983 – Marion Barber III, American football player
1983 – Aaron Davey, Australian footballer
1983 – Leelee Sobieski, American actress and producer
1983 – Steve von Bergen, Swiss footballer
1984 – Johanna Kedzierski, German sprinter
1984 – Dirk Van Tichelt, Belgian martial artist
1985 – Richard Chambers, Irish rower
1985 – Celina Jade, Hong Kong-American actress
1985 – Kaia Kanepi, Estonian tennis player
1985 – Andy Schleck, Luxembourger cyclist
1985 – Vasilis Torosidis, Greek footballer
1986 – Al Alburquerque, Dominican baseball player
1986 – Marco Andreolli, Italian footballer
1987 – Martin Harnik, German-Austrian footballer
1987 – Amobi Okoye, Nigerian-American football player
1988 – Jeff Teague, American basketball player
1989 – David Miller, South African cricketer
1989 – Mustapha Carayol, Gambian footballer
1989 – Alexandra Stan, Romanian singer-songwriter, dancer, and model
1991 – Alexa Scimeca Knierim, American figure skater
1992 – Kate Upton, American model and actress
1996 – Wen Junhui, Chinese singer
1997 – Cheung Ka-long, Hong Kong foil fencer, 2020 Olympic champion
1998 – Ryan Papenhuyzen, Australian rugby league player
Deaths
Pre-1600
323 BC – Alexander the Great, Macedonian king (b. 356 BC)
AD 38 – Julia Drusilla, Roman sister of Caligula (b. 16 AD)
223 – Liu Bei, Chinese emperor (b. 161)
779 – Emperor Daizong of Tang (b. 727)
754 – Abul Abbas al-Saffah, Muslim caliph (b. 721)
871 – Odo I, Frankish nobleman
903 – Cheng Rui, Chinese warlord
932 – Dong Zhang, Chinese general
942 – Liu Yan, emperor of Southern Han (b. 889)
1075 – Ernest, Margrave of Austria (b. 1027)
1141 – Richenza of Northeim (b. 1087)
1190 – Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor (b. 1122)
1261 – Matilda of Brandenburg, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg (b. 1210)
1338 – Kitabatake Akiie, Japanese governor (b. 1318)
1364 – Agnes of Austria (b. 1281)
1424 – Ernest, Duke of Austria (b. 1377)
1437 – Joan of Navarre, Queen of England (b. 1370)
1468 – Idris Imad al-Din, supreme leader of Tayyibi Isma'ilism, scholar and historian (b. 1392)
1552 – Alexander Barclay, English poet and author (b. 1476)
1556 – Martin Agricola, German composer and theorist (b. 1486)
1580 – Luís de Camões, Portuguese poet (b. 1524–25)
1601–1900
1604 – Isabella Andreini, Italian actress (b. 1562)
1607 – John Popham, English politician, Attorney General for England and Wales (b. 1531)
1654 – Alessandro Algardi, Italian sculptor (b. 1598)
1680 – Johan Göransson Gyllenstierna, Swedish lawyer and politician (b. 1635)
1692 – Bridget Bishop, Colonial Massachusetts woman hanged as a witch during the Salem witch trials (b. 1632)
1735 – Thomas Hearne, English historian and author (b. 1678)
1753 – Joachim Ludwig Schultheiss von Unfriedt, German architect (b. 1678)
1776 – Hsinbyushin, Burmese king (b. 1736)
1776 – Leopold Widhalm, Austrian instrument maker (b. 1722)
1791 – Toussaint-Guillaume Picquet de la Motte, French admiral (b. 1720)
1799 – Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Caribbean-French violinist, composer, and conductor (b. 1745)
1811 – Charles Frederick, Grand Duke of Baden (b. 1728)
1831 – Hans Karl von Diebitsch, German-Russian field marshal (b. 1785)
1836 – André-Marie Ampère, French physicist and mathematician (b. 1775)
1849 – Thomas Robert Bugeaud, French general and politician (b. 1784)
1849 – Robert Brown, Scottish botanist (b. 1773)
1868 – Mihailo Obrenović III, Prince of Serbia (b. 1823)
1899 – Ernest Chausson, French composer (b. 1855)
1901–present
1901 – Robert Williams Buchanan, Scottish poet, author, and playwright (b. 1841)
1902 – Jacint Verdaguer, Catalan priest and poet (b. 1845)
1906 – Richard Seddon, English-New Zealand politician, 15th Prime Minister of New Zealand (b. 1845)
1909 – Edward Everett Hale, American minister, historian, and author (b. 1822)
1914 – Ödön Lechner, Hungarian architect (b. 1845)
1918 – Arrigo Boito, Italian author, poet, and composer (b. 1842)
1923 – Pierre Loti, French soldier and author (b. 1850)
1924 – Giacomo Matteotti, Italian lawyer and politician (b. 1885)
1926 – Antoni Gaudí, Spanish architect, designed the Park Güell (b. 1852)
1930 – Adolf von Harnack, German historian and theologian (b. 1851)
1934 – Frederick Delius, English composer and educator (b. 1862)
1936 – John Bowser, English-Australian politician, 26th Premier of Victoria (b. 1856)
1937 – Robert Borden, Canadian lawyer and politician, 8th Prime Minister of Canada (b. 1854)
1939 – Albert Ogilvie, Australian politician, 28th Premier of Tasmania (b. 1890)
1940 – Marcus Garvey, Jamaican journalist and activist, founded the Black Star Line (b. 1887)
1944 – Willem Jacob van Stockum, Dutch mathematician and academic (b. 1910)
1946 – Jack Johnson, American boxer (b. 1878)
1947 – Alexander Bethune, Canadian businessman and politician, 12th Mayor of Vancouver (b. 1852)
1949 – Sigrid Undset, Danish-Norwegian novelist, essayist, and translator, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1882)
1955 – Margaret Abbott, Indian-American golfer (b. 1876)
1958 – Angelina Weld Grimké, American journalist, poet, and playwright (b. 1880)
1959 – Zoltán Meskó, Hungarian politician (b. 1883)
1963 – Timothy Birdsall, English cartoonist (b. 1936)
1965 – Vahap Özaltay, Turkish footballer and manager (b. 1908)
1967 – Spencer Tracy, American actor (b. 1900)
1971 – Michael Rennie, English actor (b. 1909)
1973 – William Inge, American playwright and novelist (b. 1913)
1974 – Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester (b. 1900)
1976 – Adolph Zukor, American film producer, co-founded Paramount Pictures (b. 1873)
1982 – Rainer Werner Fassbinder, German actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1945)
1984 – Halide Nusret Zorlutuna, Turkish author and poet (b. 1901)
1986 – Merle Miller, American author and playwright (b. 1919)
1987 – Elizabeth Hartman, American actress (b. 1943)
1988 – Louis L'Amour, American novelist and short story writer (b. 1908)
1991 – Jean Bruller, French author and illustrator, co-founded Les Éditions de Minuit (b. 1902)
1992 – Hachidai Nakamura, Chinese-Japanese pianist and composer (b. 1931)
1993 – Les Dawson, English comedian, actor, writer and presenter (b. 1931)
1996 – George Hees, Canadian soldier, football player, and politician (b. 1910)
1996 – Jo Van Fleet, American actress (b. 1915)
1998 – Jim Hearn, American baseball player (b. 1921)
1998 – Hammond Innes, English soldier and author (b. 1914)
2000 – Hafez al-Assad, Syrian general and politician, 18th President of Syria (b. 1930)
2000 – Brian Statham, English cricketer (b. 1930)
2001 – Leila Pahlavi, Princess of Iran (b. 1970)
2002 – John Gotti, American mobster (b. 1940)
2003 – Donald Regan, American colonel and politician, 11th White House Chief of Staff (b. 1918)
2003 – Bernard Williams, English philosopher and academic (b. 1929)
2003 – Phil Williams, Welsh academic and politician (b. 1939)
2004 – Ray Charles, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and actor (b. 1930)
2004 – Odette Laure, French actress and singer (b. 1917)
2004 – Xenophon Zolotas, Greek economist and politician, 177th Prime Minister of Greece (b. 1904)
2005 – Curtis Pitts, American aircraft designer, designed the Pitts Special (b. 1915)
2007 – Augie Auer, American-New Zealand meteorologist (b. 1940)
2008 – Chinghiz Aitmatov, Kyrgyzstani author and diplomat (b. 1928)
2009 – Stelios Skevofilakas, Greek footballer (b. 1940)
2010 – Basil Schott, American archbishop (b. 1939)
2010 – Sigmar Polke, German painter and photographer (b. 1941)
2011 – Brian Lenihan Jnr, Irish lawyer and politician, 25th Irish Minister for Finance (b. 1959)
2012 – Piero Bellugi, Italian conductor (b. 1924)
2012 – Warner Fusselle, American sportscaster (b. 1944)
2012 – Will Hoebee, Dutch songwriter and producer (b. 1947)
2012 – Georges Mathieu, French painter and academic (b. 1921)
2012 – Joshua Orwa Ojode, Kenyan politician (b. 1958)
2012 – George Saitoti, Kenyan economist and politician, 6th Vice-President of Kenya (b. 1945)
2012 – Sudono Salim, Chinese-Indonesian businessman, founded Bank Central Asia (b. 1916)
2012 – Gordon West, English footballer (b. 1943)
2013 – Doug Bailey, American political consultant (b. 1933)
2013 – Enrique Orizaola, Spanish footballer and coach (b. 1922)
2013 – Barbara Vucanovich, American lawyer and politician (b. 1921)
2014 – Marcello Alencar, Brazilian lawyer and politician, 57th Governor of Rio de Janeiro (b. 1925)
2014 – Gary Gilmour, Australian cricketer and manager (b. 1951)
2014 – Robert M. Grant, American theologian and academic (b. 1917)
2014 – Jack Lee, American radio host and politician (b. 1920)
2015 – Robert Chartoff, American film producer and philanthropist (b. 1933)
2015 – Wolfgang Jeschke, German author and publisher (b. 1936)
2016 – Christina Grimmie, American singer-songwriter (b. 1994)
2016 – Gordie Howe, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1928)
2017 – Julia Perez, Indonesian singer and actress (b. 1980)
2018 – Neal E. Boyd, American singer, winner of the 2008 season of America's Got Talent (b. 1975)
2020 – Claudell Washington, American baseball player (b. 1954)
Holidays and observances
Abolition Day (French Guiana)
Army Day (Jordan)
World Art Nouveau Day (Worldwide)
Christian feast day:
Bardo
Getulius, Amancius and Cerealus
Guardian Angel of Portugal
John of Tobolsk (Russian Orthodox Church)
Landry of Paris
Maurinus of Cologne
Maximus of Aveia (or of Aquila)
Maximus of Naples
Olivia
June 10 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Navy Day (Italy)
Portugal Day, also Day of Camões (Portugal and the Portuguese communities)
Reconciliation Day (Republic of the Congo)
Notes
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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Events
Pre-1600
910 – Battle of Augsburg: The Hungarians defeat the East Frankish army under King Louis the Child, using the famous feigned retreat tactic of the nomadic warriors.
1240 – At the instigation of Louis IX of France, an inter-faith debate, known as the Disputation of Paris, starts between a Christian monk and four rabbis.
1381 – Peasants' Revolt: In England, rebels assemble at Blackheath, just outside London.
1418 – Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War: Parisians slaughter sympathizers of Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac, along with all prisoners, foreign bankers, and students and faculty of the College of Navarre.
1429 – Hundred Years' War: On the second day of the Battle of Jargeau, Joan of Arc leads the French army in their capture of the city and the English commander, William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk.
1550 – The city of Helsinki, Finland (belonging to Sweden at the time) is founded by King Gustav I of Sweden.
1601–1900
1643 – The Westminster Assembly is convened by the Parliament of England, without the assent of Charles I, in order to restructure the Church of England.
1653 – First Anglo-Dutch War: The Battle of the Gabbard begins, lasting until the following day.
1665 – Thomas Willett is appointed the first mayor of New York City.
1758 – French and Indian War: Siege of Louisbourg: James Wolfe's attack at Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, commences.
1772 – French explorer Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne and 25 of his men killed by Māori in New Zealand.
1775 – American War of Independence: British general Thomas Gage declares martial law in Massachusetts. The British offer a pardon to all colonists who lay down their arms. There would be only two exceptions to the amnesty: Samuel Adams and John Hancock, if captured, were to be hanged.
1776 – The Virginia Declaration of Rights is adopted.
1798 – Irish Rebellion of 1798: Battle of Ballynahinch.
1817 – The earliest form of bicycle, the dandy horse, is driven by Karl von Drais.
1821 – Badi VII, king of Sennar, surrenders his throne and realm to Isma'il Pasha, general of the Ottoman Empire, ending the existence of that Sudanese kingdom.
1830 – Beginning of the Invasion of Algiers: Thiry-four thousand French soldiers land 27 kilometers west of Algiers, at Sidi Ferruch.
1864 – American Civil War, Overland Campaign: Battle of Cold Harbor: Ulysses S. Grant gives the Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee a victory when he pulls his Union troops from their position at Cold Harbor, Virginia and moves south.
1898 – Philippine Declaration of Independence: General Emilio Aguinaldo declares the Philippines' independence from Spain.
1899 – New Richmond tornado: The eighth deadliest tornado in U.S. history kills 117 people and injures around 200.
1900 – The Reichstag approves new legislation continuing Germany's naval expansion program. It provides for construction of 38 battleships over a 20-year period. Germany's fleet will be the largest in the world.
1901–present
1914 – Massacre of Phocaea: Turkish irregulars slaughter 50 to 100 Greeks and expel thousands of others in an ethnic cleansing operation in the Ottoman Empire.
1921 – Mikhail Tukhachevsky orders the use of chemical weapons against the Tambov Rebellion, bringing an end to the peasant uprising.
1935 – A ceasefire is negotiated between Bolivia and Paraguay, ending the Chaco War.
1938 – The Helsinki Olympic Stadium was inaugurated in Töölö, Helsinki, Finland.
1939 – Shooting begins on Paramount Pictures' Dr. Cyclops, the first horror film photographed in three-strip Technicolor.
1939 – The Baseball Hall of Fame opens in Cooperstown, New York.
1940 – World War II: Thirteen thousand British and French troops surrender to Major General Erwin Rommel at Saint-Valery-en-Caux.
1942 – Anne Frank receives a diary for her thirteenth birthday.
1943 – The Holocaust: Germany liquidates the Jewish Ghetto in Brzeżany, Poland (now Berezhany, Ukraine). Around 1,180 Jews are led to the city's old Jewish graveyard and shot.
1944 – World War II: Operation Overlord: American paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division secure the town of Carentan, Normandy, France.
1954 – Pope Pius XII canonises Dominic Savio, who was 14 years old at the time of his death, as a saint, making him at the time the youngest unmartyred saint in the Roman Catholic Church. In 2017, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, aged ten and nine at the time of their deaths, are declared saints.
1963 – NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers is murdered in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi by Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith during the civil rights movement.
1963 – The film Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, is released in US theaters. It was the most expensive film made at the time.
1964 – Anti-apartheid activist and ANC leader Nelson Mandela is sentenced to life in prison for sabotage in South Africa.
1967 – The United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia declares all U.S. state laws which prohibit interracial marriage to be unconstitutional.
1975 – India, Judge Jagmohanlal Sinha of the city of Allahabad ruled that India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had used corrupt practices to win her seat in the Indian Parliament, and that she should be banned from holding any public office. Mrs. Gandhi sent word that she refused to resign.
1979 – Bryan Allen wins the second Kremer prize for a man-powered flight across the English Channel in the Gossamer Albatross.
1981 – The first of the Indiana Jones film franchise, Raiders of the Lost Ark, is released in theaters.
1982 – Nuclear disarmament rally and concert, New York City.
1987 – The Central African Republic's former emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa is sentenced to death for crimes he had committed during his 13-year rule.
1987 – Cold War: At the Brandenburg Gate, U.S. President Ronald Reagan publicly challenges Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.
1988 – Austral Líneas Aéreas Flight 46, a McDonnell Douglas MD-81, crashes short of the runway at Libertador General José de San Martín Airport, killing all 22 people on board.
1990 – Russia Day: The parliament of the Russian Federation formally declares its sovereignty.
1991 – Russians first democratically elected Boris Yeltsin as the President of Russia.
1991 – Kokkadichcholai massacre: The Sri Lankan Army massacres 152 minority Tamil civilians in the village of Kokkadichcholai near the eastern province town of Batticaloa.
1993 – An election takes place in Nigeria and is won by Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola. Its results are later annulled by the military Government of Ibrahim Babangida.
1997 – Queen Elizabeth II reopens the Globe Theatre in London.
1999 – Kosovo War: Operation Joint Guardian begins when a NATO-led United Nations peacekeeping force (KFor) enters the province of Kosovo in Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
2009 – Analog television stations (excluding low-powered stations) switch to digital television following the DTV Delay Act.
2009 – A disputed presidential election in Iran leads to wide-ranging local and international protests.
2016 – Forty-nine civilians are killed and 58 others injured in an attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; the gunman, Omar Mateen, is killed in a gunfight with police.
2017 – American student Otto Warmbier returns home in a coma after spending 17 months in a North Korean prison and dies a week later.
2018 – United States President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un of North Korea held the first meeting between leaders of their two countries in Singapore.
Births
Pre-1600
950 – Reizei, Japanese emperor (d. 1011)
1107 – Gao Zong, Chinese emperor (d. 1187)
1161 – Constance, Duchess of Brittany (d. 1201)
1519 – Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (d. 1574)
1561 – Anna of Württemberg, German princess (d. 1616)
1564 – John Casimir, Duke of Saxe-Coburg (d. 1633)
1573 – Robert Radclyffe, 5th Earl of Sussex, soldier (d. 1629)
1577 – Paul Guldin, Swiss astronomer and mathematician (d. 1643)
1580 – Adriaen van Stalbemt, Flemish painter (d. 1662)
1601–1900
1653 – Maria Amalia of Courland, Landgravine of Hesse-Kassel (d. 1711)
1686 – Marie-Catherine Homassel Hecquet, French writer (d. 1764)
1711 – Louis Legrand, French priest and theologian (d. 1780)
1760 – Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai, French author, playwright, journalist, and politician (d. 1797)
1771 – Patrick Gass, American sergeant (Lewis and Clark Expedition) and author (d. 1870)
1775 – Karl Freiherr von Müffling, Prussian field marshal (d. 1851)
1777 – Robert Clark, American physician and politician (d. 1837)
1795 – John Marston, American sailor (d. 1885)
1798 – Samuel Cooper, American general (d. 1876)
1800 – Samuel Wright Mardis, American politician (d. 1836)
1802 – Harriet Martineau, English sociologist and author (d. 1876)
1806 – John A. Roebling, German-American engineer, designed the Brooklyn Bridge (d. 1869)
1807 – Ante Kuzmanić, Croatian physician and journalist (d. 1879)
1812 – Edmond Hébert, French geologist and academic (d. 1890)
1819 – Charles Kingsley, English priest, historian, and author (d. 1875)
1827 – Johanna Spyri, Swiss author, best known for Heidi (d. 1901)
1831 – Robert Herbert, English-Australian politician, 1st Premier of Queensland (d. 1905)
1841 – Watson Fothergill, English architect, designed the Woodborough Road Baptist Church (d. 1928)
1843 – David Gill, Scottish-English astronomer and author (d. 1914)
1851 – Oliver Lodge, English physicist and academic (d. 1940)
1857 – Maurice Perrault, Canadian architect, engineer, and politician, 15th Mayor of Longueuil (d. 1909)
1858 – Harry Johnston, English botanist and explorer (d. 1927)
1858 – Henry Scott Tuke, English painter and photographer (d. 1929)
1861 – William Attewell, English cricketer and umpire (d. 1927)
1864 – Frank Chapman, American ornithologist, photographer, and author (d. 1945)
1877 – Thomas C. Hart, American admiral and politician (d. 1971)
1883 – Fernand Gonder, French pole vaulter (d. 1969)
1883 – Robert Lowie, Austrian-American anthropologist and academic (d. 1957)
1888 – Zygmunt Janiszewski, Polish mathematician and academic (d. 1920)
1890 – Egon Schiele, Austrian soldier and painter (d. 1918)
1892 – Djuna Barnes, American novelist, journalist, and playwright (d. 1982)
1895 – Eugénie Brazier, French chef (d. 1977)
1897 – Anthony Eden, English soldier and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1977)
1899 – Fritz Albert Lipmann, German-American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1986)
1899 – Weegee, Ukrainian-American photographer and journalist (d. 1968)
1901–present
1902 – Hendrik Elias, Belgian lawyer and politician, Mayor of Ghent (d. 1973)
1905 – Ray Barbuti, American sprinter and football player (d. 1988)
1906 – Sandro Penna, Italian poet (d. 1977)
1908 – Alphonse Ouimet, Canadian broadcaster (d. 1988)
1908 – Marina Semyonova, Russian ballerina and educator (d. 2010)
1908 – Otto Skorzeny, German SS officer (d. 1975)
1910 – Bill Naughton, Irish-English playwright and author (d. 1992)
1912 – Bill Cowley, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (d. 1993)
1912 – Carl Hovland, American psychologist and academic (d. 1961)
1913 – Jean Victor Allard, Canadian general (d. 1996)
1913 – Desmond Piers, Canadian admiral (d. 2005)
1914 – William Lundigan, American actor (d. 1975)
1914 – Go Seigen, Chinese-Japanese Go player (d. 2014)
1915 – Priscilla Lane, American actress (d. 1995)
1915 – Christopher Mayhew, English soldier and politician (d. 1997)
1915 – David Rockefeller, American banker and businessman (d. 2017)
1916 – Irwin Allen, American director and producer (d. 1991)
1916 – Raúl Héctor Castro, Mexican-American politician and diplomat, 14th Governor of Arizona (d. 2015)
1918 – Samuel Z. Arkoff, American film producer (d. 2001)
1918 – Georgia Louise Harris Brown, American architect (d. 1999)
1918 – Christie Jayaratnam Eliezer, Sri Lankan-Australian mathematician and academic (d. 2001)
1919 – Uta Hagen, German-American actress and educator (d. 2004)
1920 – Dave Berg, American soldier and cartoonist (d. 2002)
1920 – Peter Jones, English actor and screenwriter (d. 2000)
1921 – Luis García Berlanga, Spanish director and screenwriter (d. 2010)
1921 – Christopher Derrick, English author, critic, and academic (d. 2007)
1921 – James Archibald Houston, Canadian author and illustrator (d. 2005)
1922 – Margherita Hack, Italian astrophysicist and author (d. 2013)
1924 – George H. W. Bush, American lieutenant and politician, 41st President of the United States (d. 2018)
1924 – Grete Dollitz, German-American guitarist and radio host (d. 2013)
1928 – Vic Damone, American singer-songwriter and actor (d. 2018)
1928 – Petros Molyviatis, Greek politician and diplomat, Greek Minister for Foreign Affairs
1928 – Richard M. Sherman, American composer and director
1929 – Brigid Brophy, English author and critic (d. 1995)
1929 – Anne Frank, German-Dutch diarist; victim of the Holocaust (d. 1945)
1929 – Jameel Jalibi, Pakistani linguist and academic (d. 2019)
1929 – John McCluskey, Baron McCluskey, Scottish lawyer, judge, and politician, Solicitor General for Scotland (d. 2017)
1930 – Jim Burke, Australian cricketer (d. 1979)
1930 – Donald Byrne, American chess player (d. 1976)
1930 – Innes Ireland, Scottish race car driver and engineer (d. 1993)
1930 – Jim Nabors, American actor and singer (d. 2017)
1931 – Trevanian, American author and scholar (d. 2005)
1931 – Rona Jaffe, American novelist (d. 2005)
1932 – Mimi Coertse, South African soprano and producer
1932 – Mamo Wolde, Ethiopian runner (d. 2002)
1933 – Eddie Adams, American photographer and journalist (d. 2004)
1934 – John A. Alonzo, American actor and cinematographer (d. 2001)
1934 – Kevin Billington, English director and producer
1935 – Ian Craig, Australian cricketer (d. 2014)
1935 – Paul Kennedy, English lawyer and judge
1937 – Vladimir Arnold, Russian-French mathematician and academic (d. 2010)
1937 – Klaus Basikow, German footballer and manager (d. 2015)
1937 – Antal Festetics, Hungarian-Austrian biologist and zoologist
1937 – Chips Moman, American record producer, guitarist, and songwriter (d. 2016)
1938 – Jean-Marie Doré, Guinean lawyer and politician, 11th Prime Minister of Guinea (d. 2016)
1938 – Tom Oliver, English-Australian actor
1939 – Ron Lynch, Australian rugby league player and coach
1939 – Frank McCloskey, American sergeant and politician (d. 2003)
1940 – Jacques Brassard, Canadian educator and politician
1941 – Marv Albert, American sportscaster
1941 – Chick Corea, American pianist and composer (d. 2021)
1941 – Roy Harper, English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor
1941 – Reg Presley, English singer-songwriter (d. 2013)
1941 – Lucille Roybal-Allard, American politician
1942 – Len Barry, American singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2020)
1942 – Bert Sakmann, German physiologist and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate
1945 – Pat Jennings, Irish footballer and coach
1946 – Michel Bergeron, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1946 – Bobby Gould, English footballer and manager
1946 – Catherine Bréchignac, French physicist and academic
1948 – Hans Binder, Austrian race car driver
1948 – Herbert Meyer, German footballer
1948 – Len Wein, American comic book writer and editor (d. 2017)
1949 – Jens Böhrnsen, German judge and politician
1949 – Marc Tardif, Canadian ice hockey player
1949 – John Wetton, English singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer (d. 2017)
1950 – Oğuz Abadan, Turkish singer-songwriter and guitarist
1950 – Michael Fabricant, English politician
1950 – Sonia Manzano, American actress of Puerto Rican descent, noted for playing Maria on Sesame Street
1950 – Bun E. Carlos, American drummer
1951 – Brad Delp, American musician and singer (d. 2007)
1951 – Andranik Margaryan, Armenian engineer and politician, 10th Prime Minister of Armenia (d. 2007)
1952 – Spencer Abraham, American academic and politician, 10th United States Secretary of Energy
1952 – Junior Brown, American country music singer-songwriter and guitarist
1952 – Pete Farndon, English bass player and songwriter (d. 1983)
1953 – Rocky Burnette, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1954 – Tim Razzall, Baron Razzall, English lawyer and politician
1956 – Terry Alderman, Australian cricketer and sportscaster
1957 – Timothy Busfield, American actor, director, and producer
1957 – Javed Miandad, Pakistani cricketer and coach
1958 – Meredith Brooks, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1959 – John Linnell, American singer-songwriter and musician
1959 – Scott Thompson, Canadian actor and comedian
1960 – Joe Kopicki, American basketball player and coach
1962 – Jordan Peterson, Canadian psychologist, professor and cultural critic
1963 – Philippe Bugalski, French race car driver (d. 2012)
1963 – Warwick Capper, Australian footballer, coach, and actor
1963 – Tim DeKay, American actor
1963 – Jerry Lynn, American wrestler
1964 – Derek Higgins, Irish race car driver
1964 – Kent Jones, American journalist
1964 – Paula Marshall, American actress
1964 – Peter Such, Scottish-born, English cricketer
1965 – Adrian Toole, Australian rugby league player
1965 – Gwen Torrence, American sprinter
1965 – Cathy Tyson, English actress
1966 – Marc Glanville, Australian rugby league player
1966 – Tom Misteli, Swiss cell biologist
1967 – Aivar Kuusmaa, Estonian basketball player and coach
1967 – Frances O'Connor, English-Australian actress
1968 – Scott Aldred, American baseball player and coach
1968 – Htay Kywe, Burmese activist
1968 – Bobby Sheehan, American bass player and songwriter (d. 1999)
1969 – Zsolt Daczi, Hungarian guitarist (d. 2007)
1969 – Héctor Garza, Mexican wrestler (d. 2013)
1969 – Mathieu Schneider, American ice hockey player
1969 – Heinz-Christian Strache, Austrian politician
1971 – Mark Henry, American weightlifter and wrestler
1971 – Ryan Klesko, American baseball player
1971 – Jérôme Romain, Caribbean-Dominican triple jumper and coach
1973 – Jason Caffey, American basketball player and coach
1973 – Darryl White, Australian footballer
1974 – Flávio Conceição, Brazilian footballer
1974 – Hideki Matsui, Japanese baseball player
1974 – Jason Mewes, American actor and producer
1974 – Kerry Kittles, American basketball player
1975 – Bryan Alvarez, American wrestler and journalist
1975 – Stéphanie Szostak, French-American actress
1976 – Antawn Jamison, American basketball player and sportscaster
1976 – Ray Price, Zimbabwean cricketer
1976 – Thomas Sørensen, Danish footballer
1976 – Paul Stenning, English author
1977 – Wade Redden, Canadian ice hockey player
1977 – Kenny Wayne Shepherd, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1978 – Lewis Moody, English rugby player
1979 – Dallas Clark, American football player
1979 – Martine Dugrenier, Canadian wrestler
1979 – Diego Milito, Argentine footballer
1979 – Robyn, Swedish singer-songwriter, musician, and record producer
1979 – Earl Watson, American basketball player and coach
1980 – Marco Bortolami, Italian rugby player
1980 – Larry Foote, American football player
1981 – Raitis Grafs, Latvian basketball player
1981 – Adriana Lima, Brazilian model and actress
1982 – Ben Blackwell, American drummer
1982 – Diem Brown, German-American journalist and activist (d. 2014)
1982 – Jason David, American football player
1982 – Shailaja Pujari, Indian weightlifter
1982 – James Tomlinson, English cricketer
1983 – Bryan Habana, South African rugby player
1983 – Alexander Pipa, German rugby player
1983 – Christine Sinclair, Canadian soccer player
1984 – James Kwalia, Kenyan-Qatari runner
1984 – Bruno Soriano, Spanish footballer
1985 – Blake Ross, American computer programmer, co-created Mozilla Firefox
1985 – Sam Thaiday, Australian rugby league player
1985 – Kendra Wilkinson, American model, actress, and author
1986 – Salim Mehajer, Australian politician
1988 – Eren Derdiyok, Swiss footballer
1988 – Mauricio Isla, Chilean footballer
1989 – Emma Eliasson, Swedish ice hockey player
1989 – Ibrahim Jeilan, Ethiopian runner
1990 – Jrue Holiday, American basketball player
1990 – David Worrall, English footballer
1992 – Philippe Coutinho, Brazilian footballer
1996 – Shonica Wharton, Barbadian netball player
Deaths
Pre-1600
796 – Hisham I, Muslim emir ( 757)
816 – Pope Leo III (b. 750)
918 – Æthelflæd, Mercian daughter of Alfred the Great (b. 870)
1020 – Lyfing, English archbishop (b. 999)
1036 – Tedald, Italian bishop (b. 990)
1144 – Al-Zamakhshari, Persian theologian (b. 1075)
1152 – Henry of Scotland, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon (b. 1114)
1266 – Henry II, Prince of Anhalt-Aschersleben (b. 1215)
1294 – John I of Brienne, Count of Eu
1418 – Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac (b. 1360)
1435 – John FitzAlan, 14th Earl of Arundel, English commander (b. 1408)
1478 – Ludovico III Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua (b. 1412)
1524 – Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, Spanish conquistador (b. 1465)
1560 – Ii Naomori, Japanese warrior (b. 1506)
1560 – Imagawa Yoshimoto, Japanese daimyō (b. 1519)
1565 – Adrianus Turnebus, French philologist and scholar (b. 1512)
1567 – Richard Rich, 1st Baron Rich, English politician, Lord Chancellor of England (b. 1490)
1601–1900
1647 – Thomas Farnaby, English scholar and educator (b. 1575)
1668 – Charles Berkeley, 2nd Viscount Fitzhardinge, English politician (b. 1599)
1675 – Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy (b. 1634)
1734 – James FitzJames, 1st Duke of Berwick, French-English general and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire (b. 1670)
1758 – Prince Augustus William of Prussia (b. 1722)
1772 – Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne, French explorer (b. 1724)
1778 – Philip Livingston, American merchant and politician (b. 1716)
1816 – Pierre Augereau, French general (b. 1757)
1818 – Egwale Seyon, Ethiopian emperor
1841 – Konstantinos Nikolopoulos, Greek composer, archaeologist, and philologist (b. 1786)
1900 – Lucretia Peabody Hale, American journalist and author (b. 1820)
1901–present
1904 – Camille of Renesse-Breidbach (b. 1836)
1912 – Frédéric Passy, French economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1822)
1917 – Teresa Carreño, Venezuelan-American singer-songwriter, pianist, and conductor (b. 1853)
1932 – Theo Heemskerk, Dutch lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of the Netherlands (b. 1852)
1937 – Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Russian general (b. 1893)
1944 – Erich Marcks, German general (b. 1891)
1946 – Médéric Martin, Canadian politician, mayor of Montreal (b. 1869)
1952 – Harry Lawson, Australian politician, 27th Premier of Victoria (b. 1875)
1957 – Jimmy Dorsey, American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader (The Dorsey Brothers and The California Ramblers) (b. 1904)
1962 – John Ireland, English composer and educator (b. 1879)
1963 – Medgar Evers, American soldier and activist (b. 1925)
1966 – Hermann Scherchen, German viola player and conductor (b. 1891)
1968 – Herbert Read, English poet and critic (b. 1893)
1969 – Aleksandr Deyneka, Ukrainian-Russian painter and sculptor (b. 1899)
1972 – Edmund Wilson, American critic, essayist, and editor (b. 1895)
1972 – Dinanath Gopal Tendulkar, Indian writer and documentary filmmaker (b. 1909)
1976 – Gopinath Kaviraj, Indian philosopher and scholar (b. 1887)
1978 – Guo Moruo, Chinese historian, author, and poet (b. 1892)
1978 – Georg Siimenson, Estonian footballer (b. 1912)
1980 – Billy Butlin, South African-English businessman, founded the Butlins Company (b. 1899)
1980 – Masayoshi Ōhira, Japanese politician, 68th Prime minister of Japan (b. 1910)
1980 – Milburn Stone, American actor (b. 1904)
1982 – Ian McKay, English sergeant, Victoria Cross recipient (b. 1953)
1982 – Karl von Frisch, Austrian-German ethologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1886)
1983 – Norma Shearer, Canadian-American actress (b. 1902)
1989 – Bruce Hamilton, Australian public servant (b. 1911)
1990 – Terence O'Neill, Baron O'Neill of the Maine, English captain and politician, 4th Prime Minister of Northern Ireland (b. 1914)
1993 – Monte Melkonian, Armenian-American revolutionary and military commander (b. 1957)
1994 – Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Russian-American rabbi and author (b. 1902)
1994 – Nicole Brown Simpson, ex-wife of O. J. Simpson (b. 1959) and Ron Goldman, restaurant employee (b. 1968)
1995 – Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Italian pianist (b. 1920)
1995 – Pierre Russell, American basketball player (b. 1949)
1997 – Bulat Okudzhava, Russian singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1924)
1998 – Leo Buscaglia, American author and educator (b. 1924)
1998 – Theresa Merritt, American actress and singer (b. 1922)
1999 – J. F. Powers, American novelist and short story writer (b. 1917)
2000 – Purushottam Laxman Deshpande, Indian actor, director, and producer (b. 1919)
2002 – Bill Blass, American fashion designer, founded Bill Blass Limited (b. 1922)
2002 – Zena Sutherland, American reviewer of children's literature (b. 1915)
2003 – Gregory Peck, American actor and political activist (b. 1916)
2005 – Scott Young, Canadian journalist and author (b. 1918)
2006 – Nicky Barr, Australian rugby player and fighter pilot (b. 1915)
2006 – György Ligeti, Romanian-Hungarian composer and educator (b. 1923)
2006 – Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet, Canadian businessman and art collector (b. 1923)
2008 – Miroslav Dvořák, Czech ice hockey player (b. 1951)
2008 – Derek Tapscott, Welsh footballer and manager (b. 1932)
2010 – Al Williamson, American illustrator (b. 1931)
2011 – René Audet, Canadian bishop (b. 1920)
2011 – Carl Gardner, American singer (The Coasters) (b. 1928)
2012 – Hector Bianciotti, Argentinian-French journalist and author (b. 1930)
2012 – Margarete Mitscherlich-Nielsen, Danish-German psychoanalyst and author (b. 1917)
2012 – Medin Zhega, Albanian footballer and manager (b. 1946)
2012 – Elinor Ostrom, American political scientist and economist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1933)
2012 – Pahiño, Spanish footballer (b. 1923)
2012 – Frank Walker, Australian judge and politician, 41st Attorney General of New South Wales (b. 1942)
2013 – Teresita Barajuen, Spanish nun (b. 1908)
2014 – Nabil Hemani, Algerian footballer (b. 1979)
2014 – Dan Jacobson, South African-English author and critic (b. 1929)
2014 – Frank Schirrmacher, German journalist (b. 1959)
2015 – Fernando Brant, Brazilian journalist, poet, and composer (b. 1946)
2018 – Jon Hiseman, English drummer (b. 1944)
2019 – Sylvia Miles, American actress (b. 1924)
Holidays and observances
Chaco Armistice Day (Paraguay)
Christian feast day:
108 Martyrs of World War II
Basilides, Cyrinus, Nabor and Nazarius
Blessed Hildegard Burjan
Enmegahbowh (Episcopal Church)
Eskil
First Ecumenical Council (Lutheran)
Gaspar Bertoni
John of Sahagún
Onuphrius
Pope Leo III
Ternan
June 12 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Dia dos Namorados (Brazil)
Helsinki Day (Finland)
Independence Day, celebrates the independence of the Philippines from Spain in 1898.
June 12 Commemoration (Lagos State)
Loving Day (United States)
Russia Day (Russia)
World Day Against Child Labour, and its related observances:
Children's Day (Haiti)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15807 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20Horton%20Conway | John Horton Conway | John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches of recreational mathematics, most notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life.
Born and raised in Liverpool, Conway spent the first half of his career at the University of Cambridge before moving to the United States, where he held the John von Neumann Professorship at Princeton University for the rest of his career. On 11 April 2020, at age 82, he died of complications from COVID-19.
Early life
Conway was born on 26 December 1937 in Liverpool, the son of Cyril Horton Conway and Agnes Boyce. He became interested in mathematics at a very early age. By the time he was 11, his ambition was to become a mathematician. After leaving sixth form, he studied mathematics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. A "terribly introverted adolescent" in school, he took his admission to Cambridge as an opportunity to transform himself into an extrovert, a change which would later earn him the nickname of "the world's most charismatic mathematician".
Conway was awarded a BA in 1959 and, supervised by Harold Davenport, began to undertake research in number theory. Having solved the open problem posed by Davenport on writing numbers as the sums of fifth powers, Conway began to become interested in infinite ordinals. It appears that his interest in games began during his years studying the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, where he became an avid backgammon player, spending hours playing the game in the common room. He was awarded his doctorate in 1964 and was appointed as College Fellow and Lecturer in Mathematics at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. After leaving Cambridge in 1986, he took up the appointment to the John von Neumann Chair of Mathematics at Princeton University.
Conway's Game of Life
Conway was especially known for the invention of the Game of Life, one of the early examples of a cellular automaton. His initial experiments in that field were done with pen and paper, long before personal computers existed.
Since the game was introduced by Martin Gardner in Scientific American in 1970, it has spawned hundreds of computer programs, web sites, and articles. It is a staple of recreational mathematics. There is an extensive wiki devoted to curating and cataloging the various aspects of the game. From the earliest days, it has been a favorite in computer labs, both for its theoretical interest and as a practical exercise in programming and data display. Conway used to hate the Game of Life—largely because it had come to overshadow some of the other deeper and more important things he has done. Nevertheless, the game did help launch a new branch of mathematics, the field of cellular automata.
The Game of Life is known to be Turing complete.
Conway and Martin Gardner
Conway's career was intertwined with that of mathematics popularizer and Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner. When Gardner featured Conway's Game of Life in his Mathematical Games column in October 1970, it became the most widely read of all his columns and made Conway an instant celebrity. Gardner and Conway had first corresponded in the late 1950s, and over the years Gardner had frequently written about recreational aspects of Conway's work. For instance, he discussed Conway's game of Sprouts (Jul 1967), Hackenbush (Jan 1972), and his angel and devil problem (Feb 1974). In the September 1976 column, he reviewed Conway's book On Numbers and Games and even managed to explain Conway's surreal numbers.
Conway was a prominent member of Martin Gardner's Mathematical Grapevine. He regularly visited Gardner and often wrote him long letters summarizing his recreational research. In a 1976 visit, Gardner kept him for a week, pumping him for information on the Penrose tilings which had just been announced. Conway had discovered many (if not most) of the major properties of the tilings. Gardner used these results when he introduced the world to Penrose tiles in his January 1977 column. The cover of that issue of Scientific American features the Penrose tiles and is based on a sketch by Conway.
Conferences called Gathering 4 Gardner are held every two years to celebrate the legacy of Martin Gardner, and Conway himself was often a featured speaker at these events, discussing various aspects of recreational mathematics.
Major areas of research
Combinatorial game theory
Conway was widely known for his contributions to combinatorial game theory (CGT), a theory of partisan games. This he developed with Elwyn Berlekamp and Richard Guy, and with them also co-authored the book Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays. He also wrote the book On Numbers and Games (ONAG) which lays out the mathematical foundations of CGT.
He was also one of the inventors of sprouts, as well as philosopher's football. He developed detailed analyses of many other games and puzzles, such as the Soma cube, peg solitaire, and Conway's soldiers. He came up with the angel problem, which was solved in 2006.
He invented a new system of numbers, the surreal numbers, which are closely related to certain games and have been the subject of a mathematical novelette by Donald Knuth. He also invented a nomenclature for exceedingly large numbers, the Conway chained arrow notation. Much of this is discussed in the 0th part of ONAG.
Geometry
In the mid-1960s with Michael Guy, Conway established that there are sixty-four convex uniform polychora excluding two infinite sets of prismatic forms. They discovered the grand antiprism in the process, the only non-Wythoffian uniform polychoron. Conway has also suggested a system of notation dedicated to describing polyhedra called Conway polyhedron notation.
In the theory of tessellations, he devised the Conway criterion which is a fast way to identify many prototiles that tile the plane.
He investigated lattices in higher dimensions and was the first to determine the symmetry group of the Leech lattice.
Geometric topology
In knot theory, Conway formulated a new variation of the Alexander polynomial and produced a new invariant now called the Conway polynomial. After lying dormant for more than a decade, this concept became central to work in the 1980s on the novel knot polynomials. Conway further developed tangle theory and invented a system of notation for tabulating knots, nowadays known as Conway notation, while correcting a number of errors in the 19th-century knot tables and extending them to include all but four of the non-alternating primes with 11 crossings.(Some might say "all but 3½ of the non-alternating primes with 11 crossings." The typographical duplication in the published version of his 1970 table seems to be an effort to include one of the two missing knots that was included in the draft of the table that he sent to Fox [Compare D. Lombardero's 1968 Princeton Senior Thesis, which distinguished this one, but not the other, from all others, based on its Alexander polynomial].) The Conway knot is named after him.
Group theory
He was the primary author of the ATLAS of Finite Groups giving properties of many finite simple groups. Working with his colleagues Robert Curtis and Simon P. Norton he constructed the first concrete representations of some of the sporadic groups. More specifically, he discovered three sporadic groups based on the symmetry of the Leech lattice, which have been designated the Conway groups. This work made him a key player in the successful classification of the finite simple groups.
Based on a 1978 observation by mathematician John McKay, Conway and Norton formulated the complex of conjectures known as monstrous moonshine. This subject, named by Conway, relates the monster group with elliptic modular functions, thus bridging two previously distinct areas of mathematics—finite groups and complex function theory. Monstrous moonshine theory has now been revealed to also have deep connections to string theory.
Conway introduced the Mathieu groupoid, an extension of the Mathieu group M12 to 13 points.
Number theory
As a graduate student, he proved one case of a conjecture by Edward Waring, that every integer could be written as the sum of 37 numbers each raised to the fifth power, though Chen Jingrun solved the problem independently before Conway's work could be published.
Algebra
Conway wrote a textbook on Stephen Kleene's theory of state machines and published original work on algebraic structures, focusing particularly on quaternions and octonions. Together with Neil Sloane, he invented the icosians.
Analysis
He invented a base 13 function as a counterexample to the converse of the intermediate value theorem: the function takes on every real value in each interval on the real line, so it has a Darboux property but is not continuous.
Algorithmics
For calculating the day of the week, he invented the Doomsday algorithm. The algorithm is simple enough for anyone with basic arithmetic ability to do the calculations mentally. Conway could usually give the correct answer in under two seconds. To improve his speed, he practised his calendrical calculations on his computer, which was programmed to quiz him with random dates every time he logged on. One of his early books was on finite-state machines.
Theoretical physics
In 2004, Conway and Simon B. Kochen, another Princeton mathematician, proved the free will theorem, a startling version of the "no hidden variables" principle of quantum mechanics. It states that given certain conditions, if an experimenter can freely decide what quantities to measure in a particular experiment, then elementary particles must be free to choose their spins to make the measurements consistent with physical law. In Conway's provocative wording: "if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles."
Awards and honours
Conway received the Berwick Prize (1971), was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1981), became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, was the first recipient of the Pólya Prize (LMS) (1987), won the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (1998) and received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (2000) of the American Mathematical Society. In 2001 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Liverpool, and in 2014 one from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University.
His FRS nomination, in 1981, reads:
In 2017 Conway was given honorary membership of the British Mathematical Association.
Death
On 8 April 2020, Conway developed symptoms of COVID-19. On 11 April, he died in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at the age of 82.
Publications
1971 – Regular algebra and finite machines. Chapman and Hall, London, 1971, Series: Chapman and Hall mathematics series, .
1976 – On numbers and games. Academic Press, New York, 1976, Series: L.M.S. monographs, 6, .
1979 – On the Distribution of Values of Angles Determined by Coplanar Points (with Paul Erdős, Michael Guy, and H. T. Croft). Journal of the London Mathematical Society, vol. II, series 19, pp. 137–143.
1979 – Monstrous Moonshine (with Simon P. Norton). Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, vol. 11, issue 2, pp. 308–339.
1982 – Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays (with Richard K. Guy and Elwyn Berlekamp). Academic Press, .
1985 – Atlas of finite groups (with Robert Turner Curtis, Simon Phillips Norton, Richard A. Parker, and Robert Arnott Wilson). Clarendon Press, New York, Oxford University Press, 1985, .
1988 – Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups (with Neil Sloane). Springer-Verlag, New York, Series: Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften, 290, .
1995 – Minimal-Energy Clusters of Hard Spheres (with Neil Sloane, R. H. Hardin, and Tom Duff). Discrete & Computational Geometry, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 237–259.
1996 – The Book of Numbers (with Richard K. Guy). Copernicus, New York, 1996, .
1997 – The Sensual (quadratic) Form (with Francis Yein Chei Fung). Mathematical Association of America, Washington, DC, 1997, Series: Carus mathematical monographs, no. 26, .
2002 – On Quaternions and Octonions (with Derek A. Smith). A. K. Peters, Natick, MA, 2002, .
2008 – The Symmetries of Things (with Heidi Burgiel and Chaim Goodman-Strauss). A. K. Peters, Wellesley, MA, 2008, .
See also
List of things named after John Horton Conway
References
Sources
Alpert, Mark (1999). Not Just Fun and Games Scientific American, April 1999
Conway, John and Smith, Derek A. (2003). On quaternions and Octonions : their Geometry, Arithmetic, and Symmetry Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 2005, vol=42, issue=2, pp. 229–243,
Boden, Margaret (2006). Mind As Machine, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 1271
du Sautoy, Marcus (2008). Symmetry, HarperCollins, p. 308
Guy, Richard K (1983). Conway's Prime Producing Machine Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Jan. 1983), pp. 26–33
Princeton University (2009). Bibliography of John H. Conway Mathematics Department
Seife, Charles (1994). Impressions of Conway The Sciences
Schleicher, Dierk (2011), Interview with John Conway, Notices of the AMS
External links
Conway leading a tour of brickwork patterns in Princeton, lecturing on the ordinals and on sums of powers and the Bernoulli numbers
necrology by Keith Hartnett in Quanta Magazine, April 20, 2020
1937 births
2020 deaths
20th-century British mathematicians
21st-century mathematicians
Algebraists
Group theorists
Combinatorial game theorists
Cellular automatists
Mathematics popularizers
Recreational mathematicians
English mathematicians
Alumni of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
Fellows of the Royal Society
Princeton University faculty
Scientists from Liverpool
British expatriate academics in the United States
Researchers of artificial life
Deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic in New Jersey | [
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15809 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July%2010 | July 10 |
Events
Pre-1600
138 – Emperor Hadrian dies of heart failure at his residence on the bay of Naples, Baiae; he is buried at Rome in the Tomb of Hadrian beside his late wife, Vibia Sabina.
645 – Isshi Incident: Prince Naka-no-Ōe and Fujiwara no Kamatari assassinate Soga no Iruka during a coup d'état at the imperial palace.
988 – The Norse King Glúniairn recognises Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill, High King of Ireland, and agrees to pay taxes and accept Brehon Law; the event is considered to be the founding of the city of Dublin.
1086 – King Canute IV of Denmark is killed by rebellious peasants.
1212 – The most severe of several early fires of London burns most of the city to the ground.
1460 – Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, defeats the king's Lancastrian forces and takes King Henry VI prisoner in the Battle of Northampton.
1499 – The Portuguese explorer Nicolau Coelho returns to Lisbon after discovering the sea route to India as a companion of Vasco da Gama.
1512 – The Spanish conquest of Iberian Navarre commences with the capture of Goizueta.
1519 – Zhu Chenhao declares the Ming dynasty's Zhengde Emperor a usurper, beginning the Prince of Ning rebellion, and leads his army north in an attempt to capture Nanjing.
1553 – Lady Jane Grey takes the throne of England.
1584 – William I of Orange is assassinated in his home in Delft, Holland, by Balthasar Gérard.
1601–1900
1645 – English Civil War: The Battle of Langport takes place.
1778 – American Revolution: Louis XVI of France declares war on the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1789 – Alexander Mackenzie reaches the Mackenzie River delta.
1806 – The Vellore Mutiny is the first instance of a mutiny by Indian sepoys against the British East India Company.
1832 – U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoes a bill that would re-charter the Second Bank of the United States.
1850 – U.S. President Millard Fillmore is sworn in, a day after becoming president upon Zachary Taylor's death.
1877 – The then-villa of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, formally receives its city charter from the Royal Crown of Spain.
1882 – War of the Pacific: Chile suffers its last military defeat in the Battle of La Concepción when a garrison of 77 men is annihilated by a 1,300-strong Peruvian force, many of them armed with spears.
1883 – War of the Pacific: Chileans led by Alejandro Gorostiaga defeat Andrés Avelino Cáceres's Peruvuan army at the Battle of Huamachuco, hastening the end of the war.
1890 – Wyoming is admitted as the 44th U.S. state.
1901–present
1920 – Arthur Meighen becomes Prime Minister of Canada.
1921 – Belfast's Bloody Sunday: Sixteen people are killed and 161 houses destroyed during rioting and gun battles in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
1924 – Paavo Nurmi won the 1,500 and 5,000 m races with just an hour between them at the Paris Olympics.
1925 – Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called "Monkey Trial" begins of John T. Scopes, a young high school science teacher accused of teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act.
1927 – Kevin O'Higgins TD, Vice-President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State is assassinated by the IRA.
1938 – Howard Hughes begins a 91-hour airplane flight around the world that will set a new record.
1940 – World War II: The Vichy government is established in France.
1940 – World War II: Six days before Adolf Hitler issues his Directive 16 to the combined Wehrmacht armed forces for Operation Sea Lion, the Kanalkampf shipping attacks against British maritime convoys begin, in the leadup to initiating the Battle of Britain.
1941 – Jedwabne pogrom: Massacre of Polish Jews living in and near the village of Jedwabne.
1942 – World War II: An American pilot spots a downed, intact Mitsubishi A6M Zero on Akutan Island (the "Akutan Zero") that the US Navy uses to learn the aircraft's flight characteristics.
1943 – World War II: Operation Husky begins in Sicily.
1947 – Muhammad Ali Jinnah is recommended as the first Governor-General of Pakistan by the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee.
1951 – Korean War: Armistice negotiations begin at Kaesong.
1962 – Telstar, the world's first communications satellite, is launched into orbit.
1966 – The Chicago Freedom Movement, co-founded by Martin Luther King Jr., holds a rally at Soldier Field in Chicago. As many as 60,000 people attend.
1973 – The Bahamas gain full independence within the Commonwealth of Nations.
1976 – Four mercenaries (one American and three British) are executed in Angola following the Luanda Trial.
1978 – ABC World News Tonight premieres on ABC.
1978 – President Moktar Ould Daddah of Mauritania is ousted in a bloodless coup d'état.
1985 – The Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior is bombed and sunk in Auckland harbour by French DGSE agents, killing Fernando Pereira.
1985 – An Aeroflot Tupolev Tu-154 stalls and crashes near Uchkuduk, Uzbekistan (then part of the Soviet Union), killing all 200 people on board in the USSR's worst-ever airline disaster.
1991 – The South African cricket team is readmitted into the International Cricket Council following the end of Apartheid.
1991 – Boris Yeltsin takes office as the first elected President of Russia.
1991 – A Beechcraft Model 99 crashes near Birmingham Municipal Airport (now Birmingham–Shuttlesworth International Airport) in Birmingham, Alabama, killing 13 of the 15 people on board.
1992 – In Miami, former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega is sentenced to 40 years in prison for drug and racketeering violations.
1997 – In London, scientists report the findings of the DNA analysis of a Neanderthal skeleton which supports the "out of Africa theory" of human evolution, placing an "African Eve" at 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
1997 – Miguel Ángel Blanco, a member of Partido Popular (Spain), is kidnapped (and later murdered) in the Basque city of Ermua by ETA members, sparking widespread protests.
1998 – Catholic Church sexual abuse cases: The Diocese of Dallas agrees to pay $23.4 million to nine former altar boys who claimed they were sexually abused by Rudolph Kos, a former priest.
1999 – In women's association football, the United States defeated China in a penalty shoot-out at the Rose Bowl near Los Angeles to win the final match of the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup. The final was watched by 90,185 spectators, which set a new world record for attendance at a women's sporting event.
2000 – EADS, the world's second-largest aerospace group is formed by the merger of Aérospatiale-Matra, DASA, and CASA.
2000 – Bashar al-Assad succeeds his father Hafez al-Assad as President of Syria.
2002 – At a Sotheby's auction, Peter Paul Rubens's painting The Massacre of the Innocents is sold for £49.5 million (US$76.2 million) to Lord Thomson.
2007 – Erden Eruç begins the first solo human-powered circumnavigation of the world.
2008 – Former Macedonian Interior Minister Ljube Boškoski is acquitted of all war-crimes charges by a United Nations Tribunal.
2011 – Russian cruise ship Bulgaria sinks in Volga near Syukeyevo, Tatarstan, causing 122 deaths.
2012 – The Episcopal Church USA allows same-sex marriage.
2017 – Iraqi Civil War: Mosul is declared fully liberated from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
2019 – The last Volkswagen Beetle rolls off the line in Puebla, Mexico. The last of 5,961 "Special Edition" cars will be exhibited in a museum.
Births
Pre-1600
1419 – Emperor Go-Hanazono of Japan (d. 1471)
1451 – James III of Scotland (d. 1488)
1501 – Cho Shik, Korean poet and scholar (d. 1572)
1509 – John Calvin, French pastor and theologian (d. 1564)
1515 – Francisco de Toledo, Viceroy of Peru (d. 1582)
1517 – Odet de Coligny, French cardinal (d. 1571)
1533 – Antonio Possevino, Italian diplomat (d. 1611)
1592 – Pierre d'Hozier, French genealogist and historian (d. 1660)
1601–1900
1614 – Arthur Annesley, 1st Earl of Anglesey, Irish-English politician (d. 1686)
1625 – Jean Herauld Gourville, French adventurer (d. 1703)
1638 – David Teniers III, Flemish painter (d. 1685)
1666 – John Ernest Grabe, German theologian and academic (d. 1711)
1682 – Roger Cotes, English mathematician and astronomer (d. 1716)
1723 – William Blackstone, English lawyer, judge, and politician (d. 1780)
1724 – Eva Ekeblad, Swedish noble and agronomist (d. 1786)
1752 – St. George Tucker, United States federal judge (d. 1827)
1792 – George M. Dallas, American lawyer and politician, 11th Vice President of the United States (d. 1864)
1802 – Robert Chambers, Scottish geologist and publisher, co-founded Chambers Harrap (d. 1871)
1804 – Emma Smith, American religious leader (d. 1879)
1809 – Friedrich August von Quenstedt, German geologist and palaeontologist (d. 1889)
1823 – Louis-Napoléon Casault, Canadian lawyer, judge, and politician (d. 1908)
1830 – Camille Pissarro, Danish-French painter (d. 1903)
1832 – Alvan Graham Clark, American astronomer (d. 1897)
1835 – Henryk Wieniawski, Polish violinist and composer (d. 1880)
1839 – Adolphus Busch, German brewer, co-founded Anheuser-Busch (d. 1913)
1856 – Nikola Tesla, Serbian-American physicist and engineer (d. 1943)
1864 – Austin Chapman, Australian businessman and politician, 4th Australian Minister for Defence (d. 1926)
1867 – Prince Maximilian of Baden (d. 1929)
1871 – Marcel Proust, French novelist, critic, and essayist (d. 1922)
1874 – Sergey Konenkov, Russian sculptor (d. 1971)
1875 – Mary McLeod Bethune, American educator and activist (d. 1955)
1875 – Dezső Pattantyús-Ábrahám, Hungarian politician (d. 1973)
1877 – Ernst Bresslau, German zoologist (d. 1935)
1878 – Otto Freundlich, German painter and sculptor (d. 1943)
1882 – Ima Hogg, American society leader, philanthropist, patron and collector of the arts (d. 1975)
1883 – Johannes Blaskowitz, German general (d. 1948)
1883 – Hugo Raudsepp, Estonian playwright and politician (d. 1952)
1888 – Giorgio de Chirico, Greek-Italian painter and set designer (d. 1978)
1888 – Toyohiko Kagawa, Japanese evangelist, author, and activist (d. 1960)
1891 – Edith Quimby, American medical researcher and physicist (d. 1982)
1894 – Jimmy McHugh, American composer (d. 1969)
1895 – Carl Orff, German composer and educator (d. 1982)
1896 – Thérèse Casgrain, Canadian politician (d. 1981)
1897 – Legs Diamond, American gangster (d. 1931)
1897 – Karl Plagge, German general and engineer (d. 1957)
1898 – Renée Björling, Swedish actress (d. 1975)
1899 – John Gilbert, American actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 1936)
1899 – Heiri Suter, Swiss cyclist (d. 1978)
1900 – Mitchell Parish, Lithuanian-American songwriter (d. 1993)
1900 – Sampson Sievers, Russian monk and mystic (d. 1979)
1901–present
1902 – Kurt Alder, German chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1958)
1902 – Nicolás Guillén, Cuban poet, journalist, and activist (d. 1989)
1903 – Werner Best, German SS officer and jurist (d. 1989)
1903 – John Wyndham, English soldier and author (d. 1969)
1904 – Lili Damita, French-American actress (d. 1994)
1905 – Mildred Benson, American journalist and author (d. 2002)
1905 – Thomas Gomez, American actor (d. 1971)
1905 – Wolfram Sievers, German physician (d. 1948)
1907 – Blind Boy Fuller, American singer and guitarist (d. 1941)
1909 – Donald Sinclair, English lieutenant and businessman (d. 1981)
1911 – Terry-Thomas, English comedian and character actor (d. 1990)
1911 – Cootie Williams, American trumpeter and bandleader (d. 1985)
1913 – Salvador Espriu, Spanish author, poet, and playwright (d. 1985)
1914 – Joe Shuster, Canadian-American illustrator, co-created Superman (d. 1992)
1914 – Rempo Urip, Indonesian film director (d. 2001)
1916 – Judith Jasmin, Canadian journalist (d. 1972)
1917 – Hugh Alexander, American baseball player and scout (d. 2000)
1917 – Reg Smythe, English cartoonist (d. 1998)
1918 – James Aldridge, Australian-English journalist and author (d. 2015)
1918 – Chuck Stevens, American baseball player (d. 2018)
1918 – Frank L. Lambert, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Occidental College (d. 2018)
1918 – Fred Wacker, American race driver and engineer (d. 1998)
1919 – Pierre Gamarra, French author, poet, and critic (d. 2009)
1919 – Ian Wallace, English actor and singer (d. 2009)
1920 – David Brinkley, American journalist (d. 2003)
1920 – Owen Chamberlain, American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2006)
1920 – Cyril Grant, English footballer (d. 2002)
1921 – Harvey Ball, American illustrator, created the Smiley (d. 2001)
1921 – Jeff Donnell, American actress (d. 1988)
1921 – John K. Singlaub, U.S. Army Major General (d. 2022)
1921 – Eunice Kennedy Shriver, American activist, co-founded the Special Olympics (d. 2009)
1922 – Jean Kerr, American author and playwright (d. 2003)
1922 – Herb McKenley, Jamaican sprinter (d. 2007)
1922 – Jake LaMotta, American boxer and actor (d. 2017)
1923 – Amalia Mendoza, Mexican singer and actress (d. 2001)
1923 – John Bradley, American soldier (d. 1994)
1923 – Suzanne Cloutier, Canadian actress and producer (d. 2003)
1923 – G. A. Kulkarni, Indian author and academic (d. 1987)
1924 – Johnny Bach, American basketball player and coach (d. 2016)
1924 – Bobo Brazil, American wrestler (d. 1998)
1925 – Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysian physician and politician, 4th and 7th Prime Minister of Malaysia
1925 – Ernest Bertrand Boland, American Roman Catholic bishop
1926 – Carleton Carpenter, American actor, magician, songwriter, and novelist (d. 2022)
1926 – Fred Gwynne, American actor (d. 1993)
1927 – Grigory Barenblatt, Russian mathematician and academic (d. 2018)
1927 – David Dinkins, American soldier and politician, 106th Mayor of New York City (d. 2020)
1927 – William Smithers, American actor
1928 – Don Bolles, American investigative reporter (d. 1976)
1928 – Bernard Buffet, French painter and illustrator (d. 1999)
1928 – Alejandro de Tomaso, Argentinian-Italian race car driver and businessman, founded De Tomaso (d. 2003)
1928 – Moshe Greenberg, American-Israeli rabbi and scholar (d. 2010)
1928 – John Glenn, American baseball player
1929 – Winnie Ewing, Scottish lawyer and politician
1929 – George Clayton Johnson, American author and screenwriter (d. 2015)
1929 – Moe Norman, Canadian golfer (d. 2004)
1929 – José Vicente Rangel, Venezuelan politician; 21st Vice President of Venezuela (d. 2020)
1930 – Bruce Boa, Canadian actor (d. 2004)
1930 – Janette Sherman, American physician, author, and pioneer in occupational and environmental health (d. 2019)
1930 – Josephine Veasey, English soprano and actress (d. 2022)
1931 – Nick Adams, American actor and screenwriter (d. 1968)
1931 – Jerry Herman, American composer and songwriter (d. 2019)
1931 – Julian May, American author (d. 2017)
1931 – Alice Munro, Canadian short story writer, Nobel Prize laureate
1932 – Carlo Maria Abate, Italian race car driver (d. 2019)
1932 – Neile Adams, Filipino-American actress, singer and dancer
1932 – Manfred Preußger, German athlete
1933 – Jumpin' Gene Simmons, American rockabilly singer-songwriter (d. 2006)
1933 – C.K. Yang, Taiwanese decathlete and pole vaulter (d. 2007)
1934 – Marshall Brodien, American actor (d. 2019)
1934 – Jerry Nelson, American puppeteer and voice actor (d. 2012)
1935 – Margaret McEntee, American Catholic religious sister and educator
1935 – Wilson Tuckey, Australian politician
1935 – Wilson Whineray, New Zealand rugby player and businessman (d. 2012)
1936 – Herbert Boyer, American businessman, co-founded Genentech
1936 – Tunne Kelam, Estonian journalist and politician
1937 – Edwards Barham, American farmer and politician (d. 2014)
1937 – Gun Svensson, Swedish politician
1938 – Paul Andreu, French architect (d. 2018)
1938 – Lee Morgan, American trumpet player and composer (d. 1972)
1939 – Phil Kelly, Irish-English footballer and manager (d. 2012)
1939 – Ahmet Taner Kışlalı, Turkish political scientist, journalist and educator (d. 1999)
1939 – Mavis Staples, American singer
1940 – Meghnad Desai, Baron Desai, Indian-English economist and politician
1940 – Helen Donath, American soprano and actress
1940 – Brian Priestley, English pianist and composer
1940 – Keith Stackpole, Australian cricketer
1941 – Jake Eberts, Canadian film producer (d. 2012)
1941 – David G. Hartwell, American anthologist, author, and critic (d. 2016)
1941 – Robert Pine, American actor and director
1941 – Ian Whitcomb, English singer-songwriter, producer, and actor (d. 2020)
1942 – Ronnie James Dio, American singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2010)
1942 – Pyotr Klimuk, Belarusian general, pilot, and astronaut
1942 – Sixto Rodriguez, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1942 – Lopo do Nascimento, Angolan politician; 1st Prime Minister of Angola
1943 – Arthur Ashe, American tennis player and journalist (d. 1993)
1943 – Inonge Mbikusita-Lewanika, Zambian politician
1943 – Jerry Miller, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1944 – Mick Grant, English motorcycle racer
1944 – Norman Hammond, English archaeologist and academic
1945 – Ron Glass, American actor (d. 2016)
1945 – Hal McRae, American baseball player and manager
1945 – John Motson, English sportscaster
1945 – Jean-Marie Poiré, French director, producer, and screenwriter
1945 – Virginia Wade, English tennis player and sportscaster
1946 – Jean-Pierre Jarier, French race car driver
1946 – Chin Han, Taiwanese actor
1947 – Arlo Guthrie, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actor
1948 – Ronnie Cutrone, American painter (d. 2013)
1948 – Chico Resch, Canadian ice hockey player and sportscaster
1948 – Natalya Sedykh, Russian figure skater, ballet dancer, actor
1948 – John Whitehead, American singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2004)
1949 – Anna Czerwińska, Polish mountaineer and author
1949 – Sunil Gavaskar, Indian cricketer and sportscaster
1949 – Greg Kihn, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1950 – Tony Baldry, English colonel, lawyer, and politician, British Minister of State for Agriculture
1950 – Prokopis Pavlopoulos, President of Greece, Greek lawyer and politician, Greek Minister for the Interior
1951 – Cheryl Wheeler, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1951 – Rajnath Singh, Indian Politician and Union Home Minister of India
1952 – Kim Mitchell, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist
1952 – Peter van Heemst, Dutch politician
1953 – Rik Emmett, Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1953 – Zoogz Rift, American musician and wrestler (d. 2011)
1954 – Tommy Bowden, American football player and coach
1954 – Andre Dawson, American baseball player
1954 – Neil Tennant, English singer-songwriter and keyboard player
1955 – Nic Dakin, English educator and politician
1955 – Geoff Gerard, Australian rugby league player
1956 – Tom McClintock, American lawyer and politician
1956 – K. Rajagopal, Malaysian football manager
1957 – Derry Grehan, Canadian rock guitarist and songwriter
1958 – Béla Fleck, American banjo player and songwriter
1958 – Fiona Shaw, Irish actress and director
1959 – Ellen Kuras, American director and cinematographer
1960 – Ariel Castro, Puerto Rican-American convicted kidnapper and rapist (d. 2013)
1959 – Sandy West, American singer-songwriter and drummer (d. 2006)
1961 – Jacky Cheung, Hong Kong singer and film actor
1961 – Marc Riley, English guitarist (The Fall), radio DJ
1963 – Ian Lougher, Welsh motorcycle racer
1964 – Martin Laurendeau, Canadian tennis player and coach
1964 – Urban Meyer, American football player and coach
1964 – Wilfried Peeters, Belgian cyclist
1965 – Scott McCarron, American golfer
1965 – Ken Mellons, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1966 – Clive Efford, English politician
1966 – Johnny Grunge, American wrestler (d. 2006)
1966 – Christian Stangl, Austrian skier and mountaineer
1966 – Anna Bråkenhielm, Swedish business executive
1967 – Tom Meents, American professional monster truck driver
1967 – Rebekah Del Rio, American singer-songwriter
1967 – Gillian Tett, English journalist and author
1967 – Ikki Sawamura, Japanese model, actor and television presenter
1967 – John Yoo, South Korean-American lawyer, author, and educator
1969 – Marty Cordova, American baseball player
1969 – Gale Harold, American actor
1970 – Gary LeVox, American singer-songwriter
1970 – Jason Orange, English singer-songwriter and dancer
1970 – John Simm, English actor
1971 – Adam Foote, Canadian ice hockey player
1971 – Gregory Goodridge, Barbadian footballer and coach
1972 – Peter Serafinowicz, English actor
1972 – Sofía Vergara, Colombian-American actress and producer
1972 – Tilo Wolff, German-Swiss singer-songwriter, pianist, and producer
1974 – Imelda May, Irish singer-songwriter, musician, and producer
1975 – Andrew Firestone, American businessman
1975 – Brendan Gaughan, American race car driver
1975 – Alain Nasreddine, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1975 – Stefán Karl Stefánsson, Icelandic actor (d. 2018)
1975 – Richard Westbrook, English race car driver
1976 – Edmílson, Brazilian footballer
1976 – Elijah Blue Allman, American singer and guitarist
1976 – Ludovic Giuly, French footballer
1976 – Adrian Grenier, American actor, producer, and screenwriter
1976 – Brendon Lade, Australian footballer and coach
1976 – Lars Ricken, German footballer
1977 – Chiwetel Ejiofor, English actor
1979 – Mvondo Atangana, Cameroon footballer
1979 – Gong Yoo, Korean actor
1980 – Alejandro Millán, Mexican singer-songwriter and keyboard player
1980 – Adam Petty, American race car driver (d. 2000)
1980 – Claudia Leitte, Brazilian singer-songwriter
1980 – James Rolfe, American actor, director, and producer
1980 – Jessica Simpson, American singer-songwriter, actress, and fashion designer
1981 – Aleksandar Tunchev, Bulgarian footballer
1982 – Alex Arrowsmith, American guitarist and producer
1982 – Juliya Chernetsky, Ukrainian-American television host
1982 – Sebastian Mila, Polish footballer
1982 – Jeffrey Walker, Australian actor and director
1983 – Giuseppe De Feudis, Italian footballer
1983 – Matthew Egan, Australian footballer
1983 – Gabi, Spanish footballer
1983 – Kim Hee-chul, Korean entertainer and singer
1983 – Joelson José Inácio, Brazilian footballer
1983 – Doug Kramer, Filipino basketball player
1983 – Anthony Watmough, Australian rugby league player
1984 – Nikolaos Mitrou, Greek footballer
1985 – Park Chu-young, South Korean footballer
1985 – B. J. Crombeen, American ice hockey player
1985 – Mario Gómez, German footballer
1988 – Antonio Brown, American football player
1988 – Heather Hemmens, American actress, director, and producer
1988 – Sarah Walker, New Zealand BMX rider
1990 – Adam Reynolds, Australian rugby league player
1990 – Trent Richardson, American footballer
1990 – Chiyonokuni Toshiki, Japanese sumo wrestler
1991 – Daishōmaru Shōgo, Japanese sumo wrestler
1999 – April Ivy, Portuguese composer and singer
2001 – Isabela Merced, American actress
2002 – Reece Walsh, Australian rugby league player
Deaths
Pre-1600
138 – Hadrian, Roman emperor (b. 76)
645 – Soga no Iruka, Japanese politician
649 – Tai Zong, Chinese emperor (b. 598)
772 – Amalberga of Temse, Frankish noblewoman
831 – Zubaidah bint Ja`far, Abbasid Princess
983 – Benedict VII, pope of the Catholic Church
994 – Leopold I, margrave of Austria
1086 – Canute IV, king of Denmark (b. 1043)
1103 – Eric I, king of Denmark (b. 1060)
1290 – Ladislaus IV, king of Hungary (b. 1262)
1460 – Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham, English commander and politician, Lord High Constable of England (b. 1402)
1460 – John Talbot, 2nd Earl of Shrewsbury, English nobleman (b. c. 1413)
1461 – Thomas, king of Bosnia (b. 1411)
1473 – James II, king of Cyprus
1480 – René of Anjou, French nobleman (b. 1400)
1510 – Catherine Cornaro, queen of Cyprus (b. 1454)
1576 – Eleonora di Garzia di Toledo, Italian noble (b. 1553)
1559 – Henry II, king of France (b. 1519)
1584 – William I, Dutch nobleman (b. 1533)
1590 – Charles II, archduke of Austria (b. 1540)
1594 – Paolo Bellasio, Italian organist and composer (b. 1554)
1601–1900
1603 – Joan Terès i Borrull, Spanish archbishop and academic (b. 1538)
1621 – Charles Bonaventure de Longueval, French commander (b. 1571)
1653 – Gabriel Naudé, French librarian and scholar (b. 1600)
1680 – Louis Moréri, French priest and scholar (b. 1643)
1683 – François Eudes de Mézeray, French historian and author (b. 1610)
1686 – John Fell, English bishop and academic (b. 1625)
1776 – Richard Peters, English lawyer and minister (b. 1704)
1794 – Gaspard de Bernard de Marigny, French general (b. 1754)
1806 – George Stubbs, English painter and academic (b. 1724)
1851 – Louis Daguerre, French photographer and physicist, invented the daguerreotype (b. 1787)
1863 – Clement Clarke Moore, American author and educator (b. 1779)
1881 – Georg Hermann Nicolai, German architect and academic (b. 1812)
1884 – Paul Morphy, American chess player (b. 1837)
1901–present
1908 – Phoebe Knapp, American organist and composer (b. 1839)
1915 – Hendrik Willem Mesdag, Dutch painter (b. 1831)
1920 – John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, British admiral (b. 1841)
1929 – Ève Lavallière, French actress (b. 1866)
1941 – Jelly Roll Morton, American pianist, composer, and bandleader (b. 1890)
1941 – Huntley Wright, English actor (b. 1868)
1950 – Richard Maury, American-Argentinian engineer (b. 1882)
1952 – Rued Langgaard, Danish organist and composer (b. 1893)
1954 – Calogero Vizzini, Italian mob boss (b. 1877)
1956 – Joe Giard, American baseball player (b. 1898)
1960 – Sæbjørn Buttedahl, Norwegian actor and sculptor (b. 1876)
1962 – Yehuda Leib Maimon, Israeli rabbi and politician (b. 1875)
1963 – Teddy Wakelam, English rugby player and sportscaster (b. 1893)
1970 – Bjarni Benediktsson, Icelandic academic and politician, 13th Prime Minister of Iceland (b. 1908)
1971 – Laurent Dauthuille, French boxer (b. 1924)
1972 – Lovie Austin, American pianist, composer, and bandleader (b. 1887)
1978 – John D. Rockefeller III, American businessman and philanthropist, founded the Asia Society (b. 1906)
1979 – Arthur Fiedler, American conductor (b. 1894)
1980 – Joseph Krumgold, American author and screenwriter (b. 1908)
1985 – Fernando Pereira, Dutch photographer (b. 1950)
1986 – Tadeusz Piotrowski, Polish mountaineer and author (b. 1940)
1987 – John Hammond, American record producer, critic, and activist (b. 1910)
1989 – Mel Blanc, American voice actor (b. 1908)
1993 – Ruth Krauss, American author and poet (b. 1901)
1993 – Sam Rolfe, American screenwriter and producer (b. 1924)
1995 – Mehmet Ali Aybar, Turkish lawyer and politician (b. 1908)
1996 – Eno Raud, Estonian author (b. 1928)
2000 – Vakkom Majeed, Indian journalist and politician (b. 1909)
2002 – Jean-Pierre Côté, Canadian politician, 23rd Lieutenant Governor of Quebec (b. 1926)
2002 – Evangelos Florakis, Greek general (b. 1943)
2002 – Laurence Janifer, American author (b. 1933)
2003 – Winston Graham, English author (b. 1908)
2003 – Hartley Shawcross, Baron Shawcross, German-English lawyer and politician, Attorney General for England and Wales (b. 1902)
2004 – Pati Behrs, Russian-American ballerina and actress (b. 1922)
2005 – A. J. Quinnell, English author (b. 1940)
2006 – Shamil Basayev, Chechen terrorist rebel leader (b. 1965)
2007 – Doug Marlette, American cartoonist and author (b. 1949)
2008 – Hiroaki Aoki, Japanese-American wrestler and businessman, founded Benihana (b. 1938)
2008 – Mike Souchak, American golfer (b. 1927)
2011 – Pierrette Alarie, Canadian soprano and educator (b. 1921)
2011 – Roland Petit, French dancer and choreographer (b. 1924)
2012 – Dolphy, Filipino actor, singer, and producer (b. 1928)
2012 – Peter Kyros, American lawyer and politician (b. 1925)
2012 – Berthe Meijer, German-Dutch journalist and author (b. 1938)
2012 – Fritz Langanke, German lieutenant (b. 1919)
2012 – Viktor Suslin, Russian-German composer (b. 1942)
2013 – Philip Caldwell, American businessman (b. 1920)
2013 – Józef Gara, Polish poet and linguist (b. 1929)
2013 – Concha García Campoy, Spanish journalist (b. 1958)
2013 – Caroline Duby Glassman, American lawyer and jurist (b. 1922)
2013 – Ku Ok-hee, South Korean golfer (b. 1956)
2013 – Gokulananda Mahapatra, Indian author and academic (b. 1922)
2014 – Robert C. Broomfield, American lawyer and judge (b. 1933)
2014 – Juozas Kazickas, Lithuanian-American businessman and philanthropist (b. 1918)
2014 – Paul G. Risser, American ecologist and academic (b. 1939)
2014 – Zohra Sehgal, Indian actress, dancer, and choreographer (b. 1912)
2014 – Gloria Schweigerdt, American baseball player (b. 1934)
2015 – Roger Rees, Welsh-American actor and director (b. 1944)
2015 – Omar Sharif, Egyptian actor (b. 1932)
2015 – Jon Vickers, Canadian tenor (b. 1926)
2016 – Katharina Focke, German politician (b. 1922)
2018 – Henry Morgenthau III, American author and television producer (b. 1917)
2020 – Lara van Ruijven, Dutch short track speed skater (b. 1992)
2020 – Jack Charlton, English footballer and manager (b. 1935)
Holidays and observances
Armed Forces Day (Mauritania)
Christian feast day:
Amalberga of Maubeuge
Canute IV of Denmark
Rufina and Secunda
Seven Brothers
Victoria, Anatolia, and Audax
July 10 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Independence Day (Bahamas), celebrates the independence of the Bahamas from the United Kingdom in 1973.
Nikola Tesla Day
Statehood Day (Wyoming)
References
External links
Days of the year
July | [
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15812 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2024 | June 24 |
Events
Pre-1600
1312 BC – Mursili II launches a campaign against the Kingdom of Azzi-Hayasa.
217 BC – The Romans, led by Gaius Flaminius, are ambushed and defeated by Hannibal at the Battle of Lake Trasimene.
109 – Roman emperor Trajan inaugurates the Aqua Traiana, an aqueduct that channels water from Lake Bracciano, northwest of Rome.
474 – Julius Nepos forces Roman usurper Glycerius to abdicate the throne and proclaims himself Emperor of the Western Roman Empire.
637 – The Battle of Moira is fought between the High King of Ireland and the Kings of Ulster and Dál Riata. It is claimed to be the largest battle in the history of Ireland.
843 – The Vikings sack French city of Nantes.
972 – Battle of Cedynia, the first documented victory of Polish forces, takes place.
1128 – Battle of São Mamede, near Guimarães: Forces led by Afonso I defeat forces led by his mother Teresa of León and her lover Fernando Pérez de Traba.
1230 – The Siege of Jaén begins, in the context of the Spanish Reconquista.
1314 – First War of Scottish Independence: The Battle of Bannockburn concludes with a decisive victory by Scottish forces led by Robert the Bruce.
1340 – Hundred Years' War: Battle of Sluys: The French fleet is almost completely destroyed by the English fleet commanded in person by King Edward III.
1374 – A sudden outbreak of St. John's Dance causes people in the streets of Aachen, Germany, to experience hallucinations and begin to jump and twitch uncontrollably until they collapse from exhaustion.
1497 – John Cabot lands in North America at Newfoundland leading the first European exploration of the region since the Vikings.
1509 – Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon are crowned King and Queen of England.
1535 – The Anabaptist state of Münster is conquered and disbanded.
1540 – English King Henry VIII commands his 4th wife, Anne of Cleves, to leave the court.
1571 – Miguel López de Legazpi founds Manila, the capital of the Philippines.
1593 – The Dutch city of Geertruidenberg held by the Spanish, capitulates to a besieging Dutch and English army led by Maurice of Nassau.
1601–1900
1604 – Samuel de Champlain discovers the mouth of the Saint John River, site of Reversing Falls and the present-day city of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.
1622 – Battle of Macau: The Dutch make a failed attempt to capture Macau.
1663 – The Spanish garrison of Évora capitulates, following the Portuguese victory at the Battle of Ameixial.
1717 – The Premier Grand Lodge of England is founded in London, the first Masonic Grand Lodge in the world (now the United Grand Lodge of England).
1762 – Battle of Wilhelmsthal: The British-Hanoverian army of Ferdinand of Brunswick defeats French forces in Westphalia.
1779 – American Revolutionary War: The Great Siege of Gibraltar begins.
1793 – The first Republican constitution in France is adopted.
1812 – Napoleonic Wars: Napoleon's Grande Armée crosses the Neman river beginning the invasion of Russia.
1813 – Battle of Beaver Dams: A British and Indian combined force defeats the United States Army.
1821 – Battle of Carabobo: Decisive battle in the war of independence of Venezuela from Spain.
1859 – Battle of Solferino (Battle of the Three Sovereigns): Sardinia and France defeat Austria in Solferino, northern Italy.
1866 – Battle of Custoza: An Austrian army defeats the Italian army during the Austro-Prussian War.
1880 – First performance of O Canada at the Congrès national des Canadiens-Français. The song would later become the national anthem of Canada.
1894 – Marie François Sadi Carnot is assassinated by Sante Geronimo Caserio.
1901–present
1902 – King Edward VII of the United Kingdom develops appendicitis, delaying his coronation.
1913 – Greece and Serbia annul their alliance with Bulgaria.
1916 – Mary Pickford becomes the first female film star to sign a million-dollar contract.
1918 – First airmail service in Canada from Montreal to Toronto.
1922 – The American Professional Football Association is renamed the National Football League.
1932 – A bloodless revolution instigated by the People's Party ends the absolute power of King Prajadhipok of Siam (now Thailand).
1938 – Pieces of a meteorite land near Chicora, Pennsylvania. The meteorite is estimated to have weighed 450 metric tons when it hit the Earth's atmosphere and exploded.
1939 – Siam is renamed Thailand by Plaek Phibunsongkhram, the country's third prime minister.
1940 – World War II: Operation Collar, the first British Commando raid on occupied France, by No 11 Independent Company.
1943 – US military police attempt to arrest a black soldier in Bamber Bridge, England, sparking the Battle of Bamber Bridge mutiny that leaves one dead and seven wounded.
1947 – Kenneth Arnold makes the first widely reported UFO sighting near Mount Rainier, Washington.
1948 – Cold War: Start of the Berlin Blockade: The Soviet Union makes overland travel between West Germany and West Berlin impossible.
1949 – The first television western, Hopalong Cassidy, starring William Boyd, is aired on NBC.
1950 – Apartheid: In South Africa, the Group Areas Act is passed, formally segregating races.
1954 – First Indochina War: Battle of Mang Yang Pass: Viet Minh troops belonging to the 803rd Regiment ambush G.M. 100 of France in An Khê.
1957 – In Roth v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment.
1960 – Assassination attempt of Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt.
1963 – The United Kingdom grants Zanzibar internal self-government.
1973 – The UpStairs Lounge arson attack takes place at a gay bar located on the second floor of the three-story building at 141 Chartres Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Thirty-two people die as a result of fire or smoke inhalation.
1975 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 66 encounters severe wind shear and crashes on final approach to New York's JFK Airport killing 113 of the 124 passengers on board, making it the deadliest U.S. plane crash at the time. This accident led to decades of research into downburst and microburst phenomena and their effects on aircraft.
1981 – The Humber Bridge opens to traffic, connecting Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. It remained the world's longest bridge span for 17 years.
1982 – "The Jakarta Incident": British Airways Flight 9 flies into a cloud of volcanic ash thrown up by the eruption of Mount Galunggung, resulting in the failure of all four engines.
1989 – Jiang Zemin succeeds Zhao Ziyang to become the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
1995 – Rugby World Cup: South Africa defeats New Zealand and Nelson Mandela presents Francois Pienaar with the Webb Ellis Cup in an iconic post-apartheid moment.
2002 – The Igandu train disaster in Tanzania kills 281, the worst train accident in African history.
2004 – In New York, capital punishment is declared unconstitutional.
2010 – At Wimbledon, John Isner of the United States defeats Nicolas Mahut of France, in the longest match in professional tennis history.
2010 – Julia Gillard assumes office as the first female Prime Minister of Australia.
2012 – Death of Lonesome George, the last known individual of Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii, a subspecies of the Galápagos tortoise.
2013 – Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is found guilty of abusing his power and engaging in sex with an underage prostitute, and is sentenced to seven years in prison.
Births
Pre-1600
1210 – Count Floris IV of Holland (d. 1234)
1244 – Henry I, Landgrave of Hesse (d. 1308)
1254 – Floris V, Count of Holland (d. 1296)
1257 – Robert de Vere, 6th Earl of Oxford, English nobleman (probable; d. 1331)
1314 – Philippa of Hainault Queen of England (d. 1369)
1322 – Joanna, Duchess of Brabant (d. 1406)
1343 – Joan of Valois, Queen of Navarre (d. 1373)
1360 – Nuno Álvares Pereira, Portuguese general
1386 – John of Capistrano, Italian priest and saint (d. 1456)
1465 – Isabella del Balzo, Queen Consort of Naples (d. 1533)
1485 – Johannes Bugenhagen, Polish-German priest and reformer (d. 1558)
1485 – Elizabeth of Denmark, Electress of Brandenburg (d. 1555)
1499 – Johannes Brenz, German theologian and the Protestant Reformer (d. 1570)
1519 – Theodore Beza, French theologian and scholar (d. 1605)
1532 – Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, English politician (d. 1588)
1532 – William IV, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (d. 1573)
1535 – Joanna of Austria, Princess of Portugal (d. 1573)
1546 – Robert Persons, English Jesuit priest, insurrectionist, and author (d. 1610)
1587 – William Arnold, English-American settler (d. 1675)
1601–1900
1614 – John Belasyse, 1st Baron Belasyse
1616 – Ferdinand Bol, Dutch painter, etcher and draftsman, student of Rembrandt (d. 1680)
1661 – Hachisuka Tsunanori, Japanese daimyō (d. 1730)
1663 – Jean Baptiste Massillon, French bishop (d. 1742)
1687 – Johann Albrecht Bengel, German-Lutheran clergyman and scholar (d. 1757)
1694 – Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, Swiss author and theorist (d. 1748)
1704 – Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens, French philosopher and author (d. 1771)
1753 – William Hull, American general and politician, 1st Governor of Michigan Territory (d. 1825)
1755 – Anacharsis Cloots, Prussian-French activist (d. 1794)
1767 – Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès, French geographer and author (d. 1846)
1771 – Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, French chemist and businessman, founded DuPont (d. 1834)
1774 – Antonio González de Balcarce, Argentinian commander and politician, 5th Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (d. 1819)
1774 – François-Nicolas-Benoît Haxo, French general and engineer (d. 1838)
1777 – John Ross, Scottish commander and explorer (d. 1856)
1782 – Juan Larrea, Argentinian captain and politician (d. 1847)
1783 – Johann Heinrich von Thünen, German economist and geographer (d. 1850)
1784 – Juan Antonio Lavalleja, Uruguayan general and politician, President of Uruguay (d. 1853)
1788 – Thomas Blanchard, American inventor (d. 1864)
1795 – Ernst Heinrich Weber, German physician and psychologist (d. 1878)
1797 – John Hughes, Irish-American archbishop (d. 1864)
1797 – Paweł Edmund Strzelecki, Polish geologist and explorer (d. 1873)
1804 – Stephan Endlicher, Austrian botanist, numismatist, and sinologist (d. 1849)
1804 – Willard Richards, American religious leader (d. 1854)
1811 – John Archibald Campbell, American lawyer and jurist (d. 1889)
1813 – Henry Ward Beecher, American minister and reformer (d. 1887)
1813 – Francis Boott, American composer (d. 1904)
1821 – Guillermo Rawson, Argentinian physician and politician (d. 1890)
1826 – George Goyder, English-Australian surveyor (d. 1898)
1835 – Johannes Wislicenus, German chemist and academic (d. 1902)
1838 – Jan Matejko, Polish painter (d. 1893)
1839 – Gustavus Franklin Swift, American businessman (d. 1903)
1842 – Ambrose Bierce, American short story writer, essayist, and journalist (d. 1914)
1846 – Samuel Johnson, Nigerian priest and historian (d. 1901)
1850 – Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, Irish field marshal and politician, Governor-General of Sudan (d. 1916)
1852 – Friedrich Loeffler, German bacteriologist and academic (d. 1915)
1854 – Eleanor Norcross, American painter (d. 1923)
1856 – Henry Chapman Mercer, American archaeologist and author (d. 1930)
1858 – Hastings Rashdall, English historian, philosopher, and theologian (d. 1924)
1865 – Robert Henri, American painter and educator (d. 1929)
1867 – Ruth Randall Edström, American educator and activist (d. 1944)
1869 – Prince George of Greece and Denmark (d. 1957)
1872 – Frank Crowninshield, American journalist and art and theatre critic (d. 1947)
1873 – Hugo Simberg, Finnish symbolist painter and graphic artist (d. 1917)
1875 – Forrest Reid, Irish novelist, literary critic and translator (d. 1947)
1880 – Oswald Veblen, American mathematician and academic (g. 1960)
1880 – João Cândido Felisberto, Brazilian revolutionary and sailor (d. 1969)
1881 – George Shiels, Irish-Canadian author, poet, and playwright (d. 1949)
1882 – Athanase David, Canadian lawyer and politician (d. 1953)
1882 – Carl Diem, German businessman (d. 1962)
1883 – Victor Francis Hess, Austrian-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1964)
1883 – Fritz Löhner-Beda, Austrian librettist, lyricist and writer (d.1942)
1883 – Jean Metzinger, French artist (d. 1956)
1883 – Arthur L. Newton, American runner (d. 1956)
1883 – Frank Verner, American runner (d. 1966)
1884 – Frank Waller, American runner (d. 1941)
1885 – Olaf Holtedahl, Norwegian geologist (d. 1975)
1888 – Gerrit Rietveld, Dutch architect, designed the Rietveld Schröder House (d. 1964)
1893 – Roy O. Disney, American businessman, co-founded The Walt Disney Company (d. 1971)
1895 – Jack Dempsey, American boxer and soldier (d. 1983)
1898 – Armin Öpik, Estonian-Australian paleontologist and geologist (d. 1983)
1898 – Karl Selter, Estonian politician, 14th Minister of Foreign Affairs of Estonia (d. 1958)
1900 – Wilhelm Cauer, German mathematician and engineer (d. 1945)
1901–present
1901 – Marcel Mule, French saxophonist (d. 2001)
1901 – Harry Partch, American composer and theorist (d. 1974)
1901 – Chuck Taylor, American basketball player and salesman (d. 1969)
1904 – Phil Harris, American singer-songwriter and actor (d. 1995)
1905 – Fred Alderman, American sprinter (d. 1998)
1906 – Pierre Fournier, French cellist and educator (d. 1986)
1906 – Willard Maas, American poet and educator (d. 1971)
1907 – Arseny Tarkovsky, Russian poet and translator (d. 1989)
1908 – Hugo Distler, German organist, composer, and conductor (d. 1942)
1908 – Alfons Rebane, Estonian colonel (d. 1976)
1909 – Jean Deslauriers, Canadian violinist, composer, and conductor (d. 1978)
1909 – William Penney, Baron Penney, English mathematician and physicist (d. 1991)
1909 – Betty Cavanna, American author (d. 2001)
1911 – Juan Manuel Fangio, Argentinian race car driver (d. 1995)
1911 – Ernesto Sabato, Argentinian physicist and academic (d. 2011)
1911 – Portia White, Canadian opera singer (d. 1968)
1912 – Brian Johnston, English sportscaster and author (d. 1994)
1912 – Mary Wesley, English author (d. 2002)
1913 – Gustaaf Deloor, Belgian cyclist and soldier (d. 2002)
1914 – Jan Karski, Polish-American activist and academic (d. 2000)
1914 – Pearl Witherington, French secret agent (d. 2008)
1915 – Fred Hoyle, English astronomer and author (d. 2001)
1916 – William B. Saxbe, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 70th United States Attorney General (d. 2010)
1916 – Saloua Raouda Choucair, Lebanese painter and sculptor (d. 2017)
1917 – David Easton, Canadian-American political scientist and academic (d. 2014)
1917 – Lucy Jarvis, American television producer (d. 2020)
1917 – Ramblin' Tommy Scott, American singer and guitarist (d. 2013)
1917 – Joan Clarke, English cryptanalyst and numismatist (d. 1996)
1918 – Mildred Ladner Thompson, American journalist and author (d. 2013)
1918 – Yong Nyuk Lin, Singaporean businessman and politician, Singaporean Minister for Education (d. 2012)
1919 – Al Molinaro, American actor (d. 2015)
1921 – Gerhard Sommer, German soldier (d. 2019)
1922 – Jack Carter, American actor and comedian (d. 2015)
1922 – John Postgate, English microbiologist, author, and academic (d. 2014)
1922 – Richard Timberlake, American economist (d.2020)
1923 – Margaret Olley, Australian painter and philanthropist (d. 2011)
1924 – Kurt Furgler, Swiss politician, 70th President of the Swiss Confederation (d. 2008)
1924 – Archie Roy, Scottish astronomer and academic (d. 2012)
1924 – Yoshito Takamine, American politician (d. 2015)
1925 – Ogden Reid, American politician (d. 2019)
1927 – Fernand Dumont, Canadian sociologist, philosopher, and poet (d. 1997)
1927 – James B. Edwards, American dentist, soldier, and politician, 3rd United States Secretary of Energy (d. 2014)
1927 – Martin Lewis Perl, American physicist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2014)
1929 – Carolyn S. Shoemaker, American astronomer (d. 2021)
1930 – Claude Chabrol, French actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2010)
1930 – Donald Gordon, South African businessman and philanthropist (d. 2019)
1930 – William Bernard Ziff, Jr., American publisher (d. 2006)
1931 – Billy Casper, American golfer (d. 2015)
1932 – David McTaggart, Canadian-Italian environmentalist (d. 2001)
1933 – Sam Jones, American basketball player and coach (d. 2021)
1933 – Ngina Kenyatta, 1st First Lady of Kenya
1934 – Ferdinand Biwersi, German footballer and referee (d. 2013)
1934 – Jean-Pierre Ferland, Canadian singer-songwriter
1934 – Gloria Christian, Italian singer
1935 – Terry Riley, American composer and educator
1935 – Jean Milesi, French racing cyclist
1935 – Charlie Dees, American baseball player
1936 – Robert Downey Sr., American actor and director. Father of Robert Downey Jr. (d. 2021)
1937 – Anita Desai, Indian-American author and academic
1938 – Lawrence Block, American author
1938 – Abulfaz Elchibey, 1st democratically elected Azerbaijani president (d. 2000)
1938 – Ken Gray, New Zealand rugby player (d. 1992)
1939 – Brigitte Fontaine, French singer
1940 – Ian Ross, Australian newsreader (d. 2014)
1940 – Vittorio Storaro, Italian cinematographer
1941 – Erkin Koray, Turkish singer-songwriter and guitarist
1941 – Julia Kristeva, Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst and author
1941 – Graham McKenzie, Australian cricketer
1942 – Arthur Brown, English rock singer-songwriter
1942 – Mick Fleetwood, English-American drummer
1942 – Michele Lee, American actress and singer
1942 – Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Chilean engineer and politician, 32nd President of Chile
1942 – Colin Groves, Australian academician and educator (d. 2017)
1943 – Birgit Grodal, Danish economist and academic (d. 2004)
1944 – Jeff Beck, English guitarist and songwriter
1944 – Kathryn Lasky, American author
1944 – Chris Wood, English saxophonist (d. 1983)
1945 – Colin Blunstone, English singer-songwriter
1945 – Wayne Cashman, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1945 – George Pataki, American lawyer and politician, 53rd Governor of New York
1945 – Betty Stöve, Dutch tennis player
1946 – David Collenette, Canadian civil servant and politician, 32nd Canadian Minister of National Defence
1946 – Ellison Onizuka, American engineer, and astronaut (d. 1986)
1946 – Robert Reich, American economist and politician, 22nd United States Secretary of Labor
1947 – Clarissa Dickson Wright, English chef, author, and television personality (d. 2014)
1947 – Peter Weller, American actor and director
1948 – Patrick Moraz, Swiss keyboard player and songwriter
1949 – John Illsley, English singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer
1949 – Betty Jackson, English fashion designer
1950 – Nancy Allen, American actress
1950 – Bob Carlos Clarke, Irish-born English photographer (d. 2006)
1950 – Jan Kulczyk, Polish businessman (d. 2015)
1950 – Mercedes Lackey, American author
1951 – Raelene Boyle, Australian sprinter
1951 – Charles Sturridge, English director, producer, and screenwriter
1952 – Dianna Melrose, English diplomat, British High Commissioner to Tanzania
1952 – Bob Neill, English lawyer and politician
1953 – William E. Moerner, American chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1953 – Michael Tuck, Australian footballer and coach
1955 – Chris Higgins, English geneticist and academic
1955 – Edmund Malura, German footballer and manager
1955 – Loren Roberts, American golfer
1956 – Owen Paterson, English politician, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
1957 – Mark Parkinson, American lawyer and politician, 45th Governor of Kansas
1958 – Jean Charest, Canadian lawyer and politician, 5th Deputy Prime Minister of Canada
1958 – Silvio Mondinelli, Italian mountaineer
1958 – John Tortorella, American ice hockey player and coach
1959 – Andy McCluskey, English singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer
1960 – Elish Angiolini, Scottish lawyer, judge, and politician, Solicitor General for Scotland
1960 – Siedah Garrett, American singer-songwriter and pianist
1960 – Karin Pilsäter, Swedish accountant and politician
1960 – Erik Poppe, Norwegian director, cinematographer, and screenwriter
1961 – Dennis Danell, American singer and guitarist (d. 2000)
1961 – Iain Glen, Scottish actor
1961 – Bernie Nicholls, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1961 – Ralph E. Reed, Jr., American journalist and activist
1961 – Curt Smith, English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1963 – Yuri Kasparyan, Russian guitarist
1963 – Preki, Serbian-American soccer player and coach
1963 – Mike Wieringo, American author and illustrator (d. 2007)
1964 – Jean-Luc Delarue, French television host and producer (d. 2012)
1964 – Kathryn Parminter, Baroness Parminter, English politician
1964 – Gary Suter, American ice hockey player and scout
1965 – Claude Bourbonnais, Canadian race car driver
1965 – Uwe Krupp, German ice hockey player and coach
1965 – Richard Lumsden, English actor, writer, composer and musician
1966 – Hope Sandoval, American singer-songwriter and musician
1966 – Adrienne Shelly, American actress, director, and screenwriter (d. 2006)
1967 – Janez Lapajne, Slovenian director and producer
1967 – John Limniatis, Greek-Canadian footballer and manager
1968 – Alaa Abdelnaby, Egyptian-American basketball player and sportscaster
1970 – Glenn Medeiros, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1970 – Bernardo Sassetti, Portuguese pianist, composer, and educator (d. 2012)
1972 – Robbie McEwen, Australian cyclist
1972 – Denis Žvegelj, Slovenian rower
1973 – Alexis Gauthier, French chef
1973 – Jere Lehtinen, Finnish ice hockey player
1974 – Dan Byles, English sailor, rower, and politician
1974 – Chris Guccione, American baseball player and umpire
1975 – Marek Malík, Czech ice hockey player
1975 – Federico Pucciariello, Argentinian-Italian rugby player
1976 – Brock Olivo, American football player and coach
1977 – Dimos Dikoudis, Greek basketball player and manager
1977 – Jeff Farmer, Australian footballer
1978 – Luis García, Spanish footballer
1978 – Pantelis Kafes, Greek footballer
1978 – Shunsuke Nakamura, Japanese footballer
1978 – Ariel Pink, American singer-songwriter
1978 – Juan Román Riquelme, Argentinian footballer
1978 – Emppu Vuorinen, Finnish guitarist and songwriter
1979 – Mindy Kaling, American actress and producer
1979 – Petra Němcová, Czech model and philanthropist
1980 – Cicinho, Brazilian footballer
1980 – Nina Dübbers, German tennis player
1980 – Andrew Jones, Australian race car driver
1980 – Minka Kelly, American actress
1982 – Kevin Nolan, English footballer
1982 – Jarret Stoll, Canadian ice hockey player
1983 – Rebecca Cooke, English swimmer
1983 – Gianni Munari, Italian footballer
1983 – Gard Nilssen, Norwegian drummer
1983 – David Shillington, Australian rugby league player
1984 – Andrea Raggi, Italian footballer
1984 – JJ Redick, American basketball player
1984 – Johanna Welin, Swedish-born German wheelchair basketball player
1985 – Diego Alves Carreira, Brazilian footballer
1985 – Tom Kennedy, English footballer
1985 – Nate Myles, Australian rugby league player
1985 – Vernon Philander, South African cricketer
1985 – Yukina Shirakawa, Japanese model
1986 – Stuart Broad, English cricketer
1986 – Phil Hughes, American baseball player
1986 – Solange Knowles, American singer-songwriter and actress
1987 – Simona Dobrá, Czech tennis player
1987 – Lionel Messi, Argentinian footballer
1987 – Pierre Vaultier, French snowboarder
1988 – Micah Richards, English footballer
1989 – Teklemariam Medhin, Eritrean runner
1990 – Michael Del Zotto, Canadian ice hockey player
1990 – Richard Sukuta-Pasu, German footballer
1991 – Yasmin Paige, English actress
1991 – Aidan Sezer, Australian rugby league player
1992 – David Alaba, Austrian footballer
1996 – Duki, Argentinian rapper
Deaths
Pre-1600
994 – Abu Isa al-Warraq, Arab scholar (b. 889)
1046 – Jeongjong II, Korean ruler (b. 1018)
1088 – William de Warenne, 1st Earl of Surrey, Norman nobleman
1314 – Gilbert de Clare, 8th Earl of Gloucester, English commander (b. 1291)
1314 – Robert de Clifford, 1st Baron de Clifford, English soldier and politician, Lord Warden of the Marches (b. 1274)
1398 – Hongwu, Chinese emperor (b. 1328)
1439 – Frederick IV, duke of Austria (b. 1382)
1503 – Reginald Bray, English architect and politician, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (b. 1440)
1519 – Lucrezia Borgia, Italian wife of Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara (b. 1480)
1520 – Hosokawa Sumimoto, Japanese commander (b. 1489)
1601–1900
1604 – Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, English courtier, Lord Great Chamberlain (b. 1550)
1637 – Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, French astronomer and historian (b. 1580)
1643 – John Hampden, English politician (b. 1595)
1766 – Adrien Maurice de Noailles, French soldier and politician, French Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1678)
1778 – Pieter Burman the Younger, Dutch philologist and academic (b. 1714)
1803 – Matthew Thornton, Irish-American judge and politician (b. 1714)
1817 – Thomas McKean, American lawyer and politician, 2nd Governor of Pennsylvania (b. 1734)
1835 – Andreas Vokos Miaoulis, Greek admiral and politician (b. 1769)
1901–present
1902 – George Leake, Australian politician, 2nd Premier of Western Australia (b. 1856)
1908 – Grover Cleveland, American lawyer and politician, 22nd and 24th President of the United States (b. 1837)
1909 – Sarah Orne Jewett, American novelist, short story writer, and poet (b. 1849)
1922 – Walther Rathenau, German businessman and politician, 7th German Minister for Foreign Affairs (b. 1867)
1931 – Otto Mears, Russian-American businessman (b. 1840)
1931 – Xiang Zhongfa, Chinese politician, 2nd General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (b. 1880)
1932 – Ernst Põdder, Estonian general (b. 1879)
1943 – Camille Roy, Canadian priest and critic (b. 1870)
1946 – Louise Whitfield Carnegie, American philanthropist (b. 1857)
1947 – Emil Seidel, American politician, Mayor of Milwaukee (b. 1864)
1962 – Volfgangs Dārziņš, Latvian composer, pianist and music critic (b. 1906)
1964 – Stuart Davis, American painter and academic (b. 1892)
1969 – Frank King, American cartoonist (b. 1883)
1969 – Willy Ley, German-American historian and author (b. 1906)
1975 – Wendell Ladner, Profesional Basketball Player in the ABA
1976 – Minor White, American photographer, critic, and academic (b. 1908)
1978 – Robert Charroux, French author and critic (b. 1909)
1980 – V. V. Giri, Indian lawyer and politician, 4th President of India (b. 1894)
1984 – Clarence Campbell, Canadian businessman (b. 1905)
1987 – Jackie Gleason, American actor, comedian, and producer (b. 1916)
1988 – Csaba Kesjár, Hungarian race car driver (b. 1962)
1991 – Sumner Locke Elliott, Australian-American author and playwright (b. 1917)
1991 – Rufino Tamayo, Mexican painter and illustrator (b. 1899)
1994 – Jean Vallerand, Canadian violinist, composer, and conductor (b. 1915)
1995 – Andrew J. Transue, American politician and attorney Morissette v. United States (b. 1903)
1997 – Brian Keith, American actor (b. 1921)
2000 – Vera Atkins, British intelligence officer (b. 1908)
2000 – David Tomlinson, English actor and comedian (b. 1917)
2000 – Rodrigo Bueno, Argentine cuarteto singer (b. 1973)
2001 – Konstantin Gerchik, the second head of the world's first cosmodrome — "Baikonur" (1958-1961).
2002 – Pierre Werner, Luxembourgian banker and politician, 21st Prime Minister of Luxembourg (b. 1913)
2004 – Ifigeneia Giannopoulou, Greek songwriter and author (b. 1957)
2005 – Paul Winchell, American actor, voice artist, and ventriloquist (b. 1922)
2007 – Natasja Saad, Danish rapper and reggae singer (b. 1974)
2007 – Chris Benoit, Canadian wrestler (b. 1967)
2007 – Derek Dougan, Northern Irish footballer and manager (b. 1938)
2008 – Gerhard Ringel, Austrian mathematician and academic (b. 1919)
2009 – Roméo LeBlanc, Canadian journalist and politician, 25th Governor General of Canada (b. 1927)
2010 – Fred Anderson, American jazz tenor saxophonist (b. 1929)
2011 – Tomislav Ivić, Croatian football coach and manager (b. 1933)
2012 – Darrel Akerfelds, American baseball player and coach (b. 1962)
2012 – Gad Beck, German author and educator (b. 1923)
2012 – Gu Chaohao, Chinese mathematician and academic (b. 1926)
2012 – Miki Roqué, Spanish footballer (b. 1988)
2012 – Ann C. Scales, American lawyer, educator, and activist (b. 1952)
2013 – Mick Aston, English archaeologist and academic (b. 1946)
2013 – Emilio Colombo, Italian politician, 40th Prime Minister of Italy (b. 1920)
2013 – Joannes Gijsen, Dutch bishop (b. 1932)
2013 – William Hathaway, American lawyer and politician (b. 1924)
2013 – James Martin, English-Bermudian computer scientist and author (b. 1933)
2013 – Alan Myers, American drummer (b. 1955)
2014 – John Clement, Canadian lawyer and politician (b. 1928)
2014 – Olga Kotelko, Canadian runner and softball player (b. 1919)
2014 – Ramón José Velásquez, Venezuelan journalist, lawyer, and politician, President of Venezuela (b. 1916)
2014 – Eli Wallach, American actor (b. 1915)
2015 – Cristiano Araújo, Brazilian singer-songwriter (b. 1986)
2015 – Mario Biaggi, American police officer, politician and criminal (b. 1917)
2015 – Marva Collins, American author and educator (b. 1936)
2015 – Susan Ahn Cuddy, American lieutenant (b. 1915)
2021 – Benigno Aquino III, 15th President of the Philippines (b. 1960)
Holidays and observances
Army Day or Battle of Carabobo Day (Venezuela)
Bannockburn Day (Scotland)
Christian feast day:
María Guadalupe García Zavala
Nativity of Saint John the Baptist
June 24 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Day of the Caboclo (Amazonas, Brazil)
Discovery Day, observed on the nearest Monday to June 24 (Newfoundland and Labrador)
Earliest day on which Armed Forces Day can fall, while June 30 is the latest; celebrated on the last Saturday in June. (United Kingdom)
Earliest day on which Inventors' and Rationalizers' Day can fall, while June 30 is the latest; celebrated on the last Saturday in June. (Russia)
Earliest day on which Mother's Day can fall, while June 30 is the latest; celebrated on the last Sunday in June. (Kenya)
Earliest day on which Youth Day can fall, while Jun 30 is the latest; celebrated on the last Sunday in June. (Ukraine, Belarus)
Inti Raymi, a winter solstice festival and a New Year in the Andes of the Southern Hemisphere (Sacsayhuamán)
St John's Day and the second day of the Midsummer celebrations (although this is not the astronomical summer solstice, see June 20) (Roman Catholic Church, Europe), and its related observances:
Enyovden (Bulgaria)
Jaanipäev (Estonia)
Jāņi (Latvia)
Jónsmessa (Iceland)
Midsummer Day (England)
Saint Jonas' Festival or Joninės (Lithuania)
Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day (Quebec)
Sânziene (western Carpathian Mountains of Romania)
Wattah Wattah Festival (Philippines)
Fors Fortuna, ancient Roman festival to Fortuna
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15813 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January%2030 | January 30 |
Events
Pre-1600
1018 – Poland and the Holy Roman Empire conclude the Peace of Bautzen.
1287 – King Wareru founds the Hanthawaddy Kingdom, and proclaims independence from the Pagan Kingdom.
1601–1900
1607 – An estimated 200 square miles (51,800 ha) along the coasts of the Bristol Channel and Severn Estuary in England are destroyed by massive flooding, resulting in an estimated 2,000 deaths.
1648 – Eighty Years' War: The Treaty of Münster and Osnabrück is signed, ending the conflict between the Netherlands and Spain.
1649 – Charles I of England is executed in Whitehall, London.
1661 – Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, is ritually executed more than two years after his death, on the 12th anniversary of the execution of the monarch he himself deposed.
1703 – The Forty-seven rōnin, under the command of Ōishi Kuranosuke, avenge the death of their master, by killing Kira Yoshinaka.
1789 – Tây Sơn forces emerge victorious against Qing armies and liberate the capital Thăng Long.
1806 – The original Lower Trenton Bridge (also called the Trenton Makes the World Takes Bridge), which spans the Delaware River between Morrisville, Pennsylvania and Trenton, New Jersey, is opened.
1820 – Edward Bransfield sights the Trinity Peninsula and claims the discovery of Antarctica.
1826 – The Menai Suspension Bridge, considered the world's first modern suspension bridge, connecting the Isle of Anglesey to the north West coast of Wales, is opened.
1835 – In the first assassination attempt against a President of the United States, Richard Lawrence attempts to shoot president Andrew Jackson, but fails and is subdued by a crowd, including several congressmen as well as Jackson himself.
1847 – Yerba Buena, California is renamed San Francisco, California.
1858 – The first Hallé concert is given in Manchester, England, marking the official founding of The Hallé orchestra as a full-time, professional orchestra.
1862 – The first American ironclad warship, the is launched.
1889 – Archduke Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian crown, is found dead with his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera in the Mayerling.
1901–present
1902 – The first Anglo-Japanese Alliance is signed in London.
1908 – Indian pacifist and leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is released from prison by Jan C. Smuts after being tried and sentenced to two months in jail earlier in the month.
1911 – The destroyer makes the first airplane rescue at sea saving the life of Douglas McCurdy ten miles from Havana, Cuba.
1920 – Japanese carmaker Mazda is founded, initially as a cork-producing company.
1925 – The Government of Turkey expels Patriarch Constantine VI from Istanbul.
1930 – The Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union orders that a million prosperous peasant families be driven off their farms.
1933 – Adolf Hitler's rise to power: Hitler takes office as the Chancellor of Germany.
1942 – World War II: Japanese forces invade the island of Ambon in the Dutch East Indies. Some 300 captured Allied troops are killed after the surrender. One-quarter of the remaining POWs remain alive at the end of the war.
1944 – World War II: The Battle of Cisterna, part of Operation Shingle, begins in central Italy.
1945 – World War II: The Wilhelm Gustloff, overfilled with German refugees, sinks in the Baltic Sea after being torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, killing approximately 9,500 people.
1945 – World War II: Raid at Cabanatuan: One hundred and twenty-six American Rangers and Filipino resistance fighters liberate over 500 Allied prisoners from the Japanese-controlled Cabanatuan POW camp.
1948 – British South American Airways' Tudor IV Star Tiger disappears over the Bermuda Triangle.
1948 – Following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in his home compound, India's prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, broadcasts to the nation, saying "The light has gone out of our lives". The date of the assassination becomes observed as "Martyrs' Day" in India.
1956 – In the United States, Civil Rights Movement leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s home is bombed in retaliation for the Montgomery bus boycott.
1959 – The forces of the Sultanate of Muscat occupy the last strongholds of the Imamate of Oman, Saiq and Shuraijah, marking the end of Jebel Akhdar War in Oman.
1959 – , specifically designed to operate in icebound seas, strikes an iceberg on her maiden voyage and sinks, killing all 95 aboard.
1960 – The African National Party is founded in Chad, through the merger of traditionalist parties.
1964 – In a bloodless coup, General Nguyễn Khánh overthrows General Dương Văn Minh's military junta in South Vietnam.
1968 – Vietnam War: Tet Offensive launch by forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army against South Vietnam, the United States, and their allies.
1969 – The Beatles' last public performance, on the roof of Apple Records in London. The impromptu concert is broken up by the police.
1972 – The Troubles: Bloody Sunday: British paratroopers open fire on anti-internment marchers in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing 13 people; another person later dies of injuries sustained.
1972 – Pakistan leaves the Commonwealth of Nations in protest of its recognition of breakaway Bangladesh.
1974 – Pan Am Flight 806 crashes near Pago Pago International Airport in American Samoa, killing 97.
1975 – The Monitor National Marine Sanctuary is established as the first United States National Marine Sanctuary.
1979 – A Varig Boeing 707-323C freighter, flown by the same commander as Flight 820, disappears over the Pacific Ocean 30 minutes after taking off from Tokyo.
1982 – Richard Skrenta writes the first PC virus code, which is 400 lines long and disguised as an Apple boot program called "Elk Cloner".
1989 – The American embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan is closed.
1995 – Hydroxycarbamide becomes the first approved preventive treatment for sickle cell disease.
2000 – Kenya Airways Flight 431 crashes into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Ivory Coast, killing 169.
2013 – Naro-1 becomes the first carrier rocket launched by South Korea.
Births
Pre-1600
58 BC – Livia, Roman wife of Augustus (d. 29)
1410 – William Calthorpe, English knight (d. 1494)
1520 – William More, English courtier (d. 1600)
1563 – Franciscus Gomarus, Dutch theologian and academic (d. 1641)
1573 – Georg Friedrich, Margrave of Baden-Durlach (d. 1638)
1580 – Gundakar, Prince of Liechtenstein, court official in Vienna (d. 1658)
1590 – Lady Anne Clifford, 14th Baroness de Clifford (d. 1676)
1601–1900
1628 – George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, English statesman (d. 1687)
1661 – Charles Rollin, French historian and educator (d. 1741)
1697 – Johann Joachim Quantz, German flute player and composer (d. 1773)
1703 – François Bigot, French politician (d. 1778)
1720 – Charles De Geer, Swedish entomologist and archaeologist (d. 1778)
1754 – John Lansing, Jr., American lawyer and politician (d. 1829)
1775 – Walter Savage Landor, English poet and author (d. 1864)
1781 – Adelbert von Chamisso, German botanist and poet (d. 1838)
1816 – Nathaniel P. Banks, American general and politician, 24th Governor of Massachusetts (d. 1894)
1822 – Franz Ritter von Hauer, Austrian geologist and curator (d. 1899)
1841 – Félix Faure, French politician, 7th President of France (d. 1899)
1844 – Richard Theodore Greener, American lawyer, academic, and diplomat (d. 1922)
1846 – Angela of the Cross, Spanish nun and saint (d. 1932)
1861 – Charles Martin Loeffler, German-American violinist and composer (d. 1935)
1862 – Walter Damrosch, German-American conductor and composer (d. 1950)
1866 – Gelett Burgess, American author, poet, and critic (d. 1951)
1878 – Anton Hansen Tammsaare, Estonian author (d. 1940)
1882 – Franklin D. Roosevelt, American lawyer and statesman, 32nd President of the United States (d. 1945)
1889 – Jaishankar Prasad, Indian poet and playwright (d. 1937)
1899 – Max Theiler, South African-American virologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1972)
1900 – Martita Hunt, Argentine-born British actress (d. 1969)
1901–present
1901 – Rudolf Caracciola, German racing driver (d. 1959)
1902 – Nikolaus Pevsner, German-English historian and scholar (d. 1983)
1910 – Chidambaram Subramaniam, Indian lawyer and politician, Indian Minister of Defence (d. 2000)
1911 – Roy Eldridge, American jazz trumpet player (d. 1989)
1912 – Werner Hartmann, German physicist and academic (d. 1988)
1912 – Francis Schaeffer, American pastor and theologian (d. 1984)
1912 – Barbara W. Tuchman, American historian and author (d. 1989)
1914 – Luc-Marie Bayle, French commander and painter (d. 2000)
1914 – John Ireland, Canadian-American actor and director (d. 1992)
1914 – David Wayne, American actor (d. 1995)
1915 – Joachim Peiper, German SS officer (d. 1976)
1915 – John Profumo, English soldier and politician, Secretary of State for War (d. 2006)
1917 – Paul Frère, Belgian racing driver and journalist (d. 2008)
1918 – David Opatoshu, American actor and screenwriter (d. 1996)
1919 – Fred Korematsu, American activist (d. 2005)
1920 – Michael Anderson, English director and producer (d. 2018)
1920 – Patrick Heron, British painter (d. 1999)
1920 – Delbert Mann, American director and producer (d. 2007)
1922 – Dick Martin, American comedian, actor, and director (d. 2008)
1923 – Marianne Ferber, Czech-American economist and author (d. 2013)
1924 – S. N. Goenka, Burmese-Indian author and educator (d. 2013)
1924 – Lloyd Alexander, American soldier and author (d. 2007)
1925 – Douglas Engelbart, American computer scientist, invented the computer mouse (d. 2013)
1927 – Olof Palme, Swedish statesman, 26th Prime Minister of Sweden (d. 1986)
1928 – Harold Prince, American director and producer (d. 2019)
1929 – Lois Hole, Canadian businesswoman and politician, 15th Lieutenant Governor of Alberta (d. 2005)
1929 – Hugh Tayfield, South African cricketer (d. 1994)
1929 – Lucille Teasdale-Corti, Canadian-Italian physician and humanitarian (d. 1996)
1930 – Gene Hackman, American actor and author
1930 – Magnus Malan, South African general and politician, South African Minister of Defence (d. 2011)
1931 – John Crosbie, Canadian lawyer and politician, 34th Canadian Minister of Justice (d. 2020)
1931 – Shirley Hazzard, Australian-American novelist, short story writer, and essayist (d. 2016)
1932 – Knock Yokoyama, Japanese comedian and politician (d. 2007)
1934 – Tammy Grimes, American actress and singer (d. 2016)
1935 – Richard Brautigan, American novelist, poet, and short story writer (d. 1984)
1935 – Tubby Hayes, English saxophonist and composer (d. 1973)
1936 – Horst Jankowski, German pianist and composer (d. 1998)
1937 – Vanessa Redgrave, English actress
1937 – Boris Spassky, Russian chess player and theoretician
1938 – Islam Karimov, Uzbek politician, 1st President of Uzbekistan (d. 2016)
1941 – Gregory Benford, American astrophysicist and author
1941 – Dick Cheney, American businessman and politician, 46th Vice President of the United States, 17th US Secretary of Defense
1941 – Tineke Lagerberg, Dutch swimmer
1942 – Marty Balin, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2018)
1943 – Davey Johnson, American baseball player and manager
1944 – Lynn Harrell, American cellist and academic (d. 2020)
1944 – Colin Rimer, English lawyer and judge
1945 – Meir Dagan, Israeli military officer and intelligence official, Director of Mossad (2002–11) (d. 2016)
1945 – Michael Dorris, American author and scholar (d. 1997)
1946 – John Bird, Baron Bird, English publisher, founded The Big Issue
1947 – Les Barker, English poet and author
1947 – Steve Marriott, English singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1991)
1949 – Peter Agre, American physician and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate
1950 – Jack Newton, Australian golfer
1951 – Phil Collins, English drummer, singer-songwriter, producer, and actor
1951 – Charles S. Dutton, American actor and director
1951 – Bobby Stokes, English footballer (d. 1995)
1952 – Doug Falconer, Canadian football player and producer (d. 2021)
1953 – Fred Hembeck, American author and illustrator
1955 – John Baldacci, American politician, 73rd Governor of Maine
1955 – Curtis Strange, American golfer and sportscaster
1957 – Payne Stewart, American golfer (d. 1999)
1959 – Steve Folkes, Australian rugby league player and coach (d. 2018)
1959 – Jody Watley, American entertainer
1962 – Abdullah II of Jordan
1962 – Mary Kay Letourneau, American child rapist (d. 2020)
1964 – Otis Smith, American basketball player, coach, and manager
1965 – Kevin Moore, Australian rugby league player and coach
1966 – Danielle Goyette, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1968 – Felipe VI of Spain
1969 – Justin Skinner, English footballer and manager
1973 – Jalen Rose, American basketball player and sportscaster
1974 – Christian Bale, British actor
1974 – Olivia Colman, English actress
1975 – Juninho Pernambucano, Brazilian footballer
1976 – Andy Milonakis, American entertainer
1978 – Carmen Küng, Swiss curler
1978 – John Patterson, American baseball player
1979 – Trevor Gillies, Canadian ice hockey player
1980 – João Soares de Almeida Neto, Brazilian footballer
1980 – Georgios Vakouftsis, Greek footballer
1980 – Wilmer Valderrama, American actor and producer
1981 – Dimitar Berbatov, Bulgarian footballer
1981 – Peter Crouch, English footballer
1981 – Mathias Lauda, Austrian racing driver
1982 – Jorge Cantú, Mexican baseball player
1984 – Kotoshōgiku Kazuhiro, Japanese sumo wrestler
1984 – Kid Cudi, American entertainer
1985 – Gisela Dulko, Argentinian tennis player
1987 – Becky Lynch, Irish wrestler
1987 – Renato Santos, Brazilian footballer
1987 – Arda Turan, Turkish footballer
1989 – Yoon Bo-ra, South Korean singer
1990 – Mitchell Starc, Australian cricketer
1990 – Phillip Supernaw, American football player
1991 – Stefan Elliott, Canadian ice hockey player
1993 – Katy Marchant, English track cyclist
1993 – Thitipoom Techaapaikhun, Thai actor
1995 – Jack Laugher, English diver
1996 – Dafne Navarro, Mexican trampoline gymnast
Deaths
Pre-1600
680 – Balthild, Frankish queen (b. 626)
970 – Peter I of Bulgaria
1030 – William V, Duke of Aquitaine (b. 969)
1181 – Emperor Takakura of Japan (b. 1161)
1240 – Pelagio Galvani, Leonese lawyer and cardinal (b. 1165)
1314 – Nicholas III of Saint Omer
1344 – William Montacute, 1st Earl of Salisbury (b. 1301)
1384 – Louis II, Count of Flanders (b. 1330)
1574 – Damião de Góis, Portuguese historian and philosopher (b. 1502)
1601–1900
1606 – Everard Digby, English criminal (b. 1578)
1606 – John Grant, English conspirator (b. 1570)
1606 – Robert Wintour, English conspirator (b. 1565)
1649 – Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland (b. 1600)
1664 – Cornelis de Graeff, Dutch mayor (b. 1599)
1730 – Peter II of Russia (b. 1715)
1770 – Giovanni Pietro Francesco Agius de Soldanis, Maltese linguist, historian and cleric (b. 1712)
1836 – Betsy Ross, American seamstress, said to have designed the American Flag (b. 1752)
1838 – Osceola, American tribal leader (b. 1804)
1858 – Coenraad Jacob Temminck, Dutch zoologist and ornithologist (b. 1778)
1867 – Emperor Kōmei of Japan (b. 1831)
1869 – William Carleton, Irish author (b. 1794)
1881 – Arthur O'Shaughnessy, English poet and herpetologist (b. 1844)
1889 – Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, heir apparent to the throne of Austria-Hungary (b. 1858)
1901–present
1926 – Barbara La Marr, American actress (b. 1896)
1928 – Johannes Fibiger, Danish physician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1867)
1934 – Frank Nelson Doubleday, American publisher, founded the Doubleday Publishing Company (b. 1862)
1947 – Frederick Blackman, English botanist and physiologist (b. 1866)
1948 – Arthur Coningham, Australian air marshal (b. 1895)
1948 – Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the Indian independence movement against British rule (b. 1869)
1948 – Orville Wright, American pilot and engineer, co-founded the Wright Company (b. 1871)
1951 – Ferdinand Porsche, Austrian-German engineer and businessman, founded Porsche (b. 1875)
1958 – Jean Crotti, Swiss painter (b. 1878)
1958 – Ernst Heinkel, German engineer and businessman; founded the Heinkel Aircraft Company (b. 1888)
1962 – Manuel de Abreu, Brazilian physician and engineer (b. 1894)
1963 – Francis Poulenc, French pianist and composer (b. 1899)
1966 – Jaan Hargel, Estonian flute player, conductor, and educator (b. 1912)
1968 – Makhanlal Chaturvedi, Indian poet, playwright, and journalist (b. 1889)
1969 – Dominique Pire, Belgian friar, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1910)
1973 – Elizabeth Baker, American economist and academic (b. 1885)
1974 – Olav Roots, Estonian pianist and composer (b. 1910)
1977 – Paul Marais de Beauchamp, French zoologist (b. 1883)
1980 – Professor Longhair, American singer-songwriter and pianist (b. 1918)
1982 – Lightnin' Hopkins, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1912)
1991 – John Bardeen, American physicist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1908)
1991 – Clifton C. Edom, American photographer and educator (b. 1907)
1993 – Alexandra of Yugoslavia, the last Queen of Yugoslavia (b. 1921)
1994 – Pierre Boulle, French soldier and author (b. 1912)
1999 – Huntz Hall, American actor (b. 1919)
1999 – Ed Herlihy, American journalist (b. 1909)
2001 – Jean-Pierre Aumont, French soldier and actor (b. 1911)
2001 – Johnnie Johnson, English air marshal and pilot (b. 1915)
2001 – Joseph Ransohoff, American surgeon and educator (b. 1915)
2005 – Martyn Bennett, Canadian-Scottish violinist (b. 1971)
2006 – Coretta Scott King, American author and activist (b. 1927)
2006 – Wendy Wasserstein, American playwright and academic (b. 1950)
2007 – Sidney Sheldon, American author and screenwriter (b. 1917)
2008 – Marcial Maciel, Mexican-American priest, founded the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi (b. 1920)
2009 – H. Guy Hunt, American soldier, pastor, and politician, 49th Governor of Alabama (b. 1933)
2010 – Fadil Ferati, Kosovar accountant and politician (b. 1960)
2011 – John Barry, English composer and conductor (b. 1933)
2012 – Frank Aschenbrenner, American football player and soldier (b. 1925)
2012 – Doeschka Meijsing, Dutch author (b. 1947)
2013 – Gamal al-Banna, Egyptian author and scholar (b. 1920)
2013 – Patty Andrews, American singer (b. 1918)
2013 – George Witt, American baseball player and coach (b. 1931)
2014 – Stefan Bałuk, Polish general and photographer (b. 1914)
2014 – The Mighty Hannibal, American singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1939)
2014 – William Motzing, American composer and conductor (b. 1937)
2014 – Arthur Rankin, Jr., American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1924)
2015 – Carl Djerassi, Austrian-American chemist, author, and playwright (b. 1923)
2015 – Ülo Kaevats, Estonian academic, philosopher, and politician (b. 1947)
2015 – Geraldine McEwan, English actress (b. 1932)
2015 – Gerrit Voorting, Dutch cyclist (b. 1923)
2015 – Zhelyu Zhelev, Bulgarian philosopher and politician, 2nd President of Bulgaria (b. 1935)
2016 – Frank Finlay, English actor (b. 1926)
2016 – Francisco Flores Pérez, Salvadorian politician, President of El Salvador (b. 1959)
2016 – Georgia Davis Powers, American activist and politician (b. 1923)
2018 – Mark Salling, American actor and musician (b. 1982)
2019 – Dick Miller, American actor (b. 1928)
2021 – Sophie Xeon, Scottish musician (b. 1986)
2022 – Cheslie Kryst, American television presenter and model (b. 1991)
Holidays and observances
Christian Feast Day:
Adelelmus of Burgos
Aldegonde
Anthony the Great (Coptic Church)
Armentarius of Pavia
Balthild
Charles, King and Martyr (various provinces of the Anglican Communion)
Hippolytus of Rome
Hyacintha Mariscotti
Martina
Matthias of Jerusalem
Mutien-Marie Wiaux
Savina
Three Holy Hierarchs (Eastern Orthodox), and its related observances:
Teacher's Day (Greece)
January 30 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Day of Azerbaijani customs (Azerbaijan)
Day of Saudade (Brazil)
Fred Korematsu Day (California, Florida, Hawaii, Virginia)
Martyrdom of Mahatma Gandhi, and its related observances:
Martyrs' Day (India)
School Day of Non-violence and Peace (Spain)
Start of the Season for Nonviolence (January 30 – April 4)
References
External links
BBC: On This Day
Historical Events on January 30
Today in Canadian History
Days of the year
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Events
Pre-1600
904 – Sergius III is elected pope, after coming out of retirement to take over the papacy from the deposed antipope Christopher.
946 – Caliph Al-Mustakfi is blinded and deposed by Emir Mu'izz al-Dawla, ruler of the Buyid Empire. He is succeeded by Al-Muti as caliph of the Abbasid Caliphate.
1258 – First Mongol invasion of Đại Việt: Đại Việt defeats the Mongols at the battle of Đông Bộ Đầu, forcing the Mongols to withdraw from the country.
1601–1900
1814 – War of the Sixth Coalition: France defeats Russia and Prussia in the Battle of Brienne.
1819 – Stamford Raffles lands on the island of Singapore.
1845 – "The Raven" is published in The Evening Mirror in New York, the first publication with the name of the author, Edgar Allan Poe.
1850 – Henry Clay introduces the Compromise of 1850 to the U.S. Congress.
1856 – Queen Victoria issues a Warrant under the Royal sign-manual that establishes the Victoria Cross to recognise acts of valour by British military personnel during the Crimean War.
1861 – Kansas is admitted as the 34th U.S. state.
1863 – The Bear River Massacre: A detachment of California Volunteers led by Colonel Patrick Edward Connor engage the Shoshone at Bear River, Washington Territory, killing hundreds of men, women and children.
1886 – Karl Benz patents the first successful gasoline-driven automobile.
1891 – Liliʻuokalani is proclaimed the last monarch and only queen regnant of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
1901–present
1907 – Charles Curtis of Kansas becomes the first Native American U.S. Senator.
1911 – Mexican Revolution: Mexicali is captured by the Mexican Liberal Party, igniting the Magonista rebellion of 1911.
1918 – Ukrainian–Soviet War: The Bolshevik Red Army, on its way to besiege Kyiv, is met by a small group of military students at the Battle of Kruty.
1918 – Ukrainian–Soviet War: An armed uprising organized by the Bolsheviks in anticipation of the encroaching Red Army begins at the Kiev Arsenal, which will be put down six days later.
1936 – The first inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame are announced.
1940 – Three trains on the Nishinari Line; present Sakurajima Line, in Osaka, Japan, collide and explode while approaching Ajikawaguchi Station. One hundred and eighty-one people are killed.
1941 – Alexandros Koryzis becomes Prime Minister of Greece upon the sudden death of his predecessor, dictator Ioannis Metaxas.
1943 – World War II: The first day of the Battle of Rennell Island, is torpedoed and heavily damaged by Japanese bombers.
1944 – World War II: Approximately 38 people are killed and about a dozen injured when the Polish village of Koniuchy (present-day Kaniūkai, Lithuania) is attacked by Soviet partisan units.
1944 – In Bologna, Italy, the Anatomical theatre of the Archiginnasio is completely destroyed in an air-raid, during the Second World War.
1959 – The first Melodifestivalen is held in Cirkus, Stockholm, Sweden.
1963 – The first inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame are announced.
1973 – EgyptAir Flight 741 crashes into the Kyrenia Mountains in Cyprus, killing 37 people.
1980 – The Rubik's Cube makes its international debut at the Ideal Toy Corp. in Earl's Court, London.
1983 – Singapore cable car crash: Panamanian-registered oil rig, Eniwetok, strikes the cables of the Singapore Cable Car system linking the mainland and Sentosa Island, causing two cabins to fall into the water and killing seven people and leaving thirteen others trapped for hours.
1989 – Cold War: Hungary establishes diplomatic relations with South Korea, making it the first Eastern Bloc nation to do so.
1991 – Gulf War: The Battle of Khafji, the first major ground engagement of the war, as well as its deadliest, begins between Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
1996 – President Jacques Chirac announces a "definitive end" to French nuclear weapons testing.
2001 – Thousands of student protesters in Indonesia storm parliament and demand that President Abdurrahman Wahid resign due to alleged involvement in corruption scandals.
2002 – In his State of the Union address, President George W. Bush describes "regimes that sponsor terror" as an Axis of evil, in which he includes Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
2005 – The first direct commercial flights from mainland China (from Guangzhou) to Taiwan since 1949 arrived in Taipei. Shortly afterwards, a China Airlines flight lands in Beijing.
2009 – The Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt rules that people who do not adhere to one of the three government-recognised religions, while not allowed to list any belief outside of those three, are still eligible to receive government identity documents.
2009 – Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich is removed from office following his conviction of several corruption charges, including the alleged solicitation of personal benefit in exchange for an appointment to the United States Senate as a replacement for then-U.S. president-elect Barack Obama.
2013 – SCAT Airlines Flight 760 crashes near the Kazakh city of Almaty, killing 21 people.
2014 – Rojava conflict: The Afrin Canton declares its autonomy from the Syrian Arab Republic.
2017 – Quebec City mosque shooting: Alexandre Bissonnette opens fire at mosque in Sainte-Foy, Quebec, killing six and wounding 19 others in a spree shooting.
2020 – COVID-19 pandemic: The Trump administration establishes the White House Coronavirus Task Force under Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar.
Births
Pre-1600
133 – Didius Julianus, Roman emperor (probable; d. 193)
919 – Shi Zong, emperor of the Liao Dynasty (d. 951)
1455 – Johann Reuchlin, German-born humanist and scholar (d. 1522)
1475 – Giuliano Bugiardini, Italian painter (d. 1555)
1499 – Katharina von Bora, wife of Martin Luther; formerly a Roman Catholic nun (d. 1552)
1525 – Lelio Sozzini, Italian humanist and reformer (d. 1562)
1584 – Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange (d. 1647)
1591 – Franciscus Junius, pioneer of Germanic philology (d. 1677)
1601–1900
1602 – Countess Amalie Elisabeth of Hanau-Münzenberg (d. 1651)
1632 – Johann Georg Graevius, German scholar and critic (d. 1703)
1650 – Juan de Galavís, Spanish Roman Catholic archbishop of Santo Domingo and Bogotá (d. 1739)
1688 – Emanuel Swedenborg, Swedish astronomer, philosopher, and theologian (d. 1772)
1711 – Giuseppe Bonno, Austrian composer (d. 1788)
1715 – Georg Christoph Wagenseil, Austrian organist and composer (d. 1777)
1717 – Jeffery Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst, English field marshal and politician, 19th Governor General of Canada (d. 1797)
1718 – Paul Rabaut, French pastor (d. 1794)
1737 – Thomas Paine, prominent for publishing Common Sense (1776), which established him as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States (d. 1809)
1749 – Christian VII of Denmark (d. 1808)
1754 – Moses Cleaveland, American general, lawyer, and politician, founded Cleveland, Ohio (d. 1806)
1756 – Henry Lee III, American general and politician, 9th Governor of Virginia (d. 1818)
1761 – Albert Gallatin, Swiss-American ethnologist, linguist, and politician, 4th United States Secretary of the Treasury (d. 1849)
1782 – Daniel Auber, French composer (d. 1871)
1801 – Johannes Bernardus van Bree, Dutch violinist, composer, and conductor (d. 1857)
1810 – Ernst Kummer, Polish-German mathematician and academic (d. 1893)
1810 – Mary Whitwell Hale, American teacher, school founder, and hymnwriter (d. 1862)
1843 – William McKinley, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 25th President of the United States (d. 1901)
1846 – Karol Olszewski, Polish chemist, mathematician, and physicist (d. 1915)
1852 – Frederic Hymen Cowen, Jamaican-English pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1935)
1858 – Henry Ward Ranger, American painter and academic (d. 1916)
1860 – Anton Chekhov, Russian playwright and short story writer (d. 1904)
1861 – Florida Ruffin Ridley, American civil rights activist, teacher, editor, and writer (d. 1943)
1862 – Frederick Delius, English composer (d. 1934)
1866 – Julio Peris Brell, Spanish painter (d. 1944)
1866 – Romain Rolland, French historian, author, and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1944)
1867 – Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Spanish journalist and author (d. 1928)
1870 – Süleyman Nazif, Turkish poet and civil servant (d. 1927)
1874 – John D. Rockefeller, Jr., American businessman and philanthropist (d. 1960)
1876 – Havergal Brian, English composer (d. 1972)
1877 – Georges Catroux, French general and diplomat (d. 1969)
1880 – W. C. Fields, American actor, comedian, and screenwriter (d. 1946)
1881 – Alice Catherine Evans, American microbiologist (d. 1975)
1884 – Juhan Aavik, Estonian-Swedish composer and conductor (d. 1982)
1888 – Sydney Chapman, English mathematician and geophysicist (d. 1970)
1888 – Wellington Koo, Chinese statesman (d. 1985)
1891 – Elizaveta Gerdt, Russian ballerina and educator (d. 1975)
1891 – R. Norris Williams, Swiss-American tennis player and banker (d. 1968)
1892 – Ernst Lubitsch, German American film director, producer, writer, and actor (d. 1947)
1895 – Muna Lee, American poet and author (d. 1965)
1901–present
1901 – Allen B. DuMont, American engineer and broadcaster, founded the DuMont Television Network (d. 1965)
1901 – E. P. Taylor, Canadian businessman and horse breeder (d. 1989)
1903 – Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Russian-Israeli biochemist and philosopher (d. 1994)
1905 – Barnett Newman, American painter and etcher (d. 1970)
1906 – Joe Primeau, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (d. 1989)
1913 – Victor Mature, American actor (d. 1999)
1915 – Bill Peet, American author and illustrator (d. 2002)
1915 – John Serry Sr., Italian-American concert accordionist and composer (d. 2003)
1917 – John Raitt, American actor and singer (d. 2005)
1918 – John Forsythe, American actor (d. 2010)
1921 – Geraldine Pittman Woods, American science administrator and embryologist (d. 1999)
1923 – Jack Burke Jr., American golfer
1923 – Paddy Chayefsky, American author and screenwriter (d. 1981)
1926 – Abdus Salam, Pakistani-British physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1996)
1926 – Amelita Ramos, 11th First Lady of the Philippines
1927 – Edward Abbey, American environmentalist and author (d. 1989)
1929 – Elio Petri, Italian director and screenwriter (d. 1982)
1929 – Joseph Kruskal, American mathematician and computer scientist (d. 2010)
1931 – Leslie Bricusse, English playwright and composer (d. 2021)
1931 – Ferenc Mádl, Hungarian academic and politician, 2nd President of Hungary (d. 2011)
1932 – Raman Subba Row, English cricketer and referee
1932 – Tommy Taylor, English footballer (d. 1958)
1933 – Sacha Distel, French singer and guitarist (d. 2004)
1934 – Branko Miljković, Serbian poet and academic (d. 1961)
1936 – Veturi, Indian poet and songwriter (d. 2010)
1937 – Hassan Habibi, Iranian lawyer and politician, 1st Vice President of Iran (d. 2013)
1937 – Bobby Scott, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and producer (d. 1990)
1939 – Germaine Greer, Australian journalist and author
1940 – Katharine Ross, American actress and author
1940 – Kunimitsu Takahashi, Japanese motorcycle racer and race car driver
1941 – Robin Morgan, American actress, journalist, and author
1943 – Tony Blackburn, English radio and television host
1943 – Pat Quinn, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (d. 2014)
1944 – Andrew Loog Oldham, English record producer and manager
1944 – Patrick Lipton Robinson, Jamaican lawyer and judge
1944 – Pauline van der Wildt, Dutch swimmer
1945 – Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, Malian academic and politician, Prime Minister of Mali (d. 2022)
1945 – Jim Nicholson, Northern Irish politician
1945 – Tom Selleck, American actor and businessman
1946 – Bettye LaVette, American singer-songwriter
1947 – Linda B. Buck, American biologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1947 – David Byron, English singer-songwriter (d. 1985)
1947 – Marián Varga, Slovak organist and composer (d. 2017)
1948 – Raymond Keene, English chess player and author
1949 – Doris Davenport, American poet and teacher
1949 – Evgeny Lovchev, Russian footballer and manager
1949 – Tommy Ramone, Hungarian-American drummer and producer (d. 2014)
1950 – Ann Jillian, American actress and singer
1950 – Jody Scheckter, South African race car driver and sportscaster
1951 – Fereydoon Forooghi, Iranian singer-songwriter (d. 2001)
1951 – Andy Roberts, Caribbean cricketer
1953 – Peter Baumann, German keyboard player and songwriter
1953 – Charlie Wilson, American singer-songwriter and producer
1953 – Teresa Teng, Taiwanese singer (d. 1995)
1954 – Christian Bjelland IV, Norwegian businessman and art collector
1954 – Terry Kinney, American actor and director
1954 – Oprah Winfrey, American talk show host, actress, and producer, founded Harpo Productions
1956 – Jan Jakub Kolski, Polish director, screenwriter, and cinematographer
1957 – Philippe Dintrans, French rugby player
1957 – Ron Franscell, American author and journalist
1957 – Grażyna Miller, Polish journalist and poet (d. 2009)
1959 – Mike Foligno, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1960 – Gia Carangi, American supermodel (d. 1986)
1960 – Greg Louganis, American diver and author
1961 – Petra Thümer, German swimmer and photographer
1962 – Nicholas Turturro, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
1964 – John Anthony Gallagher, English-New Zealand rugby player
1965 – Dominik Hašek, Czech ice hockey player
1965 – Peter Lundgren, Swedish tennis player and coach
1966 – Romário, Brazilian footballer, manager, and politician
1967 – Stacey King, American basketball player, coach, and sportscaster
1968 – Edward Burns, American actor, director, and producer
1968 – Susi Erdmann, German luger and bobsledder
1970 – Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, Indian colonel and politician
1970 – Heather Graham, American actress
1970 – Jörg Hoffmann, German swimmer
1970 – Paul Ryan, American politician, 62nd Speaker of the United States House of Representatives
1970 – Mohammed Yusuf, Nigerian Islamist leader, founded Boko Haram (d. 2009)
1975 – Sara Gilbert, American actress, producer, and talk show host
1980 – Ivan Klasnic, German-Croatian footballer
1982 – Adam Lambert, American singer, songwriter and actor
1984 – Natalie du Toit, South African swimmer
1984 – Nuno Morais, Portuguese footballer
1985 – Marc Gasol, Spanish basketball player
1987 – José Abreu, Cuban baseball player
1988 – Tatyana Chernova, Russian heptathlete
1988 – Shay Logan, English footballer
1988 – Aydın Yılmaz, Turkish footballer
1989 – Kevin Shattenkirk, American ice hockey player
1992 – Markel Brown, American basketball player
1993 – Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Japanese singer
Deaths
Pre-1600
661 – Ali, cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad (b. 601)
702 – Princess Ōku of Japan (b. 661)
757 – An Lushan, Chinese general (b. 703)
870 – Salih ibn Wasif, Muslim general
1119 – Pope Gelasius II (b. 1060)
1327 – Adolf, Count Palatine of the Rhine (b. 1300)
1465 – Louis, Duke of Savoy (b. 1413)
1597 – Elias Ammerbach, German organist and composer (b. 1530)
1601–1900
1608 – Frederick I, Duke of Württemberg (b. 1557)
1647 – Francis Meres, English priest and author (b. 1565)
1678 – Jerónimo Lobo, Portuguese missionary and author (b. 1593)
1706 – Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, English poet and courtier (b. 1638)
1737 – George Hamilton, 1st Earl of Orkney, Scottish-English field marshal and politician, Colonial Governor of Virginia (b. 1666)
1743 – André-Hercule de Fleury, French cardinal (b. 1653)
1763 – Louis Racine, French poet (b. 1692)
1820 – George III of the United Kingdom (b. 1738)
1829 – Paul François Jean Nicolas, vicomte de Barras, French captain and politician (b. 1755)
1829 – István Pauli, Hungarian-Slovenian priest and poet (b. 1760)
1870 – Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany (b. 1797)
1871 – Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé, Canadian author (b. 1786)
1888 – Edward Lear, English poet and illustrator (b. 1812)
1899 – Alfred Sisley, French-English painter (b. 1839)
1901–present
1906 – Christian IX of Denmark (b. 1818)
1928 – Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, Scottish field marshal (b. 1861)
1929 – La Goulue, French model and dancer (b. 1866)
1931 – Henri Mathias Berthelot, French general during World War I (b. 1861)
1933 – Sara Teasdale, American poet (b. 1884)
1934 – Fritz Haber, Polish-German chemist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1868)
1941 – Ioannis Metaxas, Greek general and politician, 130th Prime Minister of Greece (b. 1871)
1944 – William Allen White, American journalist and author (b. 1868)
1946 – Harry Hopkins, American businessman and politician, 8th United States Secretary of Commerce (b. 1890)
1948 – Prince Aimone, Duke of Aosta (b. 1900)
1950 – Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, Kuwaiti ruler (b. 1885)
1951 – Frank Tarrant, Australian cricketer and umpire (b. 1880)
1956 – H. L. Mencken, American journalist and critic (b. 1880)
1959 – Winifred Brunton, South African painter and illustrator (b. 1880)
1962 – Fritz Kreisler, Austrian-American violinist and composer (b. 1875)
1963 – Robert Frost, American poet and playwright (b. 1874)
1964 – Alan Ladd, American actor (b. 1913)
1969 – Allen Welsh Dulles, American banker, lawyer, and diplomat, 5th Director of Central Intelligence (b. 1893)
1970 – B. H. Liddell Hart, French-English soldier, historian, and journalist (b. 1895)
1977 – Freddie Prinze, American comedian and actor (b. 1954)
1978 – Frank Nicklin, Australian politician, 28th Premier of Queensland (b. 1895)
1980 – Jimmy Durante, American entertainer (b. 1893)
1991 – Yasushi Inoue, Japanese author and poet (b. 1907)
1992 – Willie Dixon, American singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1915)
1993 – Adetokunbo Ademola, Nigerian lawyer and jurist, 2nd Chief Justice of Nigeria (b. 1906)
1994 – Ulrike Maier, Austrian skier (b. 1967)
1999 – Lili St. Cyr, American model and dancer (b. 1918)
2002 – Harold Russell, Canadian-American soldier and actor (b. 1914)
2003 – Frank Moss, American lawyer and politician (b. 1911)
2004 – Janet Frame, New Zealand author and poet (b. 1924)
2005 – Ephraim Kishon, Israeli author, screenwriter, and director (b. 1924)
2006 – Nam June Paik, South Korean-American artist, (b. 1932)
2008 – Bengt Lindström, Swedish painter and sculptor (b. 1925)
2008 – Margaret Truman, American singer and author (b. 1924)
2009 – Hélio Gracie, Brazilian martial artist (b. 1913)
2009 – John Martyn, British singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1948)
2011 – Milton Babbitt, American composer, educator, and theorist (b. 1916)
2012 – Ranjit Singh Dyal, Indian general and politician, 10th Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry (b. 1928)
2012 – Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Italian lawyer and politician, 9th President of Italy (b. 1918)
2012 – Camilla Williams, American soprano and educator (b. 1919)
2014 – François Cavanna, French journalist and author (b. 1923)
2015 – Colleen McCullough, Australian neuroscientist, author, and academic (b. 1937)
2015 – Rod McKuen, American singer-songwriter and poet (b. 1933)
2015 – Alexander Vraciu, American commander and pilot (b. 1918)
2016 – Jean-Marie Doré, Guinean lawyer and politician, 11th Prime Minister of Guinea (b. 1938)
2016 – Jacques Rivette, French director, screenwriter, and critic (b. 1928)
2019 – George Fernandes, Indian politician (b. 1930)
2019 – James Ingram, American musician (b. 1952)
2021 – Walker Boone, Canadian actor (b. 1944)
2022 – Howard Hesseman, American actor (b. 1940)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Andrei Rublev (Episcopal Church (USA))
Aquilinus of Milan
Constantius of Perugia
Dallán Forgaill
Gildas
Juniper
Sabinian of Troyes
Sulpitius I of Bourges
Valerius of Trèves
January 29 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Earliest day on which Fat Thursday can fall, while March 4 is the latest; celebrated on Thursday before Ash Wednesday. (Christianity)
Kansas Day (Kansas, United States)
References
External links
BBC: On This Day
Historical Events on January 29
Today in Canadian History
Days of the year
January | [
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15815 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2018 | June 18 |
Events
Pre-1600
618 – Li Yuan becomes Emperor Gaozu of Tang, initiating three centuries of Tang dynasty rule over China.
656 – Ali becomes Caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate.
860 – Byzantine–Rus' War: A fleet of about 200 Rus' vessels sails into the Bosphorus and starts pillaging the suburbs of the Byzantine capital Constantinople.
1053 – Battle of Civitate: Three thousand Norman horsemen of Count Humphrey rout the troops of Pope Leo IX.
1178 – Five Canterbury monks see an event believed to have been the formation of the Giordano Bruno crater on the moon. It is believed that the current oscillations of the Moon's distance from the Earth (on the order of meters) are a result of this collision.
1264 – The Parliament of Ireland meets at Castledermot in County Kildare, the first definitively known meeting of this Irish legislature.
1265 – A draft Byzantine–Venetian treaty is concluded between Venetian envoys and Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, but is not ratified by Doge Reniero Zeno.
1429 – Charles VII's army defeats an English army under John Talbot at the Battle of Patay during the Hundred Years' War. The English lost 2,200 men, over half their army, crippling their efforts during this segment of the war.
1601–1900
1633 – Charles I is crowned King of Scots at St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh.
1684 – The charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is revoked via a scire facias writ issued by an English court.
1757 – Battle of Kolín between Prussian forces under Frederick the Great and an Austrian army under the command of Field Marshal Count Leopold Joseph von Daun in the Seven Years' War.
1778 – American Revolutionary War: The British Army abandons Philadelphia.
1799 – Action of 18 June 1799: A frigate squadron under Rear-admiral Jean-Baptiste Perrée is captured by the British fleet under Lord Keith.
1803 – Haitian Revolution: The Royal Navy led by Rear-Admiral John Thomas Duckworth commence the blockade of Saint-Domingue against French forces.
1812 – The United States declaration of war upon the United Kingdom is signed by President James Madison, beginning the War of 1812.
1815 – Napoleonic Wars: The Battle of Waterloo results in the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte by the Duke of Wellington and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher forcing him to abdicate the throne of France for the second and last time.
1822 – Konstantinos Kanaris blows up the Ottoman navy's flagship at Chios, killing the Kapudan Pasha Nasuhzade Ali Pasha.
1858 – Charles Darwin receives a paper from Alfred Russel Wallace that includes nearly identical conclusions about evolution as Darwin's own, prompting Darwin to publish his theory.
1859 – First ascent of Aletschhorn, second summit of the Bernese Alps.
1873 – Susan B. Anthony is fined $100 for attempting to vote in the 1872 presidential election.
1887 – The Reinsurance Treaty between Germany and Russia is signed.
1900 – Empress Dowager Cixi of China orders all foreigners killed, including foreign diplomats and their families.
1901–present
1908 – Japanese immigration to Brazil begins when 781 people arrive in Santos aboard the ship Kasato-Maru.
1908 – The University of the Philippines is established.
1923 – Checker Taxi puts its first taxi on the streets.
1928 – Aviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly in an aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean (she is a passenger; Wilmer Stultz is the pilot and Lou Gordon the mechanic).
1935 – Police in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, clash with striking longshoremen, resulting in a total of 60 injuries and 24 arrests.
1940 – Appeal of 18 June by Charles de Gaulle.
1940 – The "Finest Hour" speech is delivered by Winston Churchill.
1945 – William Joyce ("Lord Haw-Haw") is charged with treason for his pro-German propaganda broadcasting during World War II.
1946 – Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, a Socialist, calls for a Direct Action Day against the Portuguese in Goa.
1948 – Columbia Records introduces the long-playing record album in a public demonstration at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.
1948 – Britain, France and the United States announce that on June 21, the Deutsche Mark will be introduced in western Germany and West Berlin. Over the next six days, Communists increasingly restrict access to Berlin.
1953 – The Egyptian revolution of 1952 ends with the overthrow of the Muhammad Ali dynasty and the declaration of the Republic of Egypt.
1953 – A United States Air Force C-124 crashes and burns near Tachikawa, Japan, killing 129.
1954 – Carlos Castillo Armas leads an invasion force across the Guatemalan border, setting in motion the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état.
1965 – Vietnam War: The United States Air Force uses B-52 bombers to attack guerrilla fighters in South Vietnam.
1972 – Staines air disaster: One hundred eighteen people are killed when a BEA H.S. Trident crashes two minutes after takeoff from London's Heathrow Airport.
1979 – SALT II is signed by the United States and the Soviet Union.
1981 – The Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, the first operational aircraft initially designed around stealth technology, makes its first flight.
1982 – Italian banker Roberto Calvi's body is discovered hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London, England.
1983 – Space Shuttle program: STS-7, Astronaut Sally Ride becomes the first American woman in space.
1983 – Mona Mahmudnizhad, together with nine other women of the Baháʼí Faith, is sentenced to death and hanged in Shiraz, Iran over her religious beliefs.
1984 – A major clash between about 5,000 police and a similar number of miners takes place at Orgreave, South Yorkshire, during the 1984–85 UK miners' strike.
1994 – The Troubles: Members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) attack a crowded pub with assault rifles in Loughinisland, Northern Ireland. Six Catholic civilians are killed and five wounded. It was crowded with people watching the 1994 FIFA World Cup.
1998 – Propair Flight 420 crashes near Montréal–Mirabel International Airport in Quebec, Canada, killing 11.
2006 – The first Kazakh space satellite, KazSat-1 is launched.
2007 – The Charleston Sofa Super Store fire happened in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine firefighters.
2009 – The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a NASA robotic spacecraft is launched.
2018 – An earthquake of magnitude 6.1 strikes northern Osaka.
Births
Pre-1600
1269 – Eleanor of England, Countess of Bar (d. 1298)
1318 – Eleanor of Woodstock (d. 1355)
1332 – John V Palaiologos, Byzantine Emperor (d. 1391)
1466 – Ottaviano Petrucci, Italian printer (d. 1539)
1511 – Bartolomeo Ammannati, Italian architect and sculptor, designed the Ponte Santa Trinita (d. 1592)
1517 – Emperor Ōgimachi of Japan (d. 1593)
1521 – Maria of Portugal, Duchess of Viseu (d. 1577)
1601–1900
1667 – Ivan Trubetskoy, Russian field marshal (d. 1750)
1673 – Antonio de Literes, Spanish composer (d. 1747)
1677 – Antonio Maria Bononcini, Italian cellist and composer (d. 1726)
1716 – Joseph-Marie Vien, French painter and educator (d. 1809)
1717 – Johann Stamitz, Czech violinist and composer (d. 1757)
1757 – Ignaz Pleyel, Austrian-French pianist and composer (d. 1831)
1757 – Gervasio Antonio de Posadas, Argentine lawyer and politician 1st Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (d. 1833)
1769 – Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, Irish-English politician, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (d. 1822)
1799 – William Lassell, English astronomer and merchant (d. 1880)
1812 – Ivan Goncharov, Russian journalist and author (d. 1891)
1815 – Ludwig Freiherr von und zu der Tann-Rathsamhausen, German general (d. 1881)
1816 – Hélène Napoleone Bonaparte, French daughter of Napoleon (d. 1907)
1816 – Jung Bahadur Rana, Nepali ruler (d. 1877)
1833 – Manuel González Flores, Mexican general and President (1880-1884) (d. 1893)
1834 – Auguste-Théodore-Paul de Broglie, French philosopher and academic (d. 1895)
1839 – William H. Seward Jr., American general and banker (d. 1920)
1845 – Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, French physician and parasitologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1922)
1850 – Richard Heuberger, Austrian composer and critic (d. 1914)
1854 – E. W. Scripps, American publisher, founded the E. W. Scripps Company (d. 1926)
1857 – Henry Clay Folger, American businessman and philanthropist, founded the Folger Shakespeare Library (d. 1930)
1858 – Andrew Forsyth, Scottish-English mathematician and academic (d. 1942)
1858 – Hector Rason, English-Australian politician, 7th Premier of Western Australia (d. 1927)
1862 – Carolyn Wells, American novelist and poet (d. 1942)
1863 – George Essex Evans, English-Australian poet and author (d. 1909)
1868 – Miklós Horthy, Hungarian admiral and politician, Regent of Hungary (d. 1957)
1870 – Édouard Le Roy, French mathematician and philosopher (d. 1954)
1877 – James Montgomery Flagg, American painter and illustrator (d. 1960)
1881 – Zoltán Halmay, Hungarian swimmer (d. 1956)
1882 – Georgi Dimitrov, Bulgarian compositor and politician, 32nd Prime Minister of Bulgaria (d. 1949)
1884 – Édouard Daladier, French captain and politician, Prime Minister of France (d. 1970)
1886 – George Mallory, English lieutenant and mountaineer (d. 1924)
1886 – Alexander Wetmore, American ornithologist and paleontologist (d. 1978)
1887 – Tancrède Labbé, Canadian businessman and politician (d. 1956)
1896 – Blanche Sweet, American actress (d. 1986)
1897 – Martti Marttelin, Finnish runner (d. 1940)
1900 – Vlasta Vraz, Czech-American relief worker, editor, and fundraiser (d. 1989)
1901–present
1901 – Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia (d. 1918)
1901 – Llewellyn Rees, English actor (d. 1994)
1902 – Louis Alter, American musician (d. 1980)
1902 – Paavo Yrjölä, Finnish decathlete (d. 1980)
1903 – Jeanette MacDonald, American actress and singer (d. 1965)
1903 – Raymond Radiguet, French author and poet (d. 1923)
1904 – Keye Luke, Chinese-American actor (d. 1991)
1904 – Manuel Rosenthal, French conductor and composer (d. 2003)
1905 – Eduard Tubin, Estonian composer and conductor (d. 1982)
1907 – Frithjof Schuon, Swiss-American metaphysicist, philosopher, and author (d. 1998)
1908 – Bud Collyer, American actor and game show host (d. 1969)
1908 – Stanley Knowles, American-Canadian academic and politician (d. 1997)
1908 – Nedra Volz, American actress (d. 2003)
1910 – Dick Foran, American actor and singer (d. 1979)
1910 – Avon Long, American actor and singer (d. 1984)
1910 – Ray McKinley, American singer, drummer, and bandleader (d. 1995)
1912 – Glenn Morris, American decathlete (d. 1974)
1913 – Wilfred Gordon Bigelow, Canadian soldier and surgeon (d. 2005)
1913 – Sammy Cahn, American pianist and composer (d. 1993)
1913 – Sylvia Porter, American economist and journalist (d. 1991)
1913 – Françoise Loranger, Canadian playwright and producer (d. 1995)
1913 – Robert Mondavi, American winemaker and philanthropist (d. 2008)
1913 – Oswald Teichmüller, German mathematician (d. 1943)
1914 – E. G. Marshall, American actor (d. 1998)
1914 – Efraín Huerta, Mexican poet (d.1982)
1915 – Red Adair, American firefighter (d. 2004)
1915 – Robert Kanigher, American author (d. 2002)
1915 – Alice T. Schafer, American mathematician (d. 2009)
1916 – Julio César Turbay Ayala, Colombian lawyer and politician, 25th President of Colombia (d. 2005)
1917 – Richard Boone, American actor, singer, and director (d. 1981)
1917 – Jack Karnehm, English snooker player and sportscaster (d. 2002)
1917 – Erik Ortvad, Danish painter and illustrator (d. 2008)
1918 – Alf Francis, West Prussia-born, English motor racing mechanic and race car constructor (d. 1983)
1918 – Jerome Karle, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2013)
1918 – Franco Modigliani, Italian-American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2003)
1919 – Jüri Järvet, Estonian actor and screenwriter (d. 1995)
1920 – Ian Carmichael, English actor and singer (d. 2010)
1920 – Aster Berkhof, Belgian author and academic (d. 2020)
1922 – Claude Helffer, French pianist and educator (d. 2004)
1924 – George Mikan, American basketball player and coach (d. 2005)
1925 – Robert Beadell, American composer and educator (d. 1994)
1926 – Philip B. Crosby, American businessman and author (d. 2001)
1926 – Allan Sandage, American astronomer and cosmologist (d. 2010)
1926 – Tom Wicker, American journalist and author (d. 2011)
1927 – Eva Bartok, Hungarian-English actress (d. 1998)
1927 – Paul Eddington, English actor (d. 1995)
1928 – Michael Blakemore, Australian actor, director, and screenwriter
1928 – David T. Lykken, American geneticist and academic (d. 2006)
1929 – Jürgen Habermas, German sociologist and philosopher
1929 – Tibor Rubin, Hungarian-American soldier, Medal of Honor recipient (d. 2015)
1931 – Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazilian sociologist, academic, and politician, 34th President of Brazil
1932 – Dudley R. Herschbach, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1932 – Geoffrey Hill, English poet and academic (d. 2016)
1933 – Colin Brumby, Australian composer and conductor (d. 2018)
1933 – Tommy Hunt, American singer
1934 – Brian Kenny, English general (d. 2017)
1934 – Mitsuteru Yokoyama, Japanese author and illustrator (d. 2004)
1934 – Barack Obama Sr., Kenyan economist (d. 1982)
1936 – Denny Hulme, New Zealand race car driver (d. 1992)
1936 – Ronald Venetiaan, Surinamese politician, 6th President of Suriname
1937 – Del Harris, American basketball player and coach
1937 – Jay Rockefeller, American lawyer and politician, 29th Governor of West Virginia
1937 – Bruce Trigger, Canadian archaeologist, anthropologist and historian (d. 2006)
1937 – Vitaly Zholobov, Ukrainian colonel, engineer, and astronaut
1938 – Kevin Murray, Australian footballer and coach
1939 – Lou Brock, American baseball player and sportscaster (d. 2020)
1939 – Jean-Claude Germain, Canadian historian, author, and journalist
1939 – Brooks Firestone, American businessman and politician
1941 – Roger Lemerre, French footballer and manager
1941 – Paul Mayersberg, English director and screenwriter
1941 – Delia Smith, English chef and author
1942 – John Bellany, Scottish painter and academic (d. 2013)
1942 – Roger Ebert, American journalist, critic, and screenwriter (d. 2013)
1942 – Pat Hutchins, English author and illustrator (d. 2017)
1942 – Thabo Mbeki, South African politician, 23rd President of South Africa
1942 – Paul McCartney, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1942 – Richard Perry, American record producer
1942 – Carl Radle, American bass player and producer (d. 1980)
1942 – Nick Tate, Australian actor and director
1942 – Hans Vonk, Dutch conductor (d. 2004)
1943 – Barry Evans, English actor (d. 1997)
1943 – Raffaella Carrà, Italian singer, dancer, and actress (d. 2021)
1943 – Éva Marton, Hungarian soprano and actress
1944 – Bruce DuMont, American broadcaster and political analyst
1944 – Sandy Posey, American pop/country singer
1946 – Russell Ash, English journalist and author (d. 2010)
1946 – Bruiser Brody, American wrestler (d. 1988)
1946 – Fabio Capello, Italian footballer and manager
1946 – Maria Bethânia, Brazilian singer
1946 – Gordon Murray, British automobile designer
1947 – Ivonne Coll, Puerto Rican-American model and actress, Miss Puerto Rico 1967
1947 – Bernard Giraudeau, French actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2010)
1947 – Linda Thorson, Canadian actress
1948 – Philip Jackson, English actor
1948 – Sherry Turkle, American academic, psychologist, and sociologist
1949 – Chris Van Allsburg, American author and illustrator
1949 – Jarosław Kaczyński, Polish lawyer and politician, 13th Prime Minister of Poland
1949 – Lech Kaczyński, Polish lawyer and politician, 4th President of Poland (d. 2010)
1950 – Rod de'Ath, Welsh drummer and producer (d. 2014)
1950 – Annelie Ehrhardt, German hurdler
1950 – Mike Johanns, American lawyer and politician, 28th United States Secretary of Agriculture
1950 – Jackie Leven, Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2011)
1951 – Mohammed Al-Sager, Kuwaiti journalist and politician
1951 – Miriam Flynn, American actress and comedian
1951 – Ian Hargreaves, English-Welsh journalist and academic
1951 – Stephen Hopper, Australian botanist and academic
1951 – Gyula Sax, Hungarian chess player (d. 2014)
1952 – Tiiu Aro, Estonian physician and politician, Estonian Minister of Social Affairs
1952 – Denis Herron, Canadian ice hockey player
1952 – Carol Kane, American actress
1952 – Isabella Rossellini, Italian actress, director, producer, and screenwriter
1952 – Lee Soo-man, South Korean singer and businessman, founded S.M. Entertainment
1953 – Peter Donohoe, English pianist and educator
1955 – Ed Fast, Canadian lawyer and politician
1956 – Brian Benben, American actor and producer
1956 – John Scott, English organist and conductor (d. 2015)
1957 – Miguel Ángel Lotina, Spanish footballer and manager
1957 – Richard Powers, American novelist
1958 – Peter Altmaier, German jurist and politician, Federal Minister for Special Affairs of Germany
1958 – Gary Martin, British voice actor and actor
1959 – Joe Ansolabehere, American animation screenwriter and producer
1960 – Barbara Broccoli, American director and producer
1960 – Steve Murphy, Canadian journalist
1961 – Oz Fox, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1961 – Andrés Galarraga, Venezuelan-American baseball player
1961 – Angela Johnson, American novelist and poet
1961 – Alison Moyet, English singer-songwriter
1962 – Lisa Randall, American physicist and academic
1963 – Dizzy Reed, American keyboard player and songwriter
1963 – Bruce Smith, American football player
1964 – Uday Hussein, Iraqi commander (d. 2003)
1964 – Patti Webster, American publicist and author (d. 2013)
1966 – Kurt Browning, Canadian figure skater, choreographer, and sportscaster
1966 – Troy Kemp, Bahamian high jumper
1968 – Frank Müller, German decathlete
1969 – Haki Doku, Albanian cyclist
1969 – Christopher Largen, American journalist and author (d. 2012)
1970 – Katie Derham, English journalist
1970 – Ivan Kozák, Slovak footballer
1970 – Greg Yaitanes, American director and producer
1971 – Kerry Butler, American actress and singer
1971 – Jason McAteer, English-Irish footballer and manager
1971 – Nathan Morris, American soul singer
1971 – Nigel Owens, Welsh rugby referee and TV presenter
1972 – Anu Tali, Estonian pianist and conductor
1972 – Wikus du Toit, South African actor, director, and composer
1973 – Julie Depardieu, French actress
1973 – Stephen Thomas Erlewine, American author and music critic
1973 – Ray LaMontagne, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1973 – Alexandra Meissnitzer, Austrian skier
1973 – Matt Parsons, Australian rugby league player
1973 – Gavin Wanganeen Australian footballer and coach
1974 – Vincenzo Montella, Italian footballer and manager
1974 – Sergey Sharikov, Russian fencer and coach (d. 2015)
1975 – Marie Gillain, Belgian actress
1975 – Aleksandrs Koļinko, Latvian footballer
1975 – Martin St. Louis, Canadian ice hockey player
1976 – Blake Shelton, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1978 – Wang Liqin, Chinese table tennis player
1979 – Yumiko Kobayashi, Japanese voice actress and singer
1979 – Ivana Wong, Hong Kong singer-songwriter and actress
1980 – Antonio Gates, American football player
1980 – Sergey Kirdyapkin, Russian race walker
1980 – Craig Mottram, Australian runner
1980 – Antero Niittymäki, Finnish ice hockey player
1980 – Tara Platt, American actress, producer, and screenwriter
1981 – Clint Newton, American-Australian rugby league player
1981 – Marco Streller, Swiss footballer
1982 – Nadir Belhadj, French-Algerian footballer
1982 – Marco Borriello, Italian footballer
1982 – Nathan Cavaleri, Australian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor
1983 – Billy Slater, Australian rugby league player
1983 – Cameron Smith, Australian rugby league player
1984 – Nanyak Dala, Canadian rugby player
1985 – Chris Coghlan, American baseball player
1985 – Alex Hirsch, American animator and television producer
1986 – Edgars Eriņš, Latvian decathlete
1986 – Richard Gasquet, French tennis player
1987 – Omar Arellano, Mexican footballer
1987 – Moeen Ali, English cricketer
1988 – Elini Dimoutsos, Greek footballer
1988 – Josh Dun, American musician
1989 – Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, French-born Gabonese footballer
1989 – Chris Harris Jr., American football player
1990 – Luke Adam, Canadian ice hockey player
1990 – Sandra Izbașa, Romanian gymnast
1990 – Derek Stepan, American ice hockey player
1990 – Christian Taylor, American triple jumper
1993 – Dennis Lloyd, Israeli musician, producer, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist
1994 – Sean McMahon, Australian rugby player
1994 – Takeoff, American rapper
1995 – Maxim Kovtun, Russian figure skater
1996 – Alen Halilović, Croatian footballer
1996 – Niki Wories, Dutch figure skater
1997 – Katharina Hobgarski, German tennis player
1997 – Latrell Mitchell, Australian rugby league player
1999 – Trippie Redd, American rapper
Deaths
Pre-1600
741 – Leo III the Isaurian, Byzantine emperor (b. 685)
908 – Zhang Hao, general of Yang Wu
1095 – Sophia of Hungary (b. c. 1050)
1164 – Elisabeth of Schönau, German Benedictine visionary (b. c. 1129)
1234 – Emperor Chūkyō of Japan (b. 1218)
1250 – Theresa of Portugal, Queen of León
1291 – Alfonso III of Aragon (b. 1265)
1333 – Henry XV, Duke of Bavaria (b. 1312)
1464 – Rogier van der Weyden, Flemish painter (b. 1400)
1588 – Robert Crowley, English minister and poet (b. 1517)
1601–1900
1629 – Piet Pieterszoon Hein, Dutch admiral (b. 1577)
1650 – Christoph Scheiner, German priest, physicist, and astronomer (b. 1575)
1673 – Jeanne Mance, French-Canadian nurse, founded the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal (b. 1606)
1704 – Tom Brown, English author and translator (b. 1662)
1726 – Michel Richard Delalande, French organist and composer (b. 1657)
1742 – John Aislabie, English politician, Chancellor of the Exchequer (b. 1670)
1749 – Ambrose Philips, English poet and politician (b. 1674)
1772 – Johann Ulrich von Cramer, German jurist and scholar (b. 1706)
1772 – Gerard van Swieten, Dutch-Austrian physician and reformer (b. 1700)
1788 – Adam Gib, Scottish religious leader (b. 1714)
1794 – François Buzot, French lawyer and politician (b. 1760)
1794 – James Murray, Scottish-English general and politician, 20th Governor of the Province of Quebec (b. 1721)
1804 – Maria Amalia, Duchess of Parma (b. 1746)
1815 – Thomas Picton, Welsh-English general and politician (b. 1758)
1833 – Robert Hett Chapman, American minister, missionary, and academic (b. 1771)
1835 – William Cobbett, English farmer and journalist (b. 1763)
1860 – Friedrich Wilhelm von Bismarck, German army officer and writer (b. 1783)
1866 – Prince Sigismund of Prussia (b. 1864)
1901–present
1902 – Samuel Butler, English novelist, satirist, and critic (b. 1835)
1905 – Carmine Crocco, Italian soldier (b. 1830)
1916 – Max Immelmann, German lieutenant and pilot (b. 1890)
1917 – Titu Maiorescu, Romanian critic and politician, 23rd Prime Minister of Romania (b. 1840)
1922 – Jacobus Kapteyn, Dutch astronomer and academic (b. 1851)
1926 – Olga Constantinovna of Russia, Queen consort of the Hellenes (b. 1851)
1928 – Roald Amundsen, Norwegian pilot and explorer (b. 1872)
1936 – Maxim Gorky, Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright (b. 1868)
1937 – Gaston Doumergue, French politician, 13th President of France (b. 1863)
1942 – Arthur Pryor, American trombonist, bandleader, and politician (b. 1870)
1943 – Elias Degiannis, Greek commander (b. 1912)
1945 – Florence Bascom, American geologist and educator (b. 1862)
1945 – Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., American general (b. 1886)
1947 – Shigematsu Sakaibara, Japanese admiral (b. 1898)
1948 – Edward Brooker, English-Australian politician, 31st Premier of Tasmania (b. 1891)
1959 – Ethel Barrymore, American actress (b. 1879)
1963 – Pedro Armendáriz, Mexican-American actor (b. 1912)
1964 – Giorgio Morandi, Italian painter (b. 1890)
1967 – Geki, Italian race car driver (b. 1937)
1967 – Beat Fehr, Swiss race car driver (b. 1942)
1971 – Thomas Gomez, American actor (b. 1905)
1971 – Paul Karrer, Russian-Swiss chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1889)
1974 – Júlio César de Mello e Souza, Brazilian mathematician and academic (b. 1896)
1974 – Georgy Zhukov, Russian marshal and politician, Minister of Defence for the Soviet Union (b. 1896)
1975 – Hugo Bergmann, German-Israeli philosopher and author (b. 1883)
1978 – Walter C. Alvarez, American physician and author (b. 1884)
1980 – Terence Fisher, English director and screenwriter (b. 1904)
1980 – André Leducq, French cyclist (b. 1904)
1982 – Djuna Barnes, American novelist, journalist, and playwright (b. 1892)
1982 – John Cheever, American novelist and short story writer (b. 1912)
1982 – Curd Jürgens, German-Austrian actor and director (b. 1915)
1984 – Alan Berg, American lawyer and radio host (b. 1934)
1985 – Paul Colin, French illustrator (b. 1892)
1986 – Frances Scott Fitzgerald, American journalist (b. 1921)
1989 – I. F. Stone, American journalist and author (b. 1907)
1992 – Kofoworola Abeni Pratt, the first black Chief Nursing Officer of Nigeria (b. 1910)
1992 – Peter Allen, Australian singer-songwriter and pianist (b. 1944)
1992 – Mordecai Ardon, Polish-Israeli painter and educator (b. 1896)
1993 – Craig Rodwell, American activist, founded the Oscar Wilde Bookshop (b. 1940)
1996 – Endel Puusepp, Estonian-Soviet military pilot and politician (b. 1909)
1997 – Lev Kopelev, Ukrainian-German author and academic (b. 1912)
1998 – Felix Knight, American actor and tenor (b. 1908)
2000 – Nancy Marchand, American actress (b. 1928)
2003 – Larry Doby, American baseball player and manager (b. 1923)
2005 – Mushtaq Ali, Indian cricketer (b. 1914)
2005 – Manuel Sadosky, Argentinian mathematician and academic (b. 1914)
2006 – Vincent Sherman, American actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1906)
2006 – Joseph Zobel, Martinique-French author (b. 1915)
2007 – Bernard Manning, English comedian and actor (b. 1930)
2007 – Hank Medress, American singer and producer (b. 1938)
2007 – Georges Thurston, Canadian singer-songwriter (b. 1951)
2008 – Jean Delannoy, French actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1908)
2008 – Tasha Tudor, American author and illustrator (b. 1915)
2008 – Hans Steinbrenner, German sculptor (b. 1928)
2010 – Trent Acid, American wrestler (b. 1980)
2010 – José Saramago, Portuguese novelist Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1922)
2010 – Okan Demiriş, Turkish composer (b. 1942)
2011 – Yelena Bonner, Russian activist (b. 1923)
2011 – Frederick Chiluba, Zambian politician, 2nd President of Zambia (b. 1943)
2011 – Clarence Clemons, American saxophonist (b. 1942)
2012 – Horacio Coppola, Argentinian photographer and director (b. 1906)
2012 – Lina Haag, German author and activist (b. 1907)
2012 – Tom Maynard, Welsh cricketer (b. 1989)
2012 – Luis Edgardo Mercado Jarrín, Peruvian general and politician, 109th Prime Minister of Peru (b. 1919)
2012 – Alketas Panagoulias, Greek footballer and manager (b. 1934)
2012 – William Van Regenmorter, American businessman and politician (b. 1939)
2013 – Brent F. Anderson, American engineer and politician (b. 1932)
2013 – Alastair Donaldson, Scottish bass player (b. 1955)
2013 – Garde Gardom, Canadian lawyer and politician, 26th Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia (b. 1924)
2013 – Michael Hastings, American journalist and author (b. 1980)
2013 – David Wall, English ballet dancer (b. 1946)
2014 – Stephanie Kwolek, American chemist and engineer (b. 1923)
2014 – Johnny Mann, American singer-songwriter and conductor (b. 1928)
2014 – Claire Martin, Canadian author (b. 1914)
2014 – Vladimir Popovkin, Russian general (b. 1957)
2014 – Horace Silver, American pianist and composer (b. 1928)
2015 – Phil Austin, American comedian, actor, and screenwriter (b. 1941)
2015 – Ralph J. Roberts, American businessman, co-founded Comcast (b. 1920)
2015 – Danny Villanueva, American football player and broadcaster, co-founded Univision (b. 1937)
2015 – Allen Weinstein, American historian and academic (b. 1937)
2016 – Jeppiaar, Indian educationist, founder and chancellor of Sathyabama University (b. 1931)
2018 – XXXTentacion, American rapper (b. 1998)
2018 – Big Van Vader (also known as Vader) American professional wrestler (b. 1955)
2018 – Jimmy Wopo, American rapper (b. 1997)
2020 – Vera Lynn, English singer who was the "Forces' Sweetheart" in World War II (b. 1917)
Holidays and observances
Autistic Pride Day (International)
Christian feast day:
Bernard Mizeki (Anglican and Episcopal Church)
Elisabeth of Schönau
Gregorio Barbarigo
Leontius, Hypatius and Theodulus
Marina the Monk (Maronite Church, Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria)
Mark and Marcellian
June 18 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Foundation Day (Benguet)
Human Rights Day (Azerbaijan)
National Day (Seychelles)
Queen Mother's Birthday (Cambodia)
Waterloo Day (United Kingdom)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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0.13769276440143585,
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0.09176778048276901,
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15816 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2013 | June 13 |
Events
Pre-1600
313 – The decisions of the Edict of Milan, signed by Constantine the Great and co-emperor Valerius Licinius, granting religious freedom throughout the Roman Empire, are published in Nicomedia.
1325 – Ibn Battuta begins his travels, leaving his home in Tangiers to travel to Mecca (gone 24 years).
1381 – In England, the Peasants' Revolt, led by Wat Tyler, comes to a head, as rebels set fire to the Savoy Palace.
1514 – Henry Grace à Dieu, at over 1,000 tons the largest warship in the world at this time, built at the new Woolwich Dockyard in England, is dedicated.
1525 – Martin Luther marries Katharina von Bora, against the celibacy rule decreed by the Roman Catholic Church for priests and nuns.
1601–1900
1625 – King Charles I of England marries Catholic princess Henrietta Maria of France and Navarre, at Canterbury.
1740 – Georgia provincial governor James Oglethorpe begins an unsuccessful attempt to take Spanish Florida during the Siege of St. Augustine.
1774 – Rhode Island becomes the first of Britain's North American colonies to ban the importation of slaves.
1777 – American Revolutionary War: Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette lands near Charleston, South Carolina, in order to help the Continental Congress to train its army.
1805 – Lewis and Clark Expedition: Scouting ahead of the expedition, Meriwether Lewis and four companions sight the Great Falls of the Missouri River.
1855 – Twentieth opera of Giuseppe Verdi, Les vêpres siciliennes ("The Sicilian Vespers"), is premiered in Paris.
1881 – The USS Jeannette is crushed in an Arctic Ocean ice pack.
1886 – A fire devastates much of Vancouver, British Columbia.
1893 – Grover Cleveland notices a rough spot in his mouth and on July 1 undergoes secret, successful surgery to remove a large, cancerous portion of his jaw; the operation was not revealed to the public until 1917, nine years after the president's death.
1895 – Emile Levassor wins the world's first real automobile race. Levassor completed the 732-mile course, from Paris to Bordeaux and back, in just under 49 hours, at a then-impressive speed of about 15 miles per hour.
1898 – Yukon Territory is formed, with Dawson chosen as its capital.
1901–present
1917 – World War I: The deadliest German air raid on London of the war is carried out by Gotha G.IV bombers and results in 162 deaths, including 46 children, and 432 injuries.
1927 – Aviator Charles Lindbergh receives a ticker tape parade down 5th Avenue in New York City.
1944 – World War II: The Battle of Villers-Bocage: German tank ace Michael Wittmann ambushes elements of the British 7th Armoured Division, destroying up to fourteen tanks, fifteen personnel carriers and two anti-tank guns in a Tiger I tank.
1944 – World War II: German combat elements, reinforced by the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division, launch a counterattack on American forces near Carentan.
1944 – World War II: Germany launches the first V1 Flying Bomb attack on England. Only four of the eleven bombs strike their targets.
1952 – Catalina affair: A Swedish Douglas DC-3 is shot down by a Soviet MiG-15 fighter.
1966 – The United States Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona that the police must inform suspects of their Fifth Amendment rights before questioning them (colloquially known as "Mirandizing").
1967 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson nominates Solicitor-General Thurgood Marshall to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
1971 – Vietnam War: The New York Times begins publication of the Pentagon Papers.
1977 – Convicted Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray is recaptured after escaping from prison three days before.
1981 – At the Trooping the Colour ceremony in London, a teenager, Marcus Sarjeant, fires six blank shots at Queen Elizabeth II.
1982 – Fahd becomes King of Saudi Arabia upon the death of his brother, Khalid.
1982 – Battles of Tumbledown and Wireless Ridge, during the Falklands War.
1983 – Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the central Solar System when it passes beyond the orbit of Neptune.
1990 – First day of the June 1990 Mineriad in Romania. At least 240 strikers and students are arrested or killed in the chaos ensuing from the first post-Ceaușescu elections.
1994 – A jury in Anchorage, Alaska, blames recklessness by Exxon and Captain Joseph Hazelwood for the Exxon Valdez disaster, allowing victims of the oil spill to seek $15 billion in damages.
1996 – The Montana Freemen surrender after an 81-day standoff with FBI agents.
1997 – A jury sentences Timothy McVeigh to death for his part in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
1999 – BMW win the 24 Hours of Le Mans, with Toyota being a contention for the win until a puncture in the last hour relegated it to second, Toyota not participating in Le Mans again until 2012. The race was also remembered for the flipping incidents involving the Mercedes cars, the team withdrawing mid-race and Mercedes never entering Le Mans again.
2000 – President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea meets Kim Jong-il, leader of North Korea, for the beginning of the first ever inter-Korea summit, in the northern capital of Pyongyang.
2000 – Italy pardons Mehmet Ali Ağca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981.
2002 – The United States withdraws from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
2005 – The jury acquits pop singer Michael Jackson of his charges for allegedly sexually molesting a child in 1993.
2007 – The Al Askari Mosque is bombed for a second time.
2010 – A capsule of the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa, containing particles of the asteroid 25143 Itokawa, returns to Earth by landing in the Australian Outback.
2012 – A series of bombings across Iraq, including Baghdad, Hillah and Kirkuk, kills at least 93 people and wounds over 300 others.
2015 – A man opens fire at policemen outside the police headquarters in Dallas, Texas, while a bag containing a pipe bomb is also found. He was later shot dead by police.
2018 – Volkswagen is fined one billion euros over the emissions scandal.
2021 – A gas explosion in Zhangwan district of Shiyan city, in Hubei province of China killing at least 12 people and wounding over 138 others.
Births
Pre-1600
AD 40 – Gnaeus Julius Agricola, Roman general (d. 93)
823 – Charles the Bald, Holy Roman Emperor (d. 877)
839 – Charles the Fat, Holy Roman Emperor (d. 888)
1367 – Taejong of Joseon (d. 1422)
1500 – Ernest of Bavaria, pledge lord of the County of Glatz (d. 1560)
1508 – Alessandro Piccolomini, Italian astronomer and philosopher (d. 1579)
1539 – Jost Amman, Swiss printmaker (d. 1591)
1555 – Giovanni Antonio Magini, Italian mathematician, cartographer and astronomer (d. 1617)
1580 – Willebrord Snell, Dutch astronomer and mathematician (d. 1626)
1595 – Jan Marek Marci, Czech physician and scientist (d. 1667)
1601–1900
1617 – Sir Vincent Corbet, 1st Baronet, English politician (d. 1656)
1649 – Adrien Baillet, French scholar and critic (d. 1706)
1711 – Sir Richard Glyn, 1st Baronet, of Ewell, English banker and politician, Lord Mayor of London (d. 1773)
1752 – Frances Burney, English novelist and playwright (d. 1840)
1761 – Antonín Vranický, Czech violinist and composer (d. 1820)
1763 – José Bonifácio de Andrada, Brazilian poet, academic, and politician (d. 1838)
1773 – Thomas Young, English physicist and physiologist (d. 1829)
1775 – Antoni Radziwiłł, Polish-Lithuanian composer and politician (d. 1833)
1786 – Winfield Scott, American general (d. 1866)
1790 – José Antonio Páez, Venezuelan general and politician, President of Venezuela (d. 1873)
1809 – Heinrich Hoffmann, German psychiatrist and author (d. 1894)
1822 – Carl Schmidt, Latvian-German chemist and academic (d. 1894)
1827 – Alberto Henschel, German-Brazilian photographer and businessman (d. 1882)
1831 – James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish physicist and mathematician (d. 1879)
1840 – Augusta Lundin, the first international Swedish fashion designer (d. 1919)
1854 – Charles Algernon Parsons, English engineer, founded C. A. Parsons and Company (d. 1931)
1863 – Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, English fashion designer (d. 1935)
1864 – Rudolf Kjellén, Swedish political scientist and academic (d. 1922)
1864 – Dwight B. Waldo, American historian and academic (d. 1939)
1865 – Karl Blossfeldt, German photographer (d. 1932)
1865 – W. B. Yeats, Irish poet and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1939)
1868 – Wallace Clement Sabine, American physicist and academic (d. 1919)
1870 – Jules Bordet, Belgian immunologist and microbiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1961)
1872 – Thomas N. Heffron, American actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 1951)
1873 – Karin Swanström, Swedish actress, director, and producer (d. 1942)
1875 – Paul Neumann, Austrian swimmer and physician (d. 1932)
1876 – William Sealy Gosset, English chemist and statistician (d. 1937)
1879 – Heinrich Gutkin, Estonian businessman and politician (d. 1941)
1879 – Charalambos Tseroulis, Greek general and politician, Greek Minister for Military Affairs (d. 1929)
1884 – Leon Chwistek, Polish painter, philosopher, and mathematician (d. 1944)
1884 – Étienne Gilson, French philosopher and academic (d. 1978)
1885 – Henry George Lamond, Australian farmer and author (d. 1969)
1887 – André François-Poncet, French politician and diplomat (d. 1978)
1887 – Bruno Frank, German-American author, poet, and playwright (d. 1945)
1888 – Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese poet and critic (d. 1935)
1892 – Basil Rathbone, South African-born British-American actor (d. 1967)
1893 – Alan Arnold Griffith, English engineer (d. 1963)
1893 – Dorothy L. Sayers, English author and poet (d. 1957)
1894 – Leo Kanner, Ukrainian-American psychiatrist and physician (d. 1981)
1894 – Jacques Henri Lartigue, French photographer and painter (d. 1986)
1897 – Paavo Nurmi, Finnish runner and coach (d. 1973)
1899 – Carlos Chávez, Mexican composer, conductor, and journalist, founded the Mexican Symphonic Orchestra (d. 1978)
1901–present
1901 – Tage Erlander, Swedish lieutenant and politician, 25th Prime Minister of Sweden (d. 1985)
1902 – Carolyn Eisele, American mathematician and historian (d. 2000)
1903 – Willard Harrison Bennett, American physicist and chemist (d. 1987)
1905 – James T. Rutnam, Sri Lankan historian and author (d. 1988)
1906 – Bruno de Finetti, Austrian-Italian mathematician and statistician (d. 1985)
1909 – E. M. S. Namboodiripad, Indian theorist and politician, 1st Chief Minister of Kerala (d. 1998)
1910 – Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Spanish journalist, author, and playwright (d. 1999)
1910 – Mary Wickes, American actress (d. 1995)
1910 – Mary Whitehouse, English activist, founded the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (d. 2001)
1911 – Luis Walter Alvarez, American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1988)
1911 – Maurice Copeland, American actor (d. 1985)
1911 – Erwin Wilhelm Müller, German physicist and academic (d. 1977)
1912 – Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, Canadian poet and painter (d. 1943)
1913 – Ralph Edwards, American radio and television host (d. 2005)
1913 – Yitzhak Pundak, Israeli general, diplomat and politician (d. 2017)
1914 – Frederic Franklin, English-American ballet dancer and director (d. 2013)
1915 – Don Budge, American tennis player and coach (d. 2000)
1916 – Wu Zhengyi, Chinese botanist and academic (d. 2013)
1917 – Teddy Turner, English actor (d. 1992)
1917 – Augusto Roa Bastos, Paraguayan novelist (d. 2005)
1918 – Ben Johnson, American actor and stuntman (d. 1996)
1918 – Helmut Lent, German soldier and pilot (d. 1944)
1918 – Percy Rodriguez, Canadian-American actor (d. 2007)
1920 – Rolf Huisgen, German chemist and academic (d. 2020)
1920 – Iosif Vorovich, Russian mathematician and engineer (d. 2001)
1921 – Lennart Strand, Swedish runner (d. 2004)
1922 – Etienne Leroux, South African author (d. 1989)
1923 – Lloyd Conover, American chemist and inventor (d. 2017)
1925 – Kristine Miller, American actress (d. 2015)
1926 – Jérôme Lejeune, French pediatrician and geneticist (d. 1994)
1926 – Paul Lynde, American actor and comedian (d. 1982)
1927 – Slim Dusty, Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2003)
1928 – Giacomo Biffi, Italian cardinal (d. 2015)
1928 – Renée Morisset, Canadian pianist (d. 2009)
1928 – John Forbes Nash, Jr., American mathematician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2015)
1929 – Ralph McQuarrie, American illustrator (d. 2012)
1929 – Robert W. Scott, American farmer and politician, 67th Governor of North Carolina (d. 2009)
1930 – Gotthard Graubner, German painter and educator (d. 2013)
1930 – Ryszard Kukliński, Polish colonel and spy (d. 2004)
1930 – Paul Veyne, French archaeologist, historian, and academic
1931 – Nora Kovach, Hungarian-American ballerina (d. 2009)
1931 – Reed Scowen, Canadian politician (d. 2020)
1931 – Irvin D. Yalom, American psychotherapist and academic
1932 – Raymond Jolliffe, 5th Baron Hylton, English politician
1932 – Bob McGrath, American singer and actor
1932 – Billy Williams, American baseball player and coach (d. 2013)
1933 – Tom King, Baron King of Bridgwater, English soldier and politician, Secretary of State for Defence
1933 – Norman Lloyd-Edwards, Welsh lawyer and politician, Lord Lieutenant of South Glamorgan
1934 – Bill Blakeley, American basketball player and coach (d. 2010)
1934 – Lucjan Brychczy, Polish footballer and coach
1934 – Manuel Clouthier, Mexican businessman and politician (d. 1989)
1934 – James Anthony Griffin, American bishop
1934 – Uriel Jones, American drummer (d. 2009)
1934 – Leonard Kleinrock, American computer scientist and engineer
1935 – Christo, Bulgarian-French sculptor and painter (d. 2020)
1935 – Jeanne-Claude, Moroccan sculptor and painter (d. 2009)
1935 – Samak Sundaravej, Thai politician, 25th Prime Minister of Thailand (d. 2009)
1937 – Eleanor Holmes Norton, American lawyer and politician
1937 – Erich Ribbeck, German footballer and manager
1937 – Andreas Whittam Smith, English journalist and publisher, co-founded The Independent
1940 – Bobby Freeman, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and producer (d. 2017)
1940 – Dallas Long, American shot putter and physician
1941 – Marcel Lachemann, American baseball player, coach, and manager
1941 – Serge Lemoyne, Canadian painter (d. 1998)
1941 – Marv Tarplin, American guitarist and songwriter (d. 2011)
1942 – Yiannis Boutaris, Greek businessman and politician, Mayor of Thessaloniki
1943 – Harry Collins, English sociologist, author, and academic
1943 – Malcolm McDowell, English actor and producer
1943 – Jim Guy Tucker, American lawyer and politician, 43rd Governor of Arkansas
1944 – Christine Beasley, English nursing administrator
1944 – David Curry, English journalist and politician, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government
1944 – Ban Ki-moon, South Korean politician and diplomat, 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations
1945 – Whitley Strieber, American author
1946 – Sher Bahadur Deuba, Nepalese politician, 32nd Prime Minister of Nepal
1946 – Paul L. Modrich, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1946 – Gabriel of Komana, Belgian-Dutch archbishop (d. 2013)
1948 – Garnet Bailey, Canadian-American ice hockey player and scout (d. 2001)
1948 – Joe Roth, American director and producer, co-founded Morgan Creek Productions
1949 – Ann Druyan, American popular science writer
1949 – Dennis Locorriere, American singer and musician
1949 – Ulla Schmidt, German educator and politician, German Federal Minister of Health
1949 – Red Symons, English-Australian musician, television, and radio personality
1950 – Nick Brown, English politician, Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food
1950 – Gerd Zewe, German footballer and manager
1951 – Howard Leese, American guitarist and producer
1951 – Richard Thomas, American actor, director, and producer
1951 – Stellan Skarsgård, Swedish actor
1952 – Jean-Marie Dedecker, Belgian martial artist and politician
1953 – Tim Allen, American actor, comedian, and producer
1954 – Andrzej Lepper, Polish politician, Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland (d. 2011)
1954 – Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigerian economist and politician, Minister of Foreign Affairs for Nigeria
1955 – Alan Hansen, Scottish footballer and sportscaster
1955 – Leah Ward Sears, German-American lawyer and jurist
1956 – Blair Chapman, Canadian ice hockey player
1956 – Sal Paolantonio, American lieutenant and journalist
1957 – Ron Areshenkoff, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 2019)
1957 – Roy Cooper, American lawyer and politician, 75th Governor of North Carolina
1957 – Bruce Flowers, American basketball player
1957 – Andrzej Morozowski, Polish journalist and author
1957 – Dicky Thompson, American golfer
1959 – Boyko Borissov, Bulgarian footballer and politician, 50th Prime Minister of Bulgaria
1959 – Maurice G. Dantec, French-born Canadian science fiction writer (d. 2016)
1959 – Steve Georganas, Australian politician
1959 – Klaus Iohannis, Romanian educator and politician, 5th President of Romania
1960 – Jacques Rougeau, Canadian wrestler
1962 – Davey Hamilton, American race car driver
1962 – Glenn Michibata, Canadian-American tennis player and coach
1962 – Ally Sheedy, American actress and author
1962 – Hannah Storm, American journalist and author
1963 – Bettina Bunge, Swiss-German tennis player
1963 – Sarah Connolly, English soprano and actress
1963 – Audrey Niffenegger, American author and academic
1964 – Christian Wilhelm Berger, Romanian organist, composer, and educator
1964 – Kathy Burke, English actress, director, and playwright
1964 – Piyush Goyal, Indian politician, Minister of Railways
1964 – Šarūnas Marčiulionis, Lithuanian basketball player
1965 – Infanta Cristina Federica of Spain
1965 – Vassilis Karapialis, Greek footballer
1965 – Lukas Ligeti, Austrian-American drummer and composer
1965 – Maninder Singh, Indian cricketer
1966 – Henry Bond, English photographer and curator
1966 – Grigori Perelman, Russian mathematician
1966 – Naoki Hattori, Japanese race car driver
1967 – Taşkın Aksoy, German-Turkish footballer and manager
1968 – Fabio Baldato, Italian cyclist
1968 – Peter DeBoer, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1968 – Darren Dreger, Canadian sportscaster
1968 – David Gray, English-Welsh singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1968 – Tim Leveque, Canadian ice hockey player
1968 – Denise Pearson, English singer-songwriter
1968 – Marcel Theroux, Ugandan-English journalist and author
1969 – Cayetana Guillén Cuervo, Spanish actress, director, and screenwriter
1969 – Virginie Despentes, French author, screenwriter, and director
1969 – Laura Kightlinger, American actress, comedian, producer, and screenwriter
1969 – Svetlana Krivelyova, Russian shot putter
1969 – Søren Rasted, Danish singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1970 – Rivers Cuomo, American rock musician
1970 – Chris Cairns, New Zealand cricketer
1971 – Nóra Köves, Hungarian tennis player
1972 – Natalie MacMaster, Canadian fiddler
1972 – Marek Jerzy Minakowski, Polish philosopher, historian, genealogist
1973 – Sam Adams, American football player
1973 – Tanner Foust, American race car driver and television host
1973 – Mattias Hellberg, Swedish singer-songwriter
1973 – Stuart Karppinen, Australian cricketer and coach
1973 – Ville Laihiala, Finnish singer-songwriter and guitarist
1974 – Valeri Bure, Russian-American ice hockey player
1975 – Ante Covic, Australian footballer
1975 – Jeff Davis, American screenwriter and producer
1975 – Jennifer Nicole Lee, American model, actress, and author
1975 – Jaan Pehk, Estonian singer-songwriter and guitarist
1975 – Riccardo Scimeca, English footballer
1976 – Kym Marsh, English singer-songwriter and actress
1977 – Romain Mesnil, French pole vaulter
1977 – Earthwind Moreland, American football player
1978 – Ethan Embry, American actor
1979 – Esther Anderson, Australian actress
1979 – Nila Håkedal, Norwegian volleyball player
1979 – Miguel Pate, American long jumper
1979 – Ryan Pickett, American director, producer, and screenwriter
1980 – Florent Malouda, French footballer
1980 – Diego Mendieta, Paraguayan footballer (d. 2012)
1980 – Jamario Moon, American basketball player
1980 – Juan Carlos Navarro, Spanish basketball player
1980 – Darius Vassell, English footballer
1980 – Markus Winkelhock, German racing driver
1981 – Chris Evans, American actor and producer
1981 – Blake Judd, American actor, director, and producer
1981 – David Madden, founder and executive director of the National History Bee and the National History Bowl
1981 – Radim Vrbata, Czech ice hockey player
1982 – Kenenisa Bekele, Ethiopian runner
1982 – Krzysztof Bosak, Polish politician
1982 – Nate Jones, American football player
1983 – Steve Novak, American basketball player
1983 – Jason Spezza, Canadian ice hockey player
1983 – Rachel Taylor, Welsh rugby union player
1984 – Nery Castillo, Mexican-Uruguayan footballer
1984 – Kaori Icho, Japanese wrestler
1984 – Antje Möldner-Schmidt, German runner
1985 – Filipe Albuquerque, Portuguese racing driver
1985 – Silvio Bankert, German footballer
1985 – Pedro Strop, Dominican baseball player
1985 – Danny Syvret, Canadian ice hockey player
1986 – Kat Dennings, American actress and comedian
1986 – Keisuke Honda, Japanese footballer
1986 – Jonathan Lucroy, American baseball catcher
1986 – Ashley Olsen, American child actress, fashion designer, and businesswoman
1986 – Mary-Kate Olsen, American child actress, fashion designer, and businesswoman
1986 – DJ Snake, French DJ and record producer
1986 – Lea Verou, Greek computer scientist and author
1986 – Måns Zelmerlöw, Swedish singer
1987 – Marko Grgić, Croatian footballer
1988 – Gabe Carimi, American football player
1988 – Reece Noi, British actor
1988 – Cody Walker, American actor
1989 – Ben Barba, Australian rugby league player
1989 – James Calado, English racing driver
1989 – Ryan McDonagh, American ice hockey defenseman
1989 – Daniel Mortimer, Australian rugby league player
1989 – Andreas Samaris, Greek footballer
1989 – Tommy Searle, English motocross racer
1989 – Hassan Whiteside, American basketball player
1989 – Erica Wiebe, Canadian wrestler
1990 – James McCann, American baseball player
1990 – Nicole Riner, Swiss tennis player
1990 – Aaron Taylor-Johnson, English actor
1991 – Will Claye, American jumper
1991 – Ryan Mason, English footballer
1992 – Semi Radradra, Fijian rugby league player
1993 – Simona Senoner, Italian ski jumper (d. 2011)
1993 – Denis Ten, Kazakhstani figure skater (d. 2018)
1994 – Deepika Kumari, Indian archer
1995 – Emily Fanning, New Zealand tennis player
1995 – Laura Ucrós, Colombian tennis player
2000 – Penny Oleksiak, Canadian swimmer
Deaths
Pre-1600
220 – Xiahou Dun, Chinese general
976 – Mansur I, Samanid emir
995 – Fujiwara no Michikane, Japanese nobleman (b. 961)
1036 – Ali az-Zahir, Fatimid caliph (b. 1005)
1231 – Anthony of Padua, Portuguese priest and saint (b. 1195)
1256 – Tankei, Japanese sculptor (b. 1173)
1348 – Juan Manuel, Spanish prince (b. 1282)
1432 – Uko Fockena, Frisian chieftain (b. c. 1408)
1550 – Veronica Gambara, Italian poet (b. 1485)
1601–1900
1636 – George Gordon, 1st Marquess of Huntly, Scottish politician (b. 1562)
1645 – Miyamoto Musashi, Japanese samurai (b. 1584)
1661 – Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth, English politician (b. 1595)
1665 – Egbert Bartholomeusz Kortenaer, Dutch admiral (b. 1604)
1784 – Henry Middleton, American farmer and politician, 2nd President of the Continental Congress (b. 1717)
1846 – Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès, French geographer and author (b. 1767)
1861 – Henry Gray, English anatomist and surgeon (b. 1827)
1881 – Joseph Škoda, Czech physician and dermatologist (b. 1805)
1886 – Ludwig II, king of Bavaria (b. 1845)
1894 – John Cox Bray, Australian politician, 15th Premier of South Australia (b. 1842)
1898 – Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau, Canadian lawyer and politician, 5th Premier of Quebec (b. 1840)
1901–present
1904 – Nikiforos Lytras, Greek painter and educator (b. 1832)
1917 – Louis-Philippe Hébert, Canadian sculptor (b. 1850)
1918 – Michael Alexandrovich, Russian Grand Duke (b. 1878)
1930 – Henry Segrave, American-English racing driver (b. 1896)
1931 – Kitasato Shibasaburō, Japanese physician and bacteriologist (b. 1851)
1939 – Arthur Coningham, Australian cricketer (b. 1863)
1943 – Kočo Racin, Macedonian author and activist (b. 1908)
1948 – Osamu Dazai, Japanese author (b. 1909)
1951 – Ben Chifley, Australian engineer and politician, 16th Prime Minister of Australia (b. 1885)
1957 – Irving Baxter, American high jumper and pole vaulter (b. 1876)
1958 – Edwin Keppel Bennett, English poet and academic (b. 1887)
1965 – Martin Buber, Austrian-Israeli philosopher and theologian (b. 1878)
1965 – David Drummond, Australian farmer and politician (b. 1890)
1969 – Pralhad Keshav Atre, Indian journalist, director, and producer (b. 1898)
1972 – Georg von Békésy, Hungarian biophysicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1899)
1972 – Stephanie von Hohenlohe, Austrian-German spy (b. 1891)
1979 – Demetrio Stratos, Egyptian-Italian singer-songwriter and pianist (b. 1945)
1980 – Walter Rodney, Guyanese historian and activist (b. 1942)
1981 – Olivério Pinto, Brazilian zoologist and physician (b. 1896)
1984 – António Variações, Portuguese singer-songwriter (b. 1944)
1986 – Benny Goodman, American clarinet player, songwriter, and bandleader (b. 1909)
1987 – Geraldine Page, American actress (b. 1924)
1989 – Fran Allison, American television personality and puppeteer (b. 1907)
1993 – Gérard Côté, Canadian runner (b. 1913)
1993 – Deke Slayton, American soldier, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1924)
1994 – Nadia Gray, Romanian-French actress (b. 1923)
1997 – Nguyen Manh Tuong, Vietnamese lawyer and academic (b. 1909)
1998 – Alfred Gerrard, English sculptor and academic (b. 1899)
1998 – Birger Ruud, Norwegian ski jumper (b. 1911)
1998 – Reg Smythe, English cartoonist (b. 1917)
2002 – John Hope, American navigator and meteorologist (b. 1919)
2002 – Maia Wojciechowska, Polish-American author (b. 1927)
2003 – Malik Meraj Khalid, Pakistani lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of Pakistan (b. 1916)
2004 – Ralph Wiley, American journalist and author (b. 1952)
2005 – Álvaro Cunhal, Portuguese academic and politician (b. 1913)
2005 – David Diamond, American pianist and composer (b. 1915)
2006 – Charles Haughey, Irish lawyer and politician, 7th Taoiseach of Ireland (b. 1925)
2007 – Walid Eido, Lebanese judge and politician (b. 1942)
2008 – Tim Russert, American journalist and lawyer (b. 1950)
2009 – Fathi Yakan, Lebanese scholar and politician (b. 1933)
2010 – Jimmy Dean, American singer and businessman, founded Jimmy Dean Foods (b. 1928)
2012 – Sam Beddingfield, American pilot and engineer (b. 1933)
2012 – Graeme Bell, Australian pianist, composer, and bandleader (b. 1914)
2012 – Roger Garaudy, French philosopher and author (b. 1913)
2012 – Jože Humer, Slovenian composer and translator (b. 1934)
2012 – Mehdi Hassan, Pakistani ghazal singer and playback singer for Lollywood (b. 1927)
2013 – David Deutsch, American businessman, founded Deutsch Inc. (b. 1929)
2013 – Sam Most, American flute player and saxophonist (b. 1930)
2013 – Albert White Hat, American educator and activist (b. 1938)
2014 – Mahdi Elmandjra, Moroccan economist and sociologist (b. 1933)
2014 – Gyula Grosics, Hungarian footballer and manager (b. 1926)
2014 – Jim Keays, Scottish-Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1946)
2014 – Chuck Noll, American football player and coach (b. 1932)
2014 – Robert Peters, American poet, playwright, and critic (b. 1924)
2015 – Buddy Boudreaux, American saxophonist and clarinet player (b. 1917)
2015 – Sergio Renán, Argentinian actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1933)
2015 – Mike Shrimpton, New Zealand cricketer and coach (b. 1940)
2021 – Ned Beatty, American actor (b. 1937)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Anthony of Padua, Doctor of the Church
Aquilina
Cetteus (Peregrinus)
Felicula
G. K. Chesterton (Episcopal Church (USA))
Gerard of Clairvaux
Psalmodius
Ragnebert (Rambert)
Blessed Thomas Woodhouse
Triphyllius
June 13 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Inventors' Day (Hungary)
Suleimaniah City Fallen and Martyrs Day (Iraqi Kurdistan)
International Albinism Awareness Day (international)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15817 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2019 | June 19 |
Events
Pre-1600
325 – The original Nicene Creed is adopted at the First Council of Nicaea.
1179 – The Battle of Kalvskinnet takes place outside Nidaros (now Trondheim), Norway. Earl Erling Skakke is killed, and the battle changes the tide of the civil wars.
1306 – The Earl of Pembroke's army defeats Bruce's Scottish army at the Battle of Methven.
1586 – English colonists leave Roanoke Island, after failing to establish England's first permanent settlement in North America.
1601–1900
1718 – At least 73,000 people died in the 1718 Tongwei–Gansu earthquake due to landslides in the Qing dynasty.
1770 – New Church Day: Emanuel Swedenborg writes: "The Lord sent forth His twelve disciples, who followed Him in the world into the whole spiritual world to preach the Gospel that the Lord God Jesus Christ reigns. This took place on the 19th day of June, in the year 1770."
1800 – War of the Second Coalition Battle of Höchstädt results in a French victory over Austria.
1816 – Battle of Seven Oaks between North West Company and Hudson's Bay Company, near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
1821 – Decisive defeat of the Filiki Eteria by the Ottomans at Drăgășani (in Wallachia).
1846 – The first officially recorded, organized baseball game is played under Alexander Cartwright's rules on Hoboken, New Jersey's Elysian Fields with the New York Base Ball Club defeating the Knickerbockers 23–1. Cartwright umpired.
1850 – Princess Louise of the Netherlands marries Crown Prince Karl of Sweden–Norway.
1862 – The U.S. Congress prohibits slavery in United States territories, nullifying Dred Scott v. Sandford.
1865 – Over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in Galveston, Texas, United States, are finally informed of their freedom. The anniversary was officially celebrated in Texas and other states as Juneteenth. On June 17, 2021, Juneteenth officially became a federal holiday in the United States.
1867 – Maximilian I of the Second Mexican Empire is executed by a firing squad in Querétaro, Querétaro.
1875 – The Herzegovinian rebellion against the Ottoman Empire begins.
1901–present
1903 – Benito Mussolini, at the time a radical Socialist, is arrested by Bern police for advocating a violent general strike.
1910 – The first Father's Day is celebrated in Spokane, Washington.
1913 – Natives Land Act, 1913 in South Africa implemented.
1921 – The village of Knockcroghery, Ireland, was burned by British forces.
1934 – The Communications Act of 1934 establishes the United States' Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
1943 – The Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers in the NFL merge for one season due to player shortages caused by World War II.
1953 – Cold War: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing, in New York.
1960 – The first NASCAR race was held at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
1961 – Kuwait declares independence from the United Kingdom.
1964 – The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate.
1965 – Nguyễn Cao Kỳ becomes Prime Minister of South Vietnam at the head of a military junta; General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu becomes the figurehead chief of state.
1985 – Members of the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers, dressed as Salvadoran soldiers, attack the Zona Rosa area of San Salvador.
1987 – Basque separatist group ETA commits one of its most violent attacks, in which a bomb is set off in a supermarket, Hipercor, killing 21 and injuring 45.
1988 – Pope John Paul II canonizes 117 Vietnamese Martyrs.
1990 – The current international law defending indigenous peoples, Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989, is ratified for the first time by Norway.
1990 – The Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic is founded in Moscow.
1991 – The last Soviet army units in Hungary are withdrawn.
2005 – Following a series of Michelin tire failures during the United States Grand Prix weekend at Indianapolis, and without an agreement being reached, 14 cars from seven teams in Michelin tires withdrew after completing the formation lap, leaving only six cars from three teams on Bridgestone tires to race.
2007 – The al-Khilani Mosque bombing in Baghdad leaves 78 people dead and another 218 injured.
2009 – Mass riots involving over 10,000 people and 10,000 police officers break out in Shishou, China, over the dubious circumstances surrounding the death of a local chef.
2009 – War in North-West Pakistan: The Pakistani Armed Forces open Operation Rah-e-Nijat against the Taliban and other Islamist rebels in the South Waziristan area of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
2012 – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange requested asylum in London's Ecuadorian Embassy for fear of extradition to the US after publication of previously classified documents including footage of civilian killings by the US army.
2018 – The 10,000,000th United States Patent is issued.
2018 – Antwon Rose II was fatally shot in East Pittsburgh by East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld after being involved in a near-fatal drive-by shooting.
Births
Pre-1600
1301 – Prince Morikuni, shōgun of Japan (d. 1333)
1417 – Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, lord of Rimini (d. 1468)
1566 – James VI and I of the United Kingdom (d. 1625)
1590 – Philip Bell, British colonial governor (d. 1678)
1595 – Hargobind, sixth Sikh guru (d. 1644)
1598 – Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1677)
1601–1900
1606 – James Hamilton, 1st Duke of Hamilton, Scottish soldier and politician, Lord Chancellor of Scotland (d. 1649)
1623 – Blaise Pascal, French mathematician and physicist (d. 1662)
1633 – Philipp van Limborch, Dutch author and theologian (d. 1712)
1701 – François Rebel, French violinist and composer (d. 1775)
1731 – Joaquim Machado de Castro, Portuguese sculptor (d. 1822)
1764 – José Gervasio Artigas, Uruguayan general and politician (d. 1850)
1771 – Joseph Diaz Gergonne, French mathematician and philosopher (d. 1859)
1776 – Francis Johnson, American lawyer and politician (d. 1842)
1783 – Friedrich Sertürner, German chemist and pharmacist (d. 1841)
1793 – Joseph Earl Sheffield, American businessman and philanthropist (d. 1882)
1795 – James Braid, Scottish-English surgeon (d. 1860)
1797 – Hamilton Hume, Australian explorer (d. 1873)
1815 – Cornelius Krieghoff, Dutch-Canadian painter (d. 1872)
1816 – William H. Webb, American shipbuilder and philanthropist, founded the Webb Institute (d. 1899)
1833 – Mary Tenney Gray, American editorial writer, club-woman, philanthropist, and suffragette (d. 1904)
1834 – Charles Spurgeon, English pastor and author (d. 1892)
1840 – Georg Karl Maria Seidlitz, German entomologist and academic (d. 1917)
1843 – Mary Sibbet Copley, American philanthropist (d. 1929)
1845 – Cléophas Beausoleil, Canadian journalist and politician (d. 1904)
1846 – Antonio Abetti, Italian astronomer and academic (d. 1928)
1850 – David Jayne Hill, American historian and politician, 24th United States Assistant Secretary of State (d. 1932)
1851 – Billy Midwinter, English-Australian cricketer (d. 1890)
1851 – Silvanus P. Thompson, English physicist, engineer, and academic (d. 1916)
1854 – Alfredo Catalani, Italian composer and academic (d. 1893)
1854 – Hjalmar Mellin, Finnish mathematician and theorist (d. 1933)
1855 – George F. Roesch, American lawyer and politician (d. 1917)
1858 – Sam Walter Foss, American poet and librarian (d. 1911)
1861 – Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, Scottish-English field marshal (d. 1928)
1861 – Émile Haug, French geologist and paleontologist (d. 1927)
1861 – José Rizal, Filipino journalist, author, and poet (d. 1896)
1865 – May Whitty, English actress (d. 1948)
1871 – Alajos Szokolyi, Hungarian hurdler, jumper, and physician (d. 1932)
1872 – Theodore Payne, English-American gardener and botanist (d. 1963)
1874 – Peder Oluf Pedersen, Danish physicist and engineer (d. 1941)
1876 – Nigel Gresley, Scottish-English engineer (d. 1941)
1877 – Charles Coburn, American actor (d. 1961)
1881 – Maginel Wright Enright, American illustrator (d. 1966)
1883 – Gladys Mills Phipps, American horse breeder (d. 1970)
1884 – Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, French painter and historian (d. 1974)
1886 – Finley Hamilton, American lawyer and politician (d. 1940)
1888 – Arthur Massey Berry, Canadian soldier and pilot (d. 1970)
1891 – John Heartfield, German photographer and activist (d. 1968)
1896 – Rajani Palme Dutt, English journalist and politician (d. 1974)
1896 – Wallis Simpson, American wife of Edward VIII (d. 1986)
1897 – Cyril Norman Hinshelwood, English chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1967)
1897 – Moe Howard, American comedian (d. 1975)
1901–present
1902 – Guy Lombardo, Canadian-American violinist and bandleader (d. 1977)
1903 – Mary Callery, American-French sculptor and academic (d. 1977)
1903 – Lou Gehrig, American baseball player (d. 1941)
1903 – Wally Hammond, English cricketer and coach (d. 1965)
1903 – Hans Litten, German lawyer (d. 1938)
1905 – Mildred Natwick, American actress (d. 1994)
1906 – Ernst Boris Chain, German-Irish biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1979)
1906 – Knut Kroon, Swedish footballer (d. 1975)
1906 – Walter Rauff, German SS officer (d. 1984)
1907 – Clarence Wiseman, Canadian 10th General of the Salvation Army (d. 1985)
1909 – Osamu Dazai, Japanese author (d. 1948)
1909 – Rūdolfs Jurciņš, Latvian basketball player (d. 1948)
1910 – Sydney Allard, English race car driver, founded the Allard Company (d. 1966)
1910 – Paul Flory, American chemist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1985)
1910 – Abe Fortas, American lawyer and jurist (d. 1982)
1912 – Don Gutteridge, American baseball player and manager (d. 2008)
1912 – Virginia MacWatters, American soprano and actress (d. 2005)
1913 – Helene Madison, American swimmer (d. 1970)
1914 – Alan Cranston, American journalist and politician (d. 2000)
1914 – Lester Flatt, American bluegrass singer-songwriter, guitarist, and mandolin player (d. 1979)
1915 – Pat Buttram, American actor (d. 1994)
1915 – Julius Schwartz, American publisher and agent (d. 2004)
1917 – Joshua Nkomo, Zimbabwean guerrilla leader and politician, Vice President of Zimbabwe (d. 1999)
1919 – Pauline Kael, American film critic (d. 2001)
1920 – Yves Robert, French actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2002)
1921 – Louis Jourdan, French-American actor and singer (d. 2015)
1922 – Aage Bohr, Danish physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2009)
1922 – Marilyn P. Johnson, American educator and diplomat, 8th United States Ambassador to Togo
1923 – Bob Hank, Australian footballer and coach (d. 2012)
1926 – Erna Schneider Hoover, American mathematician and inventor
1927 – Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, Argentine general and human rights violator (d. 2018)
1928 – Tommy DeVito, American singer and guitarist (d. 2020)
1928 – Nancy Marchand, American actress (d. 2000)
1930 – Gena Rowlands, American actress
1932 – Pier Angeli, Italian actress (d. 1971)
1932 – José Sanchis Grau, Spanish author and illustrator (d. 2011)
1932 – Marisa Pavan, Italian actress
1933 – Viktor Patsayev, Kazakh engineer and astronaut (d. 1971)
1934 – Gérard Latortue, Haitian politician, 12th Prime Minister of Haiti
1936 – Marisa Galvany, American soprano and actress
1937 – André Glucksmann, French philosopher and author (d. 2015)
1938 – Wahoo McDaniel, American football player and wrestler (d. 2002)
1939 – Bernd Hoss, German footballer and manager (d. 2016)
1939 – John F. MacArthur, American minister and theologian
1941 – Václav Klaus, Czech economist and politician, 2nd President of the Czech Republic
1942 – Merata Mita, New Zealand director and producer (d. 2010)
1944 – Chico Buarque, Brazilian singer, composer, writer and poet
1945 – Radovan Karadžić, Serbian-Bosnian politician and convicted war criminal, 1st President of Republika Srpska
1945 – Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese politician, Nobel Prize laureate
1945 – Tobias Wolff, American short story writer, memoirist, and novelist
1946 – Jimmy Greenhoff, English footballer and manager
1947 – Salman Rushdie, Indian-English novelist and essayist
1947 – John Ralston Saul, Canadian philosopher and author
1948 – Nick Drake, English singer-songwriter (d. 1974)
1948 – Phylicia Rashad, American actress
1950 – Neil Asher Silberman, American archaeologist and historian
1950 – Ann Wilson, American singer-songwriter and musician
1951 – Ayman al-Zawahiri, Egyptian terrorist
1951 – Francesco Moser, Italian cyclist
1952 – Bob Ainsworth, English politician, Secretary of State for Defence
1954 – Mike O'Brien, English lawyer and politician, Solicitor General for England and Wales
1954 – Lou Pearlman, American music producer and fraudster (d. 2016)
1954 – Kathleen Turner, American actress
1954 – Richard Wilkins, New Zealand-Australian journalist and television presenter
1955 – Mary O'Connor, New Zealand runner
1955 – Mary Schapiro, American lawyer and politician
1957 – Anna Lindh, Swedish politician, 39th Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs (d. 2003)
1957 – Jean Rabe, American journalist and author
1958 – Sergei Makarov, Russian-American ice hockey player and coach
1959 – Mark DeBarge, American singer-songwriter and trumpet player
1959 – Christian Wulff, German lawyer and politician, 10th President of Germany
1960 – Andrew Dilnot, English economist and academic
1960 – Johnny Gray, American runner and coach
1960 – Luke Morley, English guitarist, songwriter, and producer
1960 – Patti Rizzo, American golfer
1962 – Paula Abdul, American singer-songwriter, dancer, actress, and presenter
1962 – Jeremy Bates, English tennis player
1962 – Ashish Vidyarthi, Indian actor
1963 – Laura Ingraham, American radio host and author
1963 – Margarita Ponomaryova, Russian hurdler
1963 – Rory Underwood, English rugby player, lieutenant, and pilot
1964 – Brent Goulet, American soccer player and manager
1964 – Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and former Mayor of London
1964 – Brian Vander Ark, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1965 – Sabine Braun, German heptathlete
1965 – Sadie Frost, English actress and producer
1966 – Michalis Romanidis, Greek basketball player
1967 – Bjørn Dæhlie, Norwegian skier and businessman
1968 – Alastair Lynch, Australian footballer and sportscaster
1968 – Timothy Morton, American philosopher and academic
1968 – Kimberly Anne "Kim" Walker, American film and television actress (d. 2001)
1970 – Rahul Gandhi, Indian politician
1970 – Quincy Watts, American sprinter and football player
1970 – Brian Welch, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1971 – José Emilio Amavisca, Spanish footballer
1971 – Chris Armstrong, English footballer
1972 – Jean Dujardin, French actor
1972 – Ilya Markov, Russian race walker
1972 – Brian McBride, American soccer player and coach
1972 – Robin Tunney, American actress
1973 – Jahine Arnold, American football player
1973 – Yuko Nakazawa, Japanese singer
1973 – Yasuhiko Yabuta, Japanese baseball player
1974 – Doug Mientkiewicz, American baseball player, coach, and manager
1974 – Mustaque Ahmed Ruhi, Bangladeshi member of parliament
1975 – Hugh Dancy, English actor and model
1975 – Anthony Parker, American basketball player
1976 – Anar Baghirov, Azerbaijani lawyer
1976 – Dennis Crowley, American businessman, co-founded Foursquare
1976 – Bryan Hughes, English footballer and manager
1976 – Anita Wilson, American singer-songwriter and producer
1978 – Dirk Nowitzki, German basketball player
1978 – Zoe Saldana, American actress
1978 – Claudio Vargas, Dominican baseball player
1979 – José Kléberson, Brazilian footballer
1980 – Jean Carroll, Irish cricketer
1980 – Dan Ellis, Canadian ice hockey player
1980 – Robbie Neilson, Scottish footballer and manager
1980 – Nuno Santos, Portuguese footballer
1981 – Mohammed Al-Khuwalidi, Saudi Arabian long jumper
1981 – Moss Burmester, New Zealand swimmer
1982 – Alexander Frolov, Russian ice hockey player
1982 – Chris Vermeulen, Australian motorcycle racer
1983 – Macklemore, American rapper
1983 – Aidan Turner, Irish actor
1984 – Paul Dano, American actor
1984 – Wieke Dijkstra, Dutch field hockey player
1984 – Andri Eleftheriou, Cypriot sport shooter
1985 – Ai Miyazato, Japanese golfer
1985 – José Ernesto Sosa, Argentinian footballer
1985 – Dire Tune, Ethiopian runner
1986 – Aoiyama Kōsuke, Bulgarian sumo wrestler
1986 – Lázaro Borges, Cuban pole vaulter
1986 – Diego Hypólito, Brazilian gymnast
1986 – Marvin Williams, American basketball player
1987 – Rashard Mendenhall, American football player
1988 – Jacob deGrom, American baseball player
1990 – Moa Hjelmer, Swedish sprinter
1990 – Xavier Rhodes, American football player
1992 – Keaton Jennings, South African-English cricketer
1992 – C. J. Mosley, American football player
1993 – Olajide Olatunji, English YouTuber
Deaths
Pre-1600
404 – Huan Xuan, Jin-dynasty warlord and emperor of Huan Chu (b. 369)
626 – Soga no Umako, Japanese son of Soga no Iname (b. 551)
930 – Xiao Qing, chancellor of Later Liang (b. 862)
1027 – Romuald, Italian mystic and saint (b. 951)
1185 – Taira no Munemori, Japanese soldier (b. 1147)
1282 – Eleanor de Montfort, Welsh princess (b. 1252)
1312 – Piers Gaveston, 1st Earl of Cornwall, English politician (b. 1284)
1341 – Juliana Falconieri, Italian nun and saint (b. 1270)
1364 – Elisenda of Montcada, queen consort and regent of Aragon (b. 1292)
1504 – Bernhard Walther, German astronomer and humanist (b. 1430)
1542 – Leo Jud, Swiss theologian and reformer (b. 1482)
1545 – Abraomas Kulvietis, Lithuanian-Russian lawyer and jurist (b. 1509)
1567 – Anna of Brandenburg, Duchess of Mecklenburg (b. 1507)
1584 – Francis, Duke of Anjou (b. 1555)
1601–1900
1608 – Alberico Gentili, Italian lawyer and jurist (b. 1551)
1650 – Matthäus Merian, Swiss-German engraver and publisher (b. 1593)
1747 – Alessandro Marcello, Italian composer and educator (b. 1669)
1747 – Nader Shah, Persian leader (b. 1688)
1762 – Johann Ernst Eberlin, German organist and composer (b. 1702)
1768 – Benjamin Tasker Sr., American soldier and politician, 10th Colonial Governor of Maryland (b. 1690)
1786 – Nathanael Greene, American general (b. 1742)
1805 – Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, French painter and educator (b. 1724)
1820 – Joseph Banks, English botanist and author (b. 1743)
1844 – Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, French zoologist and biologist (b. 1772)
1864 – Richard Heales, English-Australian politician, 4th Premier of Victoria (b. 1822)
1864 – Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, American soldier (b. 1843)
1865 – Evangelos Zappas, Greek-Romanian businessman and philanthropist (b. 1800)
1867 – Miguel Miramón, Unconstitutional president of Mexico, 1859-1860 (b. 1832)
1867 – Maximilian I of Mexico (b. 1832)
1874 – Ferdinand Stoliczka, Moravian palaeontologist and ornithologist (b. 1838)
1884 – Juan Bautista Alberdi, Argentinian-French politician and diplomat (b. 1810)
1901–present
1903 – Herbert Vaughan, English cardinal (b. 1832)
1918 – Francesco Baracca, Italian fighter pilot (b. 1888)
1921 – Ramón López Velarde, Mexican poet and author (b. 1888)
1922 – Hitachiyama Taniemon, Japanese sumo wrestler, the 19th Yokozuna (b. 1874)
1932 – Sol Plaatje, South African journalist and activist (b. 1876)
1937 – J. M. Barrie, Scottish novelist and playwright (b. 1860)
1939 – Grace Abbott, American social worker and activist (b. 1878)
1940 – Maurice Jaubert, French composer and conductor (b. 1900)
1941 – C. V. Hartman, Swiss botanist and anthropologist (b. 1862)
1941 – Otto Hirsch, German jurist and politician (b. 1885)
1949 – Syed Zafarul Hasan, Indian philosopher and academic (b. 1885)
1951 – Angelos Sikelianos, Greek poet and playwright (b. 1884)
1953 – Ethel Rosenberg, American spy (b. 1915)
1953 – Julius Rosenberg, American spy (b. 1918)
1956 – Thomas J. Watson, American businessman (b. 1874)
1962 – Frank Borzage, American film director and actor (b. 1894)
1966 – Ed Wynn, American actor and comedian (b. 1886)
1968 – James Joseph Sweeney, American bishop (b. 1898)
1975 – Sam Giancana, American mob boss (b. 1908)
1977 – Ali Shariati, Iranian sociologist and philosopher (b. 1933)
1979 – Paul Popenoe, American explorer and scholar, founded Relationship counseling (b. 1888)
1981 – Anya Phillips, Chinese-American band manager (b. 1955)
1984 – Lee Krasner, American painter and educator (b. 1908)
1986 – Len Bias, American basketball player (b. 1963)
1987 – Margaret Carver Leighton, American author (b. 1896)
1988 – Fernand Seguin, Canadian biochemist and academic (b. 1922)
1988 – Gladys Spellman, American lawyer and politician (b. 1918)
1989 – Betti Alver, Estonian author and poet (b. 1906)
1990 – George Addes, American trade union leader, co-founded United Automobile Workers (b. 1911)
1990 – Isobel Andrews, New Zealand writer (b. 1905)
1991 – Jean Arthur, American actress (b. 1900)
1993 – William Golding, British novelist, playwright, and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1911)
1995 – Peter Townsend, Burmese-English captain and pilot (b. 1914)
2001 – Stanley Mosk, American lawyer, jurist, and politician (b. 1912)
2001 – John Heyer, Australian director and producer (b. 1916)
2004 – Clayton Kirkpatrick, journalist and newspaper editor (b. 1915)
2007 – Antonio Aguilar, Mexican singer-songwriter, actor, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1919)
2007 – Alberto Mijangos, Mexican-American painter and educator (b. 1925)
2007 – Terry Hoeppner, American football player and coach (b. 1947)
2007 – Ze'ev Schiff, Israeli journalist and author (b. 1932)
2008 – Barun Sengupta, Bengali journalist, founded Bartaman (b. 1934)
2009 – Tomoji Tanabe, Japanese engineer and surveyor (b. 1895)
2010 – Manute Bol, Sudanese-American basketball player and activist (b. 1962)
2010 – Anthony Quinton, Baron Quinton, English philosopher and academic (b. 1925)
2010 – Carlos Monsiváis, Mexican writer, journalist and political activist (b. 1938)
2012 – Norbert Tiemann, American soldier and politician, 32nd Governor of Nebraska (b. 1924)
2013 – Vince Flynn, American author (b. 1966)
2013 – James Gandolfini, American actor and producer (b. 1961)
2013 – Gyula Horn, Hungarian politician, 37th Prime Minister of Hungary (b. 1932)
2013 – Dave Jennings, American football player and sportscaster (b. 1952)
2013 – Filip Topol, Czech singer-songwriter and pianist (b. 1965)
2013 – Slim Whitman, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1923)
2014 – Oskar-Hubert Dennhardt, German general (b. 1915)
2014 – Gerry Goffin, American songwriter (b. 1939)
2014 – Ibrahim Touré, Ivorian footballer (b. 1985)
2015 – James Salter, American novelist and short-story writer (b. 1925)
2016 – Anton Yelchin, American actor (b. 1989)
2017 – Otto Warmbier, American college student detained in North Korea (b. 1994)
2018 – Koko, western lowland gorilla and user of American Sign Language (b. 1971)
2019 – Etika, American YouTuber and streamer (b. 1990)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Deodatus (or Didier) of Nevers (or of Jointures)
Gervasius and Protasius (Catholic Church)
Hildegrim of Châlons
Juliana Falconieri
Romuald
Ursicinus of Ravenna
Zosimus
June 19 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
New Church feast day
New Church Day
Day of the Independent Hungary (Hungary)
Feast of Forest (Palawan)
Juneteenth (United States)
Labour Day (Trinidad and Tobago)
Laguna Day (Laguna)
Never Again Day (Uruguay)
World Sickle Cell Day (International)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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-0.07455457001924515,
0.5655104517936707,
-0.12630783021450043,
0.12560804188251495,
-0.1349170207977295,
0.2739470303058624,
0.07760249823331833,
-0.18677560985088348,
-0.6074179410934448,
-0.2247607558965683,
0.18384160101413727,
0.14756305515766144,
0.275762379169464... |
15818 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2020 | June 20 | In the Northern Hemisphere, the Summer solstice sometimes occurs on this date, while the Winter solstice occurs in the Southern Hemisphere.
Events
Pre-1600
451 – Battle of Chalons: Flavius Aetius' battles Attila the Hun. After the battle, which was inconclusive, Attila retreats, causing the Romans to interpret it as a victory.
1180 – First Battle of Uji, starting the Genpei War in Japan.
1601–1900
1620 – The Battle of Höchst takes place during the Thirty Years' War.
1631 – The Sack of Baltimore: The Irish village of Baltimore is attacked by Algerian pirates.
1652 – Tarhoncu Ahmed Pasha is appointed Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire.
1685 – Monmouth Rebellion: James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth declares himself King of England at Bridgwater.
1756 – A British garrison is imprisoned in the Black Hole of Calcutta.
1782 – The U.S. Congress adopts the Great Seal of the United States.
1787 – Oliver Ellsworth moves at the Federal Convention to call the government the 'United States'.
1789 – Deputies of the French Third Estate take the Tennis Court Oath.
1791 – King Louis XVI, disguised as a valet, and the French royal family attempt to flee Paris during the French Revolution.
1819 – The U.S. vessel arrives at Liverpool, United Kingdom. It is the first steam-propelled vessel to cross the Atlantic, although most of the journey is made under sail.
1837 – Queen Victoria succeeds to the British throne.
1840 – Samuel Morse receives the patent for the telegraph.
1862 – Barbu Catargiu, the Prime Minister of Romania, is assassinated.
1863 – American Civil War: West Virginia is admitted as the 35th U.S. state.
1877 – Alexander Graham Bell installs the world's first commercial telephone service in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
1893 – Lizzie Borden is acquitted of the murders of her father and stepmother.
1895 – The Kiel Canal, crossing the base of the Jutland peninsula and the busiest artificial waterway in the world, is officially opened.
1900 – Boxer Rebellion: The Imperial Chinese Army begins a 55-day siege of the Legation Quarter in Beijing, China.
1900 – Baron Eduard Toll, leader of the Russian Polar Expedition of 1900, departs Saint Petersburg in Russia on the explorer ship Zarya, never to return.
1901–present
1921 – Workers of Buckingham and Carnatic Mills in the city of Chennai, India, begin a four-month strike.
1926 – The 28th International Eucharistic Congress begins in Chicago, with over 250,000 spectators attending the opening procession.
1940 – World War II: The Soviet Union occupies the Romanian territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
1942 – The Holocaust: Kazimierz Piechowski and three others, dressed as members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, steal an SS staff car and escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp.
1943 – The Detroit race riot breaks out and continues for three more days.
1943 – World War II: The Royal Air Force launches Operation Bellicose, the first shuttle bombing raid of the war. Avro Lancaster bombers damage the V-2 rocket production facilities at the Zeppelin Works while en route to an air base in Algeria.
1944 – World War II: The Battle of the Philippine Sea concludes with a decisive U.S. naval victory. The lopsided naval air battle is also known as the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot".
1944 – Continuation War: The Soviet Union demands an unconditional surrender from Finland during the beginning of partially successful Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive. The Finnish government refuses.
1944 – The experimental MW 18014 V-2 rocket reaches an altitude of 176 km, becoming the first man-made object to reach outer space.
1945 – The United States Secretary of State approves the transfer of Wernher von Braun and his team of Nazi rocket scientists to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip.
1948 – The Deutsche Mark is introduced in Western Allied-occupied Germany. The Soviet Military Administration in Germany responded by imposing the Berlin Blockade four days later.
1956 – A Venezuelan Super-Constellation crashes in the Atlantic Ocean off Asbury Park, New Jersey, killing 74 people.
1959 – A rare June hurricane strikes Canada's Gulf of St. Lawrence killing 35.
1960 – The Mali Federation gains independence from France (it later splits into Mali and Senegal).
1963 – Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union and the United States sign an agreement to establish the so-called "red telephone" link between Washington, D.C. and Moscow.
1972 – Watergate scandal: An 18½-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex.
1973 – Snipers fire upon left-wing Peronists in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in what is known as the Ezeiza massacre. At least 13 are killed and more than 300 are injured.
1973 – Aeroméxico Flight 229 crashes on approach to Licenciado Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport, killing all 27 people on board.
1975 – The film Jaws is released in the United States, becoming the highest-grossing film of that time and starting the trend of films known as "summer blockbusters".
1979 – ABC News correspondent Bill Stewart is shot dead by a Nicaraguan National Guard soldier under the regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle during the Nicaraguan Revolution. The murder is caught on tape and sparks an international outcry against the regime.
1982 – The International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide opens in Tel Aviv, despite attempts by the Turkish government to cancel it, as it included presentations on the Armenian genocide.
1982 – The Argentine Corbeta Uruguay base on Southern Thule surrenders to Royal Marine commandos in the final action of the Falklands War.
1990 – Asteroid Eureka is discovered.
1990 – The 7.4 Manjil–Rudbar earthquake affects northern Iran with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme), killing 35,000–50,000, and injuring 60,000–105,000.
1991 – The German Bundestag votes to move seat of government from the former West German capital of Bonn to the present capital of Berlin.
1994 – The 1994 Imam Reza shrine bomb explosion in Iran leaves at least 25 dead and 70 to 300 injured.
2003 – The Wikimedia Foundation is founded in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Births
Pre-1600
1005 – Ali az-Zahir, Fatimid caliph of Egypt (d. 1036)
1389 – John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford, English statesman (d. 1435)
1469 – Gian Galeazzo Sforza, duke of Milan (d. 1494)
1566 – Sigismund III Vasa, Polish and Swedish king (d. 1632)
1583 – Jacob De la Gardie, Swedish soldier and politician, Lord High Constable of Sweden (d. 1652)
1601–1900
1634 – Charles Emmanuel II, duke of Savoy (d. 1675)
1642 – (O.S.) George Hickes, English minister and scholar (d. 1715)
1647 – (O.S.) John George III, Elector of Saxony (d. 1691)
1717 – Jacques Saly, French sculptor and painter (d. 1776)
1723 – (O.S.) Adam Ferguson, Scottish philosopher and historian (d. 1816)
1737 – Tokugawa Ieharu, Japanese shōgun (d. 1786)
1754 – Amalie of Hesse-Darmstadt, princess of Baden (d. 1832)
1756 – Joseph Martin Kraus, German-Swedish composer and educator (d. 1792)
1761 – Jacob Hübner, German entomologist and author (d. 1826)
1763 – Wolfe Tone, Irish rebel leader (d. 1798)
1770 – Moses Waddel, American minister and academic (d. 1840)
1771 – Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, Scottish philanthropist and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Kirkcudbright (d. 1820)
1771 – Hermann von Boyen, Prussian general and politician, Prussian Minister of War (d. 1848)
1777 – Jean-Jacques Lartigue, Canadian bishop (d. 1840)
1778 – Jean Baptiste Gay, vicomte de Martignac, French politician, 7th Prime Minister of France (d. 1832)
1786 – Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, French poet and author (d. 1859)
1796 – Luigi Amat di San Filippo e Sorso, Italian cardinal (d. 1878)
1808 – Samson Raphael Hirsch, German rabbi and scholar (d. 1888)
1809 – Isaak August Dorner, German theologian and academic (d. 1884)
1813 – Joseph Autran, French poet and author (d. 1877)
1819 – Jacques Offenbach, German-French cellist and composer (d. 1880)
1847 – Gina Krog, Norwegian suffragist and women's rights activist (d. 1916)
1855 – Richard Lodge, English historian and academic (d. 1936)
1858 – Charles W. Chesnutt, American novelist and short story writer (d. 1932)
1859 – Christian von Ehrenfels, Austrian philosopher (d. 1932)
1860 – Alexander Winton, Scottish-American race car driver and engineer (d. 1932)
1860 – Jack Worrall, Australian cricketer, footballer, and coach (d. 1937)
1861 – Frederick Gowland Hopkins, English biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1947)
1865 – George Redmayne Murray, English biologist and physician (d. 1939)
1866 – James Burns, English cricketer (d. 1957)
1867 – Leon Wachholz, Polish scientist and medical examiner (d. 1942)
1869 – Laxmanrao Kirloskar, Indian businessman, founded the Kirloskar Group (d. 1956)
1870 – Georges Dufrénoy, French painter and academic (d. 1943)
1872 – George Carpenter, American 5th General of The Salvation Army (d. 1948)
1875 – Reginald Punnett, English geneticist, statistician, and academic (d. 1967)
1882 – Daniel Sawyer, American golfer (d. 1937)
1884 – Mary R. Calvert, American astronomer and author (d. 1974)
1884 – Johannes Heinrich Schultz, German psychiatrist and psychotherapist (d. 1970)
1885 – Andrzej Gawroński, Polish linguist and academic (d. 1927)
1887 – Kurt Schwitters, German painter and illustrator (d. 1948)
1889 – John S. Paraskevopoulos, Greek-South African astronomer and academic (d. 1951)
1891 – Giannina Arangi-Lombardi, Italian soprano (d. 1951)
1891 – John A. Costello, Irish lawyer and politician, 3rd Taoiseach of Ireland (d. 1976)
1893 – Wilhelm Zaisser, German soldier and politician (d. 1958)
1894 – Lloyd Hall, American chemist and academic (d. 1971)
1896 – Wilfrid Pelletier, Canadian pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1982)
1897 – Elisabeth Hauptmann, German author and playwright (d. 1973)
1899 – Jean Moulin, French soldier and engineer (d. 1943)
1901–present
1903 – Sam Rabin, English wrestler, sculptor, and singer (d. 1991)
1905 – Lillian Hellman, American playwright and screenwriter (d. 1984)
1906 – Bob King, American high jumper and obstetrician (d. 1965)
1907 – Jimmy Driftwood, American singer-songwriter and banjo player (d. 1998)
1908 – Billy Werber, American baseball player (d. 2009)
1908 – Gus Schilling, American actor (d. 1957)
1909 – Errol Flynn, Australian-American actor (d. 1959)
1910 – Josephine Johnson, American author and poet (d. 1990)
1911 – Gail Patrick, American actress (d. 1980)
1912 – Anthony Buckeridge, English author (d. 2004)
1912 – Jack Torrance, American shot putter and football player (d. 1969)
1912 – Geoffrey Baker, English Field Marshal and Chief of the General Staff of the British Army (d. 1980)
1914 – Gordon Juckes, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 1994)
1914 – Muazzez İlmiye Çığ, Turkish archaeologist and academic
1915 – Dick Reynolds, Australian footballer and coach (d. 2002)
1915 – Terence Young, Chinese-English director and screenwriter (d. 1994)
1916 – Jean-Jacques Bertrand, Canadian lawyer and politician, 21st Premier of Quebec (d. 1973)
1916 – T. Texas Tyler, American country music singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1972)
1917 – Helena Rasiowa, Austrian-Polish mathematician and academic (d. 1994)
1918 – George Lynch, American race car driver (d. 1997)
1918 – Zoltán Sztáray, Hungarian-American author (d. 2011)
1920 – Danny Cedrone, American guitarist and bandleader (d. 1954)
1920 – Thomas Jefferson, American trumpet player (d. 1986)
1921 – Byron Farwell, American historian and author (d. 1999)
1921 – Pancho Segura, Ecuadorian tennis player (d. 2017)
1923 – Peter Gay, German-American historian, author, and academic (d. 2015)
1923 – Jerzy Nowak, Polish actor and educator (d. 2013)
1924 – Chet Atkins, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 2001)
1924 – Fritz Koenig, German sculptor and academic, designed The Sphere (d. 2017)
1925 – Doris Hart, American tennis player and educator (d. 2015)
1925 – Audie Murphy, American lieutenant and actor, Medal of Honor recipient (d. 1971)
1926 – Rehavam Ze'evi, Israeli general and politician, 9th Israeli Minister of Tourism (d. 2001)
1927 – Simin Behbahani, Iranian poet and activist (d. 2014)
1928 – Eric Dolphy, American saxophonist, flute player, and composer (d. 1964)
1928 – Martin Landau, American actor and producer (d. 2017)
1928 – Jean-Marie Le Pen, French intelligence officer and politician
1928 – Asrat Woldeyes, Ethiopian surgeon and educator (d. 1999)
1929 – Edgar Bronfman, Sr., Canadian-American businessman and philanthropist (d. 2013)
1929 – Anne Weale, English journalist and author (d. 2007)
1929 – Edith Windsor, American lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights activist (d. 2017)
1930 – Magdalena Abakanowicz, Polish sculptor and academic (d. 2017)
1930 – John Waine, English bishop (d. 2020)
1931 – Olympia Dukakis, American actress (d. 2021)
1931 – James Tolkan, American actor and director
1932 – Robert Rozhdestvensky, Russian poet and author (d. 1994)
1933 – Danny Aiello, American actor (d. 2019)
1933 – Claire Tomalin, English journalist and author
1934 – Wendy Craig, English actress
1935 – Jim Barker, American politician (d. 2005)
1935 – Len Dawson, American football player
1935 – Armando Picchi, Italian footballer and coach (d. 1971)
1936 – Billy Guy, American singer (d. 2002)
1936 – Enn Vetemaa, Estonian author and screenwriter (d. 2017)
1937 – Stafford Dean, English actor and singer
1937 – Jerry Keller, American singer-songwriter
1938 – Joan Kirner, Australian educator and politician, 42nd Premier of Victoria (d. 2015)
1938 – Mickie Most, English music producer (d. 2003)
1939 – Ramakant Desai, Indian cricketer (d. 1998)
1939 – Budge Rogers, English rugby player and manager
1940 – Eugen Drewermann, German priest and theologian
1940 – John Mahoney, English-born American actor (d. 2018)
1941 – Stephen Frears, English actor, director, and producer
1941 – Ulf Merbold, German physicist and astronaut
1942 – Neil Trudinger, Australian mathematician and theorist
1942 – Brian Wilson, American singer-songwriter and producer
1945 – Anne Murray, Canadian singer and guitarist
1946 – Xanana Gusmão, Timorese soldier and politician, 1st President of East Timor
1946 – David Kazhdan, Russian-Israeli mathematician and academic
1946 – Bob Vila, American television host
1946 – André Watts, American pianist and educator
1947 – Dolores "LaLa" Brooks, American pop singer
1948 – Cirilo Flores, American bishop (d. 2014)
1948 – Alan Longmuir, Scottish bass player and songwriter (d. 2018)
1948 – Ludwig Scotty, Nauruan politician, 10th President of Nauru
1949 – Gotabaya Rajapaksa, 8th president of Sri Lanka
1949 – Lionel Richie, American singer-songwriter, pianist, producer, and actor
1950 – Nouri al-Maliki, Iraqi politician, 76th Prime Minister of Iraq
1951 – Tress MacNeille, American actress and voice artist
1951 – Sheila McLean, Scottish scholar and academic
1951 – Paul Muldoon, Irish poet and academic
1952 – John Goodman, American actor
1952 – Vikram Seth, Indian author and poet
1953 – Robert Crais, American author and screenwriter
1953 – Raúl Ramírez, Mexican tennis player
1953 – Willy Rampf, German engineer
1954 – Allan Lamb, South African-English cricketer and sportscaster
1954 – Ilan Ramon, Israeli colonel, pilot, and astronaut (d. 2003)
1955 – E. Lynn Harris, American author (d. 2009)
1956 – Peter Reid, English footballer and manager
1956 – Sohn Suk-hee, South Korean newscaster
1958 – Kelly Johnson, English hard rock guitarist and songwriter (d. 2007)
1960 – Philip M. Parker, American economist and author
1960 – John Taylor, English singer-songwriter, bass player, and actor
1963 – Kirk Baptiste, American sprinter
1963 – Mark Ovenden, British author and broadcaster
1964 – Pierfrancesco Chili, Italian motorcycle racer
1964 – Silke Möller, German runner
1966 – Boaz Yakin, American director, producer, and screenwriter
1967 – Nicole Kidman, American-Australian actress
1967 – Dan Tyminski, American singer-songwriter
1968 – Robert Rodriguez, American director, producer, and screenwriter
1969 – Paulo Bento, Portuguese footballer and manager
1969 – Misha Verbitsky, Russian mathematician and academic
1969 – MaliVai Washington, American tennis player and sportscaster
1970 – Andrea Nahles, German politician, German Minister of Labour and Social Affairs
1970 – Athol Williams, South African poet and social philosopher
1971 – Rodney Rogers, American basketball player and coach
1971 – Jeordie White, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and bass player
1972 – Alexis Alexoudis, Greek footballer
1973 – Chino Moreno, American singer-songwriter
1975 – Joan Balcells, Spanish tennis player
1975 – Daniel Zítka, Czech footballer
1976 – Juliano Belletti, Brazilian footballer
1976 – Carlos Lee, Panamanian baseball player
1977 – Gordan Giriček, Croatian basketball player
1977 – Amos Lee, American singer-songwriter
1978 – Frank Lampard, English footballer
1978 – Jan-Paul Saeijs, Dutch footballer
1979 – Charles Howell III, American golfer
1980 – Franco Semioli, Italian footballer
1980 – Fabian Wegmann, German cyclist
1981 – Brede Hangeland, Norwegian footballer
1982 – Aleksei Berezutski, Russian footballer
1982 – Vasili Berezutski, Russian footballer
1982 – Example, English singer/rapper
1983 – Josh Childress, American basketball player
1983 – Darren Sproles, American football player
1984 – Hassan Adams, American basketball player
1985 – Saki Aibu, Japanese actress
1985 – Aurélien Chedjou, Cameroonian footballer
1985 – Matt Flynn, American football player
1986 – Dreama Walker, American actress
1987 – A-fu, Taiwanese singer and songwriter
1987 – Carsten Ball, Australian tennis player
1987 – Asmir Begović, Bosnian footballer
1987 – Joseph Ebuya, Kenyan runner
1989 – Christopher Mintz-Plasse, American actor
1989 – Javier Pastore, Argentinian footballer
1989 – Terrelle Pryor, American football player
1990 – DeQuan Jones, American basketball player
1991 – Kalidou Koulibaly, Senegalese footballer
1991 – Rick ten Voorde, Dutch footballer
1994 – Leonard Williams, American football player
1995 – Caroline Weir, Scottish footballer
1996 – Sam Bennett, Canadian ice hockey player
1997 – Bálint Kopasz, Hungarian sprint canoeist
Deaths
Pre-1600
465 – Emperor Wencheng of Northern Wei (b. 440)
656 – Uthman ibn Affan, Rashidun caliph (b. 577)
840 – Louis the Pious, Carolingian emperor (b. 778)
930 – Hucbald, Frankish monk and music theorist
981 – Adalbert, archbishop of Magdeburg
1176 – Mikhail of Vladimir, Russian prince
1351 – Margareta Ebner, German nun and mystic (b. 1291)
1597 – Willem Barentsz, Dutch cartographer and explorer (b. 1550)
1601–1900
1605 – Feodor II of Russia (b. 1589)
1668 – Heinrich Roth, German missionary and scholar (b. 1620)
1776 – Benjamin Huntsman, English businessman (b. 1704)
1787 – Carl Friedrich Abel, German viol player and composer (b. 1723)
1800 – Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, German mathematician and academic (b. 1719)
1810 – Axel von Fersen the Younger, Swedish general and politician (b. 1755)
1815 – Guillaume Philibert Duhesme, French general (b. 1766)
1820 – Manuel Belgrano, Argentinian general, economist, and politician (b. 1770)
1837 – William IV of the United Kingdom (b. 1765)
1840 – Pierre Claude François Daunou, French historian and politician (b. 1761)
1847 – Juan Larrea, Argentinian captain and politician (b. 1782)
1869 – Hijikata Toshizō, Japanese commander (b. 1835)
1870 – Jules de Goncourt, French historian and author (b. 1830)
1872 – Élie Frédéric Forey, French general (b. 1804)
1875 – Joseph Meek, American police officer and politician (b. 1810)
1876 – John Neal, American writer, critic, editor, lecturer, and activist (b. 1793)
1888 – Johannes Zukertort, Polish-English chess player (b. 1842)
1901–present
1906 – John Clayton Adams, English painter (b. 1840)
1909 – Friedrich Martens, Estonian-Russian historian, lawyer, and diplomat (b. 1845)
1925 – Josef Breuer, Austrian physician and psychologist (b. 1842)
1929 – Emmanouil Benakis, Greek merchant and politician, 35th Mayor of Athens (b. 1843)
1945 – Bruno Frank, German author, poet, and playwright (b. 1878)
1947 – Bugsy Siegel, American mobster (b. 1906)
1952 – Luigi Fagioli, Italian race car driver (b. 1898)
1958 – Kurt Alder, German chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1902)
1963 – Raphaël Salem, Greek-French mathematician and academic (b. 1898)
1965 – Bernard Baruch, American financier and politician (b. 1870)
1966 – Georges Lemaître, Belgian priest, physicist, and astronomer (b. 1894)
1969 – Bishnu Prasad Rabha, Indian artist, painter, actor, dancer, writer, music composer and politician (b. 1909)
1974 – Horace Lindrum, Australian snooker player (b. 1912)
1975 – Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, Hatian anthropologist (b. 1898)
1978 – Mark Robson, Canadian-American director and producer (b. 1913)
1984 – Estelle Winwood, English actress (b. 1883)
1995 – Emil Cioran, Romanian-French philosopher and educator (b. 1911)
1997 – Cahit Külebi, Turkish poet and author (b. 1917)
1999 – Clifton Fadiman, American game show host, author, and critic (b. 1902)
2001 – Gina Cigna, French-Italian soprano (b. 1900)
2002 – Erwin Chargaff, Austrian-American biochemist and academic (b. 1905)
2002 – Tinus Osendarp, Dutch runner (b. 1916)
2004 – Jim Bacon, Australian politician, 41st Premier of Tasmania (b. 1950)
2005 – Larry Collins, American journalist, historian, and author (b. 1929)
2005 – Jack Kilby, American physicist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1923)
2010 – Roberto Rosato, Italian footballer (b. 1943)
2010 – Harry B. Whittington, English palaeontologist and academic (b. 1916)
2011 – Ryan Dunn, American television personality (b. 1977)
2012 – Judy Agnew, Second Lady of the United States. (b. 1921)
2012 – LeRoy Neiman, American painter (b. 1921)
2012 – Heinrich IV, Prince Reuss of Köstritz (b. 1919)
2012 – Andrew Sarris, American critic (b. 1928)
2013 – Ingvar Rydell, Swedish footballer (b. 1922)
2015 – Angelo Niculescu, Romanian footballer and manager (b. 1921)
2015 – Miriam Schapiro, Canadian-American painter and sculptor (b. 1923)
2017 – Prodigy, American music artist (b. 1974)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Adalbert of Magdeburg
Florentina
John of Matera
Blessed Margareta Ebner
Methodius of Olympus
Pope Silverius
June 20 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Day of the National Flag (Argentina)
Earliest possible date for the summer solstice in the Northern hemisphere and the winter solstice in the Southern hemisphere, and its related observance:
Earliest day on which Day of the Finnish Flag can fall, while June 26 is the latest; celebrated on Saturday of Midsummer's Day (Finland)
International Surfing Day (third Saturday in June, on or near Summer solstice)
Litha / Midsummer celebrations in the northern hemisphere, Yule in the southern hemisphere.
Gas Sector Day (Azerbaijan)
Martyrs' Day (Eritrea)
West Virginia Day (West Virginia)
World Refugee Day (International)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15819 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2021 | June 21 | This day usually marks the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, which is the day of the year with the most hours of daylight in the Northern Hemisphere and the fewest hours of daylight in the Southern Hemisphere.
Events
Pre-1600
533 – A Byzantine expeditionary fleet under Belisarius sails from Constantinople to attack the Vandals in Africa, via Greece and Sicily (approximate date).
1307 – Külüg Khan is enthroned as Khagan of the Mongols and Wuzong of the Yuan.
1529 – French forces are driven out of northern Italy by Spain at the Battle of Landriano during the War of the League of Cognac.
1582 – Sengoku period: Oda Nobunaga, the most powerful of the Japanese daimyōs, is forced to commit suicide by his own general Akechi Mitsuhide.
1601–1900
1621 – Execution of 27 Czech noblemen on the Old Town Square in Prague as a consequence of the Battle of White Mountain.
1734 – In Montreal in New France, a slave known by the French name of Marie-Joseph Angélique is put to death, having been convicted of setting the fire that destroyed much of the city.
1749 – Halifax, Nova Scotia, is founded.
1768 – James Otis Jr. offends the King and Parliament in a speech to the Massachusetts General Court.
1788 – New Hampshire becomes the ninth state to ratify the Constitution of the United States.
1791 – King Louis XVI of France and his immediate family begin the Flight to Varennes during the French Revolution.
1798 – Irish Rebellion of 1798: The British Army defeats Irish rebels at the Battle of Vinegar Hill.
1813 – Peninsular War: Wellington defeats Joseph Bonaparte at the Battle of Vitoria.
1824 – Greek War of Independence: Egyptian forces capture Psara in the Aegean Sea.
1826 – Maniots defeat Egyptians under Ibrahim Pasha in the Battle of Vergas.
1848 – In the Wallachian Revolution, Ion Heliade Rădulescu and Christian Tell issue the Proclamation of Islaz and create a new republican government.
1864 – American Civil War: The Battle of Jerusalem Plank Road begins.
1898 – The United States captures Guam from Spain. The few warning shots fired by the U.S. naval vessels are misinterpreted as salutes by the Spanish garrison, which was unaware that the two nations were at war.
1900 – Boxer Rebellion: China formally declares war on the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Japan, as an edict issued from the Empress Dowager Cixi.
1900 – In the Philippines, General Arthur McArthur issues an amnesty proclamation to those Filipinos who will renounce the insurgent movement and accept US sovereignty
1901–present
1915 – The U.S. Supreme Court hands down its decision in Guinn v. United States 238 US 347 1915, striking down Oklahoma grandfather clause legislation which had the effect of denying the right to vote to blacks.
1919 – The Royal Canadian Mounted Police fire a volley into a crowd of unemployed war veterans, killing two, during the Winnipeg general strike.
1919 – Admiral Ludwig von Reuter scuttles the German fleet at Scapa Flow, Orkney. The nine sailors killed are the last casualties of World War I.
1921 – The Irish village of Knockcroghery was burned by British forces.
1929 – An agreement brokered by U.S. Ambassador Dwight Whitney Morrow ends the Cristero War in Mexico.
1930 – One-year conscription comes into force in France.
1940 – World War II: Italy begins an unsuccessful invasion of France.
1942 – World War II: Tobruk falls to Italian and German forces; 33,000 Allied troops are taken prisoner.
1942 – World War II: A Japanese submarine surfaces near the Columbia River in Oregon, firing 17 shells at Fort Stevens in one of only a handful of attacks by Japan against the United States mainland.
1945 – World War II: The Battle of Okinawa ends when the organized resistance of Imperial Japanese Army forces collapses in the Mabuni area on the southern tip of the main island.
1952 – The Philippine School of Commerce, through a republic act, is converted to Philippine College of Commerce, later to be the Polytechnic University of the Philippines.
1957 – Ellen Fairclough is sworn in as Canada's first female Cabinet Minister.
1963 – Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini is elected as Pope Paul VI.
1964 – Three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, are murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, United States, by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
1970 – Penn Central declares Section 77 bankruptcy in what was the largest U.S. corporate bankruptcy to date.
1973 – In its decision in Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, the Supreme Court of the United States establishes the Miller test for determining whether something is obscene and not protected speech under the U.S. constitution.
1978 – The original production of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, Evita, based on the life of Eva Perón, opens at the Prince Edward Theatre, London.
1982 – John Hinckley is found not guilty by reason of insanity for the attempted assassination of U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
1989 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397, that American flag-burning is a form of political protest protected by the First Amendment.
2000 – Section 28 (of the Local Government Act 1988), outlawing the 'promotion' of homosexuality in the United Kingdom, is repealed in Scotland with a 99 to 17 vote.
2001 – A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicts 13 Saudis and a Lebanese in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American servicemen.
2004 – SpaceShipOne becomes the first privately funded spaceplane to achieve spaceflight.
2005 – Edgar Ray Killen, who had previously been unsuccessfully tried for the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner, is convicted of manslaughter 41 years afterwards (the case had been reopened in 2004).
2006 – Pluto's newly discovered moons are officially named Nix and Hydra.
2009 – Greenland assumes self-rule.
2012 – A boat carrying more than 200 migrants capsizes in the Indian Ocean between the Indonesian island of Java and Christmas Island, killing 17 people and leaving 70 others missing.
Births
Pre-1600
906 – Abu Ja'far Ahmad ibn Muhammad, Saffarid emir (d. 963)
1002 – Pope Leo IX (d. 1054)
1226 – Bolesław V the Chaste of Poland (d. 1279)
1521 – John II, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Haderslev (d. 1580)
1528 – Maria of Austria, Holy Roman Empress (d. 1603)
1535 – Leonhard Rauwolf, German physician and botanist (d. 1596)
1601–1900
1630 – Samuel Oppenheimer, German Jewish banker and diplomat (d. 1703)
1636 – Godefroy Maurice de La Tour d'Auvergne, Duke of Bouillon, French noble (d. 1721)
1639 – (O.S.) Increase Mather, American minister and author (d. 1723)
1676 – (O.S.) Anthony Collins, English philosopher and author (d. 1729)
1706 – John Dollond, English optician and astronomer (d. 1761)
1710 – James Short, Scottish-English mathematician and optician (d. 1768)
1712 – Luc Urbain de Bouëxic, comte de Guichen, French admiral (d. 1790)
1730 – Motoori Norinaga, Japanese poet and scholar (d. 1801)
1732 – Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, German pianist and composer (d. 1791)
1736 – Enoch Poor, American general (d. 1780)
1741 – Prince Benedetto, Duke of Chablais (d. 1808)
1750 – Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet, French sculptor and illustrator (d. 1818)
1759 – Alexander J. Dallas, American lawyer and politician, 6th United States Secretary of the Treasury (d. 1817)
1763 – Pierre Paul Royer-Collard, French philosopher and academic (d. 1845)
1764 – Sidney Smith, English admiral and politician (d. 1840)
1774 – Daniel D. Tompkins, American lawyer and politician, 6th Vice President of the United States (d. 1825)
1781 – Siméon Denis Poisson, French mathematician and physicist (d. 1840)
1786 – Charles Edward Horn, English singer-songwriter (d. 1849)
1792 – Ferdinand Christian Baur, German theologian and scholar (d. 1860)
1797 – Wilhelm Küchelbecker, Russian poet and author (d. 1846)
1802 – Karl Zittel, German theologian (d. 1871)
1805 – Karl Friedrich Curschmann, German composer and singer (d. 1841)
1805 – Charles Thomas Jackson, American physician and geologist (d. 1880)
1811 – Carlo Matteucci, Italian physicist and neurophysiologist (d. 1868)
1814 – Paweł Bryliński, Polish sculptor (d. 1890)
1814 – Anton Nuhn, German anatomist and academic (d. 1889)
1823 – Jean Chacornac, French astronomer (d. 1873)
1825 – Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie, Irish economist and jurist (d. 1882)
1825 – William Stubbs, English bishop and historian (d. 1901)
1828 – Ferdinand André Fouqué, French geologist and academic (d. 1904)
1828 – Nikolaus Nilles, German Catholic writer and teacher (d. 1907)
1834 – Frans de Cort, Flemish poet and author (d. 1878)
1836 – Luigi Tripepi, Italian theologian (d. 1906)
1839 – Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brazilian author, poet, and playwright (d. 1908)
1845 – Samuel Griffith, Welsh-Australian politician, 9th Premier of Queensland (d. 1920)
1845 – Arthur Cowper Ranyard, English astrophysicist and astronomer (d. 1894)
1846 – Marion Adams-Acton, Scottish-English author and playwright (d. 1928)
1846 – Enrico Coleman, Italian painter (d. 1911)
1850 – Daniel Carter Beard, American author and illustrator, co-founded the Boy Scouts of America (d. 1941)
1858 – Giuseppe De Sanctis, Italian painter (d. 1924)
1858 – Medardo Rosso, Italian sculptor and educator (d. 1928)
1859 – Henry Ossawa Tanner, American-French painter and illustrator (d. 1937)
1862 – Damrong Rajanubhab, Thai historian and author (d. 1943)
1863 – Max Wolf, German astronomer and academic (d. 1932)
1864 – Heinrich Wölfflin, Swiss historian and critic (d. 1945)
1867 – Oscar Florianus Bluemner, German-American painter and illustrator (d. 1938)
1867 – William Brede Kristensen, Norwegian historian of religion (d. 1953)
1868 – Edwin Stephen Goodrich, English zoologist and anatomist (d. 1946)
1870 – Clara Immerwahr, Jewish-German chemist and academic (d. 1915)
1870 – Anthony Michell, English-Australian engineer (d. 1959)
1870 – Julio Ruelas, Mexican painter (d. 1907)
1874 – Jacob Linzbach, Estonian linguist (d. 1953)
1876 – Willem Hendrik Keesom, Dutch physicist and academic (d. 1956)
1880 – Arnold Gesell, American psychologist and pediatrician (d. 1961)
1880 – Josiah Stamp, 1st Baron Stamp, English economist and civil servant (d. 1941)
1881 – (O.S.) Natalia Goncharova, Russian painter, costume designer, and illustrator (d. 1962)
1882 – Lluís Companys, Spanish lawyer and politician, 123rd President of Catalonia (d. 1940)
1882 – Adrianus de Jong, Dutch fencer and soldier (d. 1966)
1882 – Rockwell Kent, American painter and illustrator (d. 1971)
1883 – Feodor Gladkov, Russian author and educator (d. 1958)
1884 – Claude Auchinleck, English field marshal (d. 1981)
1887 – Norman L. Bowen, Canadian geologist and petrologist (d. 1956)
1889 – Ralph Craig, American sprinter and sailor (d. 1972)
1891 – Pier Luigi Nervi, Italian architect and engineer, co-designed the Pirelli Tower and Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption (d. 1979)
1891 – Hermann Scherchen, German-Swiss viola player and conductor (d. 1966)
1892 – Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian and academic (d. 1971)
1893 – Alois Hába, Czech composer and educator (d. 1973)
1894 – Milward Kennedy, English journalist and civil servant (d. 1968)
1894 – Harry Schmidt, German mathematician and physicist (d. 1951)
1896 – Charles Momsen, American admiral, invented the Momsen lung (d. 1967)
1899 – Pavel Haas, Czech composer (d. 1944)
1900 – Georges-Henri Bousquet, French economist and Islamologist (d. 1978)
1901–present
1903 – Hermann Engelhard, German runner and coach (d. 1984)
1903 – Al Hirschfeld, American caricaturist, painter and illustrator (d. 2003)
1905 – Jacques Goddet, French journalist (d. 2000)
1905 – Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher and author (d. 1980)
1908 – William Frankena, American philosopher and academic (d. 1994)
1910 – Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Russian poet and author (d. 1971)
1911 – Irving Fein, American producer and manager (d. 2012)
1912 – Kazimierz Leski, Polish pilot and engineer (d. 2000)
1912 – Mary McCarthy, American novelist and critic (d. 1989)
1912 – Vishnu Prabhakar, Indian author and playwright (d. 2009)
1913 – Madihe Pannaseeha Thero, Sri Lankan monk and scholar (d. 2003)
1913 – Luis Taruc, Filipino political activist (d. 2005)
1914 – William Vickrey, Canadian-American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1996)
1915 – Wilhelm Gliese, German soldier and astronomer (d. 1993)
1916 – Joseph Cyril Bamford, English businessman, founded J. C. Bamford (d. 2001)
1916 – Tchan Fou-li, Chinese photographer (d. 2018)
1916 – Herbert Friedman, American physicist and astronomer (d. 2000)
1916 – Buddy O'Connor, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 1977)
1918 – Robert A. Boyd, Canadian engineer (d. 2006)
1918 – James Joll, English historian, author, and academic (d. 1994)
1918 – Eddie Lopat, American baseball player, coach, and manager (d. 1992)
1918 – Dee Molenaar, American mountaineer (d. 2020)
1918 – Robert Roosa, American economist and banker (d. 1993)
1918 – Tibor Szele, Hungarian mathematician and academic (d. 1955)
1918 – Josephine Webb, American engineer
1919 – Antonia Mesina, Italian martyr and saint (d. 1935)
1919 – Gérard Pelletier, Canadian journalist and politician (d. 1997)
1919 – Vladimir Simagin, Russian chess player and coach (d. 1968)
1919 – Paolo Soleri, Italian-American architect, designed the Cosanti (d. 2013)
1920 – Hans Gerschwiler, Swiss figure skater (d. 2017)
1921 – Judy Holliday, American actress and singer (d. 1965)
1921 – Jane Russell, American actress and singer (d. 2011)
1921 – William Edwin Self, American actor, producer, and production manager (d. 2010)
1922 – Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Burkinabé historian, politician and writer (d. 2006)
1923 – Jacques Hébert, Canadian journalist and politician (d. 2007)
1924 – Pontus Hultén, Swedish art collector and historian (d. 2006)
1924 – Ezzatolah Entezami, Iranian actor (d. 2018)
1924 – Wally Fawkes, British-Canadian jazz clarinetist and satirical cartoonist
1924 – Jean Laplanche, French psychoanalyst and academic (d. 2012)
1925 – Larisa Avdeyeva, Russian mezzo-soprano (d. 2013)
1925 – Stanley Moss, American poet, publisher, and art dealer
1925 – Giovanni Spadolini, Italian journalist and politician, 45th Prime Minister of Italy (d. 1994)
1925 – Maureen Stapleton, American actress (d. 2006)
1926 – Fred Cone, American football player
1926 – Conrad Hall, French-American cinematographer (d. 2003)
1927 – Carl Stokes, American lawyer, politician, and diplomat, United States Ambassador to Seychelles (d. 1996)
1928 – Wolfgang Haken, German-American mathematician and academic
1928 – Fiorella Mari, Brazilian-Italian actress
1928 – Margit Bara, Hungarian actress (d. 2016)
1930 – Gerald Kaufman, English journalist and politician, Shadow Foreign Secretary (d. 2017)
1930 – Mike McCormack, American football player and coach (d. 2013)
1931 – Zlatko Grgić, Croatian-Canadian animator, director, and screenwriter (d. 1988)
1931 – Margaret Heckler, American journalist, lawyer, and politician, 15th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (d. 2018)
1931 – David Kushnir, Israeli Olympic long-jumper (d. 2020)
1932 – Bernard Ingham, English journalist and civil servant
1932 – Lalo Schifrin, Argentinian pianist, composer, and conductor
1932 – O.C. Smith, American R&B/jazz singer (d. 2001)
1933 – Bernie Kopell, American actor and comedian
1935 – Françoise Sagan, French author and playwright (d. 2004)
1937 – John Edrich, English cricketer and coach (d. 2020)
1938 – Don Black, English songwriter
1938 – John W. Dower, American historian and author
1938 – Michael M. Richter, German mathematician and computer scientist (d. 2020)
1940 – Mariette Hartley, American actress and television personality
1940 – Michael Ruse, Canadian philosopher and academic
1941 – Aloysius Paul D'Souza, Indian bishop
1941 – Joe Flaherty, American-Canadian actor, producer, and screenwriter
1941 – Lyman Ward, Canadian actor
1942 – Clive Brooke, Baron Brooke of Alverthorpe, English businessman and politician
1942 – Marjorie Margolies, American journalist and politician
1942 – Henry S. Taylor, American author and poet
1942 – Togo D. West, Jr., American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 3rd United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs (d. 2018)
1943 – Eumir Deodato, Brazilian pianist, composer, and producer
1943 – Diane Marleau, Canadian accountant and politician, Canadian Minister of Health (d. 2013)
1943 – Brian Sternberg, American pole vaulter (d. 2013)
1944 – Ray Davies, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1944 – Jon Hiseman, English drummer (d. 2018)
1944 – Tony Scott, English-American director and producer (d. 2012)
1945 – Robert Dewar, English-American computer scientist and academic (d. 2015)
1945 – Adam Zagajewski, Polish author and poet (d. 2021)
1946 – Per Eklund, Swedish race car driver
1946 – Kate Hoey, Northern Irish-British academic and politician, Minister for Sport and the Olympics
1946 – Brenda Holloway, American singer-songwriter
1946 – Trond Kirkvaag, Norwegian actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2007)
1946 – Malcolm Rifkind, Scottish lawyer and politician, Secretary of State for Scotland
1946 – Maurice Saatchi, Baron Saatchi, Iraqi-British businessman, founded M&C Saatchi and Saatchi & Saatchi
1947 – Meredith Baxter, American actress
1947 – Shirin Ebadi, Iranian lawyer, judge, and activist, Nobel Prize laureate
1947 – Michael Gross, American actor
1947 – Joey Molland, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1947 – Wade Phillips, American football coach
1947 – Fernando Savater, Spanish philosopher and author
1948 – Jovan Aćimović, Serbian footballer and manager
1948 – Ian McEwan, British novelist and screenwriter
1948 – Andrzej Sapkowski, Polish author and translator
1948 – Philippe Sarde, French composer and conductor
1949 – John Agard, Guyanese-English author, poet, and playwright
1949 – Derek Emslie, Lord Kingarth, Scottish lawyer and judge
1950 – Anne Carson, Canadian poet and academic
1950 – Joey Kramer, American rock drummer and songwriter
1950 – Enn Reitel, Scottish actor and screenwriter
1950 – Trygve Thue, Norwegian guitarist and record producer
1950 – John Paul Young, Scottish-Australian singer-songwriter
1951 – Jim Douglas, American academic and politician, 80th Governor of Vermont
1951 – Terence Etherton, English lawyer and judge
1951 – Alan Hudson, English footballer
1951 – Nils Lofgren, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1951 – Lenore Manderson, Australian anthropologist and academic
1951 – Mona-Lisa Pursiainen, Finnish sprinter (d. 2000)
1952 – Judith Bingham, English singer-songwriter
1952 – Jeremy Coney, New Zealand cricketer and sportscaster
1952 – Patrick Dunleavy, English political scientist and academic
1952 – Kōichi Mashimo, Japanese director and screenwriter
1953 – Benazir Bhutto, Pakistani politician, Prime Minister of Pakistan (d. 2007)
1953 – Augustus Pablo, Jamaican producer and musician (d. 1999)
1954 – Már Guðmundsson, Icelandic economist, former Governor of Central Bank of Iceland
1954 – Mark Kimmitt, American general and politician, 16th Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Political-Military Affairs
1954 – Robert Menasse, Austrian author and academic
1955 – Tim Bray, Canadian software developer and businessman
1955 – Michel Platini, French footballer and manager
1956 – Rick Sutcliffe, American baseball player and broadcaster
1957 – Berkeley Breathed, American author and illustrator
1957 – Luis Antonio Tagle, Filipino cardinal
1958 – Víctor Montoya, Bolivian journalist and author
1958 – Gennady Padalka, Russian colonel, pilot, and astronaut
1959 – John Baron, English captain and politician
1959 – Tom Chambers, American basketball player and sportscaster
1959 – Marcella Detroit, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1959 – Kathy Mattea, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1960 – Kate Brown, American politician, 38th Governor of Oregon
1960 – Karl Erjavec, Slovenian politician
1961 – Manu Chao, French singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1961 – Sascha Konietzko, German keyboard player and producer
1961 – Joko Widodo, Indonesian businessman and politician, 7th President of Indonesia
1961 – Kip Winger, American rock singer-songwriter and musician
1961 – Iztok Mlakar, Slovenian actor and singer-songwriter
1962 – Shōhei Takada, Japanese shogi player and theoretician
1962 – Viktor Tsoi, Russian singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1990)
1963 – Dario Marianelli, Italian pianist and composer
1963 – Mike Sherrard, American football player
1964 – David Morrissey, English actor and director
1964 – Valeriy Neverov, Ukrainian chess player
1964 – Dimitris Papaioannou, Greek director and choreographer
1964 – Dean Saunders, Welsh footballer and manager
1964 – Doug Savant, American actor
1965 – David Beerling, English biologist and academic
1965 – Yang Liwei, Chinese general, pilot, and astronaut
1965 – Ewen McKenzie, Australian rugby player and coach
1965 – Lana Wachowski, American director, producer, and screenwriter
1966 – Rudi Bakhtiar, American journalist and TV producer
1966 – Gretchen Carlson, American model and TV journalist, Miss America 1989
1966 – Mancow Muller, American radio and TV personality
1967 – Jim Breuer, American comedian, actor, and producer
1967 – Derrick Coleman, American basketball player and sportscaster
1967 – Pierre Omidyar, French-American businessman, founded eBay
1967 – Carrie Preston, American actress, director, and producer
1967 – Yingluck Shinawatra, Thai businesswoman and politician, 28th Prime Minister of Thailand
1968 – Sonique, English singer-songwriter and DJ
1970 – Eric Reed, American pianist and composer
1971 – Tyronne Drakeford, American football player
1972 – Nobuharu Asahara, Japanese sprinter and long jumper
1972 – Neil Doak, Northern Irish cricketer and rugby player
1972 – Irene van Dyk, South African-New Zealand netball player
1973 – Juliette Lewis, American actress and singer-songwriter
1973 – John Mitchell, English guitarist, vocalist and songwriter
1974 – Rob Kelly, American football player
1974 – Craig Lowndes, Australian race car driver
1974 – Flavio Roma, Italian footballer
1975 – Brian Simmons, American football player
1976 – Shelley Craft, Australian television host
1976 – Mike Einziger, American guitarist and songwriter
1976 – Nigel Lappin, Australian footballer and coach
1977 – Michael Gomez, Irish boxer
1977 – Al Wilson, American football player
1978 – Thomas Blondeau, Flemish writer (d. 2013)
1978 – Matt Kuchar, American golfer
1978 – Cristiano Lupatelli, Italian footballer
1978 – Dejan Ognjanović, Montenegrin footballer
1978 – Rim'K, French rapper
1979 – Kostas Katsouranis, Greek footballer
1979 – Chris Pratt, American actor
1980 – Michael Crocker, Australian rugby league player and sportscaster
1980 – Łukasz Cyborowski, Polish chess player
1980 – Richard Jefferson, American basketball player
1980 – Sendy Rleal, Dominican baseball player
1981 – Yann Danis, Canadian ice hockey player
1981 – Garrett Jones, American baseball player
1981 – Brandon Flowers, American singer-songwriter
1981 – Brad Walker, American pole vaulter
1982 – Lee Dae-ho, South Korean baseball player
1982 – Prince William, Duke of Cambridge
1982 – Jussie Smollett, American actor and singer
1983 – Edward Snowden, American activist and academic
1985 – Lana Del Rey, American singer-songwriter
1985 – Sentayehu Ejigu, Ethiopian runner
1985 – Byron Schammer, Australian footballer
1986 – Kathleen O'Kelly-Kennedy, Australian wheelchair basketball player
1986 – Hideaki Wakui, Japanese baseball player
1987 – Pablo Barrera, Mexican footballer
1987 – Sebastian Prödl, Austrian footballer
1987 – Dale Thomas, Australian footballer
1988 – Allyssa DeHaan, American basketball and volleyball player
1988 – Alejandro Ramírez, American chess player
1988 – Paolo Tornaghi, Italian footballer
1988 – Thaddeus Young, American basketball player
1989 – Abubaker Kaki, Sudanese runner
1990 – Ričardas Berankis, Lithuanian tennis player
1990 – Sergei Matsenko, Russian chess player
1990 – François Moubandje, Swiss footballer
1990 – Håvard Nordtveit, Norwegian footballer
1991 – Gaël Kakuta, French footballer
1992 – MAX, American singer, songwriter, actor, dancer and model
1994 – Başak Eraydın, Turkish tennis player
1996 – Tyrone May, Australian rugby league player
1997 – Rebecca Black, American singer-songwriter
1997 – Derrius Guice, American football player
1999 – Ky Rodwell, Australian rugby league player
2000 – Dylan Brown, New Zealand rugby league player
2001 – Alexandra Obolentseva, Russian chess player
2011 – Lil Bub, American celebrity cat (d. 2019)
Deaths
Pre-1600
532 – Emperor Jiemin of Northern Wei, former Northern Wei emperor
866 – Rodulf, Frankish archbishop
868 – Ali al-Hadi, the tenth Imam of Shia Islam (b. 829)
870 – Al-Muhtadi, Muslim caliph
947 – Zhang Li, official of the Liao Dynasty
1040 – Fulk III, Count of Anjou (b. 972)
1171 – Walter de Luci, French-English monk (b. 1103)
1208 – Philip of Swabia (b. 1177)
1305 – Wenceslaus II of Bohemia (b. 1271)
1359 – Erik Magnusson, king of Sweden (b. 1339)
1377 – Edward III of England (b. 1312)
1421 – Jean Le Maingre, French general (b. 1366)
1527 – Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian historian and author (b. 1469)
1529 – John Skelton, English poet and educator (b. 1460)
1547 – Sebastiano del Piombo, Italian painter and educator (b. 1485)
1558 – Piero Strozzi, Italian general (b. 1510)
1582 – Oda Nobunaga, Japanese warlord (b. 1534)
1585 – Henry Percy, 8th Earl of Northumberland (b. 1532)
1591 – Aloysius Gonzaga, Italian saint (b. 1568)
1596 – Jean Liebault, French agronomist and physician (b. 1535)
1601–1900
1621 – Louis III, Cardinal of Guise (b. 1575)
1621 – Kryštof Harant, Czech soldier and composer (b. 1564)
1622 – Salomon Schweigger, German theologian (b. 1551)
1631 – John Smith, English admiral and explorer (b. 1580)
1652 – Inigo Jones, English architect, designed the Queen's House and Wilton House (b. 1573)
1661 – Andrea Sacchi, Italian painter (b. 1599)
1737 – Matthieu Marais, French author, critic, and jurist (b. 1664)
1738 – Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, English politician, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (b. 1674)
1796 – Richard Gridley, American soldier and engineer (b. 1710)
1824 – Étienne Aignan, French playwright and translator (b. 1773)
1865 – Frances Adeline Seward, American wife of William H. Seward (b. 1824)
1874 – Anders Jonas Ångström, Swedish physicist and astronomer (b. 1814)
1876 – Antonio López de Santa Anna, Mexican general and politician 8th President of Mexico (b. 1794)
1880 – Theophilus H. Holmes, American general (b. 1804)
1893 – Leland Stanford, American businessman and politician, 8th Governor of California (b. 1824)
1901–present
1908 – Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Russian composer and educator (b. 1844)
1914 – Bertha von Suttner, Austrian journalist and author, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1843)
1929 – Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, English sociologist, journalist, and academic (b. 1864)
1934 – Thorne Smith, American author (b. 1892)
1940 – Smedley Butler, American general, Medal of Honor recipient (b. 1881)
1940 – Édouard Vuillard, French painter (b. 1868)
1951 – Charles Dillon Perrine, American astronomer (b. 1867)
1951 – Gustave Sandras, French gymnast (b. 1872)
1952 – Wop May, Canadian captain and pilot (b. 1896)
1954 – Gideon Sundback, Swedish-American engineer, developed the zipper (b. 1880)
1957 – Claude Farrère, French captain and author (b. 1876)
1957 – Johannes Stark, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1874)
1964 – James Chaney, American civil rights activist (b. 1943)
1964 – Andrew Goodman, American civil rights activist (b. 1943)
1964 – Michael Schwerner, American civil rights activist (b. 1939)
1967 – Theodore Sizer, American professor of the history of art (b. 1892)
1968 – Constance Georgina Tardrew, South African botanist (b. 1883)
1969 – Maureen Connolly, American tennis player (b. 1934)
1970 – Sukarno, Indonesian engineer and politician, 1st President of Indonesia (b. 1901)
1970 – Piers Courage, English race car driver (b. 1942)
1976 – Margaret Herrick, American librarian (b. 1902)
1980 – Bert Kaempfert, German conductor and composer (b. 1923)
1981 – Don Figlozzi, American illustrator and animator (b. 1909)
1985 – Hector Boyardee, Italian-American chef and businessman, founded Chef Boyardee (b. 1897)
1985 – Tage Erlander, Swedish lieutenant and politician, 25th Prime Minister of Sweden (b. 1901)
1986 – Assi Rahbani, Lebanese singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1923)
1987 – Madman Muntz, American engineer and businessman, founded the Muntz Car Company (b. 1914)
1988 – Bobby Dodd, American football coach (b. 1908)
1990 – Cedric Belfrage, English journalist and author, co-founded the National Guardian (b. 1904)
1990 – June Christy, American singer (b. 1925)
1992 – Ben Alexander, Australian rugby league player (b. 1971)
1992 – Arthur Gorrie, Australian hobby shop proprietor (b. 1922)
1992 – Rudra Mohammad Shahidullah, Bangladeshi poet, author, and playwright (b. 1956)
1992 – Li Xiannian, Chinese captain and politician, 3rd President of the People's Republic of China (b. 1909)
1994 – William Wilson Morgan, American astronomer and astrophysicist (b. 1906)
1997 – Shintaro Katsu, Japanese actor, singer, director, and producer (b. 1931)
1997 – Fidel Velázquez Sánchez, Mexican trade union leader (b. 1900)
1998 – Harry Cranbrook Allen, English historian (b. 1917)
1998 – Anastasio Ballestrero, Italian cardinal (b. 1913)
1998 – Al Campanis, American baseball player and manager (b. 1916)
1999 – Kami, Japanese drummer (b. 1973)
2000 – Alan Hovhaness, Armenian-American pianist and composer (b. 1911)
2001 – John Lee Hooker, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1917)
2001 – Soad Hosny, Egyptian actress and singer (b. 1942)
2001 – Carroll O'Connor, American actor and producer (b. 1924)
2002 – Timothy Findley, Canadian author and playwright (b. 1930)
2003 – Roger Neilson, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (b. 1934)
2003 – Leon Uris, American soldier and author (b. 1924)
2004 – Leonel Brizola, Brazilian engineer and politician, Governor of Rio de Janeiro (b. 1922)
2004 – Ruth Leach Amonette, American businesswoman (b. 1916)
2005 – Jaime Sin, Filipino cardinal (b. 1928)
2006 – Jared C. Monti, American sergeant, Medal of Honor recipient (b. 1975)
2007 – Bob Evans, American businessman, founded Bob Evans Restaurants (b. 1918)
2008 – Scott Kalitta, American race car driver (b. 1962)
2010 – Russell Ash, English author (b. 1946)
2010 – Irwin Barker, Canadian actor and screenwriter (b. 1956)
2010 – İlhan Selçuk, Turkish lawyer, journalist, and author (b. 1925)
2011 – Robert Kroetsch, Canadian author and poet (b. 1927)
2012 – Richard Adler, American composer and producer (b. 1921)
2012 – Abid Hussain, Indian economist and diplomat, Indian Ambassador to the United States (b. 1926)
2012 – Sunil Janah, Indian photographer and journalist (b. 1918)
2012 – Anna Schwartz, American economist and author (b. 1915)
2013 – James P. Gordon, American physicist and academic (b. 1928)
2013 – Elliott Reid, American actor and screenwriter (b. 1920)
2014 – Yozo Ishikawa, Japanese politician, Japanese Minister of Defense (b. 1925)
2014 – Walter Kieber, Austrian-Liechtenstein politician, 7th Prime Minister of Liechtenstein (b. 1931)
2014 – Wong Ho Leng, Malaysian lawyer and politician (b. 1959)
2015 – Darryl Hamilton, American baseball player and sportscaster (b. 1964)
2015 – Veijo Meri, Finnish author and poet (b. 1928)
2015 – Remo Remotti, Italian actor, playwright, and poet (b. 1924)
2015 – Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, German soldier and politician (b. 1932)
2015 – Gunther Schuller, American horn player, composer, and conductor (b. 1925)
2016 – Pierre Lalonde, Canadian television host and singer (b. 1941)
2018 – Charles Krauthammer, American columnist and conservative political commentator (b.1950)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Alban of Mainz
Aloysius Gonzaga
Engelmund of Velsen
Martin of Tongres
Onesimos Nesib (Lutheran)
June 21 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Day of the Martyrs (Togo)
Father's Day (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Uganda, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates)
Go Skateboarding Day
International Yoga Day (international)
National Aboriginal Day (Canada)
Solstice-related observances (see also June 20):
Day of Private Reflection
International Surfing Day
National Day (Greenland)
We Tripantu, a winter solstice festival in the southern hemisphere. (Mapuche, southern Chile)
Willkakuti, an Andean-Amazonic New Year (Aymara)
Fête de la Musique
World Humanist Day (Humanism)
World Hydrography Day (international)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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Events
Pre-1600
1257 – Kraków, in Poland, receives city rights.
1283 – Battle of the Gulf of Naples: Roger of Lauria, admiral to King Peter III of Aragon, destroys the Neapolitan fleet and captures Charles of Salerno.
1288 – The Battle of Worringen ends the War of the Limburg Succession, with John I, Duke of Brabant, being one of the more important victors.
1601–1900
1610 – The masque Tethys' Festival is performed at Whitehall Palace to celebrate the investiture of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales.
1644 – The Qing dynasty Manchu forces led by the Shunzhi Emperor take Beijing during the collapse of the Ming dynasty.
1798 – The Battle of New Ross: The attempt to spread the United Irish Rebellion into Munster is defeated.
1817 – The first Great Lakes steamer, the Frontenac, is launched.
1829 – captures the armed slave ship Voladora off the coast of Cuba.
1832 – The June Rebellion breaks out in Paris in an attempt to overthrow the monarchy of Louis Philippe.
1837 – Houston is incorporated by the Republic of Texas.
1849 – Denmark becomes a constitutional monarchy by the signing of a new constitution.
1851 – Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, starts a ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper.
1862 – As the Treaty of Saigon is signed, ceding parts of southern Vietnam to France, the guerrilla leader Trương Định decides to defy Emperor Tự Đức of Vietnam and fight on against the Europeans.
1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Piedmont: Union forces under General David Hunter defeat a Confederate army at Piedmont, Virginia, taking nearly 1,000 prisoners.
1873 – Sultan Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar closes the great slave market under the terms of a treaty with Great Britain.
1883 – The first regularly scheduled Orient Express departs Paris.
1888 – The Rio de la Plata earthquake takes place.
1893 – The trial of Lizzie Borden for the murder of her father and step-mother begins in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
1900 – Second Boer War: British soldiers take Pretoria.
1901–present
1915 – Denmark amends its constitution to allow women's suffrage.
1916 – Louis Brandeis is sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court; he is the first American Jew to hold such a position.
1916 – World War I: The Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire breaks out.
1917 – World War I: Conscription begins in the United States as "Army registration day".
1940 – World War II: After a brief lull in the Battle of France, the Germans renew the offensive against the remaining French divisions south of the River Somme in Operation Fall Rot ("Case Red").
1941 – World War II: Four thousand Chongqing residents are asphyxiated in a bomb shelter during the Bombing of Chongqing.
1942 – World War II: The United States declares war on Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania.
1944 – World War II: More than 1,000 British bombers drop 5,000 tons of bombs on German gun batteries on the Normandy coast in preparation for D-Day.
1945 – The Allied Control Council, the military occupation governing body of Germany, formally takes power.
1946 – A fire in the La Salle Hotel in Chicago, Illinois, kills 61 people.
1947 – Cold War: Marshall Plan: In a speech at Harvard University, the United States Secretary of State George Marshall calls for economic aid to war-torn Europe.
1949 – Thailand elects Orapin Chaiyakan, the first female member of Thailand's Parliament.
1956 – Elvis Presley introduces his new single, "Hound Dog", on The Milton Berle Show, scandalizing the audience with his suggestive hip movements.
1959 – The first government of Singapore is sworn in.
1960 – The Lake Bodom murders occur in Finland.
1963 – The British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, resigns in a sex scandal known as the "Profumo affair".
1963 – Movement of 15 Khordad: Protests against the arrest of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In several cities, masses of angry demonstrators are confronted by tanks and paratroopers.
1964 – DSV Alvin is commissioned.
1967 – The Six-Day War begins: Israel launches surprise strikes against Egyptian air-fields in response to the mobilisation of Egyptian forces on the Israeli border.
1968 – Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan.
1975 – The Suez Canal opens for the first time since the Six-Day War.
1975 – The United Kingdom holds its first country-wide referendum on membership of the European Economic Community (EEC).
1976 – The Teton Dam in Idaho, United States, collapses. Eleven people are killed as a result of flooding.
1981 – The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that five people in Los Angeles, California, have a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, in what turns out to be the first recognized cases of AIDS.
1983 – More than 100 people are killed when the Russian river cruise ship Aleksandr Suvorov collides with a girder of the Ulyanovsk Railway Bridge. The collision caused a freight train to derail, further damaging the vessel, yet the ship remained afloat and was eventually restored and returned to service.
1984 – Operation Blue Star: Under orders from India's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, the Indian Army begins an invasion of the Golden Temple, the holiest site of the Sikh religion.
1989 – The Tank Man halts the progress of a column of advancing tanks for over half an hour after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
1993 – Portions of the Holbeck Hall Hotel in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, UK, fall into the sea following a landslide.
1995 – The Bose–Einstein condensate is first created.
1997 – The Second Republic of the Congo Civil War begins.
1998 – A strike begins at the General Motors parts factory in Flint, Michigan, that quickly spreads to five other assembly plants. The strike lasts seven weeks.
2000 – The Six-Day War in Kisangani begins in Kisangani, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, between Ugandan and Rwandan forces. A large part of the city is destroyed.
2001 – Tropical Storm Allison makes landfall on the upper-Texas coastline as a strong tropical storm and dumps large amounts of rain over Houston. The storm causes $5.5 billion in damages, making Allison the second costliest tropical storm in U.S. history.
2003 – A severe heat wave across Pakistan and India reaches its peak, as temperatures exceed 50 °C (122 °F) in the region.
2004 – Noël Mamère, Mayor of Bègles, celebrates marriage for two men for the first time in France.
2006 – Serbia declares independence from the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro.
2009 – After 65 straight days of civil disobedience, at least 31 people are killed in clashes between security forces and indigenous people near Bagua, Peru.
2015 – An earthquake with a moment magnitude of 6.0 strikes Ranau, Sabah, Malaysia, killing 18 people, including hikers and mountain guides on Mount Kinabalu, after mass landslides that occurred during the earthquake. This is the strongest earthquake to strike Malaysia since 1975.
2017 – Montenegro becomes the 29th member of NATO.
2017 – Six Arab countries—Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates—cut diplomatic ties with Qatar, accusing it of destabilising the region.
Births
Pre-1600
1341 – Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York, son of King Edward III of England and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports (d. 1402)
1412 – Ludovico III Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, Italian ruler (d. 1478)
1493 – Justus Jonas, German priest and academic (d. 1555)
1523 – Margaret of France, Duchess of Berry (d. 1573)
1554 – Benedetto Giustiniani, Italian clergyman (d. 1621)
1587 – Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, English colonial administrator and admiral (d. 1658)
1596 – Peter Wtewael, Dutch Golden Age painter (d. 1660)
1601–1900
1640 – Pu Songling, Chinese author (d. 1715)
1646 – Elena Cornaro Piscopia, Italian mathematician and philosopher (d. 1684)
1660 – Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (d. 1744)
1757 – Pierre Jean George Cabanis, French physiologist and philosopher (d. 1808)
1760 – Johan Gadolin, Finnish chemist, physicist, and mineralogist (d. 1852)
1771 – Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover (d. 1851)
1781 – Christian Lobeck, German scholar and academic (d. 1860)
1801 – William Scamp, English architect and engineer (d. 1872)
1819 – John Couch Adams, English mathematician and astronomer (d. 1892)
1830 – Carmine Crocco, Italian soldier (d. 1905)
1850 – Pat Garrett, American sheriff (d. 1908)
1862 – Allvar Gullstrand, Swedish ophthalmologist and optician, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1930)
1868 – James Connolly, Scottish-born Irish rebel leader (d. 1916)
1870 – Bernard de Pourtalès, Swiss captain and sailor (d. 1935)
1876 – Isaac Heinemann, German-Israeli scholar and academic (d. 1957)
1877 – Willard Miller, Canadian-American sailor, Medal of Honor recipient (d. 1959)
1878 – Pancho Villa, Mexican general and politician, Governor of Chihuahua (d. 1923)
1879 – Robert Mayer, German-English businessman and philanthropist (d. 1985)
1883 – John Maynard Keynes, English economist, philosopher, and academic (d. 1946)
1884 – Ralph Benatzky, Czech-Swiss composer (d. 1957)
1884 – Ivy Compton-Burnett, English author (d. 1969)
1884 – Frederick Lorz, American runner (d. 1914)
1892 – Jaan Kikkas, Estonian weightlifter (d. 1944)
1894 – Roy Thomson, 1st Baron Thomson of Fleet, Canadian-English publisher and academic (d. 1976)
1895 – William Boyd, American actor and producer (d. 1972)
1895 – William Roberts, English soldier and painter (d. 1980)
1898 – Salvatore Ferragamo, Italian shoe designer, founded Salvatore Ferragamo S.p.A. (d. 1960)
1898 – Federico García Lorca, Spanish poet, playwright, and director (d. 1936)
1899 – Otis Barton, American diver, engineer, and actor, designed the bathysphere (d. 1992)
1899 – Theippan Maung Wa, Burmese writer (d. 1942)
1900 – Dennis Gabor, Hungarian-English physicist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1979)
1901–present
1902 – Arthur Powell Davies, American minister, author, and activist (d. 1957)
1905 – Wayne Boring, American illustrator (d. 1987)
1912 – Dean Amadon, American ornithologist and author (d. 2003)
1912 – Eric Hollies, English cricketer (d. 1981)
1913 – Conrad Marca-Relli, American-Italian painter and academic (d. 2000)
1914 – Beatrice de Cardi, English archaeologist and academic (d. 2016)
1915 - Lancelot Ware, English barrister and biochemist, co-founder of Mensa (d. 2000)
1916 – Sid Barnes, Australian cricketer (d. 1973)
1916 – Eddie Joost, American baseball player and manager (d. 2011)
1919 – Richard Scarry, American-Swiss author and illustrator (d. 1994)
1920 – Marion Motley, American football player and coach (d. 1999)
1920 – Cornelius Ryan, Irish-American journalist and author (d. 1974)
1922 – Paul Couvret, Dutch-Australian soldier, pilot, and politician (d. 2013)
1922 – Sheila Sim, English actress (d. 2016)
1923 – Jorge Daponte, Argentinian racing driver (d. 1963)
1923 – Roger Lebel, Canadian actor (d. 1994)
1923 – Daniel Pinkham, American organist and composer (d. 2006)
1924 – Lou Brissie, American baseball player and scout (d. 2013)
1924 – Art Donovan, American football player and radio host (d. 2013)
1925 – Bill Hayes, American actor and singer
1926 – Paul Soros, Hungarian-American engineer and businessman (d. 2013)
1928 – Robert Lansing, American actor (d. 1994)
1928 – Umberto Maglioli, Italian racing driver (d. 1999)
1928 – Tony Richardson, English-American director and producer (d. 1991)
1930 – Alifa Rifaat, Egyptian author (d. 1996)
1931 – Yves Blais, Canadian businessman and politician (d. 1998)
1931 – Jacques Demy, French actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 1990)
1931 – Jerzy Prokopiuk, Polish anthropologist and philosopher (d. 2021)
1932 – Christy Brown, Irish painter and author (d. 1981)
1932 – Dave Gold, American businessman, founded the 99 Cents Only Stores (d. 2013)
1933 – Bata Živojinović, Serbian actor and politician (d. 2016)
1934 – Vilhjálmur Einarsson, Icelandic triple jumper, painter, and educator (d. 2019)
1934 – Bill Moyers, American journalist, 13th White House Press Secretary
1937 – Hélène Cixous, French author, poet, and critic
1938 – Moira Anderson, Scottish singer
1938 – Karin Balzer, German hurdler (d. 2019)
1938 – Roy Higgins, Australian jockey (d. 2014)
1939 – Joe Clark, Canadian journalist and politician, 16th Prime Minister of Canada
1939 – Margaret Drabble, English novelist, biographer, and critic
1941 – Martha Argerich, Argentinian pianist
1941 – Erasmo Carlos, Brazilian singer-songwriter
1941 – Spalding Gray, American writer, actor, and monologist (d. 2004)
1941 – Gudrun Sjödén, Swedish designer
1942 – Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, Equatoguinean lieutenant and politician, 2nd President of Equatorial Guinea
1943 – Abraham Viruthakulangara, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Nagpur, Maharashtra, India (d. 2018)
1944 – Whitfield Diffie, American cryptographer and academic
1945 – John Carlos, American runner and football player
1945 – André Lacroix, Canadian-American ice hockey player and coach
1946 – John Du Cann, English guitarist (d. 2001)
1946 – Bob Grant, Australian rugby league player
1946 – Patrick Head, English engineer and businessman, co-founded Williams F1
1946 – Wanderléa, Brazilian singer and television host
1947 – Laurie Anderson, American singer-songwriter and violinist
1947 – Tom Evans, English singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1983)
1947 – David Hare, English director, playwright, and screenwriter
1947 – Freddie Stone, American singer, guitarist, and pastor
1949 – Ken Follett, Welsh author
1949 – Elizabeth Gloster, English lawyer and judge
1949 – Alexander Scrymgeour, 12th Earl of Dundee, Scottish politician
1950 – Ronnie Dyson, American singer and actor (d. 1990)
1950 – Abraham Sarmiento, Jr., Filipino journalist and activist (d. 1977)
1951 – Suze Orman, American financial adviser, author, and television host
1952 – Pierre Bruneau, Canadian journalist and news anchor
1952 – Carole Fredericks, American singer (d. 2001)
1952 – Nicko McBrain, English drummer and songwriter
1953 – Kathleen Kennedy, American film producer, co-founded Amblin Entertainment
1954 – Alberto Malesani, Italian footballer and manager
1954 – Phil Neale, English cricketer, coach, and manager
1954 – Nancy Stafford, American model and actress
1955 – Edino Nazareth Filho, Brazilian footballer and manager
1956 – Kenny G, American saxophonist, songwriter, and producer
1958 – Avigdor Lieberman, Moldavian-Israeli soldier and politician, Deputy Prime Minister of Israel
1958 – Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi, Comorian businessman and politician, President of Comoros
1959 – Mark Ella, Australian rugby player
1959 – Werner Schildhauer, German runner
1960 – Claire Fox, English author and academic
1961 – Anke Behmer, German heptathlete
1961 – Mary Kay Bergman, American voice actress (d. 1999)
1961 – Anthony Burger, American singer and pianist (d. 2006)
1961 – Aldo Costa, Italian engineer
1961 – Ramesh Krishnan, Indian tennis player and coach
1962 – Jeff Garlin, American actor, comedian, director, and screenwriter
1962 – Tõnis Lukas, Estonian historian and politician, 34th Estonian Minister of Education
1964 – Lisa Cholodenko, American director and screenwriter
1964 – Karl Sanders, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1965 – Michael E. Brown, American astronomer and author
1965 – Sandrine Piau, French soprano
1965 – Alfie Turcotte, American ice hockey player
1967 – Matt Bullard, American basketball player and sportscaster
1967 – Joe DeLoach, American sprinter
1967 – Ray Lankford, American baseball player
1967 – Ron Livingston, American actor
1968 – Ed Vaizey, English lawyer and politician, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries
1969 – Brian McKnight, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actor
1970 – Martin Gélinas, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1971 – Susan Lynch, Northern Irish actress
1971 – Alex Mooney, American politician
1971 – Takaya Tsubobayashi, Japanese racing driver
1971 – Mark Wahlberg, American model, actor, producer, and rapper
1972 – Yogi Adityanath, Indian priest and politician
1972 – Paweł Kotla, Polish conductor and academic
1973 – Lamon Brewster, American boxer
1973 – Gella Vandecaveye, Belgian martial artist
1974 – Mervyn Dillon, Trinidadian cricketer
1974 – Scott Draper, Australian tennis player and golfer
1974 – Russ Ortiz, American baseball player
1975 – Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Lithuanian-American basketball player
1975 – Duncan Patterson, English drummer and keyboard player
1975 – Sandra Stals, Belgian runner
1976 – Giannis Giannoulis, Canadian basketball player
1977 – Liza Weil, American actress
1978 – Fernando Meira, Portuguese footballer
1979 – Stefanos Kotsolis, Greek footballer
1979 – Matthew Scarlett, Australian footballer
1979 – Pete Wentz, American singer-songwriter, bass player, actor, and fashion designer
1979 – Jason White, American race car driver
1980 – Mike Fisher, Canadian ice hockey player
1980 – Antonio García, Spanish racing driver
1981 – Serhat Akın, Turkish footballer
1981 – Sébastien Lefebvre, Canadian singer and guitarist
1982 – Ryan Dallas Cook, American trombonist (d. 2005)
1983 – Marques Colston, American football player
1984 – Robert Barbieri, Canadian-Italian rugby player
1985 – Jeremy Abbott, American figure skater
1985 – Ekaterina Bychkova, Russian tennis player
1986 – Dave Bolland, Canadian ice hockey player
1986 – Vernon Gholston, American football player
1987 – Marcus Thornton, American basketball player
1988 – Alessandro Salvi, Italian footballer
1989 – Cam Atkinson, American ice hockey player
1989 – Megumi Nakajima, Japanese voice actress and singer
1990 – Radko Gudas, Czech ice hockey defenceman
1991 – Sören Bertram, German footballer
1992 – Joazhiño Arroe, Peruvian footballer
1992 – Emily Seebohm, Australian swimmer
1993 – Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, Samoan-New Zealand rugby league player
1995 – Troye Sivan, South African–born Australian singer-songwriter, actor, and YouTuber
1995 – Ross Wilson, English table tennis player
1997 – Sam Darnold, American football player
1998 – Yulia Lipnitskaya, Russian figure skater
Deaths
Pre-1600
301 – Sima Lun, Chinese emperor (b. 249)
535 – Epiphanius, patriarch of Constantinople
567 – Theodosius I, patriarch of Alexandria
708 – Jacob of Edessa, Syrian bishop (b. 640)
754 – Eoban, bishop of Utrecht
754 – Boniface, English missionary and martyr (b. 675)
879 – Ya'qub ibn al-Layth, Persian emir (b. 840)
928 – Louis the Blind, king of Provence
1017 – Sanjō, emperor of Japan (b. 976)
1118 – Robert de Beaumont, 1st Earl of Leicester, Norman nobleman and politician (b. 1049)
1296 – Edmund Crouchback, English politician, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports (b. 1245)
1310 – Amalric, prince of Tyre
1316 – Louis X, king of France (b. 1289)
1383 – Dmitry of Suzdal, Russian grand prince (b. 1324)
1400 – Frederick I, duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg
1424 – Braccio da Montone, Italian nobleman (b. 1368)
1434 – Yuri IV, Russian grand prince (b. 1374)
1443 – Ferdinand, Portuguese prince (b. 1402)
1445 – Leonel Power, English composer
1530 – Mercurino Gattinara, Italian statesman and jurist (b. 1465)
1568 – Lamoral, Count of Egmont (b. 1522)
1601–1900
1625 – Orlando Gibbons, English organist and composer (b. 1583)
1667 – Francesco Sforza Pallavicino, Italian cardinal and historian (b. 1607)
1708 – Ignatius George II, Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch (b. 1648)
1716 – Roger Cotes, English mathematician and academic (b. 1682)
1722 – Johann Kuhnau, German organist and composer (b. 1660)
1738 – Isaac de Beausobre, French pastor and theologian (b. 1659)
1740 – Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Kent, English politician and courtier (b. 1671)
1791 – Frederick Haldimand, Swiss-Canadian general and politician, 22nd Governor of Quebec (b. 1718)
1816 – Giovanni Paisiello, Italian composer and educator (b. 1741)
1825 – Odysseas Androutsos, Greek soldier (b. 1788)
1826 – Carl Maria von Weber, German pianist, composer, and conductor (b. 1786)
1866 – John McDouall Stuart, Scottish explorer and surveyor (b. 1815)
1899 – Antonio Luna, Filipino general (b. 1866)
1900 – Stephen Crane, American poet, novelist, and short story writer (b. 1871)
1901–present
1906 – Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann, German philosopher and author (b. 1842)
1910 – O. Henry, American short story writer (b. 1862)
1913 – Chris von der Ahe, German-American businessman (b. 1851)
1916 – Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, Irish-born British field marshal and politician, Secretary of State for War (b. 1850)
1920 – Rhoda Broughton, Welsh-English author (b. 1840)
1921 – Will Crooks, English trade unionist and politician (b. 1852)
1921 – Georges Feydeau, French playwright (b. 1862)
1930 – Eric Lemming, Swedish athlete (b. 1880)
1930 – Pascin, Bulgarian-French painter and illustrator (b. 1885)
1934 – Emily Dobson, Australian philanthropist (b. 1842)
1934 – William Holman, English-Australian politician, 19th Premier of New South Wales (b. 1871)
1947 – Nils Olaf Chrisander, Swedish-American actor and director (b. 1884)
1965 – Eleanor Farjeon, English author, poet, and playwright (b. 1881)
1967 – Arthur Biram, Israeli philologist, philosopher, and academic (b. 1878)
1967 – Harry Brown, Australian public servant (b. 1878)
1993 – Conway Twitty, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1933)
1996 – Acharya Kuber Nath Rai, Indian poet and scholar (b. 1933)
1997 – J. Anthony Lukas, American journalist and author (b. 1933)
1998 – Jeanette Nolan, American actress (b. 1911)
1998 – Sam Yorty, American soldier and politician, 37th Mayor of Los Angeles (b. 1909)
1999 – Mel Tormé, American singer-songwriter (b. 1925)
2000 – Don Liddle, American baseball player (b. 1925)
2002 – Dee Dee Ramone, American singer-songwriter and bass player (b. 1951)
2003 – Jürgen Möllemann, German soldier and politician, 10th Vice-Chancellor of Germany (b. 1945)
2003 – Manuel Rosenthal, French composer and conductor (b. 1904)
2004 – Iona Brown, English violinist and conductor (b. 1941)
2004 – Ronald Reagan, American actor and politician, 40th President of the United States (b. 1911)
2005 – Adolfo Aguilar Zínser, Mexican scholar and politician (b. 1949)
2005 – Wee Chong Jin, Singaporean judge (b. 1917)
2006 – Frederick Franck, Dutch-American painter, sculptor, and author (b. 1909)
2006 – Edward L. Moyers, American businessman (b. 1928)
2009 – Jeff Hanson, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1978)
2011 – Azam Khan, Bangladeshi singer-songwriter (b. 1950)
2012 – Ray Bradbury, American science fiction writer and screenwriter (b. 1920)
2012 – Hal Keller, American baseball player and manager (b. 1928)
2012 – Mihai Pătrașcu, Romanian-American computer scientist (b. 1982)
2012 – Charlie Sutton, Australian footballer and coach (b. 1924)
2013 – Helen McElhone, Scottish politician (b. 1933)
2013 – Stanisław Nagy, Polish cardinal (b. 1921)
2013 – Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, Irish republican activist and politician (b. 1932)
2013 – Michel Ostyn, Belgian physiologist and physician (b. 1924)
2014 – Abu Abdulrahman al-Bilawi, Iraqi commander (b. 1971)
2014 – Don Davis, American songwriter and producer (b. 1938)
2014 – Reiulf Steen, Norwegian journalist and politician, Norwegian Minister of Transport and Communications (b. 1933)
2015 – Tariq Aziz, Iraqi journalist and politician, Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1936)
2015 – Alan Bond, English-Australian businessman (b. 1938)
2015 – Richard Johnson, English actor (b. 1927)
2015 – Roger Vergé, French chef and author (b. 1930)
2016 – Jerome Bruner, American psychologist (b. 1915)
2017 – Andy Cunningham, English actor (b. 1950)
2017 – Cheick Tioté, Ivorian footballer (b. 1986)
2018 – Kate Spade, American fashion designer (b. 1962)
Holidays and observances
Arbor Day (New Zealand)
Christian feast day:
Boniface (Roman Catholic Church)
Dorotheus of Tyre
Genesius, Count of Clermont
Blessed Meinwerk
June 5 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Constitution Day (Denmark)
Father's Day (Denmark)
Indian Arrival Day (Suriname)
Khordad Movement Anniversary (Iran) (Only if March equinox falls on March 20)
Liberation Day (Seychelles)
President's Day (Equatorial Guinea)
Reclamation Day (Azerbaijan)
World Day Against Speciesism (International)
World Environment Day (International)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15821 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack%20Lemmon | Jack Lemmon | John Uhler Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001), commonly known as Jack Lemmon, was an American actor. Equally proficient in both dramatic and comic roles, Lemmon was known for his anxious, middle-class everyman screen persona in dramedy pictures, leading The Guardian to coin him "the most successful tragi-comedian of his age."
He starred in over sixty films and was nominated for an Academy Award eight times, winning twice, and among many other accolades, including six Golden Globe Awards (counting the honorary Cecil B. DeMille Award), three BAFTA Awards, and two Emmy Awards. In 1988, he was awarded the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the American cinema.
His best known films include Mister Roberts (1955, for which he won the year's Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Irma la Douce (1963), The Great Race (1965), Save the Tiger (1973, for which he won Best Actor), The China Syndrome (1979), Missing (1982), and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). He also acted in several Broadway plays, earning Tony Award nominations for Tribute and the 1986 revival of Long Day's Journey into Night.
Lemmon had a fruitful collaboration with actor and real-life friend Walter Matthau, which The New York Times called "one of Hollywood's most successful pairings," that spanned ten films between 1966 and 1998; The Fortune Cookie (1966), The Odd Couple (1968) and its sequel The Odd Couple II (1998), The Front Page (1974), Buddy Buddy (1981), JFK (1991), Grumpy Old Men (1993) and its sequel Grumpier Old Men (1995), The Grass Harp (1995), and Out to Sea (1997).
Early life and education
Lemmon was born on February 8, 1925, in an elevator at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts. He was the only child of Mildred Burgess (née LaRue; 1896–1967) and John Uhler Lemmon II (1893–1962), president of the Doughnut Corporation of America. John Uhler Lemmon II was of Irish heritage, and Jack Lemmon was raised Catholic. His parents had a difficult marriage, and separated permanently when Lemmon was 18, but never divorced. He attended John Ward Elementary School in Newton and the Rivers School in Weston, Massachusetts. Often unwell as a child, Lemmon had three significant operations on his ears before he turned 10. He had spent two years in hospital by the time he turned 12.
During his acceptance of his lifetime achievement award, he stated that he knew he wanted to be an actor from the age of eight. He began to act in school productions. Lemmon attended Rivers Country Day School and Phillips Andover Academy (Class of 1943), where he pursued track sports with success, and Harvard College (Class of 1947), where he lived in Eliot House. At Harvard, he was president of the Hasty Pudding Club and vice president of Dramatic and Delphic Clubs. Except for drama and music, however, he was an unexceptional student.
Forbidden to act onstage due to academic probation, Lemmon broke Harvard rules to appear in roles using pseudonyms such as Timothy Orange.
A member of the V-12 Navy College Training Program, Lemmon was commissioned by the United States Navy, serving briefly as an ensign on the aircraft carrier during World War II before returning to Harvard after completing his military service. After graduation with a degree in War Service Sciences in 1947, he studied acting under coach Uta Hagen at HB Studio in New York City. He was also a pianist, who became devoted to the instrument aged 14 and learned to play by ear. For about a year in New York City, he worked unpaid as a waiter and master of ceremonies at the Old Knick bar on Second Avenue. He also played the piano at the venue.
Career
1949–1965: Early years
Lemmon became a professional actor, working on radio and Broadway. His film debut was a bit part as a plasterer in the film The Lady Takes a Sailor (1949), but he had already appeared in television shows, which numbered about 400 from 1948 to 1953.
Lemmon believed his stage career was about to take off when he was appearing on Broadway for the first time in a 1953 revival of the comedy Room Service, but the production closed after two weeks. Despite this setback, he was spotted by talent scout Max Arnow, who was then working for Columbia, and Lemmon's focus shifted to films and Hollywood. Columbia's head, Harry Cohn, wanted to change Lemmon's name, in case it was used to describe the quality of the actor's films, but he successfully resisted.
His first role as a leading man was in the comedy It Should Happen to You (1954), which also featured the established Judy Holliday in the female lead. Bosley Crowther in his review for The New York Times described Lemmon as possessing "a warm and appealing personality. The screen should see more of him." The two leads soon reunited in Phffft (also 1954). Kim Novak had a secondary role as a brief love interest for Lemmon's character. "If it wasn't for Judy, I'm not sure I would have concentrated on films", he told The Washington Post in 1986 saying early in his career he had a snobbish attitude towards films over the stage. He managed to negotiate a contract with Columbia allowing him leeway to pursue other projects, some of the terms of which he said "nobody had gotten before". He signed a seven-year contract, but ended up staying with Columbia for 10 years. Lemmon's appearance as Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts (1955), with James Cagney and Henry Fonda, for Warner Bros., gained Lemmon the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Director John Ford decided to cast Lemmon after seeing his Columbia screen test, which had been directed by Richard Quine. At an impromptu meeting on the studio lot, Ford persuaded the actor to appear in the film, although Lemmon did not realize he was in conversation with Ford at the time.
In the military farce Operation Mad Ball (1957) set in a U.S. Army base in France after World War II, Lemmon played a calculating private. He met comedian Ernie Kovacs, who co-starred, and they became close friends, appearing together in two subsequent films, as a warlock in Bell, Book and Candle (1958, a film he apparently disliked) and It Happened to Jane (1959), all three under the direction of Richard Quine. Lemmon starred in six films directed by Quine. The others were My Sister Eileen (1955), The Notorious Landlady (1962) and How to Murder Your Wife (1965).
Lemmon worked with director Billy Wilder on seven films. Their association began with the gender-bending comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), with Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. His role required him to perform 80% of the role in drag. People who knew his mother, Millie Lemmon, said he had mimicked her personality and even her hairstyle. Critic Pauline Kael said he was "demoniacally funny" in the part. The sequence of films with Wilder continued with The Apartment (1960) alongside Shirley MacLaine. The film received mixed reviews from critics at the time, although it has been re-evaluated as a classic today. It received 11 nominations, winning five Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Lemmon received Oscar nominations for his performances in Some Like it Hot and The Apartment. Lemmon reunited with MacLaine in Irma la Douce (1963). MacLaine, observing the director's relationship with his male lead, believed it amounted to "professional infatuation".
Lemmon's first role in a film directed by Blake Edwards was in Days of Wine and Roses (1962) portraying Joe Clay, a young alcoholic businessman. The role, for which he was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, was one of Lemmon's favorites. By this time, he had appeared in 15 comedies, a Western and an adventure film. "The movie people put a label attached to your big toe — 'light comedy' — and that's the only way they think of you", he commented in an interview during 1984. "I knew damn well I could play drama. Things changed following Days of Wine and Roses. That was as important a film as I've ever done." Days of Wine and Roses was the first film where Lemmon was involved with production of the film via his Jalam production company. Lemmon's association with Edwards continued with The Great Race (1965), which reunited him with Tony Curtis. His salary this time was $1 million, but the film did not return its large budget at the box office. Variety, in its December 31, 1964, review, commented: "never has there been a villain so dastardly as Jack Lemmon".
1966–1978: Mid-career
In 1966, Lemmon began the first of his many collaborations with actor Walter Matthau in The Fortune Cookie. The film has been described by the British film critic, Philip French as their "one truly great film". Matthau went on to win an Academy Award for his performance in the film. Another nine films with them co-starring eventually followed, including The Odd Couple (1968), The Front Page (1974), and Buddy Buddy (1981).
In 1967, Lemmon's production company Jalem produced the film Cool Hand Luke, which starred Paul Newman in the lead role. The film was a box-office and critical success. Newman, in gratitude, offered him the role of the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but Lemmon turned it down.
The best-known Lemmon-Matthau film is The Odd Couple (1968), based on the Neil Simon play, with the lead characters being the mismatched Felix Unger (Lemmon) and Oscar Madison (Matthau), respectively neurotical and cynical. The much-admired comedy Kotch (1971), the only film Lemmon directed, starred Matthau, who was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. The Out-of-Towners (1970) was another Neil Simon-scripted film in which Lemmon appeared.
In 1972, at the 44th Academy Awards, Jack Lemmon presented the Honorary Academy Award to silent screen legend Charlie Chaplin.
Lemmon starred with Juliet Mills in Avanti! (1972) and appeared with Matthau in The Front Page (1974). Both films were directed by Wilder. He felt Lemmon had a natural tendency toward overacting that had to be tempered; Wilder's biography Nobody's Perfect quotes the director as saying, "Lemmon, I would describe him as a ham, a fine ham, and with ham you have to trim a little fat." Wilder, though, also once said: "Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon".
Lemmon in Save the Tiger (1973) plays Harry Stoner, a businessman in the garment trade who finds someone to commit arson by burning down his warehouse to avoid bankruptcy. The project was rejected by multiple studios, but Paramount was prepared to make the film if it were budgeted for only $1 million. Lemmon was so keen to play the part that he worked for union scale, then $165 a week. The role was demanding; like the character, Lemmon came close to breaking point: "I started to crack as the character did," he recalled. "I just kept getting deeper and deeper into the character's despair." For this film, Lemmon won the Best Actor Oscar. Having won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for Mister Roberts, he became the first actor to achieve that particular double, although Helen Hayes had achieved this feat three years earlier in the equivalent female categories.
1979–2001: Final roles
Lemmon was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role in The China Syndrome (1979), for which he was also awarded Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. In Tribute, a stage drama first performed in 1979, he played a press agent who has cancer while trying to mend his relationship with his son. The Broadway production ran for 212 performances, but it gained mixed reviews. Nevertheless, Lemmon was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. For his role in the 1980 film version, Lemmon gained another Oscar nomination.
His final Oscar nomination was for Missing (1982), as a conservative father whose son has vanished in Chile during the period the country was under the rule of Augusto Pinochet; he won another Cannes award for his performance. A contemporary failure was his last film with Billy Wilder, Buddy Buddy (1981). Lemmon's character attempts suicide in a hotel while a hitman (Matthau) is in the next suite. Another flop at the box office was his final film with Blake Edwards, another of his friends; in That's Life! (1986), he appeared in the director's self-autobiographical part with Edwards' wife, Julie Andrews. A seductress role was played by Lemmon's wife, Felicia Farr. His later career is said to have been affected by other bad choices, such as Mass Appeal (1984), about a conservative Catholic priest, Macaroni (1985), a tale about old Army friends with Marcello Mastroianni, and That's Life. Lemmon received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1988.
Lemmon was nominated for a Tony Award the second and last time for a revival of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night in 1986; Lemmon had taken the lead role of James Tyrone in a production directed by Jonathan Miller. It had a London run in 1987, Lemmon's first theatre work in the city, and a television version followed. A return to London in 1989 for the antiwar play Veterans' Day, with Michael Gambon, was poorly received by critics, and following modest audiences, soon closed. Lemmon also worked with Kevin Spacey in the films The Murder of Mary Phagan (1987), Dad (1989), and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), as well as the production of Long Day's Journey into Night.
Lemmon and Matthau had small parts in Oliver Stone's film, JFK (1991), in which both men appeared without sharing screen time. The duo reunited in Grumpy Old Men (1993). The film was a surprise hit. Later in the decade, they starred together in The Grass Harp (1995), Grumpier Old Men (1995), Out to Sea (1997), and The Odd Couple II (1998). While Grumpier Old Men grossed slightly more than its predecessor, The Odd Couple II was a box-office disappointment.
In 1996, Lemmon was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Or Nonmusical Album for his narration on "Harry S Truman: A Journey To Independence". Around the same time, Lemmon starred along with James Garner in the comedy My Fellow Americans (1996) as two feuding ex-presidents. The supporting cast included Dan Aykroyd and Lauren Bacall.
For his role in the William Friedkin-directed version of Twelve Angry Men (1997), Lemmon was nominated for Best Actor in a Made-for-TV Movie in the 1998 Golden Globe Awards.
The award ceremony was memorable because Ving Rhames, who won the Golden Globe for his portrayal of Don King: Only in America, stunned the A-list crowd and television audience by calling Lemmon up to the stage and handing him the award. Lemmon tried not to accept but Rhames insisted. The emotional crowd gave Lemmon a standing ovation to which he replied that, "This is one of the nicest, sweetest moments I have ever known in my life."
The role was as the contentious juror, played in the original 1957 film version by Henry Fonda. Lemmon appeared in the remake with George C. Scott and reunited with him in another television film, this time Inherit the Wind (1999).
Lemmon was a guest voice on The Simpsons episode "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson" (1997), as the owner of the pretzel business. For his role as Morrie Schwartz in his final television role, Tuesdays with Morrie (1999), Lemmon won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie. His final film role was uncredited: the narrator in Robert Redford's film The Legend of Bagger Vance.
Personal life
Lemmon was married twice. His first wife was actress Cynthia Stone, with whom he had a son, Chris Lemmon (born 1954), but the couple divorced over their incompatibility. He married his second wife, actress Felicia Farr, on August 17, 1962, in Paris while shooting Irma La Douce. The couple's daughter, Courtney, was born in 1966. Lemmon was the stepfather to Denise, from Farr's previous marriage to Lee Farr. Lemmon was a Catholic. He was close friends with actors Tony Curtis and Kevin Spacey, among others.
His publicist Geraldine McInerney said, "I remember Jack once telling me he lived in terror his whole life that he'd never get another job. Here was one of America's most established actors and yet he was without any confidence. It was like every job was going to be his last". As the 1970s progressed, Lemmon increased his drinking to cope with stress. He was fined for driving under the influence in 1976, finally quitting alcohol in the early 1980s. On a 1998 episode of the television program Inside the Actors Studio, he stated that he was a recovering alcoholic.
Lemmon was known as the "star" of the celebrity-packed, third-round telecast of the annual AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, held at Pebble Beach Golf Links each February. Lemmon's packed gallery was there not only for his humor, but also to root him on in his lifelong quest to "make the cut" to round four, something he was never able to achieve. The amateur who helps his team most in the Pro-Am portion is annually awarded the Jack Lemmon Award. During the 1980s and 1990s, Lemmon served on the advisory board of the National Student Film Institute. Lemmon was a registered Democrat.
Death
Lemmon died of bladder cancer on June 27, 2001. He had suffered from the disease privately for two years before his death. His body was interred at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California. (The graves of Marilyn Monroe, Walter Matthau, George C. Scott, and film director Billy Wilder lie in the same cemetery.) Lemmon's gravestone reads like a title screen from a film: "JACK LEMMON in". Guests who attended the private ceremony included Billy Wilder, Shirley MacLaine, Kevin Spacey, Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier, Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Frank Sinatra's widow Barbara and Walter Matthau's son Charlie.
Acting credits and accolades
Lemmon received eight Academy Award nominations, winning for Mister Roberts in 1956 and Save the Tiger in 1974. He was nominated for Some Like it Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The China Syndrome (1979), Tribute (1981), and Missing (1982). He received two Tony Award nominations for his performances in Tribute (1979), and Long Day's Journey into Night (1986). He received four Golden Globe Awards, from 21 nominations, and received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for his lifetime achievement in 1991. The year before he won the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. He was given tribute at the Kennedy Center Honors in 1996. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
In 1986, the U.S. National Board of Review of Motion Pictures gave Lemmon a "Career Achievement" Award; two years later, the American Film Institute gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in March 1988. In 1995, Lemmon was awarded the inaugural Harvard Arts Medal. In 1996, Lemmon was awarded the Honorary Golden Bear award at the 46th Berlin International Film Festival.
See also
List of actors with Academy Award nominations
List of actors with two or more Academy Award nominations in acting categories
List of actors with two or more Academy Awards in acting categories
References
Sources
Wise, James. Stars in Blue: Movie Actors in America's Sea Services. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997.
External links
Actor Jack Lemmon dead at 76
Jack Lemmon at the Archive of American Television
Appearance on Desert Island Discs (8 October 1989)
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Military personnel from California | [
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15823 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph%20Conrad | Joseph Conrad | Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, ; 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of what he saw as an impassive, inscrutable universe.
Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche. Postcolonial analysis of Conrad's work has incited considerable debate; author Chinua Achebe published an article denouncing Heart of Darkness as racist and dehumanising, while other scholars such as Adam Hochschild and Peter Edgerly Firchow have disagreed with Achebe's conclusions.
Life
Early years
Conrad was born on 3 December 1857 in Berdychiv (), Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire; the region had once been part of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. He was the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski—a writer, translator, political activist, and would-be revolutionary—and his wife Ewa Bobrowska. He was christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski after his maternal grandfather Józef, his paternal grandfather Teodor, and the heroes (both named "Konrad") of two poems by Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady and Konrad Wallenrod. His family called him "Konrad", rather than "Józef".
Though the vast majority of the surrounding area's inhabitants were Ukrainians, and the great majority of Berdychiv's residents were Jewish, almost all the countryside was owned by the Polish szlachta (nobility), to which Conrad's family belonged as bearers of the Nałęcz coat-of-arms. Polish literature, particularly patriotic literature, was held in high esteem by the area's Polish population.
The Korzeniowski family had played a significant role in Polish attempts to regain independence. Conrad's paternal grandfather Teodor had served under Prince Józef Poniatowski during Napoleon's Russian campaign and had formed his own cavalry squadron during the November 1830 Uprising. Conrad's fiercely patriotic father Apollo belonged to the "Red" political faction, whose goal was to re-establish the pre-partition boundaries of Poland, but which also advocated land reform and the abolition of serfdom. Conrad's subsequent refusal to follow in Apollo's footsteps, and his choice of exile over resistance, were a source of lifelong guilt for Conrad.
Because of the father's attempts at farming and his political activism, the family moved repeatedly. In May 1861 they moved to Warsaw, where Apollo joined the resistance against the Russian Empire. He was arrested and imprisoned in Pavilion X of the Warsaw Citadel. Conrad would write: "[I]n the courtyard of this Citadel—characteristically for our nation—my childhood memories begin." On 9 May 1862 Apollo and his family were exiled to Vologda, north of Moscow and known for its bad climate. In January 1863 Apollo's sentence was commuted, and the family was sent to Chernihiv in northeast Ukraine, where conditions were much better. However, on 18 April 1865 Ewa died of tuberculosis.
Apollo did his best to teach Conrad at home. The boy's early reading introduced him to the two elements that later dominated his life: in Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, he encountered the sphere of activity to which he would devote his youth; Shakespeare brought him into the orbit of English literature. Most of all, though, he read Polish Romantic poetry. Half a century later he explained that
"The Polishness in my works comes from Mickiewicz and Słowacki. My father read [Mickiewicz's] Pan Tadeusz aloud to me and made me read it aloud.... I used to prefer [Mickiewicz's] Konrad Wallenrod [and] Grażyna. Later I preferred Słowacki. You know why Słowacki?... [He is the soul of all Poland]".
In the autumn of 1866, young Conrad was sent for a year-long retreat for health reasons, to Kyiv and his mother's family estate at .
In December 1867, Apollo took his son to the Austrian-held part of Poland, which for two years had been enjoying considerable internal freedom and a degree of self-government. After sojourns in Lwów and several smaller localities, on 20 February 1869 they moved to Kraków (until 1596 the capital of Poland), likewise in Austrian Poland. A few months later, on 23 May 1869, Apollo Korzeniowski died, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven. Like Conrad's mother, Apollo had been gravely ill with tuberculosis.
The young Conrad was placed in the care of Ewa's brother, Tadeusz Bobrowski. Conrad's poor health and his unsatisfactory schoolwork caused his uncle constant problems and no end of financial outlay. Conrad was not a good student; despite tutoring, he excelled only in geography. At that time he likely received private tutoring only, as there is no evidence he attended any school regularly. Since the boy's illness was clearly of nervous origin, the physicians supposed that fresh air and physical work would harden him; his uncle hoped that well-defined duties and the rigors of work would teach him discipline. Since he showed little inclination to study, it was essential that he learn a trade; his uncle thought he could work as a sailor-cum-businessman, who would combine maritime skills with commercial activities. In the autumn of 1871, thirteen-year-old Conrad announced his intention to become a sailor. He later recalled that as a child he had read (apparently in French translation) Leopold McClintock's book about his 1857–59 expeditions in the Fox, in search of Sir John Franklin's lost ships and . Conrad also recalled having read books by the American James Fenimore Cooper and the English Captain Frederick Marryat. A playmate of his adolescence recalled that Conrad spun fantastic yarns, always set at sea, presented so realistically that listeners thought the action was happening before their eyes.
In August 1873 Bobrowski sent fifteen-year-old Conrad to Lwów to a cousin who ran a small boarding house for boys orphaned by the 1863 Uprising; group conversation there was in French. The owner's daughter recalled:
Conrad had been at the establishment for just over a year when in September 1874, for uncertain reasons, his uncle removed him from school in Lwów and took him back to Kraków.
On 13 October 1874 Bobrowski sent the sixteen-year-old to Marseilles, France, for Conrad's planned merchant-marine career on French merchant ships. His uncle provided him with a monthly stipend as well (set at 150 francs). Though Conrad had not completed secondary school, his accomplishments included fluency in French (with a correct accent), some knowledge of Latin, German and Greek; probably a good knowledge of history, some geography, and probably already an interest in physics. He was well read, particularly in Polish Romantic literature. He belonged to the second generation in his family that had had to earn a living outside the family estates. They were born and reared partly in the milieu of the working intelligentsia, a social class that was starting to play an important role in Central and Eastern Europe. He had absorbed enough of the history, culture and literature of his native land to be able eventually to develop a distinctive world view and make unique contributions to the literature of his adoptive Britain.
Tensions that originated in his childhood in Poland and increased in his adulthood abroad contributed to Conrad's greatest literary achievements. Zdzisław Najder, himself an emigrant from Poland, observes:
Some critics have suggested that when Conrad left Poland, he wanted to break once and for all with his Polish past. In refutation of this, Najder quotes from Conrad's 14 August 1883 letter to family friend Stefan Buszczyński, written nine years after Conrad had left Poland:
Merchant marine
In Marseilles Conrad had an intensive social life, often stretching his budget. A trace of these years can be found in the northern Corsica town of Luri, where there is a plaque to a Corsican merchant seaman, Dominique Cervoni, whom Conrad befriended. Cervoni became the inspiration for some of Conrad's characters, such as the title character of the 1904 novel Nostromo. Conrad visited Corsica with his wife in 1921, partly in search of connections with his long-dead friend and fellow merchant seaman.
In late 1877 Conrad's maritime career was interrupted by the refusal of the Russian consul to provide documents needed for him to continue his service. As a result, Conrad fell into debt, and in March 1878 he attempted suicide. He survived, and received further financial aid from his uncle, allowing him to resume his normal life. After nearly four years in France and on French ships, Conrad joined the British merchant marine, enlisting in April 1878 (he had most likely started learning English shortly before).
For the next fifteen years, he served under the Red Ensign. He worked on a variety of ships as crew member (steward, apprentice, able-bodied seaman) and then as third, second and first mate, until eventually achieving captain's rank. During the 19 years from the time that Conrad had left Kraków in October 1874 until he signed off the Adowa in January 1894, he had worked in ships, including long periods in port, for 10 years and almost 8 months. He had spent just over 8 years at sea—9 months of it as a passenger. His sole captaincy took place in 1888–89, when he commanded the barque Otago from Sydney to Mauritius.
During a brief call in India in 1885–86, 28-year-old Conrad sent five letters to Joseph Spiridion, a Pole eight years his senior whom he had befriended at Cardiff in June 1885 just before sailing for Singapore in the clipper ship Tilkhurst. These letters are Conrad's first preserved texts in English. His English is generally correct but stiff to the point of artificiality; many fragments suggest that his thoughts ran along the lines of Polish syntax and phraseology.
More importantly, the letters show a marked change in views from those implied in his earlier correspondence of 1881–83. He had abandoned "hope for the future" and the conceit of "sailing [ever] toward Poland", and his Panslavic ideas. He was left with a painful sense of the hopelessness of the Polish question and an acceptance of England as a possible refuge. While he often adjusted his statements to accord to some extent with the views of his addressees, the theme of hopelessness concerning the prospects for Polish independence often occurs authentically in his correspondence and works before 1914.
The year 1890 marked Conrad's first return to Poland, where he would visit his uncle and other relatives and acquaintances. His visit took place while he was waiting to proceed to the Congo Free State, having been hired by Albert Thys, deputy director of the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. Conrad's association with the Belgian company, on the Congo River, would inspire his novella, Heart of Darkness. During this period, in 1890 in the Congo, Conrad befriended Roger Casement, who was investigating matters there and was later knighted for his advocacy of human rights. Casement later became active in Irish Republicanism after leaving the British consular service.
Conrad left Africa at the end of December 1890, arriving in Brussels by late January next year. He rejoined the British marine, as first mate, in November. When he left London on 25 October 1892 aboard the passenger clipper ship Torrens, one of the passengers was William Henry Jacques, a consumptive Cambridge University graduate who died less than a year later (19 September 1893). According to Conrad's A Personal Record, Jacques was the first reader of the still-unfinished manuscript of Conrad's Almayer's Folly. Jacques encouraged Conrad to continue writing the novel.
Conrad completed his last long-distance voyage as a seaman on 26 July 1893 when the Torrens docked at London and "J. Conrad Korzemowin" (per the certificate of discharge) debarked. When the Torrens had left Adelaide on 13 March 1893, the passengers had included two young Englishmen returning from Australia and New Zealand: 25-year-old lawyer and future novelist John Galsworthy; and Edward Lancelot Sanderson, who was going to help his father run a boys' preparatory school at Elstree. They were probably the first Englishmen and non-sailors with whom Conrad struck up a friendship; he would remain in touch with both. The protagonist of one of Galsworthy's first literary attempts, "The Doldrums" (1895–96), the first mate Armand, is obviously modelled on Conrad. At Cape Town, where the Torrens remained from 17 to 19 May, Galsworthy left the ship to look at the local mines. Sanderson continued his voyage and seems to have been the first to develop closer ties with Conrad. Later that year, Conrad would visit his relatives in Poland and Ukraine once again.
Writer
In the autumn of 1889, Conrad began writing his first novel, Almayer's Folly.
Conrad's later letters to literary friends show the attention that he devoted to analysis of style, to individual words and expressions, to the emotional tone of phrases, to the atmosphere created by language. In this, Conrad in his own way followed the example of Gustave Flaubert, notorious for searching days on end for le mot juste—for the right word to render the "essence of the matter." Najder opines: "[W]riting in a foreign language admits a greater temerity in tackling personally sensitive problems, for it leaves uncommitted the most spontaneous, deeper reaches of the psyche, and allows a greater distance in treating matters we would hardly dare approach in the language of our childhood. As a rule it is easier both to swear and to analyze dispassionately in an acquired language."
In 1894, aged 36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health, partly due to unavailability of ships, and partly because he had become so fascinated with writing that he had decided on a literary career. Almayer's Folly, set on the east coast of Borneo, was published in 1895. Its appearance marked his first use of the pen name "Joseph Conrad"; "Konrad" was, of course, the third of his Polish given names, but his use of it—in the anglicised version, "Conrad"—may also have been an homage to the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz's patriotic narrative poem, Konrad Wallenrod.
Edward Garnett, a young publisher's reader and literary critic who would play one of the chief supporting roles in Conrad's literary career, had—like Unwin's first reader of Almayer's Folly, Wilfrid Hugh Chesson—been impressed by the manuscript, but Garnett had been "uncertain whether the English was good enough for publication." Garnett had shown the novel to his wife, Constance Garnett, later a translator of Russian literature. She had thought Conrad's foreignness a positive merit.
While Conrad had only limited personal acquaintance with the peoples of Maritime Southeast Asia, the region looms large in his early work. According to Najder, Conrad, the exile and wanderer, was aware of a difficulty that he confessed more than once: the lack of a common cultural background with his Anglophone readers meant he could not compete with English-language authors writing about the English-speaking world. At the same time, the choice of a non-English colonial setting freed him from an embarrassing division of loyalty: Almayer's Folly, and later "An Outpost of Progress" (1897, set in a Congo exploited by King Leopold II of Belgium) and Heart of Darkness (1899, likewise set in the Congo), contain bitter reflections on colonialism. The Malay states came theoretically under the suzerainty of the Dutch government; Conrad did not write about the area's British dependencies, which he never visited. He "was apparently intrigued by... struggles aimed at preserving national independence. The prolific and destructive richness of tropical nature and the dreariness of human life within it accorded well with the pessimistic mood of his early works."
Almayer's Folly, together with its successor, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), laid the foundation for Conrad's reputation as a romantic teller of exotic tales—a misunderstanding of his purpose that was to frustrate him for the rest of his career.
Almost all of Conrad's writings were first published in newspapers and magazines: influential reviews like The Fortnightly Review and the North American Review; avant-garde publications like the Savoy, New Review, and The English Review; popular short-fiction magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Harper's Magazine; women's journals like the Pictorial Review and Romance; mass-circulation dailies like the Daily Mail and the New York Herald; and illustrated newspapers like The Illustrated London News and the Illustrated Buffalo Express. He also wrote for The Outlook, an imperialist weekly magazine, between 1898 and 1906.
Financial success long eluded Conrad, who often requested advances from magazine and book publishers, and loans from acquaintances such as John Galsworthy. Eventually a government grant ("civil list pension") of £100 per annum, awarded on 9 August 1910, somewhat relieved his financial worries, and in time collectors began purchasing his manuscripts. Though his talent was early on recognised by English intellectuals, popular success eluded him until the 1913 publication of Chance, which is often considered one of his weaker novels.
Personal life
Temperament and health
Conrad was a reserved man, wary of showing emotion. He scorned sentimentality; his manner of portraying emotion in his books was full of restraint, scepticism and irony. In the words of his uncle Bobrowski, as a young man Conrad was "extremely sensitive, conceited, reserved, and in addition excitable. In short [...] all the defects of the Nałęcz family."
Conrad suffered throughout life from ill health, physical and mental. A newspaper review of a Conrad biography suggested that the book could have been subtitled Thirty Years of Debt, Gout, Depression and Angst. In 1891 he was hospitalised for several months, suffering from gout, neuralgic pains in his right arm and recurrent attacks of malaria. He also complained of swollen hands "which made writing difficult". Taking his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski's advice, he convalesced at a spa in Switzerland. Conrad had a phobia of dentistry, neglecting his teeth until they had to be extracted. In one letter he remarked that every novel he had written had cost him a tooth. Conrad's physical afflictions were, if anything, less vexatious than his mental ones. In his letters he often described symptoms of depression; "the evidence", writes Najder, "is so strong that it is nearly impossible to doubt it."
Attempted suicide
In March 1878, at the end of his Marseilles period, 20-year-old Conrad attempted suicide, by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver. According to his uncle, who was summoned by a friend, Conrad had fallen into debt. Bobrowski described his subsequent "study" of his nephew in an extensive letter to Stefan Buszczyński, his own ideological opponent and a friend of Conrad's late father Apollo. To what extent the suicide attempt had been made in earnest likely will never be known, but it is suggestive of a situational depression.
Romance and marriage
In 1888 during a stop-over on Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, Conrad developed a couple of romantic interests. One of these would be described in his 1910 story "A Smile of Fortune", which contains autobiographical elements (e.g., one of the characters is the same Chief Mate Burns who appears in The Shadow Line). The narrator, a young captain, flirts ambiguously and surreptitiously with Alice Jacobus, daughter of a local merchant living in a house surrounded by a magnificent rose garden. Research has confirmed that in Port Louis at the time there was a 17-year-old Alice Shaw, whose father, a shipping agent, owned the only rose garden in town.
More is known about Conrad's other, more open flirtation. An old friend, Captain Gabriel Renouf of the French merchant marine, introduced him to the family of his brother-in-law. Renouf's eldest sister was the wife of Louis Edward Schmidt, a senior official in the colony; with them lived two other sisters and two brothers. Though the island had been taken over in 1810 by Britain, many of the inhabitants were descendants of the original French colonists, and Conrad's excellent French and perfect manners opened all local salons to him. He became a frequent guest at the Schmidts', where he often met the Misses Renouf. A couple of days before leaving Port Louis, Conrad asked one of the Renouf brothers for the hand of his 26-year-old sister Eugenie. She was already, however, engaged to marry her pharmacist cousin. After the rebuff, Conrad did not pay a farewell visit but sent a polite letter to Gabriel Renouf, saying he would never return to Mauritius and adding that on the day of the wedding his thoughts would be with them.
On 24 March 1896 Conrad married an Englishwoman, Jessie George. The couple had two sons, Borys and John. The elder, Borys, proved a disappointment in scholarship and integrity. Jessie was an unsophisticated, working-class girl, sixteen years younger than Conrad. To his friends, she was an inexplicable choice of wife, and the subject of some rather disparaging and unkind remarks. (See Lady Ottoline Morrell's opinion of Jessie in Impressions.) However, according to other biographers such as Frederick Karl, Jessie provided what Conrad needed, namely a "straightforward, devoted, quite competent" companion. Similarly, Jones remarks that, despite whatever difficulties the marriage endured, "there can be no doubt that the relationship sustained Conrad's career as a writer", which might have been much less successful without her.
The couple rented a long series of successive homes, mostly in the English countryside. Conrad, who suffered frequent depressions, made great efforts to change his mood; the most important step was to move into another house. His frequent changes of home were usually signs of a search for psychological regeneration. Between 1910 and 1919 Conrad's home was Capel House in Orlestone, Kent, which was rented to him by Lord and Lady Oliver. It was here that he wrote The Rescue, Victory, and The Arrow of Gold.
Except for several vacations in France and Italy, a 1914 vacation in his native Poland, and a 1923 visit to the United States, Conrad lived the rest of his life in England.
Sojourn in Poland
The 1914 vacation with his wife and sons in Poland, at the urging of Józef Retinger, coincided with the outbreak of World War I. On 28 July 1914, the day war broke out between Austro-Hungary and Serbia, Conrad and the Retingers arrived in Kraków (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), where Conrad visited childhood haunts. As the city lay only a few miles from the Russian border, there was a risk of being stranded in a battle zone. With wife Jessie and younger son John ill, Conrad decided to take refuge in the mountain resort town of Zakopane. They left Kraków on 2 August. A few days after arrival in Zakopane, they moved to the Konstantynówka pension operated by Conrad's cousin Aniela Zagórska; it had been frequented by celebrities including the statesman Józef Piłsudski and Conrad's acquaintance, the young concert pianist Artur Rubinstein.
Zagórska introduced Conrad to Polish writers, intellectuals, and artists who had also taken refuge in Zakopane, including novelist Stefan Żeromski and Tadeusz Nalepiński, a writer friend of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. Conrad aroused interest among the Poles as a famous writer and an exotic compatriot from abroad. He charmed new acquaintances, especially women. However, Marie Curie's physician sister, Bronisława Dłuska, wife of fellow physician and eminent socialist activist Kazimierz Dłuski, openly berated Conrad for having used his great talent for purposes other than bettering the future of his native land.
But thirty-two-year-old Aniela Zagórska (daughter of the pension keeper), Conrad's niece who would translate his works into Polish in 1923–39, idolised him, kept him company, and provided him with books. He particularly delighted in the stories and novels of the ten-years-older, recently deceased Bolesław Prus, read everything by his fellow victim of Poland's 1863 Uprising—"my beloved Prus"—that he could get his hands on, and pronounced him "better than Dickens"—a favourite English novelist of Conrad's.
Conrad, who was noted by his Polish acquaintances to still be fluent in his native tongue, participated in their impassioned political discussions. He declared presciently, as Józef Piłsudski had earlier in 1914 in Paris, that in the war, for Poland to regain independence, Russia must be beaten by the Central Powers (the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires), and the Central Powers must in turn be beaten by France and Britain.
After many travails and vicissitudes, at the beginning of November 1914 Conrad managed to bring his family back to England. On his return, he was determined to work on swaying British opinion in favour of restoring Poland's sovereignty.
Jessie Conrad would later write in her memoirs: "I understood my husband so much better after those months in Poland. So many characteristics that had been strange and unfathomable to me before, took, as it were, their right proportions. I understood that his temperament was that of his countrymen."
Politics
The most extensive and ambitious political statement that Conrad ever made was his 1905 essay, "Autocracy and War", whose starting point was the Russo-Japanese War (he finished the article a month before the Battle of Tsushima Strait). The essay begins with a statement about Russia's incurable weakness and ends with warnings against Prussia, the dangerous aggressor in a future European war. For Russia he predicted a violent outburst in the near future, but Russia's lack of democratic traditions and the backwardness of her masses made it impossible for the revolution to have a salutary effect. Conrad regarded the formation of a representative government in Russia as unfeasible and foresaw a transition from autocracy to dictatorship. He saw western Europe as torn by antagonisms engendered by economic rivalry and commercial selfishness. In vain might a Russian revolution seek advice or help from a materialistic and egoistic western Europe that armed itself in preparation for wars far more brutal than those of the past.
Conrad's distrust of democracy sprang from his doubts whether the propagation of democracy as an aim in itself could solve any problems. He thought that, in view of the weakness of human nature and of the "criminal" character of society, democracy offered boundless opportunities for demagogues and charlatans. Conrad kept his distance from partisan politics, and never voted in British national elections.
He accused social democrats of his time of acting to weaken "the national sentiment, the preservation of which [was his] concern"—of attempting to dissolve national identities in an impersonal melting-pot. "I look at the future from the depth of a very black past and I find that nothing is left for me except fidelity to a cause lost, to an idea without future." It was Conrad's hopeless fidelity to the memory of Poland that prevented him from believing in the idea of "international fraternity", which he considered, under the circumstances, just a verbal exercise. He resented some socialists' talk of freedom and world brotherhood while keeping silent about his own partitioned and oppressed Poland.
Before that, in the early 1880s, letters to Conrad from his uncle Tadeusz show Conrad apparently having hoped for an improvement in Poland's situation not through a liberation movement but by establishing an alliance with neighbouring Slavic nations. This had been accompanied by a faith in the Panslavic ideology—"surprising", Najder writes, "in a man who was later to emphasize his hostility towards Russia, a conviction that... Poland's [superior] civilization and... historic... traditions would [let] her play a leading role... in the Panslavic community, [and his] doubts about Poland's chances of becoming a fully sovereign nation-state."
Conrad's alienation from partisan politics went together with an abiding sense of the thinking man's burden imposed by his personality, as described in an 1894 letter of Conrad's to a relative-by-marriage and fellow author, Marguerite Poradowska (née Gachet, and cousin of Vincent van Gogh's physician, Paul Gachet) of Brussels:
Conrad wrote H.G. Wells that the latter's 1901 book, Anticipations, "seems to presuppose... a sort of select circle to which you address yourself, leaving the rest of the world outside the pale. [In addition,] you do not take sufficient account of human imbecility which is cunning and perfidious."
In a 23 October 1922 letter to mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell, in response to the latter's book, The Problem of China, which advocated socialist reforms and an oligarchy of sages who would reshape Chinese society, Conrad explained his own distrust of political panaceas:
Leo Robson writes:
But, writes Robson, Conrad is no moral nihilist:
In an August 1901 letter to the editor of The New York Times Saturday Book Review, Conrad wrote: "Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism."
Death
On 3 August 1924, Conrad died at his house, Oswalds, in Bishopsbourne, Kent, England, probably of a heart attack. He was interred at Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, under a misspelled version of his original Polish name, as "Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski". Inscribed on his gravestone are the lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene which he had chosen as the epigraph to his last complete novel, The Rover:
Conrad's modest funeral took place amid great crowds. His old friend Edward Garnett recalled bitterly:
Another old friend of Conrad's, Cunninghame Graham, wrote Garnett: "Aubry was saying to me... that had Anatole France died, all Paris would have been at his funeral."
Conrad's wife Jessie died twelve years later, on 6 December 1936, and was interred with him.
In 1996 his grave was designated a Grade II listed structure.
Writing style
Themes and style
Despite the opinions even of some who knew Conrad personally, such as fellow-novelist Henry James, Conrad—even when only writing elegantly crafted letters to his uncle and acquaintances—was always at heart a writer who sailed, rather than a sailor who wrote. He used his sailing experiences as a backdrop for many of his works, but he also produced works of similar world view, without the nautical motifs. The failure of many critics to appreciate this caused him much frustration.
He wrote oftener about life at sea and in exotic parts than about life on British land because—unlike, for example, his friend John Galsworthy, author of The Forsyte Saga—he knew little about everyday domestic relations in Britain. When Conrad's The Mirror of the Sea was published in 1906 to critical acclaim, he wrote to his French translator: "The critics have been vigorously swinging the censer to me.... Behind the concert of flattery, I can hear something like a whisper: 'Keep to the open sea! Don't land!' They want to banish me to the middle of the ocean." Writing to his friend Richard Curle, Conrad remarked that "the public mind fastens on externals" such as his "sea life", oblivious to how authors transform their material "from particular to general, and appeal to universal emotions by the temperamental handling of personal experience".
Nevertheless, Conrad found much sympathetic readership, especially in the United States. H.L. Mencken was one of the earliest and most influential American readers to recognise how Conrad conjured up "the general out of the particular". F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing to Mencken, complained about having been omitted from a list of Conrad imitators. Since Fitzgerald, dozens of other American writers have acknowledged their debts to Conrad, including William Faulkner, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Thomas Pynchon.
An October 1923 visitor to Oswalds, Conrad's home at the time—Cyril Clemens, a cousin of Mark Twain—quoted Conrad as saying: "In everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's attention."
Conrad the artist famously aspired, in the words of his preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel... before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."
Writing in what to the visual arts was the age of Impressionism, and what to music was the age of impressionist music, Conrad showed himself in many of his works a prose poet of the highest order: for instance, in the evocative Patna and courtroom scenes of Lord Jim; in the scenes of the "melancholy-mad elephant" and the "French gunboat firing into a continent", in Heart of Darkness; in the doubled protagonists of The Secret Sharer; and in the verbal and conceptual resonances of Nostromo and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'.
Conrad used his own memories as literary material so often that readers are tempted to treat his life and work as a single whole. His "view of the world", or elements of it, is often described by citing at once both his private and public statements, passages from his letters, and citations from his books. Najder warns that this approach produces an incoherent and misleading picture. "An... uncritical linking of the two spheres, literature and private life, distorts each. Conrad used his own experiences as raw material, but the finished product should not be confused with the experiences themselves."
Many of Conrad's characters were inspired by actual persons he had met, including, in his first novel, Almayer's Folly (completed 1894), William Charles Olmeijer, the spelling of whose surname Conrad probably altered to "Almayer" inadvertently. The historic trader Olmeijer, whom Conrad encountered on his four short visits to Berau in Borneo, subsequently haunted Conrad's imagination. Conrad often borrowed the authentic names of actual individuals, e.g., Captain McWhirr (Typhoon), Captain Beard and Mr. Mahon ("Youth"), Captain Lingard (Almayer's Folly and elsewhere), and Captain Ellis (The Shadow Line). "Conrad", writes J. I. M. Stewart, "appears to have attached some mysterious significance to such links with actuality." Equally curious is "a great deal of namelessness in Conrad, requiring some minor virtuosity to maintain." Thus we never learn the surname of the protagonist of Lord Jim. Conrad also preserves, in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', the authentic name of the ship, the Narcissus, in which he sailed in 1884.
Apart from Conrad's own experiences, a number of episodes in his fiction were suggested by past or contemporary publicly known events or literary works. The first half of the 1900 novel Lord Jim (the Patna episode) was inspired by the real-life 1880 story of the ; the second part, to some extent by the life of James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak. The 1901 short story "Amy Foster" was inspired partly by an anecdote in Ford Madox Ford's The Cinque Ports (1900), wherein a shipwrecked sailor from a German merchant ship, unable to communicate in English, and driven away by the local country people, finally found shelter in a pigsty.
In Nostromo (completed 1904), the theft of a massive consignment of silver was suggested to Conrad by a story he had heard in the Gulf of Mexico and later read about in a "volume picked up outside a second-hand bookshop." The novel's political strand, according to Maya Jasanoff, is related to the creation of the Panama Canal. "In January 1903", she writes, "just as Conrad started writing Nostromo, the US and Colombian secretaries of state signed a treaty granting the United States a one-hundred-year renewable lease on a six-mile strip flanking the canal... While the [news]papers murmured about revolution in Colombia, Conrad opened a fresh section of Nostromo with hints of dissent in Costaguana", his fictional South American country. He plotted a revolution in the Costaguanan fictional port of Sulaco that mirrored the real-life secessionist movement brewing in Panama. When Conrad finished the novel on 1 September 1904, writes Jasanoff, "he left Sulaco in the condition of Panama. As Panama had gotten its independence instantly recognized by the United States and its economy bolstered by American investment in the canal, so Sulaco had its independence instantly recognized by the United States, and its economy underwritten by investment in the [fictional] San Tomé [silver] mine."
The Secret Agent (completed 1906) was inspired by the French anarchist Martial Bourdin's 1894 death while apparently attempting to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. Conrad's story "The Secret Sharer" (completed 1909) was inspired by an 1880 incident when Sydney Smith, first mate of the Cutty Sark, had killed a seaman and fled from justice, aided by the ship's captain. The plot of Under Western Eyes (completed 1910) is kicked off by the assassination of a brutal Russian government minister, modelled after the real-life 1904 assassination of Russian Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve. The near-novella "Freya of the Seven Isles" (completed in March 1911) was inspired by a story told to Conrad by a Malaya old hand and fan of Conrad's, Captain Carlos M. Marris.
For the natural surroundings of the high seas, the Malay Archipelago and South America, which Conrad described so vividly, he could rely on his own observations. What his brief landfalls could not provide was a thorough understanding of exotic cultures. For this he resorted, like other writers, to literary sources. When writing his Malayan stories, he consulted Alfred Russel Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (1869), James Brooke's journals, and books with titles like Perak and the Malays, My Journal in Malayan Waters, and Life in the Forests of the Far East. When he set about writing his novel Nostromo, set in the fictional South American country of Costaguana, he turned to The War between Peru and Chile; Edward Eastwick, Venezuela: or, Sketches of Life in a South American Republic (1868); and George Frederick Masterman, Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay (1869). As a result of relying on literary sources, in Lord Jim, as J. I. M. Stewart writes, Conrad's "need to work to some extent from second-hand" led to "a certain thinness in Jim's relations with the... peoples... of Patusan..." This prompted Conrad at some points to alter the nature of Charles Marlow's narrative to "distanc[e] an uncertain command of the detail of Tuan Jim's empire."
In keeping with his scepticism and melancholy, Conrad almost invariably gives lethal fates to the characters in his principal novels and stories. Almayer (Almayer's Folly, 1894), abandoned by his beloved daughter, takes to opium, and dies. Peter Willems (An Outcast of the Islands, 1895) is killed by his jealous lover Aïssa. The ineffectual "Nigger", James Wait (The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', 1897), dies aboard ship and is buried at sea. Mr. Kurtz (Heart of Darkness, 1899) expires, uttering the words, "The horror! The horror!" Tuan Jim (Lord Jim, 1900), having inadvertently precipitated a massacre of his adoptive community, deliberately walks to his death at the hands of the community's leader. In Conrad's 1901 short story, "Amy Foster", a Pole transplanted to England, Yanko Goorall (an English transliteration of the Polish Janko Góral, "Johnny Highlander"), falls ill and, suffering from a fever, raves in his native language, frightening his wife Amy, who flees; next morning Yanko dies of heart failure, and it transpires that he had simply been asking in Polish for water. Captain Whalley (The End of the Tether, 1902), betrayed by failing eyesight and an unscrupulous partner, drowns himself. Gian' Battista Fidanza, the eponymous respected Italian-immigrant Nostromo () of the novel Nostromo (1904), illicitly obtains a treasure of silver mined in the South American country of "Costaguana" and is shot dead due to mistaken identity. Mr. Verloc, The Secret Agent (1906) of divided loyalties, attempts a bombing, to be blamed on terrorists, that accidentally kills his mentally defective brother-in-law Stevie, and Verloc himself is killed by his distraught wife, who drowns herself by jumping overboard from a channel steamer. In Chance (1913), Roderick Anthony, a sailing-ship captain, and benefactor and husband of Flora de Barral, becomes the target of a poisoning attempt by her jealous disgraced financier father who, when detected, swallows the poison himself and dies (some years later, Captain Anthony drowns at sea). In Victory (1915), Lena is shot dead by Jones, who had meant to kill his accomplice Ricardo and later succeeds in doing so, then himself perishes along with another accomplice, after which Lena's protector Axel Heyst sets fire to his bungalow and dies beside Lena's body.
When a principal character of Conrad's does escape with his life, he sometimes does not fare much better. In Under Western Eyes (1911), Razumov betrays a fellow University of St. Petersburg student, the revolutionist Victor Haldin, who has assassinated a savagely repressive Russian government minister. Haldin is tortured and hanged by the authorities. Later Razumov, sent as a government spy to Geneva, a centre of anti-tsarist intrigue, meets the mother and sister of Haldin, who share Haldin's liberal convictions. Razumov falls in love with the sister and confesses his betrayal of her brother; later, he makes the same avowal to assembled revolutionists, and their professional executioner bursts his eardrums, making him deaf for life. Razumov staggers away, is knocked down by a streetcar, and finally returns as a cripple to Russia.
Conrad was keenly conscious of tragedy in the world and in his works. In 1898, at the start of his writing career, he had written to his Scottish writer-politician friend Cunninghame Graham: "What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. [A]s soon as you know of your slavery the pain, the anger, the strife—the tragedy begins." But in 1922, near the end of his life and career, when another Scottish friend, Richard Curle, sent Conrad proofs of two articles he had written about Conrad, the latter objected to being characterised as a gloomy and tragic writer. "That reputation... has deprived me of innumerable readers... I absolutely object to being called a tragedian."
Conrad claimed that he "never kept a diary and never owned a notebook." John Galsworthy, who knew him well, described this as "a statement which surprised no one who knew the resources of his memory and the brooding nature of his creative spirit." Nevertheless, after Conrad's death, Richard Curle published a heavily modified version of Conrad's diaries describing his experiences in the Congo; in 1978 a more complete version was published as The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces. The first accurate transcription was published in Robert Hampson's Penguin edition of Heart of Darkness in 1995; Hampson's transcription and annotations were reprinted in the Penguin edition of 2007.
Unlike many authors who make it a point not to discuss work in progress, Conrad often did discuss his current work and even showed it to select friends and fellow authors, such as Edward Garnett, and sometimes modified it in the light of their critiques and suggestions.
Edward Said was struck by the sheer quantity of Conrad's correspondence with friends and fellow writers; by 1966, it "amount[ed] to eight published volumes". Said comments: "[I]t seemed to me that if Conrad wrote of himself, of the problem of self-definition, with such sustained urgency, some of what he wrote must have had meaning for his fiction. [I]t [was] difficult to believe that a man would be so uneconomical as to pour himself out in letter after letter and then not use and reformulate his insights and discoveries in his fiction." Said found especially close parallels between Conrad's letters and his shorter fiction. "Conrad... believed... that artistic distinction was more tellingly demonstrated in a shorter rather than a longer work.... He believed that his [own] life was like a series of short episodes... because he was himself so many different people...: he was a Pole and an Englishman, a sailor and a writer." Another scholar, Najder, writes:
Conrad borrowed from other, Polish- and French-language authors, to an extent sometimes skirting plagiarism. When the Polish translation of his 1915 novel Victory appeared in 1931, readers noted striking similarities to Stefan Żeromski's kitschy novel, The History of a Sin (Dzieje grzechu, 1908), including their endings. Comparative-literature scholar Yves Hervouet has demonstrated in the text of Victory a whole mosaic of influences, borrowings, similarities and allusions. He further lists hundreds of concrete borrowings from other, mostly French authors in nearly all of Conrad's works, from Almayer's Folly (1895) to his unfinished Suspense. Conrad seems to have used eminent writers' texts as raw material of the same kind as the content of his own memory. Materials borrowed from other authors often functioned as allusions. Moreover, he had a phenomenal memory for texts and remembered details, "but [writes Najder] it was not a memory strictly categorized according to sources, marshalled into homogeneous entities; it was, rather, an enormous receptacle of images and pieces from which he would draw."
Continues Najder: "[H]e can never be accused of outright plagiarism. Even when lifting sentences and scenes, Conrad changed their character, inserted them within novel structures. He did not imitate, but (as Hervouet says) 'continued' his masters. He was right in saying: 'I don't resemble anybody.' Ian Watt put it succinctly: 'In a sense, Conrad is the least derivative of writers; he wrote very little that could possibly be mistaken for the work of anyone else.' Conrad's acquaintance George Bernard Shaw says it well: "[A] man can no more be completely original [...] than a tree can grow out of air."
Conrad, like other artists, faced constraints arising from the need to propitiate his audience and confirm their own favourable self-regard. This may account for his describing the admirable crew of the Judea in his 1898 story "Youth" as "Liverpool hard cases", whereas the crew of the Judea'''s actual 1882 prototype, the Palestine, had included not a single Liverpudlian, and half the crew had been non-Britons; and for Conrad's transforming the real-life 1880 criminally negligent British captain J. L. Clark, of the , in his 1900 novel Lord Jim, into the captain of the fictitious Patna—"a sort of renegade New South Wales German" so monstrous in physical appearance as to suggest "a trained baby elephant". Similarly, in his letters Conrad—during most of his literary career, struggling for sheer financial survival—often adjusted his views to the predilections of his correspondents.
Historians have also noted that Conrad's works which were set in European colonies and intended to critique the effects of colonialism were set in Dutch and Belgian colonies, instead of the British Empire.
The singularity of the universe depicted in Conrad's novels, especially compared to those of near-contemporaries like his friend and frequent benefactor John Galsworthy, is such as to open him to criticism similar to that later applied to Graham Greene. But where "Greeneland" has been characterised as a recurring and recognisable atmosphere independent of setting, Conrad is at pains to create a sense of place, be it aboard ship or in a remote village; often he chose to have his characters play out their destinies in isolated or confined circumstances. In the view of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, it was not until the first volumes of Anthony Powell's sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, were published in the 1950s, that an English novelist achieved the same command of atmosphere and precision of language with consistency, a view supported by later critics like A. N. Wilson; Powell acknowledged his debt to Conrad. Leo Gurko, too, remarks, as "one of Conrad's special qualities, his abnormal awareness of place, an awareness magnified to almost a new dimension in art, an ecological dimension defining the relationship between earth and man."
T. E. Lawrence, one of many writers whom Conrad befriended, offered some perceptive observations about Conrad's writing:
The Irish novelist-poet-critic Colm Tóibín captures something similar:
In a letter of 14 December 1897 to his Scottish friend, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, Conrad wrote that science tells us, "Understand that thou art nothing, less than a shadow, more insignificant than a drop of water in the ocean, more fleeting than the illusion of a dream."
In a letter of 20 December 1897 to Cunninghame Graham, Conrad metaphorically described the universe as a huge machine:
Conrad wrote Cunninghame Graham on 31 January 1898:
Leo Robson suggests that
According to Robson,
Language
Conrad spoke his native Polish and the French language fluently from childhood and only acquired English in his twenties. He would probably have spoken some Ukrainian as a child (if only to servants); he certainly had to have some knowledge of German and Russian. His son Borys records that, though Conrad had insisted that he spoke only a few words of German, when they reached the Austrian frontier in the family's attempt to leave Poland in 1914, Conrad spoke German "at considerable length and extreme fluency". Russia, Prussia, and Austria had divided up Poland among them, and he was officially a Russian subject until his naturalization as a British subject. As a result, up to this point, his official documents were in Russian. His knowledge of Russian was good enough that his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski wrote him (22 May 1893) advising that, when Conrad came to visit, he should "telegraph for horses, but in Russian, for Oratów doesn't receive or accept messages in an 'alien' language."
Conrad chose, however, to write his fiction in English. He says in his preface to A Personal Record that writing in English was for him "natural", and that the idea of his having made a deliberate choice between English and French, as some had suggested, was in error. He explained that, though he had been familiar with French from childhood, "I would have been afraid to attempt expression in a language so perfectly 'crystallized'." In 1915, as Jo Davidson sculpted his bust, Conrad answered his question: "Ah… to write French you have to know it. English is so plastic—if you haven't got a word you need you can make it, but to write French you have to be an artist like Anatole France." These statements, as so often in Conrad's "autobiographical" writings, are subtly disingenuous. In 1897 Conrad was visited by a fellow Pole, the philosopher Wincenty Lutosławski, who asked Conrad, "Why don't you write in Polish?" Lutosławski recalled Conrad explaining: "I value our beautiful Polish literature too much to bring into it my clumsy efforts. But for the English my gifts are sufficient and secure my daily bread."
Conrad wrote in A Personal Record that English was "the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions—of my very dreams!" In 1878 Conrad's four-year experience in the French merchant marine had been cut short when the French discovered he did not have a permit from the Imperial Russian consul to sail with the French. This, and some typically disastrous Conradian investments, had left him destitute and had precipitated a suicide attempt. With the concurrence of his mentor-uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, who had been summoned to Marseilles, Conrad decided to seek employment with the British merchant marine, which did not require Russia's permission. Thus began Conrad's sixteen years' seafarer's acquaintance with the British and with the English language.
Had Conrad remained in the Francophone sphere or had he returned to Poland, the son of the Polish poet, playwright, and translator Apollo Korzeniowski—from childhood exposed to Polish and foreign literature, and ambitious to himself become a writer—he might have ended writing in French or Polish instead of English. Certainly his Uncle Tadeusz thought Conrad might write in Polish; in an 1881 letter he advised his 23-year-old nephew:
In the opinion of some biographers, Conrad's third language, English, remained under the influence of his first two languages—Polish and French. This makes his English seem unusual. Najder writes that:
Inevitably for a trilingual Polish–French–English-speaker, Conrad's writings occasionally show linguistic spillover: "Franglais" or "Poglish"—the inadvertent use of French or Polish vocabulary, grammar, or syntax in his English writings. In one instance, Najder uses "several slips in vocabulary, typical for Conrad (Gallicisms) and grammar (usually Polonisms)" as part of internal evidence against Conrad's sometime literary collaborator Ford Madox Ford's claim to have written a certain instalment of Conrad's novel Nostromo, for publication in T. P.'s Weekly, on behalf of an ill Conrad.
The impracticality of working with a language which has long ceased to be one's principal language of daily use is illustrated by Conrad's 1921 attempt at translating into English the Polish physicist, columnist, story-writer, and comedy-writer Bruno Winawer's short play, The Book of Job. Najder writes:
As a practical matter, by the time Conrad set about writing fiction, he had little choice but to write in English. Poles who accused Conrad of cultural apostasy because he wrote in English instead of Polish missed the point—as do Anglophones who see, in Conrad's default choice of English as his artistic medium, a testimonial to some sort of innate superiority of the English language.
According to Conrad's close friend and literary assistant Richard Curle, the fact of Conrad writing in English was "obviously misleading" because Conrad "is no more completely English in his art than he is in his nationality". Conrad, according to Curle, "could never have written in any other language save the English language....for he would have been dumb in any other language but the English."
Conrad always retained a strong emotional attachment to his native language. He asked his visiting Polish niece Karola Zagórska, "Will you forgive me that my sons don't speak Polish?" In June 1924, shortly before his death, he apparently expressed a desire that his son John marry a Polish girl and learn Polish, and toyed with the idea of returning for good to now independent Poland.
Conrad bridled at being referred to as a Russian or "Slavonic" writer. The only Russian writer he admired was Ivan Turgenev. "The critics", he wrote an acquaintance on 31 January 1924, six months before his death, "detected in me a new note and as, just when I began to write, they had discovered the existence of Russian authors, they stuck that label on me under the name of Slavonism. What I venture to say is that it would have been more just to charge me at most with Polonism." However, though Conrad protested that Dostoyevsky was "too Russian for me" and that Russian literature generally was "repugnant to me hereditarily and individually", Under Western Eyes is viewed as Conrad's response to the themes explored in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.
Controversy
In 1975 the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe published an essay, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'", which provoked controversy by calling Conrad a "thoroughgoing racist". Achebe's view was that Heart of Darkness cannot be considered a great work of art because it is "a novel which celebrates... dehumanisation, which depersonalises a portion of the human race." Referring to Conrad as a "talented, tormented man", Achebe notes that Conrad (via the protagonist, Charles Marlow) reduces and degrades Africans to "limbs", "ankles", "glistening white eyeballs", etc., while simultaneously (and fearfully) suspecting a common kinship between himself and these natives—leading Marlow to sneer the word "ugly." Achebe also cited Conrad's description of an encounter with an African: "A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days." Achebe's essay, a landmark in postcolonial discourse, provoked debate, and the questions it raised have been addressed in most subsequent literary criticism of Conrad.
Achebe's critics argue that he fails to distinguish Marlow's view from Conrad's, which results in very clumsy interpretations of the novella. In their view, Conrad portrays Africans sympathetically and their plight tragically, and refers sarcastically to, and condemns outright, the supposedly noble aims of European colonists, thereby demonstrating his skepticism about the moral superiority of white men. Ending a passage that describes the condition of chained, emaciated slaves, the novelist remarks: "After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings." Some observers assert that Conrad, whose native country had been conquered by imperial powers, empathised by default with other subjugated peoples. Jeffrey Meyers notes that Conrad, like his acquaintance Roger Casement, "was one of the first men to question the Western notion of progress, a dominant idea in Europe from the Renaissance to the Great War, to attack the hypocritical justification of colonialism and to reveal... the savage degradation of the white man in Africa." Likewise, E.D. Morel, who led international opposition to King Leopold II's rule in the Congo, saw Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a condemnation of colonial brutality and referred to the novella as "the most powerful thing written on the subject."
Conrad scholar Peter Firchow writes that "nowhere in the novel does Conrad or any of his narrators, personified or otherwise, claim superiority on the part of Europeans on the grounds of alleged genetic or biological difference." If Conrad or his novel is racist, it is only in a weak sense, since Heart of Darkness acknowledges racial distinctions "but does not suggest an essential superiority" of any group. Achebe's reading of Heart of Darkness can be (and has been) challenged by a reading of Conrad's other African story, "An Outpost of Progress", which has an omniscient narrator, rather than the embodied narrator, Marlow. Some younger scholars, such as Masood Ashraf Raja, have also suggested that if we read Conrad beyond Heart of Darkness, especially his Malay novels, racism can be further complicated by foregrounding Conrad's positive representation of Muslims.
In 1998 H.S. Zins wrote in Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies:
Adam Hochschild makes a similar point:
Conrad's experience in the Belgian-run Congo made him one of the fiercest critics of the "white man's mission." It was also, writes Najder, Conrad's most daring and last "attempt to become a homo socialis, a cog in the mechanism of society. By accepting the job in the trading company, he joined, for once in his life, an organized, large-scale group activity on land.... It is not accidental that the Congo expedition remained an isolated event in Conrad's life. Until his death he remained a recluse in the social sense and never became involved with any institution or clearly defined group of people."
Citizenship
Conrad was a Russian subject, having been born in the Russian part of what had once been the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. After his father's death, Conrad's uncle Bobrowski had attempted to secure Austrian citizenship for him—to no avail, probably because Conrad had not received permission from Russian authorities to remain abroad permanently and had not been released from being a Russian subject. Conrad could not return to Ukraine, in the Russian Empire—he would have been liable to many years' military service and, as the son of political exiles, to harassment.
In a letter of 9 August 1877, Conrad's uncle Bobrowski broached two important subjects: the desirability of Conrad's naturalisation abroad (tantamount to release from being a Russian subject) and Conrad's plans to join the British merchant marine. "[D]o you speak English?... I never wished you to become naturalized in France, mainly because of the compulsory military service... I thought, however, of your getting naturalized in Switzerland..." In his next letter, Bobrowski supported Conrad's idea of seeking citizenship of the United States or of "one of the more important Southern [American] Republics".
Eventually Conrad would make his home in England. On 2 July 1886 he applied for British nationality, which was granted on 19 August 1886. Yet, in spite of having become a subject of Queen Victoria, Conrad had not ceased to be a subject of Tsar Alexander III. To achieve his freedom from that subjection, he had to make many visits to the Russian Embassy in London and politely reiterate his request. He would later recall the Embassy's home at Belgrave Square in his novel The Secret Agent. Finally, on 2 April 1889, the Russian Ministry of Home Affairs released "the son of a Polish man of letters, captain of the British merchant marine" from the status of Russian subject.
Memorials
An anchor-shaped monument to Conrad at Gdynia, on Poland's Baltic Seacoast, features a quotation from him in Polish: "Nic tak nie nęci, nie rozczarowuje i nie zniewala, jak życie na morzu" ("[T]here is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea" – Lord Jim, chapter 2, paragraph 1).
In Circular Quay, Sydney, Australia, a plaque in a "writers walk" commemorates Conrad's visits to Australia between 1879 and 1892. The plaque notes that "Many of his works reflect his 'affection for that young continent.'"
In San Francisco in 1979, a small triangular square at Columbus Avenue and Beach Street, near Fisherman's Wharf, was dedicated as "Joseph Conrad Square" after Conrad. The square's dedication was timed to coincide with release of Francis Ford Coppola's Heart of Darkness-inspired film, Apocalypse Now. Conrad does not appear to have ever visited San Francisco.
In the latter part of World War II, the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Danae was rechristened ORP Conrad and served as part of the Polish Navy.
Notwithstanding the undoubted sufferings that Conrad endured on many of his voyages, sentimentality and canny marketing place him at the best lodgings in several of his destinations. Hotels across the Far East still lay claim to him as an honoured guest, with, however, no evidence to back their claims: Singapore's Raffles Hotel continues to claim he stayed there though he lodged, in fact, at the Sailors' Home nearby. His visit to Bangkok also remains in that city's collective memory, and is recorded in the official history of The Oriental Hotel (where he never, in fact, stayed, lodging aboard his ship, the Otago) along with that of a less well-behaved guest, Somerset Maugham, who pilloried the hotel in a short story in revenge for attempts to eject him.
A plaque commemorating "Joseph Conrad–Korzeniowski" has been installed near Singapore's Fullerton Hotel.
Conrad is also reported to have stayed at Hong Kong's Peninsula Hotel—at a port that, in fact, he never visited. Later literary admirers, notably Graham Greene, followed closely in his footsteps, sometimes requesting the same room and perpetuating myths that have no basis in fact. No Caribbean resort is yet known to have claimed Conrad's patronage, although he is believed to have stayed at a Fort-de-France pension upon arrival in Martinique on his first voyage, in 1875, when he travelled as a passenger on the Mont Blanc.
In April 2013, a monument to Conrad was unveiled in the Russian town of Vologda, where he and his parents lived in exile in 1862–63. The monument was removed, with unclear explanation, in June 2016.
Legacy
After the publication of Chance in 1913, Conrad was the subject of more discussion and praise than any other English writer of the time. He had a genius for companionship, and his circle of friends, which he had begun assembling even prior to his first publications, included authors and other leading lights in the arts, such as Henry James, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, John Galsworthy, Edward Garnett, Garnett's wife Constance Garnett (translator of Russian literature), Stephen Crane, Hugh Walpole, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells (whom Conrad dubbed "the historian of the ages to come"), Arnold Bennett, Norman Douglas, Jacob Epstein, T. E. Lawrence, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Maurice Ravel, Valery Larbaud, Saint-John Perse, Edith Wharton, James Huneker, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, Józef Retinger (later a founder of the European Movement, which led to the European Union, and author of Conrad and His Contemporaries). In the early 1900s Conrad composed a short series of novels in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford.
In 1919 and 1922 Conrad's growing renown and prestige among writers and critics in continental Europe fostered his hopes for a Nobel Prize in Literature. It was apparently the French and Swedes—not the English—who favoured Conrad's candidacy.
In April 1924 Conrad, who possessed a hereditary Polish status of nobility and coat-of-arms (Nałęcz), declined a (non-hereditary) British knighthood offered by Labour Party Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. Conrad kept a distance from official structures—he never voted in British national elections—and seems to have been averse to public honours generally; he had already refused honorary degrees from Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Yale universities.
In the Polish People's Republic, translations of Conrad's works were openly published, except for Under Western Eyes, which in the 1980s was published as an underground "bibuła".
Conrad's narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including T. S. Eliot, Maria Dąbrowska, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Gerald Basil Edwards, Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, André Malraux, George Orwell, Graham Greene, William Golding, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Gabriel García Márquez, Peter Matthiessen, John le Carré, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie. Many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's works.
Impressions
A striking portrait of Conrad, aged about 46, was drawn by the historian and poet Henry Newbolt, who met him about 1903:
On 12 October 1912, American music critic James Huneker visited Conrad and later recalled being received by "a man of the world, neither sailor nor novelist, just a simple-mannered gentleman, whose welcome was sincere, whose glance was veiled, at times far-away, whose ways were French, Polish, anything but 'literary,' bluff or English."
After respective separate visits to Conrad in August and September 1913, two British aristocrats, the socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell and the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell—who were lovers at the time—recorded their impressions of the novelist. In her diary, Morrell wrote:
A month later, Bertrand Russell visited Conrad at Capel House in Orlestone, and the same day on the train wrote down his impressions:
Russell's Autobiography, published over half a century later in 1968, confirms his original experience:
It was not only Anglophones who remarked Conrad's strong foreign accent when speaking English. After French poet Paul Valéry and French composer Maurice Ravel made Conrad's acquaintance in December 1922, Valéry wrote in 1924 of having been astonished at Conrad's "horrible" accent in English.
The subsequent friendship and correspondence between Conrad and Russell lasted, with long intervals, to the end of Conrad's life. In one letter, Conrad avowed his "deep admiring affection, which, if you were never to see me again and forget my existence tomorrow will be unalterably yours usque ad finem." Conrad in his correspondence often used the Latin expression meaning "to the very end", which he seems to have adopted from his faithful guardian, mentor and benefactor, his maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski.
Conrad looked with less optimism than Russell on the possibilities of scientific and philosophic knowledge. In a 1913 letter to acquaintances who had invited Conrad to join their society, he reiterated his belief that it was impossible to understand the essence of either reality or life: both science and art penetrate no further than the outer shapes.
Najder describes Conrad as "[a]n alienated émigré... haunted by a sense of the unreality of other people – a feeling natural to someone living outside the established structures of family, social milieu, and country".
Conrad's sense of loneliness throughout his exile's life found memorable expression in the 1901 short story, "Amy Foster".
Works
NovelsAlmayer's Folly (1895)An Outcast of the Islands (1896)The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897)Heart of Darkness (1899)Lord Jim (1900)The Inheritors (with Ford Madox Ford) (1901)Typhoon (1902, begun 1899)The End of the Tether (written in 1902; collected in Youth, a Narrative and Two Other Stories, 1902)Romance (with Ford Madox Ford, 1903)Nostromo (1904)The Secret Agent (1907)Under Western Eyes (1911)Chance (1913)Victory (1915)The Shadow Line (1917)The Arrow of Gold (1919)The Rescue (1920)The Nature of a Crime (1923, with Ford Madox Ford)The Rover (1923)Suspense (1925; unfinished, published posthumously)
Stories
"The Black Mate": written, according to Conrad, in 1886; may be counted as his opus double zero; published 1908; posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, 1925.
"The Idiots": Conrad's truly first short story, which may be counted as his opus zero; written during his honeymoon (1896), published in The Savoy periodical, 1896, and collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898.
"The Lagoon": composed 1896; published in Cornhill Magazine, 1897; collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898: "It is the first short story I ever wrote."
"An Outpost of Progress": written 1896; published in Cosmopolis, 1897, and collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898: "My next [second] effort in short-story writing"; it shows numerous thematic affinities with Heart of Darkness; in 1906, Conrad described it as his "best story".
"The Return": completed early 1897, while writing "Karain"; never published in magazine form; collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898: "[A]ny kind word about 'The Return' (and there have been such words said at different times) awakens in me the liveliest gratitude, for I know how much the writing of that fantasy has cost me in sheer toil, in temper, and in disillusion." Conrad, who suffered while writing this psychological chef-d'oeuvre of introspection, once remarked: "I hate it."
"Karain: A Memory": written February–April 1897; published November 1897 in Blackwood's Magazine and collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898: "my third short story in... order of time".
"Youth": written 1898; collected in Youth, a Narrative, and Two Other Stories, 1902
"Falk": novella / story, written early 1901; collected only in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903
"Amy Foster": composed 1901; published in the Illustrated London News, December 1901, and collected in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903.
"To-morrow": written early 1902; serialised in The Pall Mall Magazine, 1902, and collected in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903
"Gaspar Ruiz": written after Nostromo in 1904–5; published in The Strand Magazine, 1906, and collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US). This story was the only piece of Conrad's fiction ever adapted by the author for cinema, as Gaspar the Strong Man, 1920.
"An Anarchist": written late 1905; serialised in Harper's Magazine, 1906; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US)
"The Informer": written before January 1906; published, December 1906, in Harper's Magazine, and collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US)
"The Brute": written early 1906; published in The Daily Chronicle, December 1906; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US)
"The Duel: A Military Story": serialised in the UK in The Pall Mall Magazine, early 1908, and later that year in the US as "The Point of Honor", in the periodical Forum; collected in A Set of Six in 1908 and published by Garden City Publishing in 1924. Joseph Fouché makes a cameo appearance.
"Il Conde" (i.e., "Conte" [The Count]): appeared in Cassell's Magazine (UK), 1908, and Hamptons (US), 1909; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US)
"The Secret Sharer": written December 1909; published in Harper's Magazine, 1910, and collected in Twixt Land and Sea, 1912
"Prince Roman": written 1910, published 1911 in The Oxford and Cambridge Review; posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, 1925; based on the story of Prince Roman Sanguszko of Poland (1800–81)
"A Smile of Fortune": a long story, almost a novella, written in mid-1910; published in London Magazine, February 1911; collected in Twixt Land and Sea, 1912
"Freya of the Seven Isles": a near-novella, written late 1910–early 1911; published in The Metropolitan Magazine and London Magazine, early 1912 and July 1912, respectively; collected in Twixt Land and Sea, 1912
"The Partner": written 1911; published in Within the Tides, 1915
"The Inn of the Two Witches": written 1913; published in Within the Tides, 1915
"Because of the Dollars": written 1914; published in Within the Tides, 1915
"The Planter of Malata": written 1914; published in Within the Tides, 1915
"The Warrior's Soul": written late 1915–early 1916; published in Land and Water, March 1917; collected in Tales of Hearsay, 1925
"The Tale": Conrad's only story about World War I; written 1916, first published 1917 in The Strand Magazine; posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, 1925
Essays
"Autocracy and War" (1905)
The Mirror of the Sea (collection of autobiographical essays first published in various magazines 1904–06), 1906
A Personal Record (also published as Some Reminiscences), 1912
The First News, 1918
The Lesson of the Collision: A monograph upon the loss of the "Empress of Ireland", 1919
The Polish Question, 1919
The Shock of War, 1919
Notes on Life and Letters, 1921
Notes on My Books, 1921
Last Essays, edited by Richard Curle, 1926
The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces, edited by Zdzisław Najder, 1978,
Adaptations
A number of works in various genres and media have been based on, or inspired by, Conrad's writings, including:
Cinema
Victory (1919), directed by Maurice Tourneur
Gaspar the Strong Man (1920), adapted from Gaspar Ruiz by the author
Lord Jim (1925), directed by Victor Fleming
Niebezpieczny raj (Dangerous Paradise, 1930), a Polish adaptation of Victory Dangerous Paradise (1930), an adaptation of Victory directed by William Wellman
Sabotage (1936), adapted from Conrad's The Secret Agent, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Victory (1940), featuring Fredric March
An Outcast of the Islands (1952), directed by Carol Reed and featuring Trevor Howard
Lord Jim (1965), directed by Richard Brooks and starring Peter O'Toole
The Rover (1967), adaptation of the novel The Rover (1923), directed by Terence Young, featuring Anthony Quinn
La ligne d'ombre (1973), a TV adaptation of The Shadow Line by Georges Franju
Smuga cienia (The Shadow Line, 1976), a Polish-British adaptation of The Shadow Line, directed by Andrzej Wajda
The Duellists (1977), an adaptation of The Duel by Ridley Scott
Naufragio (1977), a Mexican adaptation of Tomorrow directed by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo
Apocalypse Now (1979), by Francis Ford Coppola, adapted from Heart of Darkness Un reietto delle isole (1980), by Giorgio Moser, an Italian adaptation of An Outcast of the Islands, starring Maria Carta
Victory (1995), adapted by director Mark Peploe from the novel
The Secret Agent (1996), starring Bob Hoskins, Patricia Arquette and Gérard Depardieu
Swept from the Sea (1997), an adaptation of Amy Foster directed by Beeban Kidron
Gabrielle (2005) directed by Patrice Chéreau. Adaptation of the short story "The Return" (1898), starring Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory.
Hanyut (2011), a Malaysian adaptation of Almayer's Folly Almayer's Folly (2011), directed by Chantal Akerman
Secret Sharer (2014), inspired by "The Secret Sharer", directed by Peter Fudakowski
The Young One (2016), an adaptation of the short story "Youth", directed by Julien Samani
An Outpost of Progress (2016), an adaptation of the short story "An Outpost of Progress", directed by Hugo Vieira da Silva
Television
Heart of Darkness (1958), a CBS 90-minute loose adaption on the anthology show Playhouse 90, starring Roddy McDowall, Boris Karloff, and Eartha Kitt
Nostromo (1997), a BBC TV adaptation, co-produced with Italian and Spanish TV networks and WGBH Boston
The Secret Agent (1992 TV series) and The Secret Agent (2016 TV series), BBC TV series adapted from the novel The Secret Agent
Heart of Darkness (1993) a TNT feature-length adaptation, directed by Nicolas Roeg, starring John Malkovich and Tim Roth; also released on VHS and DVD
Operas
Heart of Darkness (2011), a chamber opera in one act by Tarik O'Regan, with an English-language libretto by artist Tom Phillips.
Orchestral works
Suite from Heart of Darkness (2013) for orchestra and narrator by Tarik O'Regan, extrapolated from the 2011 opera of the same name.
Video games
Spec Ops: The Line (2012) by Yager Development, inspired by Heart of Darkness.
See also
Bolesław Prus
King Leopold's Ghost
Alice Sarah Kinkead
List of Poles
List of covers of Time magazine (1920s) – 7 April 1923
ORP Conrad – a World War II Polish Navy cruiser named after Joseph Conrad.
Politics in fiction
Stefan Bobrowski, one of Conrad's maternal uncles; like Conrad's father, a "Red"-faction political leader.
Notes
References
Sources
Taborski, Roman (1969), "Korzeniowski, Apollo", Polski słownik biograficzny, vol. XIV, Wrocław, Polska Akademia Nauk, pp. 167–69.
Secondary sources (bibliography)
Gérard Jean-Aubry, Vie de Conrad (Life of Conrad – the authorised biography), Gallimard, 1947, translated by Helen Sebba as The Sea Dreamer: A Definitive Biography of Joseph Conrad, New York, Doubleday & Co., 1957.
Borys Conrad, My Father: Joseph Conrad, Calder & Boyars, 1970.
Peter Edgerly Firchow, Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
Robert Hampson, Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction, Palgrave, 2000.
Robert Hampson, Conrad's Secrets, Palgrave, 2012.
Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad, Reaktion Books, 2020.
Alex Kurczaba, ed., Conrad and Poland, Boulder, East European Monographs, 1996, .
C. McCarthy, The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Zdzisław Najder, "Korzeniowski, Józef Teodor Konrad", Polski Słownik Biograficzny, tom (vol.) XIV (Kopernicki, Izydor – Kozłowska, Maria), Wrocław, Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossolińskich, Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1968–1969, pp. 173–76.
Mario Pei, The Story of Language, with an Introduction by Stuart Berg Flexner, revised ed., New York, New American Library, 1984, .
Joseph Retinger, Conrad and His Contemporaries, London: Minerva, 1941; New York: Roy, 1942.
Edward W. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1966.
Edward W. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, 2008 ed., New York, Columbia University Press, .
T. Scovel, A Time to Speak: a Psycholinguistic Inquiry into the Critical Period for Human Speech, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Newbury House, 1988.
J. H. Stape, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, New York, Pantheon, 2007, .
J. I. M. Stewart, Joseph Conrad, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1968.
Krystyna Tokarzówna, Stanisław Fita (Zygmunt Szweykowski, ed.), Bolesław Prus, 1847–1912: Kalendarz życia i twórczości (Bolesław Prus, 1847–1912: a Calendar of His Life and Work), Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1969.
Ian Watt (2000) Essays on Conrad. Cambridge University Press. ,
Olivier Weber, Conrad, Arthaud-Flammarion, 2011.
Wise, T.J. (1920) A Bibliography of the Writings of Joseph Conrad (1895–1920). London: Printed for Private Circulation Only By Richard Clay & Sons, Ltd.
Morton Dauwen Zabel, "Conrad, Joseph", Encyclopedia Americana, 1986 ed., , vol. 7, pp. 606–07.
Further reading
Anna Gąsienica Byrcyn, review of G. W. Stephen Brodsky, Joseph Conrad's Polish Soul: Realms of Memory and Self, edited with an introduction by George Z. Gasyna (Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives Series, vol. 25, edited by Wiesław Krajka), Lublin, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University Press, 2016, , in The Polish Review, vol. 63, no. 4, 2018, pp. 103–5. "Brodsky reflects on the significance of Conrad's Polish mind and spirit that imbued his writings yet are often overlooked and hardly acknowledged by Western scholars.... [T]he author... belong[ed] to the ethnic Polish minority and gentry class in a borderland society [in Ukraine], making him an exile from his birth." (p. 104)
Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, Penguin, 2017.
External links
Sources
Works by Joseph Conrad at Conrad First, an archive of every newspaper and magazine in which the work of Joseph Conrad was first published.
Works by Joseph Conrad at The Online Books Page
Josep Conrad reviewed by H.L. Mencken: The Smart Set, July, 1921
Portals and biographies
The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Joseph Conrad Society of America
Biography of Joseph Conrad, at The Joseph Conrad Centre of Poland
Biography of Joseph Conrad, at The Literature Network
Literary criticism
Conrad's page at Literary Journal.com, a number of research articles on Conrad's work
Chinua Achebe: The Lecture Heard Around The World
Edward Said, "Between Worlds: Edward Said makes sense of his life", London Review of Books, vol. 20, no. 9, 7 May 1998, pp. 3–7.
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15824 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20Updike | John Updike | John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead), Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and the novella Rabbit Remembered), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1982) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were recognized with the Pulitzer Prize.
Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", Updike was recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific outputhe wrote on average a book a year. Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity".
His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans, its emphasis on Christian theology, and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail. His work has attracted significant critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered one of the great American writers of his time. Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice that describes the physical world extravagantly while remaining squarely in the realist tradition". He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due".
Early life and education
Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace (née Hoyer) and Wesley Russell Updike, and was raised in the nearby small town of Shillington. The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His mother's attempts to become a published writer impressed the young Updike. "One of my earliest memories", he later recalled, "is of seeing her at her desk ... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in—and come back in."
These early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania, would influence the environment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories. Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and received a full scholarship to Harvard College, where he was the roommate of Christopher Lasch during their first year. Updike had already received recognition for his writing as a teenager by winning a Scholastic Art & Writing Award, and at Harvard he soon became well known among his classmates as a talented and prolific contributor to The Harvard Lampoon, of which he was president. He studied with dramatist Robert Chapman, the director of Harvard's Loeb Drama Center. He graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Upon graduation, Updike attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford with the ambition of becoming a cartoonist. After returning to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. This was the beginning of his professional writing career.
Career as a writer
1950s
Updike stayed at The New Yorker as a full staff writer for only two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine. In New York, Updike wrote the poems and stories that came to fill his early books like The Carpentered Hen (1958) and The Same Door (1959). These works were influenced by Updike's early engagement with The New Yorker. This early work also featured the influence of J. D. Salinger ("A&P"); John Cheever ("Snowing in Greenwich Village"); and the Modernists Marcel Proust, Henry Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.
During this time, Updike underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of religious faith, he began reading Søren Kierkegaard and the theologian Karl Barth. Both deeply influenced his own religious beliefs, which in turn figured prominently in his fiction. Updike remained a believing Christian for the rest of his life.
1960s–1970s
Later, Updike and his family relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. Many commentators, including a columnist in the local Ipswich Chronicle, asserted that the fictional town of Tarbox in Couples was based on Ipswich. Updike denied the suggestion in a letter to the paper. Impressions of Updike's day-to-day life in Ipswich during the 1960s and 1970s are included in a letter to the same paper published soon after Updike's death and written by a friend and contemporary. In Ipswich, Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (1960), on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and The Centaur (1963), two of his most acclaimed and famous works; the latter won the National Book Award.
Rabbit, Run featured Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a former high school basketball star and middle-class paragon who would become Updike's most enduring and critically acclaimed character. Updike wrote three additional novels about him. Rabbit, Run was featured in Times All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.
Short stories
Updike's career and reputation were nurtured and expanded by his long association with The New Yorker, which published him frequently throughout his career, despite the fact that he had departed the magazine's employment after only two years. Updike's memoir indicates that he stayed in his "corner of New England to give its domestic news" with a focus on the American home from the point of view of a male writer. Updike's contract with the magazine gave it right of first offer for his short-story manuscripts, but William Shawn, The New Yorker's editor from 1952 to 1987, rejected several as too explicit.
The Maple short stories, collected in Too Far To Go (1979), reflected the ebb and flow of Updike's first marriage; "Separating" (1974) and "Here Come the Maples" (1976) related to his divorce. These stories also reflect the role of alcohol in 1970s America. They were the basis for the television movie also called Too Far To Go, broadcast by NBC in 1979.
Updike's short stories were collected in several volumes published by Alfred A. Knopf over five decades. In 2013, the Library of America issued a two-volume boxed edition of 186 stories under the title The Collected Stories.
Novels
In 1971, Updike published a sequel to Rabbit, Run called Rabbit Redux, his response to the 1960s; Rabbit reflected much of Updike's resentment and hostility towards the social and political changes that beset the United States during that time.
Updike's early Olinger period was set in the Pennsylvania of his youth; it ended around 1965 with the lyrical Of the Farm.
After his early novels, Updike became most famous for his chronicling infidelity, adultery, and marital unrest, especially in suburban America; and for his controversial depiction of the confusion and freedom inherent in this breakdown of social mores.
He once wrote that it was "a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me". The most prominent of Updike's novels of this vein is Couples (1968), a novel about adultery in a small fictional Massachusetts town called Tarbox. It garnered Updike an appearance on the cover of Time magazine with the headline "The Adulterous Society". Both the magazine article and, to an extent, the novel struck a chord of national concern over whether American society was abandoning all social standards of conduct in sexual matters.
The Coup (1978), a lauded novel about an African dictatorship inspired by a visit he made to Africa, found Updike working in new territory.
1980s–2000s
In 1980, he published another novel featuring Harry Angstrom, Rabbit Is Rich, which won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—all three major American literary prizes. The novel found "Rabbit the fat and happy owner of a Toyota dealership". Updike found it difficult to end the book, because he was "having so much fun" in the imaginary county Rabbit and his family inhabited.
After writing Rabbit Is Rich, Updike published The Witches of Eastwick (1984), a playful novel about witches living in Rhode Island. He described it as an attempt to "make things right with my, what shall we call them, feminist detractors". One of Updike's most popular novels, it was adapted as a film and included on Harold Bloom's list of canonical 20th-century literature (in The Western Canon). In 2008 Updike published The Widows of Eastwick, a return to the witches in their old age. It was his last published novel.
In 1986, he published the unconventional novel Roger's Version, the second volume of the so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy, about an attempt to prove God's existence using a computer program. Author and critic Martin Amis called it a "near-masterpiece". The novel S. (1989), uncharacteristically featuring a female protagonist, concluded Updike's reworking of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.
Updike enjoyed working in series; in addition to the Rabbit novels and the Maples stories, a recurrent Updike alter ego is the moderately well-known, unprolific Jewish novelist and eventual Nobel laureate Henry Bech, chronicled in three comic short-story cycles: Bech, a Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1981) and Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998). These stories were compiled as The Complete Henry Bech (2001) by Everyman's Library. Bech is a comical and self-conscious antithesis of Updike's own literary persona: Jewish, a World War II veteran, reclusive, and unprolific to a fault.
In 1990, he published the last Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Over 500 pages long, the novel is among Updike's most celebrated. In 2000, Updike included the novella Rabbit Remembered in his collection Licks of Love, drawing the Rabbit saga to a close. His Pulitzers for the last two Rabbit novels make Updike one of only four writers to have won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, the others being William Faulkner, Booth Tarkington, and Colson Whitehead.
In 1995, Everyman's Library collected and canonized the four novels as the omnibus Rabbit Angstrom; Updike wrote an introduction in which he described Rabbit as "a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference was often slight." Updike later called Rabbit "a brother to me, and a good friend. He opened me up as a writer."
After the publication of Rabbit at Rest, Updike spent the rest of the 1990s and early 2000s publishing novels in a wide range of genres; the work of this period was frequently experimental in nature. These styles included the historical fiction of Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), the magical realism of Brazil (1994), the science fiction of Toward the End of Time (1997), the postmodernism of Gertrude and Claudius (2000), and the experimental fiction of Seek My Face (2002).
In the midst of these, he wrote what was for him a more conventional novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), a historical saga spanning several generations and exploring themes of religion and cinema in America. It is considered the most successful novel of Updike's late career. Some critics have predicted that posterity may consider the novel a "late masterpiece overlooked or praised by rote in its day, only to be rediscovered by another generation", while others thought it overlong and depressing. In Villages (2004), Updike returned to the familiar territory of infidelities in New England. His 22nd novel, Terrorist (2006), the story of a fervent young extremist Muslim in New Jersey, garnered media attention but little critical praise.
In 2003, Updike published The Early Stories, a large collection of his short fiction spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. More than 800 pages long, with over one hundred stories, it has been called "a richly episodic and lyrical Bildungsroman ... in which Updike traces the trajectory from adolescence, college, married life, fatherhood, separation and divorce". It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2004. This lengthy volume nevertheless excluded several stories found in his short-story collections of the same period.
Updike worked in a wide array of genres, including fiction, poetry (most of it compiled in Collected Poems: 1953–1993, 1993), essays (collected in nine separate volumes), a play (Buchanan Dying, 1974), and a memoir (Self-Consciousness, 1989).
Updike's array of awards includes two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, two National Book Awards, three National Book Critics Circle awards, the 1989 National Medal of Arts, the 2003 National Humanities Medal, and the Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement. The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Updike to present the 2008 Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. government's highest humanities honor; Updike's lecture was titled "The Clarity of Things: What Is American about American Art".
At the end of his life, Updike was working on a novel about St. Paul and early Christianity. Upon his death, The New Yorker published an appreciation by Adam Gopnik of Updike's lifetime association with the magazine, calling him "one of the greatest of all modern writers, the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing".
Personal life and death
Updike married Mary Entwistle Pennington, an art student at Radcliffe College, in 1953, while he was still a student at Harvard. She accompanied him to Oxford, England, where she attended art school and where their first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1955. The couple had three more children together: writer David (born 1957), artist Michael (born 1959) and artist Miranda (born 1960). They divorced in 1974. Updike had seven grandsons.
In 1977 Updike married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, with whom he lived for more than thirty years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. He died of lung cancer at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.
Poetry
Updike published eight volumes of poetry over his career, including his first book The Carpentered Hen (1958), and one of his last, the posthumous Endpoint (2009). The New Yorker published excerpts of Endpoint in its March 16, 2009 issue. Much of Updike's poetical output was recollected in Knopf's Collected Poems (1993). He wrote that "I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form." The poet Thomas M. Disch noted that because Updike was such a well-known novelist, his poetry "could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible"; Disch saw Updike's light verse instead as a poetry of "epigrammatical lucidity". His poetry has been praised for its engagement with "a variety of forms and topics", its "wit and precision", and for its depiction of topics familiar to American readers.
British poet Gavin Ewart praised Updike for the metaphysical quality of his poetry and for his ability "to make the ordinary seem strange", and called him one of the few modern novelists capable of writing good poetry. Reading Endpoint aloud, the critic Charles McGrath claimed that he found "another, deeper music" in Updike's poetry, finding that Updike's wordplay "smooths and elides itself" and has many subtle "sound effects". John Keenan, who praised the collection Endpoint as "beautiful and poignant", noted that his poetry's engagement with "the everyday world in a technically accomplished manner seems to count against him".
Literary criticism and art criticism
Updike was also a critic of literature and art, one frequently cited as one of the best American critics of his generation. In the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose, he listed his personal rules for literary criticism:
1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never ... try to put the author "in his place," making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
He reviewed "nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th-century authors", typically in The New Yorker, always trying to make his reviews "animated". He also championed young writers, comparing them to his own literary heroes including Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust. Good reviews from Updike were often seen as a significant achievement in terms of literary reputation and even sales; some of his positive reviews helped jump-start the careers of such younger writers as Erica Jong, Thomas Mallon and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Bad reviews by Updike sometimes caused controversy, as when in late 2008 he gave a "damning" review of Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy.
Updike was praised for his literary criticism's conventional simplicity and profundity, for being an aestheticist critic who saw literature on its own terms, and for his longtime commitment to the practice of literary criticism.
Much of Updike's art criticism appeared in The New York Review of Books, where he often wrote about American art. His art criticism involved an aestheticism like that of his literary criticism.
Updike's 2008 Jefferson Lecture, "The Clarity of Things: What's American About American Art?", dealt with the uniqueness of American art from the 18th century to the 20th. In the lecture he argued that American art, until the expressionist movement of the 20th century in which America declared its artistic "independence", is characterized by an insecurity not found in the artistic tradition of Europe.
In Updike's own words:
Two centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things, William Carlos Williams wrote in introducing his long poem Paterson that "for the poet there are no ideas but in things." No ideas but in things. The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.
Critical reputation and style
Updike is considered one of the greatest American fiction writers of his generation. He was widely praised as America's "last true man of letters", with an immense and far-reaching influence on many writers. The excellence of his prose style is acknowledged even by critics skeptical of other aspects of Updike's work.
Several scholars have called attention to the importance of place, and especially of southeast Pennsylvania, in Updike's life and work. Bob Batchelor has described "Updike's Pennsylvania sensibility" as one with profound reaches that transcend time and place, such that in his writing, he used "Pennsylvania as a character" that went beyond geographic or political boundaries. SA Zylstra has compared Updike's Pennsylvania to Faulkner's Mississippi: "As with the Mississippi of Faulkner's novels, the world of Updike's novels is fictional (as are such towns as Olinger and Brewer), while at the same time it is recognizable as a particular American region." Sanford Pinsker observes that "Updike always felt a bit out of place" in places like "Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for most of his life. In his heart—and, more important, in his imagination—Updike remained a staunchly Pennsylvania boy." Similarly, Sylvie Mathé maintains that "Updike's most memorable legacy appears to be his homage to Pennsylvania."
Critics emphasize his "inimitable prose style" and "rich description and language", often favorably compared to Proust and Nabokov. Some critics consider the fluency of his prose to be a fault, questioning the intellectual depth and thematic seriousness of his work given the polish of his language and the perceived lightness of his themes, while others criticized Updike for misogynistic depictions of women and sexual relationships.
Other critics argue that Updike's "dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader". On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful prose style, with "shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life".
Updike's character Rabbit Angstrom, the protagonist of the series of novels widely considered his magnum opus, has been said to have "entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures", along with Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and others. A 2002 list by Book magazine of the 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900 listed Rabbit in the top five. The Rabbit novels, the Henry Bech stories, and the Maples stories have been canonized by Everyman's Library.
After Updike's death, Harvard's Houghton Library acquired his papers, manuscripts, and letters, naming the collection the John Updike Archive. 2009 also saw the founding of the John Updike Society, a group of scholars dedicated to "awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike's literary works". The Society will begin publishing The John Updike Review, a journal of critical scholarship in the field of Updike studies. The John Updike Society First Biennial Conference took place in 2010 at Alvernia University.
Eulogizing Updike in January 2009, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote that Updike's "literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean", and that Updike's death marked "the end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half".
McEwan said the Rabbit series is Updike's "masterpiece and will surely be his monument", and concluded:
Jonathan Raban, highlighting many of the virtues that have been ascribed to Updike's prose, called Rabbit at Rest "one of the very few modern novels in English ... that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce, and not feel the draft ... It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy and richness."
The novelist Philip Roth, considered one of Updike's chief literary rivals, wrote, "John Updike is our time's greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne."
The noted critic James Wood called Updike "a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey". In a review of Licks of Love (2001), Wood concluded that Updike's "prose trusses things in very pretty ribbons" but that there often exists in his work a "hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic worldview". Wood both praised and criticized Updike's language for having "an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract". According to Wood, Updike is capable of writing "the perfect sentence" and his style is characterized by a "delicate deferral" of the sentence. Of the beauty of Updike's language and his faith in the power of language that floats above reality, Wood wrote:
For some time now Updike's language has seemed to encode an almost theological optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures, Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books—here extended a further instance—suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us—'life's gallant, battered ongoingness ', indeed—and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.
In direct contrast to Wood's evaluation, the Oxford critic Thomas Karshan asserted that Updike is "intensely intellectual", with a style that constitutes his "manner of thought" not merely "a set of dainty curlicues". Karshan calls Updike an inheritor of the "traditional role of the epic writer". According to Karshan, "Updike's writing picks up one voice, joins its cadence, and moves on to another, like Rabbit himself, driving south through radio zones on his flight away from his wife and child."
Disagreeing with Wood's critique of Updike's alleged over-stylization, Karshan evaluates Updike's language as convincingly naturalistic:
Updike's sentences at their frequent best are not a complacent expression of faith. Rather, like Proust's sentences in Updike's description, they "seek an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith." Updike aspires to "this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence towards what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs." Their hesitancy and self-qualification arise as they meet obstacles, readjust and pass on. If life is bountiful in New England, it is also evasive and easily missed. In the stories Updike tells, marriages and homes are made only to be broken. His descriptiveness embodies a promiscuous love for everything in the world. But love is precarious, Updike is always saying, since it thrives on obstructions and makes them if it cannot find them.
Harold Bloom once called Updike "a minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable stylist ... He specializes in the easier pleasures." Bloom also edited an important collection of critical essays on Updike in 1987, in which he concluded that Updike possessed a major style and was capable of writing beautiful sentences which are "beyond praise"; nevertheless, Bloom went on, "the American sublime will never touch his pages".
On The Dick Cavett Show in 1981, the novelist and short-story writer John Cheever was asked why he did not write book reviews and what he would say if given the chance to review Rabbit Is Rich. He replied:
The reason I didn't review the book is that it perhaps would have taken me three weeks. My appreciation of it is that diverse and that complicated ... John is perhaps the only contemporary writer who I know now who gives me the sense of the fact that life is—the life that we perform is in an environment that enjoys a grandeur that escapes us. Rabbit is very much possessed of a paradise lost, of a paradise known fleetingly perhaps through erotic love and a paradise that he pursues through his children. It's the vastness of John's scope that I would have described if I could through a review.
The Fiction Circus, an online and multimedia literary magazine, called Updike one of the "four Great American Novelists" of his time along with Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, each jokingly represented as a sign of the Zodiac. Furthermore, Updike was seen as the "best prose writer in the world", like Nabokov before him. But in contrast to many literati and establishment obituaries, the Circus asserted that nobody "thought of Updike as a vital writer".
Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker evaluated Updike as "the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing ... He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisite urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him."
The critic James Wolcott, in a review of Updike's last novel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008), noted that Updike's penchant for observing America's decline is coupled with an affirmation of America's ultimate merits: "Updike elegises entropy American-style with a resigned, paternal, disappointed affection that distinguishes his fiction from that of grimmer declinists: Don DeLillo, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth. America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm."
Gore Vidal, in a controversial essay in the Times Literary Supplement, professed to have "never taken Updike seriously as a writer". He criticizes his political and aesthetic worldview for its "blandness and acceptance of authority in any form". He concludes that Updike "describes to no purpose". In reference to Updike's wide establishment acclaim, Vidal mockingly called him "our good child" and excoriated his alleged political conservatism. Vidal ultimately concluded, "Updike's work is more and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up."
Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, called Updike "one of the most elegant and coolly observant writers of his generation".
The short-story writer Lorrie Moore, who once described Updike as "American literature's greatest short story writer ... and arguably our greatest writer", reviewed Updike's body of short stories in The New York Review, praising their intricate detail and rich imagery: "his eye and his prose never falter, even when the world fails to send its more socially complicated revelations directly his story's way".
In a post commemorating his birthday in 2011, blogger and literary critic Christy Potter called Updike "... THE Writer, the kind of writer everyone has heard of, the one whose name you can bring up at a party and people who have never read one thing he wrote will still nod their heads knowingly and say, 'Oh yes, John Updike. The writer.'"
In November 2008, the editors of the UK's Literary Review magazine awarded Updike their Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award, which celebrates "crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature".
Themes
The principal themes in Updike's work are religion, sex, and America as well as death. Often he would combine them, frequently in his favored terrain of "the American small town, Protestant middle class", of which he once said, "I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."
For example, the decline of religion in America is chronicled in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) alongside the history of cinema, and Rabbit Angstrom contemplates the merits of sex with the wife of his friend Reverend Jack Eccles while the latter is giving his sermon in Rabbit, Run (1960).
Critics have often noted that Updike imbued language itself with a kind of faith in its efficacy, and that his tendency to construct narratives spanning many years and books—the Rabbit series, the Henry Bech series, Eastwick, the Maples stories—demonstrates a similar faith in the transcendent power of fiction and language. Updike's novels often act as dialectical theological debates between the book itself and the reader, the novel endowed with theological beliefs meant to challenge the reader as the plot runs its course. Rabbit Angstrom himself acts as a Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith.
Describing his purpose in writing prose, Updike himself, in the introduction to his Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2004), wrote that his aim was always "to give the mundane its beautiful due". Elsewhere he famously said, "When I write, I aim my mind not towards New York City but towards a vague spot east of Kansas." Some have suggested that the "best statement of Updike's aesthetic comes in his early memoir 'The Dogwood Tree'" (1962): "Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. And in fact there is a color, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm."
Sex
Sex in Updike's work is noted for its ubiquity and the reverence with which he described it:
The critic Edward Champion notes that Updike's prose heavily favors "external sexual imagery" rife with "explicit anatomical detail" rather than descriptions of "internal emotion" in descriptions of sex. In Champion's interview with Updike on The Bat Segundo Show, Updike replied that he perhaps favored such imagery to concretize and make sex "real" in his prose. Another sexual theme commonly addressed in Updike is adultery, especially in a suburban, middle class setting, most famously in Couples (1968). The Updikean narrator is often "a man guilty of infidelity and abandonment of his family".
United States
Similarly, Updike wrote about America with a certain nostalgia, reverence, and recognition and celebration of America's broad diversity. ZZ Packer wrote that in Updike, "there seemed a strange ability to harken both America the Beautiful as well as America the Plain Jane, and the lovely Protestant backbone in his fiction and essays, when he decided to show it off, was as progressive and enlightened as it was unapologetic."
The Rabbit novels in particular can be viewed, according to Julian Barnes, as "a distraction from, and a glittering confirmation of, the vast bustling ordinariness of American life". But as Updike celebrated ordinary America, he also alluded to its decline: at times, he was "so clearly disturbed by the downward spin of America". Adam Gopnik concludes that "Updike's great subject was the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with the materials produced by mass culture. He documented how the death of a credible religious belief has been offset by sex and adultery and movies and sports and Toyotas and family love and family obligation. For Updike, this effort was blessed, and very nearly successful."
Updike's novels about America almost always contain references to political events of the time. In this sense, they are artifacts of their historical eras, showing how national leaders shape and define their times. The lives of ordinary citizens take place against this wider background.
Death
Updike often wrote about death, his characters providing a "mosaic of reactions" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation. In The Poorhouse Fair (1959), the elderly John Hook intones, "There is no goodness without belief ... And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved, to take into the next", demonstrating a religious, metaphysical faith present in much of Updike's work.
For Rabbit Angstrom, with his constant musings on mortality, his near-witnessing of his daughter's death, and his often shaky faith, death is more frightening and less obvious in its ramifications. At the end of Rabbit at Rest (1990), though, Rabbit demonstrates a kind of certainty, telling his son Nelson on his deathbed, "... But enough. Maybe. Enough." In The Centaur (1963), George Caldwell has no religious faith and is afraid of his cancer. Death can also be a sort of unseen terror; it "occurs offstage but reverberates for survivors as an absent presence".
Updike himself also experienced a "crisis over the afterlife", and indeed
many of his heroes shared the same sort of existential fears the author acknowledged he had suffered as a young man: Henry Bech's concern that he was 'a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust,' or Colonel Ellelloû's lament that 'we will be forgotten, all of us forgotten.' Their fear of death threatens to make everything they do feel meaningless, and it also sends them running after God—looking for some reassurance that there is something beyond the familiar, everyday world with 'its signals and buildings and cars and bricks.'
Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem "Perfection Wasted" (1990):
In popular culture
Updike was featured on the cover of Time twice, on April 26, 1968 and again on October 18, 1982.
Updike was the subject of a "closed book examination" by Nicholson Baker, titled U and I (1991). Baker discusses his wish to meet Updike and become his golf partner.
In 2000, Updike appeared as himself in The Simpsons episode "Insane Clown Poppy" at the Festival of Books.
The main character portrayed by Eminem in the film 8 Mile (2002) is nicknamed "Rabbit" and has some similarities to Rabbit Angstrom. The film's soundtrack has a song titled "Rabbit Run".
Portraits of Updike drawn by the American caricaturist David Levine appeared several times in The New York Review of Books.
Bibliography
Rabbit novels
Rabbit, Run (1960)
Rabbit Redux (1971)
Rabbit Is Rich (1981)
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels (1995)
Rabbit Remembered (a novella in the collection Licks of Love) (2001)
Bech books
Bech, a Book (1970)
Bech Is Back (1982)
Bech at Bay (1998)
The Complete Henry Bech (2001)
Buchanan books
Buchanan Dying (a play) (1974)
Memories of the Ford Administration (a novel) (1992)
Eastwick books
The Witches of Eastwick (1984)
The Widows of Eastwick (2008)
The Scarlet Letter trilogy
A Month of Sundays (1975)
Roger's Version (1986)
S. (1988)
Other novels
The Poorhouse Fair (1959)
The Centaur (1963)
Of the Farm (1965)
Couples (1968)
Marry Me (1977)
The Coup (1978)
Brazil (1994)
In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)
Toward the End of Time (1997)
Gertrude and Claudius (2000)
Seek My Face (2002)
Villages (2004)
Terrorist (2006)
Books edited by Updike
The Best American Short Stories (1984)
The Binghamton Poems (2009)
Short story collections
The Same Door (1959)
Pigeon Feathers (1962)
Olinger Stories (a selection) (1964)
The Music School (1966)
Museums And Women (1972)
Problems and Other Stories (1979)
Too Far to Go (the Maples stories) (1979)
Your Lover Just Called (1980)
Trust Me (1987)
The Afterlife (1994)
The Best American Short Stories of the Century (editor) (2000)
Licks of Love (2001)
The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003)
Three Trips (2003)
My Father's Tears and Other Stories (2009)
The Maples Stories (2009)
The Collected Stories, Volume 1: Collected Early Stories (2013)
The Collected Stories, Volume 2: Collected Later Stories (2013)
Poetry
The Carpentered Hen (1958)
Telephone Poles (1963)
Midpoint (1969)
Dance of the Solids (1969)
Cunts: Upon Receiving The Swingers Life Club Membership Solicitation (limited edition) (1974)
Tossing and Turning (1977)
Facing Nature (1985)
Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993)
Americana and Other Poems (2001)
Endpoint and Other Poems (2009)
Non-fiction, essays and criticism
Assorted Prose (1965)
Picked-Up Pieces (1975)
Hugging The Shore (1983)
Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989)
Just Looking: Essays on Art (1989)
Odd Jobs (1991)
Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996)
More Matter (1999)
Still Looking: Essays on American Art (2005)
In Love with a Wanton: Essays on Golf (2005)
Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (2007)
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams (Library of America) (2010)
Higher Gossip (2011)
Always Looking: Essays on Art (2012)
See also #External links for links to archives of his essays and reviews in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
Awards
1959 Guggenheim Fellow
1959 National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award
1964 National Book Award for Fiction
1965 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
1966 O. Henry Prize
1970 Honorary Doctor of Literature from Emerson College
1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
1981 Edward MacDowell Medal
1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
1982 National Book Award for Fiction (hardcover)
1982 Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award
1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
1984 National Arts Club Medal of Honor
1987 St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates
1987 Ambassador Book Award
1987 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award
1988 PEN/Malamud Award
1989 National Medal of Arts
1990 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
1991 O. Henry Prize
1992 Honorary Doctor of Letters from Harvard University
1995 William Dean Howells Medal
1995 Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
1997 Ambassador Book Award
1998 Harvard Arts Medal
1998 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation
2002 Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature
2003 National Humanities Medal
2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
2004 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
2005 Man Booker International Prize nominee
2006 Rea Award for the Short Story
2007 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction
2008 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award
2008 Jefferson Lecture
Notes
References
Further reading and literary criticism
Bailey, Peter J., Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike's Fiction, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, New Jersey, 2006.
Baker, Nicholson, U & I: A True Story, Random House, New York, 1991.
Batchelor, Bob, John Updike: A Critical Biography, Praeger, California, 2013. .
Begley, Adam, Updike, Harper-Collins Publishers, New York, NY, 2014.
Ben Hassat, Hedda, Prophets Without Vision: Subjectivity and the Sacred in Contemporary American Writing, Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, 2000.
Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Views of John Updike, Chelsea House, New York, 1987.
Boswell, Marshall, John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2001.
Broer, Lawrence, Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 2000.
Burchard, Rachel C., John Updike: Yea Sayings, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1971.
Campbell, Jeff H., Updike's Novels: Thorns Spell A Word, Midwestern State University Press, Wichita Falls, Texas, 1988.
Clarke Taylor, C., John Updike: A Bibliography, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, 1968.
De Bellis, Jack, John Updike: A Bibliography, 1968–1993, Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut, 1994.
De Bellis, Jack, John Updike: The Critical Responses to the Rabbit Saga, Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut, 2005.
De Bellis, Jack, ed., The John Updike Encyclopedia, Greenwood Press, Santa Barbara, California, 2001.
Detwiler, Robert, John Updike, Twayne, Boston, 1984.
Findlay, Bill, Interview with John Updike in Hearn, Sheila G. (ed.), Cencrastus No. 15, New Year 1984, pp. 30 - 36,
Greiner, Donald, " Don DeLillo, John Updike, and the Sustaining Power of Myth", UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's Underworld, University of Delaware Press, Newark, Delaware, 2002.
Greiner, Donald, John Updike's Novels, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1984.
Greiner, Donald, The Other John Updike: Poems, Short Stories, Prose, Play, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1981.
Gullette, Margaret Morganroth, "John Updike: Rabbit Angstrom Grows Up", Safe at Last in the Middle Years : The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel, Backinprint.com, New York, 2001.
Hamilton, Alice and Kenneth, The Elements of John Updike, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1970.
Hunt, George W., John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art, William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1985.
Karshan, Thomas, " Batsy", London Review of Books, March 31, 2005.
Luscher, Robert M., John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne, New York, 1993.
Mazzeno, Laurence W. and Sue Norton, eds.,European Perspectives on John Updike, Camden House, 2018.
McNaughton, William R., ed., Critical Essays on John Updike, GK Hall, Boston, 1982.
Markle, Joyce B., Fighters and Lovers: Themes in the Novels of John Updike, New York University Press, 1973.
Mathé, Sylvie, John Updike : La nostalgie de l'Amérique, Berlin, 2002.
Miller, D. Quentin, John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2001.
Morley, Catherine, "The Bard of Everyday Domesticity: John Updike's Song for America", The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature, Routledge, New York, 2008.
Newman, Judie, John Updike, Macmillan, London, 1988.
O'Connell, Mary, Updike and the Patriarchal Dilemma: Masculinity in the Rabbit Novels, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1996.
Olster, Stanley, The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006.
Plath, James, ed., Conversations with John Updike, University Press of Mississippi Press, Jackson, Mississippi, 1994.
Porter, M. Gilbert, " John Updike's 'A&P': The Establishment and an Emersonian Cashier", English Journal 61 (8), pp. 1155–1158, November 1972.
Pritchard, William, Updike: America's Man of Letters, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2005.
Ristoff, Dilvo I., John Updike's Rabbit at Rest: Appropriating History, Peter Lang, New York, 1998.'
Roiphe, Anne, For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor, Free Press, Washington, D.C., 2000.
Searles, George J., The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1984.
Schiff, James A., Updike's Version: Rewriting The Scarlet Letter, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 1992.
Schiff, James A., United States Author Series: John Updike Revisited, Twayne Publishers, Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1998.
Tallent, Elizabeth, Married Men and Magic Tricks: John Updike's Erotic Heroes, Creative Arts Book Company, Berkeley, California, 1982.
Tanner, Tony, "A Compromised Environment", City of Words: American Fiction, 1950–1970, Jonathan Cape, London, 1971.
Thorburn, David and Eiland, Howard, eds., John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979.
Trachtenberg, Stanley, ed., New Essays on Rabbit, Run, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.
Uphaus, Suzanne H., John Updike, Ungar, New York, 1980.
Vidal, Gore, "Rabbit's own burrow", Times Literary Supplement, April 26, 1996.
Wallace, David Foster, "John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One", New York Observer, October 12, 1997.
Wood, James, "Gossip in Gilt", London Review of Books, April 19, 2001.
Wood, James, "John Updike's Complacent God", The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, Modern Library, New York, 2000.
Yerkes, James, John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, Grand Rapids, Missouri, 1999.
External links
The John Updike Society
John Updike collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University
The Other John Updike Archive, a collection taken from Updike's rubbish and discussed in this article from The Guardian, September 2014, and this article from The Atlantic
Jack De Bellis collection of John Updike at the University of South Carolina
Column archive at The New York Review of Books
Column archive at The New Yorker
In Depth interview with Updike, 4 December 2005
Reviews at the London Review of Books
Stuart Wright Collection: John Updike Papers, 1946–2010 (#1169-023), East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University
Authors and Poets collection at University of Maryland
Articles and interviews
John Updike, The Art of Fiction No. 43, Charles Thomas Samuels, Paris Review, Winter 1968
"Picked-Up Pieces: A half century of John Updike". The New Yorker, 2009
The ancestry of John Hoyer Updike, Rootsweb
John Updike Life & Times, New York Times Books
The Salon Interview: John Updike, "As Close as You Can Get to the Stars", Dwight Garner, Salon.com
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15825 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20Steinbeck | John Steinbeck | John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American author and the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature winner "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception." He has been called "a giant of American letters."
During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies.
Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.
Early life
Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German, English, and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck (1828–1913), Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, was a founder of Mount Hope, a short-lived messianic farming colony in Palestine that disbanded after Arab attackers killed his brother and raped his brother's wife and mother-in-law. He arrived in the United States in 1858, shortening the family name to Steinbeck. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, Germany, is still named "Großsteinbeck".
His father, John Ernst Steinbeck (1862–1935), served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton (1867–1934), a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion for reading and writing. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church, although Steinbeck later became agnostic. Steinbeck lived in a small rural valley (no more than a frontier settlement) set in some of the world's most fertile soil, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches included the Post Ranch in Big Sur. He later labored with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. There he learned of the harsher aspects of the migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in Of Mice and Men. He explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms. While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had considerable mechanical aptitude and fondness for repairing things he owned.
Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went on to study English literature at Stanford University near Palo Alto, leaving without a degree in 1925. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to publish his work, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife. They married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money by manufacturing plaster mannequins.
When their money ran out six months later due to a slow market, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks outside the Monterey city limits. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crabs that he gathered from the sea, and fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When those sources failed, Steinbeck and his wife accepted welfare, and on rare occasions, stole bacon from the local produce market. Whatever food they had, they shared with their friends. Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row.
In 1930, Steinbeck met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and mentor to Steinbeck during the following decade, teaching him a great deal about philosophy and biology. Ricketts, usually very quiet, yet likable, with an inner self-sufficiency and an encyclopedic knowledge of diverse subjects, became a focus of Steinbeck's attention. Ricketts had taken a college class from Warder Clyde Allee, a biologist and ecological theorist, who would go on to write a classic early textbook on ecology. Ricketts became a proponent of ecological thinking, in which man was only one part of a great chain of being, caught in a web of life too large for him to control or understand. Meanwhile, Ricketts operated a biological lab on the coast of Monterey, selling biological samples of small animals, fish, rays, starfish, turtles, and other marine forms to schools and colleges.
Between 1930 and 1936, Steinbeck and Ricketts became close friends. Steinbeck's wife began working at the lab as secretary-bookkeeper. Steinbeck helped on an informal basis. They formed a common bond based on their love of music and art, and John learned biology and Ricketts' ecological philosophy. When Steinbeck became emotionally upset, Ricketts sometimes played music for him.
Career
Writing
Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, published in 1929, is loosely based on the life and death of privateer Henry Morgan. It centers on Morgan's assault and sacking of Panamá Viejo, sometimes referred to as the "Cup of Gold", and on the women, brighter than the sun, who were said to be found there. In 1930, Steinbeck wrote a werewolf murder mystery, Murder at Full Moon, that has never been published because Steinbeck considered it unworthy of publication.
Between 1930 and 1933, Steinbeck produced three shorter works. The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932, consists of twelve interconnected stories about a valley near Monterey, which was discovered by a Spanish corporal while chasing runaway Indian slaves. In 1933 Steinbeck published The Red Pony, a 100-page, four-chapter story weaving in memories of Steinbeck's childhood. To a God Unknown, named after a Vedic hymn, follows the life of a homesteader and his family in California, depicting a character with a primal and pagan worship of the land he works. Although he had not achieved the status of a well-known writer, he never doubted that he would achieve greatness.
Steinbeck achieved his first critical success with Tortilla Flat (1935), a novel set in post-war Monterey, California, that won the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. It portrays the adventures of a group of classless and usually homeless young men in Monterey after World War I, just before U.S. prohibition. They are portrayed in ironic comparison to mythic knights on a quest and reject nearly all the standard mores of American society in enjoyment of a dissolute life devoted to wine, lust, camaraderie and petty theft. In presenting the 1962 Nobel Prize to Steinbeck, the Swedish Academy cited "spicy and comic tales about a gang of paisanos, asocial individuals who, in their wild revels, are almost caricatures of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. It has been said that in the United States this book came as a welcome antidote to the gloom of the then prevailing depression."
Tortilla Flat was adapted as a 1942 film of the same name, starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield, a friend of Steinbeck. With some of the proceeds, he built a summer ranch-home in Los Gatos.
Steinbeck began to write a series of "California novels" and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression. These included In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. He also wrote an article series called The Harvest Gypsies for the San Francisco News about the plight of the migrant worker.
Of Mice and Men was a drama about the dreams of two migrant agricultural laborers in California. It was critically acclaimed and Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize citation called it a "little masterpiece".
Its stage production was a hit, starring Wallace Ford as George and Broderick Crawford as George's companion, the mentally childlike, but physically powerful itinerant farmhand Lennie. Steinbeck refused to travel from his home in California to attend any performance of the play during its New York run, telling director George S. Kaufman that the play as it existed in his own mind was "perfect" and that anything presented on stage would only be a disappointment. Steinbeck wrote two more stage plays (The Moon Is Down and Burning Bright).
Of Mice and Men was also adapted as a 1939 Hollywood film, with Lon Chaney, Jr. as Lennie (he had filled the role in the Los Angeles stage production) and Burgess Meredith as George. Meredith and Steinbeck became close friends for the next two decades. Another film based on the novella was made in 1992 starring Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie.
Steinbeck followed this wave of success with The Grapes of Wrath (1939), based on newspaper articles about migrant agricultural workers that he had written in San Francisco. It is commonly considered his greatest work. According to The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month, it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. Later that year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted as a film directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad; Fonda was nominated for the best actor Academy Award. Grapes was controversial. Steinbeck's New Deal political views, negative portrayal of aspects of capitalism, and sympathy for the plight of workers, led to a backlash against the author, especially close to home. Claiming the book both was obscene and misrepresented conditions in the county, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries in August 1939. This ban lasted until January 1941.
Of the controversy, Steinbeck wrote, "The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy."
The film versions of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men (by two different movie studios) were in production simultaneously, allowing Steinbeck to spend a full day on the set of The Grapes of Wrath and the next day on the set of Of Mice and Men.
Ed Ricketts
In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast to give himself time off from his writing and to collect biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Their coauthored book, Sea of Cortez (December 1941), about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which was part travelogue and part natural history, published just as the U.S. entered World War II, never found an audience and did not sell well. However, in 1951, Steinbeck republished the narrative portion of the book as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, under his name only (though Ricketts had written some of it). This work remains in print today.
Although Carol accompanied Steinbeck on the trip, their marriage was beginning to suffer, and ended a year later, in 1941, even as Steinbeck worked on the manuscript for the book. In 1942, after his divorce from Carol he married Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger.
Ricketts was Steinbeck's model for the character of "Doc" in Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954), "Friend Ed" in Burning Bright, and characters in In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Ecological themes recur in Steinbeck's novels of the period.
Steinbeck's close relations with Ricketts ended in 1941 when Steinbeck moved away from Pacific Grove and divorced his wife Carol. Ricketts' biographer Eric Enno Tamm opined that, except for East of Eden (1952), Steinbeck's writing declined after Ricketts' untimely death in 1948.
1940s–1960s work
Steinbeck's novel The Moon Is Down (1942), about the Socrates-inspired spirit of resistance in an occupied village in Northern Europe, was made into a film almost immediately. It was presumed that the unnamed country of the novel was Norway and the occupiers the Germans. In 1945, Steinbeck received the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.
In 1943, Steinbeck served as a World War II war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and worked with the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA). It was at that time he became friends with Will Lang, Jr. of Time/Life magazine. During the war, Steinbeck accompanied the commando raids of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s Beach Jumpers program, which launched small-unit diversion operations against German-held islands in the Mediterranean. At one point, he accompanied Fairbanks on an invasion of an island off the coast of Italy and used a Thompson submachine gun to help capture Italian and German prisoners. Some of his writings from this period were incorporated in the documentary Once There Was a War (1958).
Steinbeck returned from the war with a number of wounds from shrapnel and some psychological trauma. He treated himself, as ever, by writing. He wrote Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Lifeboat (1944), and with screenwriter Jack Wagner, A Medal for Benny (1945), about paisanos from Tortilla Flat going to war. He later requested that his name be removed from the credits of Lifeboat, because he believed the final version of the film had racist undertones. In 1944, suffering from homesickness for his Pacific Grove/Monterey life of the 1930s, he wrote Cannery Row (1945), which became so famous that in 1958 Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, the setting of the book, was renamed Cannery Row.
After the war, he wrote The Pearl (1947), knowing it would be filmed eventually. The story first appeared in the December 1945 issue of Woman's Home Companion magazine as "The Pearl of the World". It was illustrated by John Alan Maxwell. The novel is an imaginative telling of a story which Steinbeck had heard in La Paz in 1940, as related in The Log From the Sea of Cortez, which he described in Chapter 11 as being "so much like a parable that it almost can't be". Steinbeck traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico for the filming with Wagner who helped with the script; on this trip he would be inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a film script (Viva Zapata!) directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn.
In 1947, Steinbeck made his first trip to the Soviet Union with photographer Robert Capa. They visited Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Batumi and Stalingrad, some of the first Americans to visit many parts of the USSR since the communist revolution. Steinbeck's 1948 book about their experiences, A Russian Journal, was illustrated with Capa's photos. In 1948, the year the book was published, Steinbeck was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1952 Steinbeck's longest novel, East of Eden, was published. According to his third wife, Elaine, he considered it his magnum opus, his greatest novel.
In 1952, John Steinbeck appeared as the on-screen narrator of 20th Century Fox's film, O. Henry's Full House. Although Steinbeck later admitted he was uncomfortable before the camera, he provided interesting introductions to several filmed adaptations of short stories by the legendary writer O. Henry. About the same time, Steinbeck recorded readings of several of his short stories for Columbia Records; the recordings provide a record of Steinbeck's deep, resonant voice.
Following the success of Viva Zapata!, Steinbeck collaborated with Kazan on the 1955 film East of Eden, James Dean's movie debut.
From March to October 1959, Steinbeck and his third wife Elaine rented a cottage in the hamlet of Discove, Redlynch, near Bruton in Somerset, England, while Steinbeck researched his retelling of the Arthurian legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Glastonbury Tor was visible from the cottage, and Steinbeck also visited the nearby hillfort of Cadbury Castle, the supposed site of King Arthur's court of Camelot. The unfinished manuscript was published after his death in 1976, as The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. The Steinbecks recounted the time spent in Somerset as the happiest of their life together.
Travels with Charley: In Search of America is a travelogue of his 1960 road trip with his poodle Charley. Steinbeck bemoans his lost youth and roots, while dispensing both criticism and praise for the United States. According to Steinbeck's son Thom, Steinbeck made the journey because he knew he was dying and wanted to see the country one last time.
Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), examines moral decline in the United States. The protagonist Ethan grows discontented with his own moral decline and that of those around him. The book has a very different tone from Steinbeck's amoral and ecological stance in earlier works such as Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. It was not a critical success. Many reviewers recognized the importance of the novel, but were disappointed that it was not another Grapes of Wrath.
In the Nobel Prize presentation speech the next year, however, the Swedish Academy cited it most favorably: "Here he attained the same standard which he set in The Grapes of Wrath. Again he holds his position as an independent expounder of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American, be it good or bad."
Apparently taken aback by the critical reception of this novel, and the critical outcry when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, Steinbeck published no more fiction in the remaining six years before his death.
Nobel Prize
In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature for his "realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception." The selection was heavily criticized, and described as "one of the Academy's biggest mistakes" in one Swedish newspaper. The reaction of American literary critics was also harsh. The New York Times asked why the Nobel committee gave the award to an author whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising", noting that "[T]he international character of the award and the weight attached to it raise questions about the mechanics of selection and how close the Nobel committee is to the main currents of American writing. ... [W]e think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer ... whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age". Steinbeck, when asked on the day of the announcement if he deserved the Nobel, replied: "Frankly, no." Biographer Jackson Benson notes, "[T]his honor was one of the few in the world that one could not buy nor gain by political maneuver. It was precisely because the committee made its judgment ... on its own criteria, rather than plugging into 'the main currents of American writing' as defined by the critical establishment, that the award had value." In his acceptance speech later in the year in Stockholm, he said:
Fifty years later, in 2012, the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a "compromise choice" among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean Anouilh and Danish author Karen Blixen. The declassified documents showed that he was chosen as the best of a bad lot. "There aren't any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation," wrote committee member Henry Olsson. Although the committee believed Steinbeck's best work was behind him by 1962, committee member Anders Österling believed the release of his novel The Winter of Our Discontent showed that "after some signs of slowing down in recent years, [Steinbeck has] regained his position as a social truth-teller [and is an] authentic realist fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway."
Although modest about his own talent as a writer, Steinbeck talked openly of his own admiration of certain writers. In 1953, he wrote that he considered cartoonist Al Capp, creator of the satirical Li'l Abner, "possibly the best writer in the world today." At his own first Nobel Prize press conference he was asked his favorite authors and works and replied: "Hemingway's short stories and nearly everything Faulkner wrote."
In September 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Steinbeck the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In 1967, at the behest of Newsday magazine, Steinbeck went to Vietnam to report on the war. He thought of the Vietnam War as a heroic venture and was considered a hawk for his position on the war. His sons served in Vietnam before his death, and Steinbeck visited one son in the battlefield. At one point he was allowed to man a machine-gun watch position at night at a firebase while his son and other members of his platoon slept.
Personal life
Steinbeck and his first wife, Carol Henning, married in January 1930 in Los Angeles. By 1940, their marriage was beginning to suffer, and ended a year later, in 1941. In 1942, after his divorce from Carol, Steinbeck married Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger. With his second wife Steinbeck had two sons, Thomas ("Thom") Myles Steinbeck (1944–2016) and John Steinbeck IV (1946–1991).
In May 1948, Steinbeck returned to California on an emergency trip to be with his friend Ed Ricketts, who had been seriously injured when a train struck his car. Ricketts died hours before Steinbeck arrived. Upon returning home, Steinbeck was confronted by Gwyn, who asked for a divorce, which became final in August. Steinbeck spent the year after Ricketts' death in deep depression.
In June 1949, Steinbeck met stage-manager Elaine Scott at a restaurant in Carmel, California. Steinbeck and Scott eventually began a relationship and in December 1950 they married, within a week of the finalizing of Scott's own divorce from actor Zachary Scott. This third marriage for Steinbeck lasted until his death in 1968. Steinbeck was also an acquaintance with the modernist poet Robinson Jeffers, a Californian neighbor. In a Letter to Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck wrote, "Robinson Jeffers and his wife came in to call the other day. He looks a little older but that is all. And she is just the same.’”
In 1962, Steinbeck began acting as friend and mentor to the young writer and naturalist Jack Rudloe, who was trying to establish his own biological supply company, now Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida. Their correspondence continued until Steinbeck's death.
In 1966, Steinbeck traveled to Tel Aviv to visit the site of Mount Hope, a farm community established in Israel by his grandfather, whose brother, Friedrich Großsteinbeck, was murdered by Arab marauders in 1858 in what became known as the Outrages at Jaffa.
Death and legacy
John Steinbeck died in New York City on December 20, 1968, during the 1968 flu pandemic of heart disease and congestive heart failure. He was 66, and had been a lifelong smoker. An autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries.
In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and interred on March 4, 1969 at the Hamilton family gravesite in Salinas, with those of his parents and maternal grandparents. His third wife, Elaine, was buried in the plot in 2004. He had written to his doctor that he felt deeply "in his flesh" that he would not survive his physical death, and that the biological end of his life was the final end to it.
The day after Steinbeck's death in New York City, reviewer Charles Poore wrote in The New York Times: "John Steinbeck's first great book was his last great book. But Good Lord, what a book that was and is: The Grapes of Wrath." Poore noted a "preachiness" in Steinbeck's work, "as if half his literary inheritance came from the best of Mark Twain—and the other half from the worst of Cotton Mather." But he asserted that "Steinbeck didn't need the Nobel Prize—the Nobel judges needed him."
Steinbeck's incomplete novel based on the King Arthur legends of Malory and others, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was published in 1976.
Many of Steinbeck's works are required reading in American high schools. In the United Kingdom, Of Mice and Men is one of the key texts used by the examining body AQA for its English Literature GCSE. A study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature in the United States found that Of Mice and Men was one of the ten most frequently read books in public high schools. Contrariwise, Steinbeck's works have been frequently banned in the United States. The Grapes of Wrath was banned by school boards: in August 1939, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries. It was burned in Salinas on two different occasions. In 2003, a school board in Mississippi banned it on the grounds of profanity. According to the American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with Of Mice and Men ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States.
Literary influences
Steinbeck grew up in California's Salinas Valley, a culturally diverse place with a rich migratory and immigrant history. This upbringing imparted a regionalistic flavor to his writing, giving many of his works a distinct sense of place.
Salinas, Monterey and parts of the San Joaquin Valley were the setting for many of his stories. The area is now sometimes referred to as "Steinbeck Country". Most of his early work dealt with subjects familiar to him from his formative years. An exception was his first novel, Cup of Gold, which concerns the pirate/privateer Henry Morgan, whose adventures had captured Steinbeck's imagination as a child.
In his subsequent novels, Steinbeck found a more authentic voice by drawing upon direct memories of his life in California. His childhood friend, Max Wagner, a brother of Jack Wagner and who later became a film actor, served as inspiration for The Red Pony. Later he used actual American conditions and events in the first half of the 20th century, which he had experienced first-hand as a reporter. Steinbeck often populated his stories with struggling characters; his works examined the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
His later work reflected his wide range of interests, including marine biology, politics, religion, history and mythology. One of his last published works was Travels with Charley, a travelogue of a road trip he took in 1960 to rediscover America.
Commemoration
Steinbeck's boyhood home, a turreted Victorian building in downtown Salinas, has been preserved and restored by the Valley Guild, a nonprofit organization. Fixed menu lunches are served Monday through Saturday, and the house is open for tours on Sunday afternoons during the summer.
The National Steinbeck Center, two blocks away at 1 Main Street is the only museum in the U.S. dedicated to a single author. Dana Gioia (chair of the National Endowment for the Arts) told an audience at the center, "This is really the best modern literary shrine in the country, and I've seen them all." Its "Steinbeckiana" includes "Rocinante", the camper-truck in which Steinbeck made the cross-country trip described in Travels with Charley.
His father's cottage on Eleventh Street in Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck wrote some of his earliest books, also survives.
In Monterey, Ed Ricketts' laboratory survives (though it is not yet open to the public) and at the corner which Steinbeck describes in Cannery Row, also the store which once belonged to Lee Chong, and the adjacent vacant lot frequented by the hobos of Cannery Row. The site of the Hovden Sardine Cannery next to Doc's laboratory is now occupied by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. In 1958 the street that Steinbeck described as "Cannery Row" in the novel, once named Ocean View Avenue, was renamed Cannery Row in honor of the novel. The town of Monterey has commemorated Steinbeck's work with an avenue of flags depicting characters from Cannery Row, historical plaques, and sculptured busts depicting Steinbeck and Ricketts.
On February 27, 1979 (the 77th anniversary of the writer's birth), the United States Postal Service issued a stamp featuring Steinbeck, starting the Postal Service's Literary Arts series honoring American writers.
Steinbeck was inducted in to the DeMolay International Hall of Fame in 1995.
On December 5, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Steinbeck into the California Hall of Fame, located at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. His son, author Thomas Steinbeck, accepted the award on his behalf.
To commemorate the 112th anniversary of Steinbeck's birthday on February 27, 2014, Google displayed an interactive doodle utilizing animation which included illustrations portraying scenes and quotes from several novels by the author.
Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts appear as fictionalized characters in the 2016 novel, Monterey Bay about the founding of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, by Lindsay Hatton (Penguin Press).
In 2019 the Sag Harbor town board approved the creation of the John Steinbeck Waterfront Park across from the iconic town windmill. The structures on the parcel were demolished and park benches installed near the beach. The Beebe windmill replica already had a plaque memorializing the author who wrote from a small hut overlooking the cove during his sojourn in the literary haven.
Religious views
Steinbeck was affiliated to the St. Paul's Episcopal Church and he stayed attached throughout his life to Episcopalianism. Especially in his works of fiction, Steinbeck was highly conscious of religion and incorporated it into his style and themes. The shaping of his characters often drew on the Bible and the theology of Anglicanism, combining elements of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.
Steinbeck distanced himself from religious views when he left Salinas for Stanford. However, the work he produced still reflected the language of his childhood at Salinas, and his beliefs remained a powerful influence within his fiction and non-fiction work. William Ray considered his Episcopal views are prominently displayed in The Grapes of Wrath, in which themes of conversion and self-sacrifice play a major part in the characters Casy and Tom who achieve spiritual transcendence through conversion.
Political views
Steinbeck's contacts with leftist authors, journalists, and labor union figures may have influenced his writing. He joined the League of American Writers, a Communist organization, in 1935. Steinbeck was mentored by radical writers Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter. Through Francis Whitaker, a member of the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club for writers, Steinbeck met with strike organizers from the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union. In 1939, he signed a letter with some other writers in support of the Soviet invasion of Finland and the Soviet-established puppet government.
Documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2012 indicate that Steinbeck offered his services to the Agency in 1952, while planning a European tour, and the Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, was eager to take him up on the offer. What work, if any, Steinbeck may have performed for the CIA during the Cold War is unknown.
Steinbeck was a close associate of playwright Arthur Miller. In June 1957, Steinbeck took a personal and professional risk by supporting him when Miller refused to name names in the House Un-American Activities Committee trials. Steinbeck called the period one of the "strangest and most frightening times a government and people have ever faced."
In 1963, Steinbeck visited the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic at the behest of John Kennedy. During his visit he sat for a rare portrait by painter Martiros Saryan and visited Geghard Monastery. Footage of this visit filmed by Rafael Aramyan was sold in 2013 by his granddaughter.
In 1967, when he was sent to Vietnam to report on the war, his sympathetic portrayal of the United States Army led the New York Post to denounce him for betraying his leftist past. Steinbeck's biographer, Jay Parini, says Steinbeck's friendship with President Lyndon B. Johnson influenced his views on Vietnam. Steinbeck may also have been concerned about the safety of his son serving in Vietnam.
Government harassment
Steinbeck complained publicly about government harassment. Thomas Steinbeck, the author's eldest son, said that J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI at the time, could find no basis for prosecuting Steinbeck and therefore used his power to encourage the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to audit Steinbeck's taxes every single year of his life, just to annoy him. According to Thomas, a true artist is one who "without a thought for self, stands up against the stones of condemnation, and speaks for those who are given no real voice in the halls of justice, or the halls of government. By doing so, these people will naturally become the enemies of the political status quo."
In a 1942 letter to United States Attorney General Francis Biddle, John Steinbeck wrote: "Do you suppose you could ask Edgar's boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I am an enemy alien. It is getting tiresome." The FBI denied that Steinbeck was under investigation.
Major works
In Dubious Battle
In 1936, Steinbeck published the first of what came to be known as his Dustbowl trilogy, which included Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. This first novel tells the story of a fruit pickers' strike in California which is both aided and damaged by the help of "the Party", generally taken to be the Communist Party, although this is never spelled out in the book.
Of Mice and Men
Of Mice and Men is a tragedy that was written as a play in 1937. The story is about two traveling ranch workers, George and Lennie, trying to earn enough money to buy their own farm/ranch. As it is set in 1930s America, it provides an insight into The Great Depression, encompassing themes of racism, loneliness, prejudice against the mentally ill, and the struggle for personal independence. Along with The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and The Pearl, Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck's best known works. It was made into a movie three times, in 1939 starring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney Jr., and Betty Field, in 1982 starring Randy Quaid, Robert Blake and Ted Neeley, and in 1992 starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath is set in the Great Depression and describes a family of sharecroppers, the Joads, who were driven from their land due to the dust storms of the Dust Bowl. The title is a reference to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Some critics found it too sympathetic to the workers' plight and too critical of capitalism, but it found a large audience of its own. It won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction (novels) and was adapted as a film starring Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell and directed by John Ford.
East of Eden
Steinbeck deals with the nature of good and evil in this Salinas Valley saga. The story follows two families: the Hamiltons – based on Steinbeck's own maternal ancestry – and the Trasks, reprising stories about the Biblical Adam and his progeny. The book was published in 1952. Portions of the novel were made into a 1955 movie directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean.
Travels with Charley
In 1960, Steinbeck bought a pickup truck and had it modified with a custom-built camper topwhich was rare at the timeand drove across the United States with his faithful "blue" standard poodle, Charley. Steinbeck nicknamed his truck Rocinante after Don Quixote's "noble steed". In this sometimes comical, sometimes melancholic book, Steinbeck describes what he sees from Maine to Montana to California, and from there to Texas and Louisiana and back to his home on Long Island. The restored camper truck is on exhibit in the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.
Bibliography
Filmography
1939: Of Mice and Men—directed by Lewis Milestone, featuring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Betty Field
1940: The Grapes of Wrath—directed by John Ford, featuring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and John Carradine
1941: The Forgotten Village—directed by Alexander Hammid and Herbert Kline, narrated by Burgess Meredith, music by Hanns Eisler
1942: Tortilla Flat—directed by Victor Fleming, featuring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield
1943: The Moon is Down—directed by Irving Pichel, featuring Lee J. Cobb and Sir Cedric Hardwicke
1944: Lifeboat—directed by Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Tallulah Bankhead, Hume Cronyn, and John Hodiak
1944: A Medal for Benny—directed by Irving Pichel, featuring Dorothy Lamour and Arturo de Cordova
1947: La Perla (The Pearl, Mexico)—directed by Emilio Fernández, featuring Pedro Armendáriz and María Elena Marqués
1949: The Red Pony—directed by Lewis Milestone, featuring Myrna Loy, Robert Mitchum, and Louis Calhern
1952: Viva Zapata!—directed by Elia Kazan, featuring Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn and Jean Peters
1955: East of Eden—directed by Elia Kazan, featuring James Dean, Julie Harris, Jo Van Fleet, and Raymond Massey
1957: The Wayward Bus—directed by Victor Vicas, featuring Rick Jason, Jayne Mansfield, and Joan Collins
1961: Flight—featuring Efrain Ramírez and Arnelia Cortez
1962: Ikimize bir dünya (Of Mice and Men, Turkey)
1972: Topoli (Of Mice and Men, Iran)
1982: Cannery Row—directed by David S. Ward, featuring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger
1992: Of Mice and Men—directed by Gary Sinise and starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise
2016: In Dubious Battle—directed by James Franco and featuring Franco, Nat Wolff and Selena Gomez
See also
Pigasus – A personal stamp used by Steinbeck.
References
Citations
General sources
Benson, Jackson J. John Steinbeck, Writer (second ed.). Penguin Putnam Inc., New York, 1990, 0-14-01.4417X,
Benson, Jackson J. (ed.) The Short Novels of John Steinbeck: Critical Essays with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism. Durham: Duke UP, 1990 .
Benson, Jackson J. Looking for Steinbeck's Ghost. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2002 .
Davis, Robert C. The Grapes of Wrath: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982. PS3537 .T3234 G734
DeMott, Robert and Steinbeck, Elaine A., eds. John Steinbeck, Novels and Stories 1932–1937 (Library of America, 1994)
DeMott, Robert and Steinbeck, Elaine A., eds. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings 1936–1941 (Library of America, 1996)
DeMott, Robert, ed. John Steinbeck, Novels 1942–1952 (Library of America, 2002)
DeMott, Robert and Railsback, Brian, eds. John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley and Later Novels, 1947–1962 (Library of America, 2007)
Ditsky, John. John Steinbeck and the Critics. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000 .
French, Warren. John Steinbeck's Fiction Revisited. NY: Twayne, 1994 .
Heavilin, Barbara A. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002 .
Hughes, R. S. John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction. R.S. Hughes. Boston : Twayne, 1989. .
Li, Luchen. ed. John Steinbeck: A Documentary Volume. Detroit: Gale, 2005 .
Meyer, Michael J. The Hayashi Steinbeck Bibliography, 1982–1996. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1998 .
Steigerwald, Bill. Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels with Charley.' Kindle Edition. 2013.
Steinbeck, John Steinbeck IV and Nancy (2001). The Other Side of Eden: Life with John Steinbeck. Prometheus Books.
Tamm, Eric Enno (2005). Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell. Thunder's Mouth Press. .
Further reading
External links
National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California
FBI file on John Steinbeck
The Steinbeck Quarterly journal
John Steinbeck Biography Early Years: Salinas to Stanford: 1902–1925 from National Steinbeck Center
Western American Literature Journal: John Steinbeck
Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1945 - Mrs. Stanford Steinbeck, Gwyndolyn, Thom and John Steinbeck
Libraries
John Steinbeck Collection, 1902–1979
Wells Fargo John Steinbeck Collection, 1870–1981
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15826 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua%20Reynolds | Joshua Reynolds | Sir Joshua Reynolds (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an English painter, specialising in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and was knighted by George III in 1769.
Early life
Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, on 16 July 1723 the third son of the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, master of the Plympton Free Grammar School in the town. His father had been a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, but did not send any of his sons to the university.
One of his sisters was Mary Palmer (1716–1794), seven years his senior, author of Devonshire Dialogue, whose fondness for drawing is said to have had much influence on him when a boy. In 1740 she provided £60, half of the premium paid to Thomas Hudson the portrait-painter, for Joshua's pupilage, and nine years later advanced money for his expenses in Italy. His other siblings included Frances Reynolds and Elizabeth Johnson.
As a boy, he came under the influence of Zachariah Mudge, whose Platonistic philosophy stayed with him all his life. Reynolds made extracts in his commonplace book from Theophrastus, Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Antonius, Ovid, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Aphra Behn, and passages on art theory by Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy, and André Félibien. The work that came to have the most influential impact on Reynolds was Jonathan Richardson's An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715). Reynolds' annotated copy was lost for nearly two hundred years until it appeared in a Cambridge bookshop, inscribed with the signature ‘J. Reynolds Pictor’, and is now in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Career
Having shown an early interest in art, Reynolds was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable London portrait painter Thomas Hudson, who had been born in Devon. Hudson had a collection of Old Master drawings, including some by Guercino, of which Reynolds made copies. Although apprenticed to Hudson for four years, Reynolds remained with him only until summer 1743. Having left Hudson, Reynolds worked for some time as a portrait-painter in Plymouth Dock (now Devonport). He returned to London before the end of 1744, but following his father's death in late 1745 he shared a house in Plymouth Dock with his sisters.
In 1749, Reynolds met Commodore Augustus Keppel, who invited him to join HMS Centurion, of which he had command, on a voyage to the Mediterranean. While with the ship he visited Lisbon, Cadiz, Algiers, and Minorca. From Minorca he travelled to Livorno in Italy, and then to Rome, where he spent two years, studying the Old Masters and acquiring a taste for the "Grand Style". Lord Edgcumbe, who had known Reynolds as a boy and introduced him to Keppel, suggested he should study with Pompeo Batoni, the leading painter in Rome, but Reynolds replied that he had nothing to learn from him. While in Rome he suffered a severe cold, which left him partially deaf, and, as a result, he began to carry a small ear trumpet with which he is often pictured.
Reynolds travelled homeward overland via Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Paris. He was accompanied by Giuseppe Marchi, then aged about 17. Apart from a brief interlude in 1770, Marchi remained in Reynolds' employment as a studio assistant for the rest of the artist's career. Following his arrival in England in October 1752, Reynolds spent three months in Devon, before establishing himself in London, where he remained for the rest of his life. He took rooms in St Martin's Lane, before moving to Great Newport Street, his sister Frances acted as his housekeeper. He achieved success rapidly, and was extremely prolific. Lord Edgecumbe recommended the Duke of Devonshire and Duke of Grafton to sit for him, and other peers followed, including the Duke of Cumberland, third son of George II, in whose portrait, according to Nicholas Penny "bulk is brilliantly converted into power". In 1760 Reynolds moved into a large house, with space to show his works and accommodate his assistants, on the west side of Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square).
Alongside ambitious full-length portraits, Reynolds painted large numbers of smaller works. In the late 1750s, at the height of the social season, he received five or six sitters a day, each for an hour. By 1761 Reynolds could command a fee of 80 guineas for a full-length portrait; in 1764 he was paid 100 guineas for a portrait of Lord Burghersh.
The clothing of Reynolds' sitters was usually painted by either one of his pupils, his studio assistant Giuseppe Marchi, or the specialist drapery painter Peter Toms. James Northcote, his pupil, wrote of this arrangement that "the imitation of particular stuffs is not the work of genius, but is to be acquired easily by practice, and this was what his pupils could do by care and time more than he himself chose to bestow; but his own slight and masterly work was still the best." Lay figures were used to model the clothes.
Reynolds often adapted the poses of his subjects from the works of earlier artists, a practice mocked by Nathaniel Hone in a painting called The Conjuror submitted to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1775, and now in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. It shows a figure representing, though not resembling, Reynolds, seated in front of a cascade of prints from which Reynolds had borrowed with varying degrees of subtlety.
Although not known principally for his landscapes, Reynolds did paint in this genre. He had an excellent vantage from his house, Wick House, on Richmond Hill, and painted the view in about 1780.
Reynolds also was recognized for his portraits of children. He emphasized the innocence and natural grace of children when depicting them. His 1788 portrait, Age of Innocence, is his best known character study of a child. The subject of the painting is not known, although conjecture includes Theophila Gwatkin, his great niece, and Lady Anne Spencer, the youngest daughter of the fourth Duke of Marlborough.
The Club
Reynolds worked long hours in his studio, rarely taking a holiday. He was gregarious and keenly intellectual, with many friends from London's intelligentsia, numbered amongst whom were Dr Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Giuseppe Baretti, Henry Thrale, David Garrick, and artist Angelica Kauffman. Johnson said in 1778: "Reynolds is too much under [Charles James] Fox and Burke at present. He is under the Fox star and the Irish constellation [meaning Burke]. He is always under some planet".
Because of his popularity as a portrait painter, Reynolds enjoyed constant interaction with the wealthy and famous men and women of the day, and it was he who brought together the figures of "The Club". It was founded in 1764 and met in a suite of rooms on the first floor of the Turks Head at 9 Gerrard Street, now marked by a plaque. Original members included Burke, Bennet Langton, Topham Beauclerk, Goldsmith, Anthony Chamier, Thomas Hawkins, and Nugent, to be joined by Garrick, Boswell, and Sheridan. In ten years the membership had risen to 35. The Club met every Monday evening for supper and conversation and continued into the early hours of Tuesday morning. In later years, it met fortnightly during Parliamentary sessions. When in 1783 the landlord of the Turks Head died and the property was sold, The Club moved to Sackville Street.
Royal Academy
Reynolds was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society of Arts, helped found the Society of Artists of Great Britain, and in 1768 became the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, a position he was to hold until his death. In 1769, he was knighted by George III, only the second artist to be so honoured. His Discourses, a series of lectures delivered at the Academy between 1769 and 1790, are remembered for their sensitivity and perception. In one lecture he expressed the opinion that "invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory." William Jackson in his contemporary essays said of Reynolds ' there is much ingenuity and originality in all his academic discourses, replete with classical knowledge of his art, acute remarks on the works of others, and general taste and discernment'.
Reynolds and the Royal Academy received a mixed reception. Critics included William Blake who published the vitriolic Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses in 1808. J. M. W. Turner and James Northcote were fervent acolytes: Turner requested he be laid to rest at Reynolds' side, and Northcote, who spent four years as Reynolds' pupil, wrote to his family "I know him thoroughly, and all his faults, I am sure, and yet almost worship him."
The Royal Academy of Art in London celebrated its 250th anniversary in 2018, since its opening in 1768. This became an impetus for galleries and museums across the UK to celebrate "the making, debating and exhibiting art at the Royal Academy". Waddesdon manor was amongst the historic houses that supported Sir Joshua Reynolds's influence at the academy, acknowledging how:
[He] transformed British painting with portraits and subject pictures that engaged their audience's knowledge, imagination, memory and emotions... As an eloquent teacher and art theorist, he used his role at the head of the Royal Academy to raise the status of art and artists of Britain.
Lord Keppel
In the Battle of Ushant against the French in 1778, Lord Keppel commanded the Channel Fleet and the outcome resulted in no clear winner; Keppel ordered the attack be renewed and was obeyed except by Sir Hugh Palliser, who commanded the rear, and the French escaped bombardment. A dispute between Keppel and Palliser arose and Palliser brought charges of misconduct and neglect of duty against Keppel and the Admiralty decided to court-martial him. On 11 February 1779 Keppel was acquitted of all charges and became a national hero. One of Keppel's lawyers commissioned Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland to paint a portrait of Keppel but Keppel redirected it to Reynolds. Reynolds alluded to Keppel's trial in the painting by painting his hand on his sword, reflecting the presiding officer's words at the court-martial: "In delivering to you your sword, I am to congratulate you on its being restored to you with so much honour".
Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King
On 10 August 1784 Allan Ramsay died and the office of Principal Painter in Ordinary to King George III became vacant. Gainsborough felt that he had a good chance of securing it, but Reynolds felt he deserved it and threatened to resign the presidency of the Royal Academy if he did not receive it. Reynolds noted in his pocket book: "Sept. 1, 2½, to attend at the Lord Chancellor's Office to be sworn in painter to the King". It did not make Reynolds happy, however, as he wrote to Boswell: "If I had known what a shabby miserable place it is, I would not have asked for it; besides as things have turned out I think a certain person is not worth speaking to, nor speaking of", presumably meaning the king. Reynolds wrote to Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St Asaph, a few weeks later: "Your Lordship congratulation on my succeeding Mr. Ramsay I take very kindly, but it is a most miserable office, it is reduced from two hundred to thirty-eight pounds per annum, the Kings Rat catcher I believe is a better place, and I am to be paid only a fourth part of what I have from other people, so that the Portraits of their Majesties are not likely to be better done now, than they used to be, I should be ruined if I was to paint them myself".
Lord Heathfield
In 1787 Reynolds painted the portrait of Lord Heathfield, who became a national hero for the successful defence of Gibraltar in the Great Siege from 1779 to 1783 against the combined forces of France and Spain. Heathfield is depicted against a background of clouds and cannon smoke, wearing the uniform of the 15th Light Dragoons and clasping the key of the Rock, its chain wrapped twice around his right hand. John Constable said in the 1830s that it was "almost a history of the defence of Gibraltar". Desmond Shawe-Taylor has claimed that the portrait may have a religious meaning, Heathfield holding the key similar to St. Peter (Jesus' "rock") possessing the keys to Heaven, Heathfield "the rock upon which Britannia builds her military interests".
Later life
In 1789, Reynolds lost the sight of his left eye, which forced him into retirement. In 1791 James Boswell dedicated his Life of Samuel Johnson to Reynolds. Reynolds agreed with Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and, writing in early 1791, expressed his belief that the ancien régime of France had fallen due to spending too much time tending, as he puts it, to the splendor of the foliage, to the neglect of the stirring the earth about the roots. They cultivated only those arts which could add splendor to the nation, to the neglect of those which supported it – They neglected Trade & substantial Manufacture ... but does it follow that a total revolution is necessary that because we have given ourselves up too much to the ornaments of life, we will now have none at all. When attending a dinner at Holland House, Fox's niece Caroline was sat next to Reynolds and "burst out into glorification of the Revolution – and was grievously chilled and checked by her neighbour's cautious and unsympathetic tone".
On 4 June 1791 at a dinner at the Freemasons' Tavern to mark the king's birthday, Reynolds drank to the toasts "GOD save the KING!" and "May our glorious Constitution under which the arts flourish, be immortal!", in what was reported by the Public Advertiser as "a fervour truly patriotick". Reynolds "filled the chair with a most convivial glee". He returned to town from Burke's house in Beaconsfield and Edmond Malone wrote that "we left his carriage at the Inn at Hayes, and walked five miles on the road, in a warm day, without his complaining of any fatigue".
Later that month Reynolds suffered from a swelling over his left eye and had to be purged by a surgeon. In October he was too ill to take the president's chair and in November Frances Burney recorded that I had long languished to see that kindly zealous friend, but his ill health had intimidated me from making the attempt": "He had a bandage over one eye, and the other shaded with a green half-bonnet. He seemed serious even to sadness, though extremely kind. 'I am very glad,' he said, in a meek voice and dejected accent, 'to see you again, and I wish I could see you better! but I have only one eye now, and hardly that.' I was really quite touched. On 5 November Reynolds, fearing he might not have an opportunity to write a will, wrote a memorandum intended to be his last will and testament, with Edmund Burke, Edmond Malone, and Philip Metcalfe named as executors. On 10 November Reynolds wrote to Benjamin West to resign the presidency, but the General Assembly agreed he should be re-elected, with Sir William Chambers and West to deputise for him.
Doctors Richard Warren and Sir George Baker believed Reynolds' illness to be psychological and they bled his neck "with a view of drawing the humour from his eyes" but the effect, in the view of his niece, was that it seemed "as if the 'principle of life' were gone" from Reynolds. On New Year's Day 1792 Reynolds became "seized with sickness" and from that point could not keep down food.
Reynolds died on 23 February 1792 at his house in Leicester Fields in London between eight and nine in the evening.
Burke was present on the night Reynolds died, and was moved within hours to write a eulogy of Reynolds starting with the following sentiments: "Sir Joshua Reynolds was on very many accounts one of the most memorable men of his Time. He was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant Arts to the other Glories of his Country. In Taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and Harmony of colouring, he was equal to the great masters of the renowned Ages." Burke's tribute was well received and one journalist called it "the eulogium of Apelles pronounced by Pericles".
Reynolds was buried at St Paul's Cathedral. In 1903, a statue, by Alfred Drury, was erected in his honour in Annenberg Courtyard of Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy. Around the statue are fountains and lights, installed in 2000, arranged in the pattern of a star chart at midnight on the night of Reynolds' birth. The planets are marked by granite discs, and the Moon by a water recess.
Personal characteristics
[[File:Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) - Huang Ya Dong 'Wang-Y-Tong' - 129924 - National Trust.jpg|thumb|right|Huang Ya Dong 'Wang-Y-Tong''' (1776)]]
In appearance Reynolds was not striking. Slight, he was about 5'6" with dark brown curls, a florid complexion and features that James Boswell thought were "rather too largely and strongly limned." He had a broad face and a cleft chin, and the bridge of his nose was slightly dented; his skin was scarred by smallpox and his upper lip disfigured as a result of falling from a horse as a young man. Edmond Malone asserted that "his appearance at first sight impressed the spectator with the idea of a well-born and well-bred English gentleman."
In his mature years he suffered from deafness, as recorded by Frances Burney, although this did not impede his lively social life (he used an ear trumpet).
Renowned for his placidity, Reynolds often claimed that he "hated nobody". This may be a little self-idealisation. It is well known that he disliked George Romney, whom he referred to only as "the man in Cavendish Square" and whom he successfully prevented from becoming a member of the Royal Academy. He did not like Gainsborough, yet appreciated his achievements in his obituary. (Rump; Kidson). It is said that when he taught in one of his "discourses" that a painter should not amass too much of the colour blue in the foreground of an image, Gainsborough was prompted to paint his famous "Blue Boy".
Never quite losing his Devonshire accent, he was not only an amiable and original conversationalist, but a friendly and generous host, so that Frances Burney recorded in her diary that he had "a suavity of disposition that set everybody at their ease in his society", and William Makepeace Thackeray believed "of all the polite men of that age, Joshua Reynolds was the finest gentleman." Dr. Johnson commented on the "inoffensiveness" of his nature; Edmund Burke noted his "strong turn for humor". Thomas Bernard, who later became Bishop of Killaloe, wrote in his closing verses on Reynolds stating:
Thou say'st not only skill is gained
But genius too may be attained
By studious imitation;
Thy temper mild, thy genius fine
I'll copy till I make them mine
By constant application.
Some, such as Hester Lynch Piozzi, construed Reynolds' equable calm as cool and unfeeling.
It is to this lukewarm temperament that Frederick W. Hilles, Bodman Professor of English Literature at Yale attributes Reynolds' never having married. In the editorial notes of his compendium Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hilles theorizes that "as a corollary one might say that he [Reynolds] was somewhat lacking in a capacity for love", and cites Boswell's notary papers: "He said the reason he would never marry was that every woman whom he liked had grown indifferent to him, and he had been glad he did not marry her." Reynolds' own sister, Frances, who lived with him as housekeeper, took her own negative opinion further still, thinking him "a gloomy tyrant". The presence of family compensated Reynolds for the absence of a wife; he wrote on one occasion to his friend Bennet Langton, that both his sister and niece were away from home "so that I am quite a bachelor". Reynolds did not marry, and had no known children.
Biographer Ian McIntyre discusses the possibility of Reynolds having enjoyed sexual rendezvous with certain clients, such as Nelly O'Brien (or "My Lady O'Brien", as he playfully dubbed her) and Kitty Fisher, who visited his house for more sittings than were strictly necessary. Dan Cruickshank in his book London's Sinful Secret summarized Reynolds as having visited and re-visited various reputed red light districts in London after his return from Italy as a possible contributor to his medical condition and appearance due to commonly contracted disease in those areas of London.
Gallery
See also
English art
Grand manner
Mary Nesbitt, eighteenth-century courtesan who began her career as Reynolds' model.
Martin Postle, an expert on Joshua Reynolds
References
Referenced books
James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Charles Robert Leslie and Tom Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London: John Murray, 1865, 2 volumes).
Ian McIntyre, Joshua Reynolds. The Life and Times of the First President of the Royal Academy (London: Allen Lane, 2003).
Martin Postle, Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723–1792), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, October 2009. Retrieved 24 September 2010.
Further reading
J. Blanc, Les Écrits de Sir Joshua Reynolds (Théorie de l'art (1400–1800) / Art Theory (1400–1800), 4), Turnhout, 2016,
John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (1986).
A. Graves and W. V. Cronin, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1899–1901, 4 volumes).
F. W. Hilles, The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1936).
Derek Hudson, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Personal Study (1958).
J. Ingamells and J. Edgcumbe (eds.), The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds (2000).
Alex Kidson, George Romney. 1734-1802 (2002)
E. Malone (ed.), The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798, 3 volumes).
D. Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA, 1723–92 (1992).
D. Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings: The Subject Pictures Catalogued by Martin Postle (New Haven ad London, 2000)
H. Mount (ed.), Sir Joshua Reynolds, A Journey to Flanders and Holland (1996)
J. Northcote, Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, knt. (1813–15).
J. Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1818, 2nd edition, 2 volumes).
Martin Postle (ed.), Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (London: Tate, 2005).
Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (1995).
Martin Postle, Drawings of Joshua Reynolds.
R. Prochno, Joshua Reynolds (1990).
Gerhard Charles Rump, George Romney (1734-1802). Zur Bildform der bürgerlichen Mitte in der Englischen Neoklassik. (1974)
S. Smiles (ed.), Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius (2009).
Uglow, Jenny, "Big Talkers" (review of Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, Yale University Press, 473 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 9 (23 May 2019), pp. 26–28.
E. K. Waterhouse, Reynolds (1941).
E. K. Waterhouse, Reynolds'' (1973).
Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (London, 1778); ed. R. R. Wark (New Haven and London, 1975)
N. Penny (ed.), Reynolds, exhibition catalogue, Paris Grand Palais, London, Royal Academy, 1986
Werner Busch, Hogarth's and Reynolds'Porträt des Schauspielers Garrick, in: Englishness. Beiträge zur englischen Kunst des 18. Jahrhunderts von Hogath bis Romney, Berlin and Munich 2010, pp.57-76
External links
Port Eliot House, home of the Earl of St. Germans contains many fine works by Reynolds, including a rare view of Plymouth
'Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius' exhibition at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery - 21 November 2009 to 20 February 2010
Frits Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins & d'estampes, 1921 and its Supplement 1956, online edition
Sir Joshua Reynolds at Waddesdon Manor
, engraved by Ambrose William Warren for The Easter Gift, 1832, with a poetical illustration by Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Collections
The National Gallery: Sir Joshua Reynolds
Works in the National Galleries of Scotland
Liverpoolmuseums.org.uk
GAC.culture.gov.uk
Artcyclopedia: Sir Joshua Reynolds
National Portrait Gallery Collection
Sir Joshua Reynolds at Olga's Gallery
Sir Joshua Reynolds, A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings (book-bound)
Electronic editions
English portrait painters
1723 births
1792 deaths
Artist authors
Fellows of the Royal Society
People from Plympton
Principal Painters in Ordinary
Royal Academicians
Streathamites
Knights Bachelor
Burials at St Paul's Cathedral
18th-century English painters
English male painters
Sibling artists
Waddesdon Manor
Fellows of the Royal Society of Arts | [
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15827 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph%20Schumpeter | Joseph Schumpeter | Joseph Alois Schumpeter (; February 8, 1883 – January 8, 1950) was an Austrian-born political economist. He served briefly as Finance Minister of German-Austria in 1919. In 1932, he emigrated to the United States to become a professor at Harvard University, where he remained until the end of his career, and in 1939 obtained American citizenship.
Schumpeter was one of the most influential economists of the early 20th century, and popularized the term "creative destruction", which was coined by Werner Sombart.
Early life and education
Schumpeter was born in Triesch, Habsburg Moravia (now Třešť in the Czech Republic, then part of Austria-Hungary) in 1883 to Catholic German-speaking parents. Both of his grandmothers were Czech. Schumpeter did not acknowledge his Czech ancestry; he considered himself an ethnic German. His father owned a factory, but he died when Joseph was only four years old. In 1893, Joseph and his mother moved to Vienna. Schumpeter was a loyal supporter of Franz Joseph I of Austria.
After attending school at the Theresianum, Schumpeter began his career studying law at the University of Vienna under the Austrian capital theorist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, taking his PhD in 1906. In 1909, after some study trips, he became a professor of economics and government at the University of Czernowitz in modern-day Ukraine. In 1911, he joined the University of Graz, where he remained until World War I.
In 1918, Schumpeter was a member of the Socialization Commission established by the Council of the People's Deputies in Germany. In March 1919, he was invited to take office as Minister of Finance in the Republic of German-Austria. He proposed a capital levy as a way to tackle the war debt and opposed the socialization of the Alpine Mountain plant. In 1921, he became president of the private Biedermann Bank. He was also a board member at the Kaufmann Bank. Problems at those banks left Schumpeter in debt. His resignation was a condition of the takeover of the Biedermann Bank in September 1924.
From 1925 to 1932, Schumpeter held a chair at the University of Bonn, Germany. He lectured at Harvard in 1927–1928 and 1930. In 1931, he was a visiting professor at The Tokyo College of Commerce. In 1932, Schumpeter moved to the United States, and soon began what would become extensive efforts to help central European economist colleagues displaced by Nazism. Schumpeter also became known for his opposition to Marxism and socialism that he thought would lead to dictatorship, and even criticized President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1939, Schumpeter became a US citizen. In the beginning of World War II, the FBI investigated him and his wife, Elizabeth Boody (a prominent scholar of Japanese economics) for pro-Nazi leanings, but found no evidence of Nazi sympathies.
At Harvard, Schumpeter was considered a memorable character, erudite and even showy in the classroom. He became known for his heavy teaching load and his personal and painstaking interest in his students. He served as the faculty advisor of the Graduate Economics Club and organized private seminars and discussion groups. Some colleagues thought his views outdated by Keynesianism which was fashionable; others resented his criticisms, particularly of their failure to offer an assistant professorship to Paul Samuelson, but recanted when they thought him likely to accept a position at Yale University. This period of his life was characterized by hard work and comparatively little recognition of his massive 2-volume book Business Cycles. However, Schumpeter persevered, and in 1942 published what became the most popular of all his works, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, reprinted many times and in many languages in the following decades, as well as cited thousands of times.
Career
Influences
The source of Schumpeter's dynamic, change-oriented, and innovation-based economics was the Historical school of economics. Although his writings could be critical of the School, Schumpeter's work on the role of innovation and entrepreneurship can be seen as a continuation of ideas originated by the Historical School, especially the work of Gustav von Schmoller and Werner Sombart. Despite being born in Austria and having trained with many of the same economists, some argue he cannot be categorized with the heterodox Austrian School of economics without major qualifications while others maintain the opposite.
The Austrian sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid's concept of fiscal sociology influenced Schumpeter's analysis of the tax state. In a 2012 paper, Fabrice Dannequin showed that Schumpeter's writings displayed the influence of Francis Galton's work.
Evolutionary economics
According to Christopher Freeman (2009), a scholar who devoted much time researching Schumpeter's work: "the central point of his whole life work [is]: that capitalism can only be understood as an evolutionary process of continuous innovation and 'creative destruction'".
History of Economic Analysis
Schumpeter's scholarship is apparent in his posthumous History of Economic Analysis, although some of his judgments seem idiosyncratic and sometimes cavalier. For instance, Schumpeter thought that the greatest 18th century economist was Turgot rather than Adam Smith, and he considered Léon Walras to be the "greatest of all economists", beside whom other economists' theories were "like inadequate attempts to catch some particular aspects of Walrasian truth". Schumpeter criticized John Maynard Keynes and David Ricardo for the "Ricardian vice". According to Schumpeter, Ricardo and Keynes reasoned in terms of abstract models, where they would freeze all but a few variables. Then they could argue that one caused the other in a simple monotonic fashion. This led to the belief that one could easily deduce policy conclusions directly from a highly abstract theoretical model.
In this book, Joseph Schumpeter recognized the implication of a gold monetary standard compared to a fiat monetary standard. In History of Economic Analysis, Schumpeter stated the following: "An 'automatic' gold currency is part and parcel of a laissez-faire and free-trade economy. It links every nation's money rates and price levels with the money-rates and price levels of all the other nations that are 'on gold.' However, gold is extremely sensitive to government expenditure and even to attitudes or policies that do not involve expenditure directly, for example, to foreign policy, to certain policies of taxation, and, in general, to precisely all those policies that violate the principles of [classical] liberalism. This is the reason why gold is so unpopular now and also why it was so popular in a bourgeois era."
Business cycles
Schumpeter's relationships with the ideas of other economists were quite complex in his most important contributions to economic analysis – the theory of business cycles and development. Following neither Walras nor Keynes, Schumpeter starts in The Theory of Economic Development with a treatise of circular flow which, excluding any innovations and innovative activities, leads to a stationary state. The stationary state is, according to Schumpeter, described by Walrasian equilibrium. The hero of his story is the entrepreneur.
The entrepreneur disturbs this equilibrium and is the prime cause of economic development, which proceeds in cyclic fashion along several time scales. In fashioning this theory connecting innovations, cycles, and development, Schumpeter kept alive the Russian Nikolai Kondratiev's ideas on 50-year cycles, Kondratiev waves.
Schumpeter suggested a model in which the four main cycles, Kondratiev (54 years), Kuznets (18 years), Juglar (9 years) and Kitchin (about 4 years) can be added together to form a composite waveform. A Kondratiev wave could consist of three lower degree Kuznets waves. Each Kuznets wave could, itself, be made up of two Juglar waves. Similarly two (or three) Kitchin waves could form a higher degree Juglar wave. If each of these were in phase, more importantly if the downward arc of each was simultaneous so that the nadir of each was coincident, it would explain disastrous slumps and consequent depressions. As far as the segmentation of the Kondratiev Wave, Schumpeter never proposed such a fixed model. He saw these cycles varying in time – although in a tight time frame by coincidence – and for each to serve a specific purpose.
Keynesianism
In Schumpeter's theory, Walrasian equilibrium is not adequate to capture the key mechanisms of economic development. Schumpeter also thought that the institution enabling the entrepreneur to buy the resources needed to realize his vision was a well-developed capitalist financial system, including a whole range of institutions for granting credit. One could divide economists among (1) those who emphasized "real" analysis and regarded money as merely a "veil" and (2) those who thought monetary institutions are important and money could be a separate driving force. Both Schumpeter and Keynes were among the latter.
Demise of capitalism
Schumpeter's most popular book in English is probably Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. While he agrees with Karl Marx that capitalism will collapse and be replaced by socialism, Schumpeter predicts a different way this will come about. While Marx predicted that capitalism would be overthrown by a violent proletarian revolution, which actually occurred in the least capitalist countries, Schumpeter believed that capitalism would gradually weaken by itself and eventually collapse. Specifically, the success of capitalism would lead to corporatism and to values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals.
"Intellectuals" are a social class in a position to critique societal matters for which they are not directly responsible and to stand up for the interests of other classes. Intellectuals tend to have a negative outlook of capitalism, even while relying on it for prestige, because their professions rely on antagonism toward it. The growing number of people with higher education is a great advantage of capitalism, according to Schumpeter. Yet, unemployment and a lack of fulfilling work will lead to intellectual critique, discontent and protests.
Parliaments will increasingly elect social democratic parties, and democratic majorities will vote for restrictions on entrepreneurship. Increasing workers' self-management, industrial democracy and regulatory institutions would evolve non-politically into "liberal capitalism". Thus, the intellectual and social climate needed for thriving entrepreneurship will be replaced by some form of "laborism". This will exacerbate "creative destruction" (a borrowed phrase to denote an endogenous replacement of old ways of doing things by new ways), which will ultimately undermine and destroy the capitalist structure.
Schumpeter emphasizes throughout this book that he is analyzing trends, not engaging in political advocacy.
William Fellner, in the book Schumpeter's Vision: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy After 40 Years, noted that Schumpeter saw any political system in which the power was fully monopolized as fascist.
Democratic theory
In the same book, Schumpeter expounded a theory of democracy which sought to challenge what he called the "classical doctrine". He disputed the idea that democracy was a process by which the electorate identified the common good, and politicians carried this out for them. He argued this was unrealistic, and that people's ignorance and superficiality meant that in fact they were largely manipulated by politicians, who set the agenda. Furthermore, he claimed that even if the common good was possible to find, it would still not make clear the means needed to reach its end, since citizens do not have the requisite knowledge to design government policy. This made a 'rule by the people' concept both unlikely and undesirable. Instead he advocated a minimalist model, much influenced by Max Weber, whereby democracy is the mechanism for competition between leaders, much like a market structure. Although periodic votes by the general public legitimize governments and keep them accountable, the policy program is very much seen as their own and not that of the people, and the participatory role for individuals is usually severely limited.
Schumpeter defined democracy as the method by which people elect representatives in competitive elections to carry out their will. This definition has been described as simple, elegant and parsimonious, making it clearer to distinguish political systems that either fulfill or fail these characteristics. This minimalist definition stands in contrast to broader definitions of democracy, which may emphasize aspects such as "representation, accountability, equality, participation, justice, dignity, rationality, security, freedom". Within such a minimalist definition, states which other scholars say have experienced democratic backsliding and which lack civil liberties, a free press, the rule of law and a constrained executive, would still be considered democracies. For Schumpeter, the formation of a government is the endpoint of the democratic process, which means that for the purposes of his democratic theory, he has no comment on what kinds of decisions that the government can take to be a democracy. Schumpeter faced pushback on his theory from other democratic theorists, such as Robert Dahl, who argued that there is more to democracy than simply the formation of government through competitive elections.
Schumpeter's view of democracy has been described as "elitist", as he criticizes the rationality and knowledge of voters, and expresses a preference for politicians making decisions. Democracy is therefore in a sense a means to ensure circulation among elites. However, studies by Natasha Piano (of the University of Chicago) emphasize that Schumpeter had substantial disdain for elites as well.
Entrepreneurship
Schumpeter was probably the first scholar to theorize about entrepreneurship, and the field owed much to his contributions. His fundamental theories are often referred to as Mark I and Mark II. In Mark I, Schumpeter argued that the innovation and technological change of a nation come from the entrepreneurs, or wild spirits. He coined the word Unternehmergeist, German for "entrepreneur-spirit", and asserted that "... the doing of new things or the doing of things that are already being done in a new way" stemmed directly from the efforts of entrepreneurs.
Schumpeter developed Mark II while a professor at Harvard. Many social economists and popular authors of the day argued that large businesses had a negative effect on the standard of living of ordinary people. Contrary to this prevailing opinion, Schumpeter argued that the agents that drive innovation and the economy are large companies which have the capital to invest in research and development of new products and services and to deliver them to customers more cheaply, thus raising their standard of living. In one of his seminal works, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter wrote:
Mark I and Mark II arguments are considered complementary.
Cycles and long wave theory
Schumpeter was the most influential thinker to argue that long cycles are caused by innovation, and are an incident of it. His treatise on business cycles developed were based on Kondratiev's ideas which attributed the causes very differently. Schumpeter's treatise brought Kondratiev's ideas to the attention of English-speaking economists. Kondratiev fused important elements that Schumpeter missed. Yet, the Schumpeterian variant of long-cycles hypothesis, stressing the initiating role of innovations, commands the widest attention today.
In Schumpeter's view, technological innovation is at the cause of both cyclical instability and economic growth. Fluctuations in innovation cause fluctuation in investment and those cause cycles in economic growth. Schumpeter sees innovations as clustering around certain points in time periods that he refers to as "neighborhoods of equilibrium", when entrepreneurs perceive that risk and returns warrant innovative commitments. These clusters lead to long cycles by generating periods of acceleration in aggregate growth.
The technological view of change needs to demonstrate that changes in the rate of innovation governs changes in the rate of new investments, and that the combined impact of innovation clusters takes the form of fluctuation in aggregate output or employment. The process of technological innovation involves extremely complex relations among a set of key variables: inventions, innovations, diffusion paths and investment activities. The impact of technological innovation on aggregate output is mediated through a succession of relationships that have yet to be explored systematically in the context of long wave. New inventions are typically primitive, their performance is usually poorer than existing technologies and the cost of their production is high. A production technology may not yet exist, as is often the case in major chemical inventions, pharmaceutical inventions. The speed with which inventions are transformed into innovations and diffused depends on actual and expected trajectory of performance improvement and cost reduction.
Innovation
Schumpeter identified innovation as the critical dimension of economic change. He argued that economic change revolves around innovation, entrepreneurial activities, and market power. He sought to prove that innovation-originated market power can provide better results than the invisible hand and price competition. He argued that technological innovation often creates temporary monopolies, allowing abnormal profits that would soon be competed away by rivals and imitators. These temporary monopolies were necessary to provide the incentive for firms to develop new products and processes.
Doing Business
The World Bank's "Doing Business" report was influenced by Schumpeter's focus on removing impediments to creative destruction. The creation of the report is credited in part to his work.
Personal life
He was married three times. His first wife was Gladys Ricarde Seaver, an Englishwoman nearly 12 years his senior (married 1907, separated 1913, divorced 1925). His best man at his wedding was his friend and Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen. His second was Anna Reisinger, 20 years his junior and daughter of the concierge of the apartment where he grew up. As a divorced man, he and his bride converted to Lutheranism to marry. They married in 1925, but within a year, she died in childbirth. The loss of his wife and newborn son came only weeks after Schumpeter's mother had died. In 1937, Schumpeter married the American economic historian Elizabeth Boody (1898–1953), who helped him popularize his work and edited what became their magnum opus, the posthumously published History of Economic Analysis.
Schumpeter claimed that he had set himself three goals in life: to be the greatest economist in the world, to be the best horseman in all of Austria and the greatest lover in all of Vienna. He said he had reached two of his goals, but he never said which two, although he is reported to have said that there were too many fine horsemen in Austria for him to succeed in all his aspirations.
Later life and death
Schumpeter died in his home in Taconic, Connecticut, at the age of 66, on the night of January 7, 1950.
Legacy
For some time after his death, Schumpeter's views were most influential among various heterodox economists, especially European, who were interested in industrial organization, evolutionary theory, and economic development, and who tended to be on the other end of the political spectrum from Schumpeter and were also often influenced by Keynes, Karl Marx, and Thorstein Veblen. Robert Heilbroner was one of Schumpeter's most renowned pupils, who wrote extensively about him in The Worldly Philosophers. In the journal Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster wrote of that journal's founder Paul Sweezy, one of the leading Marxist economists in the United States and a graduate assistant of Schumpeter's at Harvard, that Schumpeter "played a formative role in his development as a thinker". Other outstanding students of Schumpeter's include the economists Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Hyman Minsky and John Kenneth Galbraith and former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Future Nobel Laureate Robert Solow was his student at Harvard, and he expanded on Schumpeter's theory.
Today, Schumpeter has a following outside standard textbook economics, in areas such as economic policy, management studies, industrial policy, and the study of innovation. Schumpeter was probably the first scholar to develop theories about entrepreneurship. For instance, the European Union's innovation program, and its main development plan, the Lisbon Strategy, are influenced by Schumpeter. The International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society awards the Schumpeter Prize.
The Schumpeter School of Business and Economics opened in October 2008 at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. According to University President Professor Lambert T. Koch, "Schumpeter will not only be the name of the Faculty of Management and Economics, but this is also a research and teaching programme related to Joseph A. Schumpeter."
On September 17, 2009, The Economist inaugurated a column on business and management named "Schumpeter". The publication has a history of naming columns after significant figures or symbols in the covered field, including naming its British affairs column after former editor Walter Bagehot and its European affairs column after Charlemagne. The initial Schumpeter column praised him as a "champion of innovation and entrepreneurship" whose writing showed an understanding of the benefits and dangers of business that proved to be far ahead of its time.
His thought inspired the economic theory of Adam Przeworski.
Major works
Books
Translated as: Translated by: Bruce A. McDaniel
Pdf of preface by F.A. Hayek and first eight pages.
Translated from the 1911 original German, Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung.
Translated from the 1912 original German, Epochen der dogmen – und Methodengeschichte. Pdf version.
Reprinted in hardback as:
Reprinted in paperback as:
Reprinted by the University of Michigan Library
Reprinted as:
Reprinted as
Reprinted as:
Reprinted as:
See also the English translation:
Originally printed as:
Reprinted as:
Reprinted as:
Reprinted as:
Edited from a manuscript by Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter.
Originally printed as: Reprinted in 2008.
Journal articles
Continued on pp. 88–91.
Reprinted as:
Translated from a speech given in German by Schumpeter, Wie studiert man Sozialwissenschaft.
Memoriams
Reviews
See also
List of Austrians
Historical school of economics
Lausanne School
List of Austrian scientists
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
Social innovation
Creative destruction
Schumpeterian rent
References
Further reading
.
Ebeling, Richard. M., "Joseph A. Schumpeter, Outside Looking In," American Institute for Economic Research, January 13, 2020
External links
Joseph Schumpeter, Selected Writings
Innovation economists
1883 births
1950 deaths
Austrian economists
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austrian people of Czech descent
Austrian people of Moravian-German descent
Converts to Lutheranism from Roman Catholicism
Chernivtsi University faculty
Finance Ministers of Austria
Government ministers of Austria
Historians of economic thought
Macroeconomists
Development economists
People from Třešť
University of Bonn faculty
University of Vienna alumni
Fellows of the Econometric Society
Presidents of the Econometric Society
Presidents of the American Economic Association
Austrian expatriates in Japan
American people of Moravian-German descent
20th-century American economists
Harvard University faculty
Columbia University faculty
Austrian expatriates in Germany | [
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15830 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20Lee%20Hooker | John Lee Hooker | John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1912 or 1917 – June 21, 2001) was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The son of a sharecropper, he rose to prominence performing an electric guitar-style adaptation of Delta blues. Hooker often incorporated other elements, including talking blues and early North Mississippi Hill country blues. He developed his own driving-rhythm boogie style, distinct from the 1930s–1940s piano-derived boogie-woogie. Hooker was ranked 35 in Rolling Stones 2015 list of 100 greatest guitarists.
Some of his best known songs include "Boogie Chillen'" (1948), "Crawling King Snake" (1949), "Dimples" (1956), "Boom Boom" (1962), and "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (1966). Several of his later albums, including The Healer (1989), Mr. Lucky (1991), Chill Out (1995), and Don't Look Back (1997), were album chart successes in the U.S. and UK. The Healer (for the song "I'm In The Mood") and Chill Out (for the album) both earned him Grammy wins as well as Don't Look Back, which went on to earn him a double-Grammy win for Best Traditional Blues Recording and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals (with Van Morrison).
Early life
Hooker's date of birth is a subject of debate; the years 1912, 1915, 1917, 1920, and 1923 have all been suggested. Most official sources list 1917, though at times Hooker stated he was born in 1920. Information found in the 1920 and 1930 censuses indicates that he was actually born in 1912. In 2017, a series of events took place to celebrate the purported centenary of his birth. In the 1920 federal census, John Hooker is seven years old and one of nine children living with William and Minnie Hooker in Tutwiler, Mississippi.
It is believed that he was born in Tutwiler, in Tallahatchie County, although some sources say his birthplace was near Clarksdale, in Coahoma County. He was the youngest of the 11 children of William Hooker (born 1871, died after 1923), a sharecropper and Baptist preacher, and Minnie Ramsey (born c. 1880, date of death unknown). In the 1920 federal census, William and Minnie were recorded as being 48 and 39 years old, respectively, which implies that Minnie was born about 1880, not 1875. She was said to have been a "decade or so younger" than her husband (Boogie Man, p. 23), which gives additional credibility to this census record as evidence of Hooker's origins.
The Hooker children were homeschooled. They were permitted to listen only to religious songs; the spirituals sung in church were their earliest exposure to music. In 1921, their parents separated. The next year, their mother married William Moore, a blues singer, who provided John Lee with an introduction to the guitar (and whom he would later credit for his distinctive playing style).
Moore was his first significant blues influence. He was a local blues guitarist who, in Shreveport, Louisiana, learned to play a droning, one-chord blues that was strikingly different from the Delta blues of the time.
Another influence was Tony Hollins, who dated Hooker's sister Alice, helped teach Hooker to play, and gave him his first guitar. For the rest of his life, Hooker regarded Hollins as a formative influence on his style of playing and his career as a musician. Among the songs that Hollins reputedly taught Hooker were versions of "Crawlin' King Snake" and "Catfish Blues".
At the age of 14, Hooker ran away from home, reportedly never seeing his mother or stepfather again. In the mid-1930s, he lived in Memphis, Tennessee, where he performed on Beale Street, at the New Daisy Theatre and occasionally at house parties.
He worked in factories in various cities during World War II, eventually getting a job with the Ford Motor Company in Detroit in 1943. He frequented the blues clubs and bars on Hastings Street, the heart of the black entertainment district, on Detroit's east side. In a city noted for its pianists, guitar players were scarce. Hooker's popularity grew quickly as he performed in Detroit clubs, and, seeking an instrument louder than his acoustic guitar, he bought his first electric guitar.
Earlier career
Hooker was working as janitor in a Detroit steel mill when his recording career began in 1948, when Modern Records, based in Los Angeles, released a demo he had recorded for Bernie Besman in Detroit. The single, "Boogie Chillen', became a hit and the best-selling race record of 1949. Though illiterate, Hooker was a prolific lyricist. In addition to adapting traditional blues lyrics, he composed original songs. In the 1950s, like many black musicians, Hooker earned little from record sales, and so he often recorded variations of his songs for different studios for an up-front fee. To evade his recording contract, he used various pseudonyms, including John Lee Booker (for Chess Records and Chance Records in 1951–1952), Johnny Lee (for De Luxe Records in 1953–1954), John Lee, John Lee Cooker, Texas Slim, Delta John, Birmingham Sam and his Magic Guitar, Johnny Williams, and the Boogie Man.
His early solo songs were recorded by Bernie Besman. Hooker rarely played with a standard beat, but instead he changed tempo to fit the needs of the song. This often made it difficult to use backing musicians, who were not accustomed to Hooker's musical vagaries. As a result, Besman recorded Hooker playing guitar, singing and stomping on a wooden pallet in time with the music.
For much of this period he recorded and toured with Eddie Kirkland. In Hooker's later sessions for Vee-Jay Records in Chicago, studio musicians accompanied him on most of his recordings, including Eddie Taylor, who could handle his musical idiosyncrasies. "Boom Boom" (1962) and "Dimples", two popular songs by Hooker, were originally released by Vee-Jay.
Later career
Beginning in 1962, Hooker gained greater exposure when he toured Europe in the annual American Folk Blues Festival. His "Dimples" became a successful single on the UK Singles Charts in 1964, eight years after its first US release. Hooker began to perform and record with rock musicians. One of his earliest collaborations was with British blues rock band the Groundhogs. In 1970, he recorded the joint album Hooker 'n Heat, with the American blues and boogie rock group Canned Heat, whose repertoire included adaptations of Hooker songs. It became the first of Hooker's albums to reach the Billboard charts, peaking at number 78 on the Billboard 200. Other collaboration albums soon followed, including Endless Boogie (1971) and Never Get Out of These Blues Alive (1972), which included Steve Miller, Elvin Bishop, Van Morrison, and others.
Hooker appeared in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. He performed "Boom Boom" in the role of a street musician. In 1989, he recorded the album The Healer with Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, and others. The 1990s saw additional collaboration albums: Mr. Lucky (1991), Chill Out (1995), and Don't Look Back (1997) with Morrison, Santana, Los Lobos, and additional guest musicians. His re-recording of "Boom Boom" (the title track for his 1992 album) with guitarist Jimmie Vaughan became Hooker's highest charting single (number 16) in the UK. Come See About Me, a 2004 DVD, includes performances filmed between 1960 and 1994 and interviews with several of the musicians.
Hooker owned five houses in his later life, including houses located in Los Altos, California; Redwood City, California, Long Beach, California, and Gilroy, California.
Hooker died in his sleep on June 21, 2001, in Los Altos, California in his home. He is interred at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, California. He was survived by eight children, 19 grandchildren, and numerous great-grandchildren.
Collaborations
1968 with The Groundhogs: Hooker & the Hogs
1969 with The Doors: Hooker and Jim Morrison sing "Roadhouse Blues", published 2000 on the tribute album Stoned Immaculate: The Music of The Doors
1971 with Canned Heat: Hooker 'n' Heat
1985 with Kingfish: "Put A Hand On Me" on the album Kingfish, featuring John Lee Hooker and Mike Bloomfield
1989 Hooker sang on the album The Iron Man by Pete Townshend, on the songs "Over the Top" and "I Eat Heavy Metal"
1991 with Charlie Musselwhite: "Cheatin' On Me" on the album Signature
1992 with Lightnin' Hopkins: "Katie Mae" and "Candy Kitchen" on the album It's A Sin To Be Rich
1992 with Branford Marsalis: "Mabel" on I Heard You Twice the First Time
1992 with John P. Hammond: "Driftin' Blues" on the album Got Love If You Want It
1993 with Zakiya Hooker: "Loving People" and "Mean Mean World" on the album Another Generation Of The Blues
1993 with B.B. King: "You Shook Me" on his album Blues Summit
1993 with Van Morrison: "Gloria" on his album Too Long In Exile
1996 with Michael Osborn: "Shake It Down" on his album Background in the Blues
1997 with Big Head Todd and the Monsters: "Boom Boom" on the album Beautiful World
2001 with Zucchero: "I Lay Down" on his album Shake
Several Hooker songs have resulted in remixes. The piece "Sure Thing" on the album Tourist (2000) by the French musician St Germain became well known. This remix is based on vocal and guitar passages from "Harry's Philosophy" from the album Hot Spot (1990). Hooker's adaptation "It Serves Me Right to Suffer" was remixed by French DJ and music producer The Avener (actually Tristan Casara) on his album "The Wanderings of the Avener" (2015).
Awards and recognition
Among his many awards, Hooker was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. He was a recipient of a 1983 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. He was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000 and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He is also inducted into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame.
Two of his songs, "Boogie Chillen" and "Boom Boom", are included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. "Boogie Chillen" is also included in the Recording Industry Association of America's list of the "Songs of the Century".
In 2007, John Lee Hooker was voted into the Michigan Rock and Roll Legends Hall of Fame.
Grammy Awards
Best Traditional Blues Recording, 1990, for I'm in the Mood, with Bonnie Raitt
Best Traditional Blues Album, 1995, for Chill Out
Best Traditional Blues Recording, 1998, for Don't Look Back
Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, 1998, "Don't Look Back", with Van Morrison
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, 2000
Discography
Charting singles
Charting albums
Film
The Blues Brothers on Maxwell Street (Chicago) outside Aretha Franklin's restaurant (1980)
John Lee Hooker & Furry Lewis DVD (1995)
John Lee Hooker - That's My Story DVD (2001)
John Lee Hooker Rare Performances 1960–1984 DVD (2002)
Come See About Me DVD (2004)
John Lee Hooker: Bits and Pieces About … DVD and CD (2006)
Literature
Charles Shaar Murray: Boogie Man – The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century. Penguin Books, England 1999
Robert Palmer: Deep Blues – A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta. Penguin Books, Toronto 1982. ISBN 978-0-14-006223-6
References
External links
The Great R&B-files - The R&B Pioneers Series
1910s births
2001 deaths
20th-century American guitarists
Age controversies
African-American guitarists
African-American male singer-songwriters
American blues guitarists
American male guitarists
American blues singer-songwriters
Blues musicians from Mississippi
Blues musicians from Tennessee
Blues revival musicians
Charly Records artists
Chess Records artists
Country blues musicians
Detroit blues musicians
Electric blues musicians
Flair Records artists
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Kent Records artists
Modern Records artists
National Heritage Fellowship winners
Specialty Records artists
Vee-Jay Records artists
Singer-songwriters from Tennessee
Singer-songwriters from Mississippi
Guitarists from Mississippi
Guitarists from Tennessee
People from Tutwiler, Mississippi
People from Los Altos, California
Black & Blue Records artists
20th-century African-American male singers
Singer-songwriters from California | [
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15831 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2023 | June 23 |
Events
Pre-1600
229 – On his death, at Cutilia, Vespasian is deified. He is succeeded by his elder son Titus, who is responsible for the capture of Jerusalem in 70. Titus appoints his younger brother Flavius Domitianus as heir.
229 – Sun Quan proclaims himself emperor of Eastern Wu.
1266 – War of Saint Sabas: In the Battle of Trapani, the Venetians defeat a larger Genoese fleet, capturing all its ships.
1280 – The Spanish Reconquista: In the Battle of Moclín the Emirate of Granada ambush a superior pursuing force, killing most of them in a military disaster for the Kingdom of Castile.
1305 – A peace treaty between the Flemish and the French is signed at Athis-sur-Orge.
1314 – First War of Scottish Independence: The Battle of Bannockburn (south of Stirling) begins.
1532 – Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France sign the "Treaty of Closer Amity With France" (also known as the Pommeraye treaty), pledging mutual aid against Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.
1565 – Dragut, commander of the Ottoman navy, dies during the Great Siege of Malta.
1594 – The Action of Faial, Azores. The Portuguese carrack Cinco Chagas, loaded with slaves and treasure, is attacked and sunk by English ships with only 13 survivors out of over 700 on board.
1601–1900
1611 – The mutinous crew of Henry Hudson's fourth voyage sets Henry, his son and seven loyal crew members adrift in an open boat in what is now Hudson Bay; they are never heard from again.
1683 – William Penn signs a friendship treaty with Lenni Lenape Indians in Pennsylvania.
1713 – The French residents of Acadia are given one year to declare allegiance to Britain or leave Nova Scotia, Canada.
1757 – Battle of Plassey: Three thousand British troops under Robert Clive defeat a 50,000-strong Indian army under Siraj ud-Daulah at Plassey.
1758 – Seven Years' War: Battle of Krefeld: British, Hanoverian, and Prussian forces defeat French troops at Krefeld in Germany.
1760 – Seven Years' War: Battle of Landeshut: Austria defeats Prussia.
1780 – American Revolution: Battle of Springfield fought in and around Springfield, New Jersey (including Short Hills, formerly of Springfield, now of Millburn Township).
1794 – Empress Catherine II of Russia grants Jews permission to settle in Kyiv.
1810 – John Jacob Astor forms the Pacific Fur Company.
1812 – War of 1812: Great Britain revokes the restrictions on American commerce, thus eliminating one of the chief reasons for going to war.
1860 – The United States Congress establishes the Government Printing Office.
1865 – American Civil War: At Fort Towson in the Oklahoma Territory, Confederate Brigadier General Stand Watie surrenders the last significant Confederate army.
1868 – Christopher Latham Sholes received a patent for an invention he called the "Type-Writer".
1887 – The Rocky Mountains Park Act becomes law in Canada creating the nation's first national park, Banff National Park.
1894 – The International Olympic Committee is founded at the Sorbonne in Paris, at the initiative of Baron Pierre de Coubertin.
1901–present
1913 – Second Balkan War: The Greeks defeat the Bulgarians in the Battle of Doiran.
1914 – Mexican Revolution: Pancho Villa takes Zacatecas from Victoriano Huerta.
1917 – In a game against the Washington Senators, Boston Red Sox pitcher Ernie Shore retires 26 batters in a row after replacing Babe Ruth, who had been ejected for punching the umpire.
1919 – Estonian War of Independence: The decisive defeat of the Baltische Landeswehr in the Battle of Cēsis; this date is celebrated as Victory Day in Estonia.
1926 – The College Board administers the first SAT exam.
1931 – Wiley Post and Harold Gatty take off from Roosevelt Field, Long Island in an attempt to circumnavigate the world in a single-engine plane.
1938 – The Civil Aeronautics Act is signed into law, forming the Civil Aeronautics Authority in the United States.
1940 – Adolf Hitler goes on a three-hour tour of the architecture of Paris with architect Albert Speer and sculptor Arno Breker in his only visit to the city.
1940 – Henry Larsen begins the first successful west-to-east navigation of Northwest Passage from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
1941 – The Lithuanian Activist Front declares independence from the Soviet Union and forms the Provisional Government of Lithuania; it lasts only briefly as the Nazis will occupy Lithuania a few weeks later.
1942 – World War II: Germany's latest fighter aircraft, a Focke-Wulf Fw 190, is captured intact when it mistakenly lands at RAF Pembrey in Wales.
1946 – The 1946 Vancouver Island earthquake strikes Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.
1947 – The United States Senate follows the United States House of Representatives in overriding U.S. President Harry S. Truman's veto of the Taft–Hartley Act.
1951 – The ocean liner SS United States is christened and launched.
1956 – The French National Assembly takes the first step in creating the French Community by passing the Loi Cadre, transferring a number of powers from Paris to elected territorial governments in French West Africa.
1959 – Convicted Manhattan Project spy Klaus Fuchs is released after only nine years in prison and allowed to emigrate to Dresden, East Germany where he resumes a scientific career.
1960 – The United States Food and Drug Administration declares Enovid to be the first officially approved combined oral contraceptive pill in the world.
1961 – The Antarctic Treaty System, which sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve and limits military activity on the continent, its islands and ice shelves, comes into force.
1967 – Cold War: U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey for the three-day Glassboro Summit Conference.
1969 – Warren E. Burger is sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court by retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren.
1969 – IBM announces that effective January 1970 it will price its software and services separately from hardware thus creating the modern software industry.
1972 – Watergate scandal: U.S. President Richard M. Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman are taped talking about illegally using the Central Intelligence Agency to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation's investigation into the Watergate break-ins.
1972 – Title IX of the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964 is amended to prohibit sexual discrimination to any educational program receiving federal funds.
1973 – A fire at a house in Hull, England, which kills a six-year-old boy is passed off as an accident; it later emerges as the first of 26 deaths by fire caused over the next seven years by serial arsonist Peter Dinsdale.
1985 – A terrorist bomb explodes at Narita International Airport near Tokyo. An hour later, the same group detonates a second bomb aboard Air India Flight 182, bringing the Boeing 747 down off the coast of Ireland killing all 329 aboard.
1991 – Sonic the Hedgehog is released in North America on the Sega Genesis platform, beginning the popular video game franchise.
1994 – NASA's Space Station Processing Facility, a new state-of-the-art manufacturing building for the International Space Station, officially opens at Kennedy Space Center.
2001 – The 8.4 southern Peru earthquake shakes coastal Peru with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe). A destructive tsunami followed, leaving at least 74 people dead, and 2,687 injured.
2012 – Ashton Eaton breaks the decathlon world record at the United States Olympic Trials.
2013 – Nik Wallenda becomes the first man to successfully walk across the Grand Canyon on a tight rope.
2013 – Militants storm a high-altitude mountaineering base camp near Nanga Parbat in Gilgit–Baltistan, Pakistan, killing ten climbers and a local guide.
2014 – The last of Syria's declared chemical weapons are shipped out for destruction.
2016 – The United Kingdom votes in a referendum to leave the European Union, by 52% to 48%.
2017 – A series of terrorist attacks take place in Pakistan, resulting in 96 deaths and wounding 200 others.
2018 – Twelve boys and an assistant coach from a soccer team in Thailand are trapped in a flooding cave, leading to an 18-day rescue operation.
2021 – Apple Daily, a Hong Kong tabloid newspaper supporting the pro-democracy factions, is forced to close due to an asset freeze ordered by the Hong Kong government.
Births
Pre-1600
47 BC – Caesarion, Egyptian king (died 30 BC)
1385 – Stephen, Count Palatine of Simmern-Zweibrücken (died 1459)
1433 – Francis II, Duke of Brittany (died 1488)
1456 – Margaret of Denmark, Queen of Scotland (died 1486)
1489 – Charles II, Duke of Savoy, Italian nobleman (died 1496)
1534 – Oda Nobunaga, Japanese warlord (died 1582)
1596 – Johan Banér, Swedish field marshal (died 1641)
1601–1900
1616 – Shah Shuja, Mughal prince (died 1661)
1625 – John Fell, English churchman and influential academic (died 1686)
1668 – Giambattista Vico, Italian jurist, historian, and philosopher (died 1744)
1683 – Étienne Fourmont, French orientalist and sinologist (died 1745)
1711 – Giovanni Battista Guadagnini, Italian instrument maker (died 1786)
1716 – Fletcher Norton, 1st Baron Grantley, English lawyer and politician, Solicitor General for England and Wales (died 1789)
1750 – Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu, French geologist and academic (died 1801)
1763 – Joséphine de Beauharnais, French wife of Napoleon I (died 1814)
1799 – John Milton Bernhisel, American physician and politician (died 1881)
1800 – Karol Marcinkowski, Polish physician and activist (died 1846)
1824 – Carl Reinecke, German pianist, composer, and conductor (died 1910)
1843 – Paul Heinrich von Groth, German scientist (died 1927)
1860 – Albert Giraud, Belgian poet and librarian (died 1929)
1863 – Sándor Bródy, Hungarian author and journalist (died 1924)
1877 – Norman Pritchard, Indian-English hurdler and actor (died 1929)
1879 – Huda Sha'arawi, Egyptian feminist and journalist (died 1947)
1884 – Cyclone Taylor, Canadian ice hockey player and politician (died 1979)
1888 – Bronson M. Cutting, American publisher and politician (died 1935)
1889 – Anna Akhmatova, Ukrainian-Russian poet and author (died 1966)
1889 – Verena Holmes, English engineer (died 1964)
1894 – Harold Barrowclough, New Zealand military leader, lawyer and Chief Justice (died 1972)
1894 – Alfred Kinsey, American entomologist and sexologist (died 1956)
1894 – Edward VIII, King of the United Kingdom (died 1972)
1899 – Amédée Gordini, Italian-born French race car driver and sports car manufacturer (died 1979)
1900 – Blanche Noyes, American aviator, winner of the 1936 Bendix Trophy Race (died 1981)
1901–present
1901 – Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Turkish author, poet, and scholar (died 1962)
1903 – Paul Martin Sr., Canadian lawyer and politician (died 1992)
1904 – Quintin McMillan, South African cricketer (died 1938)
1905 – Jack Pickersgill, Canadian civil servant and politician, 35th Secretary of State for Canada (died 1997)
1906 – Tribhuvan of Nepal (died 1955)
1907 – Dercy Gonçalves, Brazilian actress and singer (died 2008)
1907 – James Meade, English economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1995)
1909 – David Lewis, Russian-Canadian lawyer and politician (died 1981)
1909 – Georges Rouquier, French actor, director, and screenwriter (died 1989)
1910 – Jean Anouilh, French playwright and screenwriter (died 1987)
1910 – Gordon B. Hinckley, American religious leader, 15th President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (died 2008)
1910 – Milt Hinton, American bassist and photographer (died 2000)
1910 – Bill King, English yachtsman, naval commander and author (died 2012)
1910 – Lawson Little, American golfer (died 1968)
1912 – Alan Turing, English mathematician and computer scientist (died 1954)
1913 – William P. Rogers, American commander, lawyer, and politician, 55th United States Secretary of State (died 2001)
1915 – Frances Gabe, American artist and inventor (died 2016)
1916 – Len Hutton, English cricketer and soldier (died 1990)
1916 – Irene Worth, American actress (died 2002)
1916 – Al G. Wright, American bandleader and conductor (died 2020)
1919 – Mohamed Boudiaf, Algerian politician, President of Algeria (died 1992)
1920 – Saleh Ajeery, Kuwaiti astronomer
1921 – Paul Findley, American politician (died 2019)
1922 – Morris R. Jeppson, American lieutenant and physicist (died 2010)
1922 – Hal Laycoe, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (died 1998)
1923 – Peter Corr, Irish-English footballer and manager (died 2001)
1923 – Elroy Schwartz, American screenwriter and producer (died 2013)
1923 – Doris Johnson, American politician
1923 – Jerry Rullo, American professional basketball player (died 2016)
1923 – Giuseppina Tuissi, Italian communist and Partisan (died 1945)
1924 – Frank Bolle, American comic-strip artist, comic-book artist and illustrator (died 2020)
1925 – Miriam Karlin, English actress (died 2011)
1925 – Art Modell, American businessman (died 2012)
1925 – Anna Chennault, Chinese widow of Lieutenant General Claire Lee Chennault (died 2018)
1926 – Lawson Soulsby, Baron Soulsby of Swaffham Prior, English microbiologist and parasitologist (died 2017)
1926 – Magda Herzberger, Romanian author, poet and composer, survivor of the Holocaust (died 2021)
1926 – Annette Mbaye d'Erneville, Senegalese writer
1926 – Arnaldo Pomodoro, Italian sculptor
1927 – Bob Fosse, American actor, dancer, choreographer, and director (died 1987)
1927 – John Habgood, Baron Habgood, English archbishop (died 2019)
1928 – Jean Cione, American baseball player (died 2010)
1928 – Klaus von Dohnányi, German politician
1928 – Michael Shaara, American author and academic (died 1988)
1929 – June Carter Cash, American singer-songwriter, musician, and actress (died 2003)
1929 – Mario Ghella, Italian racing cyclist
1930 – Donn F. Eisele, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut (died 1987)
1930 – John Elliott, English historian and academic
1930 – Francis Newall, 2nd Baron Newall, English businessman and politician
1930 – Anthony Thwaite, English poet, critic, and academic (died 2021)
1930 – Marie-Thérèse Houphouët-Boigny, former First Lady of Ivory Coast
1931 – Gunnar Uusi, Estonian chess player (died 1981)
1931 – Ola Ullsten, Swedish politician and diplomat (died 2018)
1932 – Peter Millett, Baron Millett, English lawyer and judge (died 2021)
1934 – Keith Sutton, English bishop (died 2017)
1934 – Bill Torrey, Canadian businessman (died 2018)
1934 – Virbhadra Singh, Indian politician (d. 2021)
1935 – Maurice Ferré, Puerto Rican-American politician, 32nd Mayor of Miami (died 2019)
1935 – Keith Burkinshaw, English footballer and manager
1936 – Richard Bach, American novelist and essayist
1936 – Costas Simitis, Greek economist, lawyer, and politician, 180th Prime Minister of Greece
1937 – Martti Ahtisaari, Finnish captain and politician, 10th President of Finland, Nobel Prize laureate
1937 – Alan Haselhurst, English academic and politician
1937 – Niki Sullivan, American guitarist and songwriter (died 2004)
1939 – Scott Burton, American sculptor (died 1989)
1940 – Adam Faith, English singer (died 2003)
1940 – George Feigley, American sex cult leader and two-time prison escapee (died 2009)
1940 – Derry Irvine, Baron Irvine of Lairg, Scottish lawyer, judge, and politician, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain
1940 – Wilma Rudolph, American runner (died 1994)
1940 – Mike Shrimpton, New Zealand cricketer and coach (died 2015)
1940 – Stuart Sutcliffe, Scottish painter and musician (died 1962)
1940 – Diana Trask, Australian singer-songwriter
1941 – Robert Hunter, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (died 2019)
1941 – Roger McDonald, Australian author and screenwriter
1941 – Keith Newton, English footballer (died 1998)
1942 – Martin Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, English cosmologist and astrophysicist
1943 – Patrick Bokanowski, French filmmaker
1943 – Ellyn Kaschak, American psychologist and academic
1943 – James Levine, American pianist and conductor (died 2021)
1945 – Kjell Albin Abrahamson, Swedish journalist and author (died 2016)
1945 – John Garang, Sudanese colonel and politician, President of Southern Sudan (died 2005)
1946 – Julian Hipwood, English polo player and coach
1946 – Ted Shackelford, American actor
1947 – Bryan Brown, Australian actor and producer
1948 – Clarence Thomas, American lawyer and jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
1949 – Gordon Bray, Australian journalist and sportscaster
1949 – Sheila Noakes, Baroness Noakes, English accountant and politician
1951 – Angelo Falcón, Puerto Rican-American political scientist, activist, and academic, founded the National Institute for Latino Policy (died 2018)
1951 – Michèle Mouton, French race car driver and manager
1952 – Raj Babbar, Indian actor and politician
1953 – Armen Sarkissian, Armenian physicist, politician and current President of Armenia
1955 – Pierre Corbeil, Canadian dentist and politician
1955 – Glenn Danzig, American singer-songwriter and producer
1955 – Jean Tigana, French footballer and manager
1956 – Daniel J. Drucker, Canadian academic and educator
1956 – Tony Hill, American football player and sportscaster
1956 – Randy Jackson, American bass player and producer
1957 – Dave Houghton, Zimbabwean cricketer and coach
1957 – Frances McDormand, American actress, winner of the Triple Crown of Acting
1958 – John Hayes, English politician, Minister of State at the Department of Energy and Climate Change
1960 – Donald Harrison, American saxophonist, composer, and producer
1960 – Tatsuya Uemura, Japanese composer and programmer
1961 – Richard Arnold, English lawyer and judge
1961 – Zoran Janjetov, Serbian singer and illustrator
1961 – LaSalle Thompson, American basketball player, coach, and manager
1962 – Chuck Billy, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1963 – Colin Montgomerie, Scottish golfer
1964 – Nicolas Marceau, Canadian economist and politician
1964 – Tara Morice, Australian actress and singer
1964 – Joss Whedon, American director, producer, and screenwriter
1964 – Lou Yun, Chinese gymnast
1965 – Paul Arthurs, English guitarist
1965 – Sylvia Mathews Burwell, American government and non-profit executive
1965 – Peter O'Malley, Australian golfer
1966 – Chico DeBarge, American singer and pianist
1969 – Martin Klebba, American actor, producer, and stuntman
1970 – Robert Brooks, American football player
1970 – Martin Deschamps, Canadian singer-songwriter
1970 – Yann Tiersen, French singer-songwriter and guitarist
1971 – Fred Ewanuick, Canadian actor and producer
1971 – Félix Potvin, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1972 – Selma Blair, American actress
1972 – Louis Van Amstel, Dutch dancer and choreographer
1972 – Zinedine Zidane, French footballer and manager
1974 – Joel Edgerton, Australian actor
1974 – Mark Hendrickson, American basketball and baseball player
1975 – Kevin Dyson, American football player and coach
1975 – David Howell, English golfer
1975 – Mike James, American basketball player
1975 – KT Tunstall, Scottish singer-songwriter and musician
1976 – Wade Barrett, American soccer player and manager
1976 – Joe Becker, American guitarist and composer
1976 – Savvas Poursaitidis, Greek-Cypriot footballer and scout
1976 – Brandon Stokley, American football player
1976 – Paola Suárez, Argentinian tennis player
1976 – Emmanuelle Vaugier, Canadian actress and singer
1976 – Patrick Vieira, French footballer and manager
1977 – Miguel Ángel Angulo, Spanish footballer
1977 – Hayden Foxe, Australian footballer and manager
1977 – Jaan Jüris, Estonian ski jumper
1977 – Jason Mraz, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1977 – Shaun O'Hara, American football player and sportscaster
1978 – Memphis Bleek, American rapper, producer, and actor
1978 – Frederic Leclercq, French heavy metal musician
1978 – Matt Light, American football player and sportscaster
1979 – LaDainian Tomlinson, American football player
1980 – Becky Cloonan, American author and illustrator
1980 – Melissa Rauch, American actress
1980 – Francesca Schiavone, Italian tennis player
1981 – Antony Costa, English singer-songwriter
1981 – Rolf Wacha, German rugby player
1982 – Derek Boogaard, Canadian-American ice hockey player (died 2011)
1983 – Brooks Laich, Canadian ice hockey player
1983 – José Manuel Rojas, Chilean footballer
1984 – Duffy, Welsh singer-songwriter and actress
1984 – Takeshi Matsuda, Japanese swimmer
1984 – Levern Spencer, Saint Lucian high jumper
1985 – Marcel Reece, American football player
1986 – Christy Altomare, American actress and singer-songwriter
1987 – Alessia Filippi, Italian swimmer
1988 – Chet Faker, Australian singer-songwriter
1988 – Chellsie Memmel, American gymnast
1989 – Lisa Carrington, New Zealand flatwater canoeist
1989 – Jordan Nolan, Canadian ice hockey player
1990 – Clevid Dikamona, French footballer
1990 – Vasek Pospisil, Canadian tennis player
1990 – Laura Ràfols, Spanish footballer
1991 – Katie Armiger, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1992 – Luiza Galiulina, Uzbekistani gymnast
1992 – Nampalys Mendy, French footballer
1993 – Tim Anderson, American baseball player
1993 – Marvin Grumann, German footballer
1994 – Ben Dwarshuis, Australian cricketer
2000 – Starford To'a, New Zealand rugby league player
2007 – Elliana Walmsley, American dancer
2008 – Lilliana Ketchman, American dancer and YouTuber
Deaths
Pre-1600
79 – Vespasian, Roman emperor (born AD 9)
679 – Æthelthryth, English saint (born 636)
947 – Li Congyi, prince of Later Tang (born 931)
947 – Wang, imperial consort of Later Tang
960 – Feng Yanji, chancellor of Southern Tang (born 903)
994 – Lothair Udo I, count of Stade (born 950)
1018 – Henry I, margrave of Austria
1137 – Adalbert of Mainz, German archbishop
1222 – Constance of Aragon, Hungarian queen (born 1179)
1290 – Henryk IV Probus, duke of Wrocław and high duke of Kraków (born c. 1258)
1314 – Henry de Bohun, English knight
1324 – Aymer de Valence, 2nd Earl of Pembroke (born 1270)
1343 – Giacomo Gaetani Stefaneschi, Italian cardinal (born c. 1270)
1356 – Margaret II, Holy Roman Empress (born 1311)
1537 – Pedro de Mendoza, Spanish conquistador (born 1487)
1565 – Dragut, Ottoman admiral (born 1485)
1582 – Shimizu Muneharu, Japanese commander (born 1537)
1601–1900
1615 – Mashita Nagamori, Japanese daimyō (born 1545)
1677 – William Louis, duke of Württemberg (born 1647)
1686 – William Coventry, English politician (born 1628)
1707 – John Mill, English theologian and author (born 1645)
1733 – Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Swiss paleontologist and scholar (born 1672)
1770 – Mark Akenside, English poet and physician (born 1721)
1775 – Karl Ludwig von Pöllnitz, German adventurer and author (born 1692)
1779 – Mikael Sehul, Ethiopian warlord (born 1691)
1806 – Mathurin Jacques Brisson, French zoologist and philosopher (born 1723)
1811 – Nicolau Tolentino de Almeida, Portuguese poet and author (born 1740)
1832 – Sir James Hall, 4th Baronet, Scottish geologist and geophysicist (born 1761)
1836 – James Mill, Scottish economist, historian, and philosopher (born 1773)
1848 – Maria Leopoldine of Austria-Este, Electress of Bavaria (born 1776)
1856 – Ivan Kireyevsky, Russian philosopher and critic (born 1806)
1881 – Matthias Jakob Schleiden, German botanist and academic (born 1804)
1891 – Wilhelm Eduard Weber, German physicist and academic (born 1804)
1891 – Samuel Newitt Wood, American lawyer and politician (born 1825)
1893 – William Fox, English-New Zealand lawyer and politician, 2nd Prime Minister of New Zealand (born 1812)
1893 – Theophilus Shepstone, English-South African politician (born 1817)
1901–present
1914 – Bhaktivinoda Thakur, Indian guru and philosopher (born 1838)
1945 – Giuseppina Tuissi, Italian journalist and activist (born 1923)
1953 – Albert Gleizes, French painter (born 1881)
1954 – Salih Omurtak, Turkish general (born 1889)
1956 – Reinhold Glière, Russian composer and educator (born 1875)
1959 – Boris Vian, French author, poet, and playwright (born 1920)
1959 – Hidir Lutfi, Iraqi poet. (born 1880)
1969 – Volmari Iso-Hollo, Finnish runner (born 1907)
1970 – Roscoe Turner, American soldier and pilot (born 1895)
1973 – Gerry Birrell, Scottish race car driver (born 1944)
1980 – Sanjay Gandhi, Indian engineer and politician (born 1946)
1980 – Clyfford Still, American painter and academic (born 1904)
1989 – Werner Best, German police officer and jurist (born 1903)
1990 – Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Indian poet, actor, and politician (born 1898)
1992 – Eric Andolsek, American football player (born 1966)
1995 – Roger Grimsby, American journalist (born 1928)
1995 – Jonas Salk, American biologist and physician (born 1914)
1995 – Anatoli Tarasov, Russian ice hockey player and coach (born 1918)
1996 – Andreas Papandreou, Greek economist and politician, 174th Prime Minister of Greece (born 1919)
1996 – Ray Lindwall, Australian cricketer and rugby player (born 1921)
1997 – Betty Shabazz, American educator and activist (born 1936)
1998 – Maureen O'Sullivan, Irish-American actress (born 1911)
2000 – Peter Dubovský, Slovak footballer (born 1972)
2002 – Pedro Alcázar, Panamanian boxer (born 1975)
2005 – Shana Alexander, American journalist and author (born 1926)
2005 – Manolis Anagnostakis, Greek poet and critic (born 1925)
2006 – Aaron Spelling, American actor, producer, and screenwriter, founded Spelling Television (born 1923)
2007 – Rod Beck, American baseball player (born 1968)
2008 – Claudio Capone, Italian-Scottish actor (born 1952)
2008 – Arthur Chung, Guyanese surveyor and politician, 1st President of Guyana (born 1918)
2008 – Marian Glinka, Polish actor and bodybuilder (born 1943)
2009 – Raymond Berthiaume, Canadian singer-songwriter and producer (born 1931)
2009 – Ed McMahon, American game show host and announcer (born 1923)
2009 – Jerri Nielsen, American physician and explorer (born 1952)
2010 – John Burton, Australian public servant and diplomat (born 1915)
2011 – Peter Falk, American actor (born 1927)
2011 – Dennis Marshall, Costa Rican footballer (born 1985)
2011 – Fred Steiner, American composer and conductor (born 1923)
2012 – James Durbin, English economist and statistician (born 1923)
2012 – Brigitte Engerer, French pianist and educator (born 1952)
2012 – Alan McDonald, Northern Ireland footballer and manager (born 1963)
2012 – Frank Chee Willeto, American soldier and politician, 4th Vice President of the Navajo Nation (born 1925)
2012 – Walter J. Zable, American football player and businessman, founded the Cubic Corporation (born 1915)
2013 – Bobby Bland, American singer-songwriter (born 1930)
2013 – Gary David Goldberg, American screenwriter and producer (born 1944)
2013 – Frank Kelso, American admiral and politician, United States Secretary of the Navy (born 1933)
2013 – Kurt Leichtweiss, German mathematician and academic (born 1927)
2013 – Richard Matheson, American author and screenwriter (born 1926)
2013 – Darryl Read, English singer-songwriter, drummer, and actor (born 1951)
2013 – Sharon Stouder, American swimmer (born 1948)
2014 – Nancy Garden, American author (born 1938)
2014 – Euros Lewis, Welsh cricketer (born 1942)
2014 – Paula Kent Meehan, American businesswoman, co-founded Redken (born 1931)
2015 – Miguel Facussé Barjum, Honduran businessman (born 1924)
2015 – Nirmala Joshi, Indian nun, lawyer, and social worker (born 1934)
2015 – Dick Van Patten, American actor (born 1928)
2016 – Ralph Stanley, American singer and banjo player (born 1927)
2021 – John McAfee, British-American computer programmer and businessman, founded McAfee (born 1945)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Æthelthryth
Marie of Oignies
Joseph Cafasso
June 23 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Father's Day (Nicaragua, Poland)
Grand Duke's Official Birthday (Luxembourg)
International Widows Day (international)
National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism (Canada)
Okinawa Memorial Day (Okinawa Prefecture)
Saint John's Eve and the first day of the Midsummer celebrations [although this is not the real summer solstice; see June 20] (Roman Catholic Church, Europe):
Bonfires of Saint John (Spain)
First night of Festa de São João do Porto (Porto)
First day of Golowan Festival (Cornwall)
Jaaniõhtu (Estonia)
Jāņi (Latvia)
Kupala Night (Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Ukraine)
Last day of Drăgaica fair (Buzău, Romania)
United Nations Public Service Day (International)
Victory Day (Estonia)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15834 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satires%20%28Juvenal%29 | Satires (Juvenal) | The Satires are a collection of satirical poems by the Latin author Juvenal written between the end of the first and the early second centuries A.D.
Juvenal is credited with sixteen known poems divided among five books; all are in the Roman genre of satire, which, at its most basic in the time of the author, comprised a wide-ranging discussion of society and social in dactylic hexameter. The sixth and tenth satires are some of the most renowned works in the collection. The poems are not individually titled, but translators have often added titles for the convenience of readers.
Book I: Satires 1–5
Book II: Satire 6
Book III: Satires 7–9
Book IV: Satires 10–12
Book V: Satires 13–16 (Satire 16 is incompletely preserved)
Roman was a formal literary genre rather than being simply clever, humorous critique in no particular format. Juvenal wrote in this tradition, which originated with Lucilius and included the Sermones of Horace and the Satires of Persius. In a tone and manner ranging from irony to apparent rage, Juvenal criticizes the actions and beliefs of many of his contemporaries, providing insight more into value systems and questions of morality and less into the realities of Roman life. The author employs outright obscenity less frequently than Martial or Catullus, but the scenes painted in his text are no less vivid or lurid for that discretion.
The author makes constant allusion to history and myth as a source of object lessons or exemplars of particular vices and virtues. Coupled with his dense and elliptical Latin, these tangential references indicate that the intended reader of the Satires was highly educated. The Satires are concerned with perceived threats to the social continuity of the Roman citizens: social-climbing foreigners, unfaithfulness, and other more extreme excesses of their own class. The intended audience of the Satires constituted a subset of the Roman elite, primarily adult males of a more conservative social stance.
Scholarly estimates for the dating of the individual books have varied. It is generally accepted that the fifth book must date to a point after 127, because of a reference to the Roman consul Iuncus in Satire 15. A recent scholar has argued that the first book should be dated to 100 or 101. Juvenal's works are contemporary with those of Martial, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger.
Manuscript tradition
The controversies concerning the surviving texts of the Satires have been extensive and heated. Many manuscripts survive, but only P (the Codex Pithoeanus Montepessulanus), a 9th-century manuscript based on an edition prepared in the 4th century by a pupil of Servius Honoratus, the grammarian, is reasonably reliable. At the same time as the Servian text was produced, however, other and lesser scholars also created their editions of Juvenal: it is these on which most medieval manuscripts of Juvenal are based. It did not help matters that P disappeared sometime during the Renaissance and was only rediscovered around 1840. It is not, however, uncommon for the generally inferior manuscripts to supply a better reading in cases when P is imperfect. In addition, modern scholarly debate has also raged around the authenticity of the text which has survived, as various editors have argued that considerable portions are not, in fact, authentically Juvenalian and represent interpolations from early editors of the text. Jachmann (1943) argued that up to one-third of what survives is non-authentic: Ulrick Knoche (1950) deleted about hundred lines, Clausen about forty, Courtney (1975) a similar number. Willis (1997) italicizes 297 lines as being potentially suspect. On the other hand, Vahlen, Housman, Duff, Griffith, Ferguson and Green believe the surviving text to be largely authentic: indeed Green regards the main problem as being not interpolations but lacunae.
In recent times debate has focused on the authenticity of the "O Passage" of Satire VI, 36 lines (34 of which are continuous) discovered by E. O. Winstedt in an 11th-century manuscript in Oxford's Bodleian Library. These lines occur in no other manuscript of Juvenal, and when discovered were considerably corrupted. Ever since Housman translated and emended the "O Passage" there has been considerable controversy over whether the fragment is in fact a forgery: the field is currently split between those (Green, Ferguson, Courtney) who believe it is not, and those (Willis, Anderson), who believe it is.
Synopsis of the Satires
Book I
Satire I: It is Hard not to Write Satire
This so-called "Programmatic Satire" lays out for the reader a catalogue of ills and annoyances that prompt the narrator to write satire. Some examples cited by Juvenal include eunuchs getting married, elite women performing in a beast hunt, and the dregs of society suddenly becoming wealthy by gross acts of sycophancy. To the extent that it is programmatic, this satire concerns the first book rather than the satires of the other four known books. The narrator explicitly marks the writings of Lucilius as the model for his book of poems (lines 19–20), although he claims that to attack the living as his model did incur great risk (lines 165–167). The narrator contends that traditional Roman virtues, such as fides and virtus, had disappeared from society to the extent that "Rome was no longer Roman":
lines 1.1–19 – Since there are so many poets wasting paper and everyone's time anyway – why not write?
lines 1.20–80 – The narrator recites a catalogue of social deviants and criminals that demand Satire be written.
lines 1.81–126 – Since the dawn of history, greed and fiscal corruption have never been worse.
lines 1.127–146 – The narrator contrasts a typical day in the life of poor clients with that of their self-indulgent patron.
lines 1.147–171 – The past cannot be worse than the present – yet one should only satirize the dead if they wish to live in safety.
Satire II: Hypocrites are Intolerable
170 lines. The narrator claims to want to flee civilization (i.e. Roma) to beyond the world's end when confronted by moral hypocrisy. Although the broad theme of this poem is the process of gender inversion, it would be an error to take it as simple invective against pathic men. Juvenal is concerned with gender deviance.
lines 2.1–35 – Pathic men that pretend to be moral exemplars are much worse than those who are open about their proclivities.
lines 2.36–65 – When criticized for her morals, Laronia turns on one of these hypocrites and mocks their open effeminacy.
lines 2.65–81 – Criticism of the effeminate dress of Creticus as he practices law. This moral plague (contagiō) spreads like disease passes through an entire herd of livestock or a bunch of grapes.
lines 2.82–116 – Effeminate dress is the gateway to complete gender inversion.
lines 2.117–148 – A noble man, Gracchus, marries another man – but such brides are infertile no matter what drugs they try or how much they are whipped in the Lupercalia.
lines 2.149–170 – The ghosts of great Romans of the past would feel themselves contaminated when such Romans descend to the underworld.
Satire III: There is no Room in Rome for a Roman
322 lines. In the place where Numa Pompilius (the legendary second king of Rome) received a nymph's advice on creating Roman law, the narrator has a final conversation with his Roman friend Umbricius, who is emigrating to Cumae. Umbricius claims that slick and immoral foreigners have shut a real Roman out of all opportunity to prosper. Only the first 20 lines are in the voice of the narrator; the remainder of the poem is cast as the words of Umbricius.
In 1738, Samuel Johnson was inspired by this text to write his London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal. The archetypal question of whether an urban life of hectic ambition is to be preferred to a pastoral fantasy retreat to the country is posed by the narrator:
lines 3.1–20 – The narrator's old friend Umbricius is about to depart Roma for Cumae. The narrator says he would himself prefer Prochyta to the Suburra, and he describes the ancient shrine of Egeria being put up for rent to Jews and polluted by marble.
lines 3.21–57 – Umbricius: There is no opportunity in Roma for an honest man.
lines 3.58–125 – Umbricius: The Greeks and their ways are flowing like pollution into Roma, and they are so adept at lying flattery that they are achieving more social advancement than real Romans.
lines 3.126–163 – Umbricius: The dregs of society so long as they are wealthy lord it over real Romans; there is no hope for an honest man in court if he is poor.
lines 3.164–189 – Umbricius: Virtue and lack of pretension is only to be found outside the City; at Roma everything is expensive, pretentious, and bought on credit.
lines 3.190–231 – Umbricius contrasts the perils and degradation of living in Roma with the easy and cheap life outside the City.
lines 3.232–267 – Umbricius: The streets of Roma are annoying and dangerous if you are not rich enough to ride in a litter.
lines 3.268–314 – Umbricius: Travel by night in Roma is fraught with danger from falling tiles, thugs, and robbers.
lines 3.315–322 – Umbricius takes his leave of the narrator, and promises to visit him in his native Aquinum.
Satire IV: The Emperor's Fish
154 lines. The narrator makes the emperor Domitian and his court the objects of his ridicule in this mock-epic tale of a fish so prodigious that it was fit for the emperor alone. The council of state is called to deal with the crisis of how to cook it, where the fish can neither be cooked by conventional means due to its size, nor can it be cut into pieces. The main themes of this poem are the corruption and incompetence of sycophantic courtiers and the inability or unwillingness to speak truth to power.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's motto, vitam impendere vero (to pay his life for the truth), is taken from the passage below, a description of the qualifications of an imperial courtier in the reign of Domitian:
lines 4.1–10 – Criticism of the courtier Crispinus.
lines 4.11–33 – Crispinus bought a mullet for six thousand sesterces – more expensive than the fisherman that caught him.
lines 4.34–56 – Mock-epic narrative of the crisis of state caused by a giant turbot begins with the catch.
lines 4.56–72 – The fisherman rushes to get the fish to the emperor.
lines 4.72–93 – Crispinus and other councilors begin to arrive.
lines 4.94–143 – More councilors arrive and one prophesizes that the fish is an omen of a future victory. The question of what to do with it is raised, and Montanus advises that a vessel be manufactured at once suitable for its size.
lines 4.144–154 – The council break up, and the narrator voices his wish that all the actions of Domitian had been so meaningless.
Satire V: Patronizing Patronage
173 lines. The narrative frame of this poem is a dinner party where many potential dysfunctions in the ideal of the patron-client relationship are put on display. Rather than being a performance of faux-equality, the patron (Virro as in 9.35) emphasizes the superiority of himself and his peers () over his clients () by offering food and drink of unequal quality to each. Juvenal concludes with the observation that the clients who put up with this treatment deserve it.
lines 5.1–11 – Begging is better than being treated disrespectfully at a patron's dinner.
lines 5.12–23 – An invitation to dinner is a social exchange for your services as a client.
lines 5.24–48 – Different wines and goblets for different social ranks.
lines 5.49–106 – Different water is served by different grades of slaves – and different breads served by arrogant slaves. The patron gets a lobster, and you get a crayfish; he gets a Corsican mullet, and you get a sewer-fish.
lines 5.107–113 – Seneca and others were known for their generosity. The elite should dine as equals with their friends – clients.
lines 5.114–124 – The patron gets a goose liver and boar meat, but you get to watch the meat carver perform.
lines 5.125–155 – If you had a fortune the patron would respect you; it is the cash that he really respects. Different mushrooms and apples.
lines 5.156–173 – Clients who will not resist this kind of treatment deserve it and worse.
Book II
Satire VI: The Decay of Feminine Virtue
c. 695 lines. For the discussion and synopsis, see Satire VI.
Book III
Satire VII: Fortuna (or the Emperor) is the Best Patron
243 lines. Juvenal returns to his theme of distorted economic values among the Roman elite – in this instance centered on their unwillingness to provide appropriate support for poets, lawyers, and teachers. It is the capricious whims of fate that determine the variables of a human life.
lines 7.1–21 – The emperor is the only remaining patron of letters.
lines 7.22–35 – Other patrons have learned to offer their admiration only.
lines 7.36–52 – The urge to write is an addictive disease.
lines 7.53–97 – Money and leisure are required to be a really great poet (); hunger and discomfort would have hobbled even Virgil.
lines 7.98–105 – Historians () do not have it any better.
lines 7.106–149 – Lawyers () get only as much respect as the quality of their dress can buy.
lines 7.150–177 – No one is willing to pay teachers of rhetoric (magistri) appropriately.
lines 7.178–214 – Rich men restrain only their spending on a teacher of rhetoric () for their sons. Quintilian was rich, he was the lucky exception to the rule.
lines 7.215–243 – The qualifications and efforts required of a teacher () are totally out of proportion to their pay.
Satire VIII: True Nobility
275 lines. The narrator takes issue with the idea that pedigree ought to be taken as evidence of a person's worth.
lines 8.1–38 – What is the value of a pedigree, if you are inferior to your ancestors?
lines 8.39–55 – Many nobles have done nothing to make themselves noble.
lines 8.56–70 – Racehorses are valued for their speed not their ancestors; if they are slow they will end up pulling a cart.
lines 8.71–86 – It is vile to rely on the reputations of others; one should be noble even in the face of danger.
lines 8.87–126 – Govern your province honestly. When everything else is stolen from those you rule, weapons and desperation remain.
lines 8.127–162 – If you live wickedly, your good ancestors are a reproach to you.
lines 8.163–182 – Bad behavior should be ceased in youth. The nobles make excuses for behavior that would not be tolerated in slaves.
lines 8.183–210 – When they bankrupt themselves, the nobles may sink to the level of the stage or the arena.
lines 8.211–230 – The emperor Nero utterly debased himself in these ways.
lines 8.231–275 – Many people without famous ancestors have served Rome with great distinction. Indeed, everyone is descended from peasants or worse if you go back far enough.
Satire IX: Flattering your Patron is Hard Work
150 lines. This satire is in the form of a dialogue between the narrator and Naevolus – a male prostitute, the disgruntled client of a pathic patron.
lines 9.1–26 – Narrator: Why do you look so haggard, Naevolus?
lines 9.27–46 – Naevolus: The life of serving the needs of pathic rich men is not paying off.
lines 9.46–47 – Nar: But you used to think you were really sexy to men.
lines 9.48–69 – Nae: Rich pathics are not willing to spend on their sickness, but I have bills to pay.
lines 9.70–90 – Nae: I saved his marriage by doing his job for him with a wife that was about to get a divorce.
lines 9.90–91 – Nar: You are justified in complaining, Naevolus. What did he say?
lines 9.92–101 – Nae: He is looking for another two-legged donkey, but don't repeat any of this, he might try to kill me.
lines 9.102–123 – Nar: Rich men have no secrets.
lines 9.124–129 – Nae: But what should I do now; youth is fleeting.
lines 9.130–134 – Nar: You will never lack a pathic patron, don't worry.
lines 9.134–150 – Nae: But I want so little. Fortuna must have her ears plugged when I pray.
Book IV
Satire X: Wrong Desire is the Source of Suffering
366 lines. The theme of this poem encompasses the myriad objects of prayer unwisely sought from the gods: wealth, power, beauty, children, long life, et cetera. The narrator argues that each of these is a false Good; each desired thing is shown to be not good in itself, but only good so long as other factors do not intervene. This satire is the source of the well-known phrase (a healthy mind in a healthy body), which appears in the passage above. It is also the source of the phrase (bread and circuses) – the only remaining cares of a Roman populace which has given up its birthright of political freedom (10.81).
lines 10.1–27 – Few know what is really Good. Wealth often destroys.
lines 10.28–55 – One can either cry like Heraclitus or laugh like Democritus at the state of things. But what should men pray for?
lines 10.56–89 – It is all too easy to fall from power – like Sejanus. The mob follows Fortuna and cares for nothing but bread and circuses.
lines 10.90–113 – By seeking ever more honors and power, Sejanus just made his eventual fall that much more terrible.
lines 10.114–132 – Being a great orator like Demosthenes or Cicero may get one killed.
lines 10.133–146 – Lust for military glory has ruined countries, and time will destroy even the graves of famous generals.
lines 10.147–167 – What did Hannibal ultimately accomplish? He dies of poison in exile.
lines 10.168–187 – The world was not big enough for Alexander the Great, but a coffin was. Xerxes I crawled back to Persia after his misadventure in Greece.
lines 10.188–209 – Long life just means ugliness, helplessness, impotence, and the loss of all pleasure.
lines 10.209–239 – Old people are deaf and full of diseases. Dementia is the worst affliction of all.
lines 10.240–272 – Old people just live to see the funerals of their children and loved ones, like Nestor or Priam.
lines 10.273–288 – Many men would have been thought fortunate if they had died before a late disaster overtook them: e.g. Croesus, Marius, and Pompey.
lines 10.289–309 – Beauty is inimical to a person's virtue. Even if they remain untouched by corruption, it makes them objects of lust for perverts.
lines 10.310–345 – Beautiful men tend to become noted adulterers, risking their lives. Even if they are unwilling like Hippolytus, the wrath of scorned women may destroy them.
lines 10.346–366—Is there nothing to pray for then? Trust the gods to choose what is best; they love humans more than we do ourselves, but if you must pray for something, "[i]t is to be prayed that the mind be sound in a sound body..." (the excerpt above).
Satire XI: Dinner and a Moral
208 lines. The main themes of this poem are self-awareness and moderation. The poem explicitly mentions one apothegm (know thyself) from the temple of Apollo at Delphi, while its theme calls to mind another (nothing in excess). The subject, in this instance, is the role of food and the (formal dinner) in Roman society. The narrator contrasts the ruinous spending habits of gourmands with the moderation of a simple meal of home-grown foods in the manner of the mythical ancient Romans.
lines 11.1–55 – People that refuse to limit their gourmet habits, even in the face of having to do so on credit, soon endure poverty and consequently inferior food. The advice of Apollo to know oneself should be heeded – not just for ambitions and endeavors, but also for what should be spent on a fish.
lines 11.56–89 – The narrator invites a Persicus to come to his house for dinner to see whether his actions match his rhetoric. The dinner will include only home-grown foods from the narrator's Tiburtine land. Long ago, the noble Curius cooked things for himself that a slave on a chain-gang would reject now.
lines 11.90–119 – The ancient Romans did not care for luxuries and Greek art. A Jupiter made of terracotta saved the city from the Gauls.
lines 11.120–135 – Now rich people get no enjoyment from delicacies unless they eat from tables decorated with ivory. The narrator claims that his food is unharmed, despite owning no ivory.
lines 11.136–161 – The narrator promises no professional meat carver or exotic slave servers, nor are his slave boys destined for emasculation and use as sexual toys.
lines 11.162–182 – In place of a pornographic Spanish dance show, there will be poetry.
lines 11.183–208 – Rather than endure the annoyance of all Roma at the Circus Maximus during the Megalensian Games, the narrator invites his addressee to shake off his cares and come to a simple dinner.
Satire XII: True Friendship
130 lines. The narrator describes to his addressee Corvinus the sacrificial vows that he has made for the salvation of his friend Catullus from shipwreck. These vows are to the primary Roman gods – Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva (the Capitoline Triad) – but other shipwrecked sailors are said to make offerings to Isis. In the passage quoted above, the narrator asserts that his sacrifices are not to curry favor or gain an inheritance, common reasons for making vows among those who would not hesitate to sacrifice their slaves or even children if it would bring them an inheritance.
lines 12.1–29 – Description of the sacrificial preparations.
lines 12.30–51 – Description of a storm: this friend had been willing to cast overboard items of great value to save his own life – who else would prefer his life to his treasures.
lines 12.52–82 – They had to cut the mast due to the ferocity of the storm, but then the weather calmed and they limped their ship into the port at Ostia.
lines 12.83–92 – The narrator orders that the altar and sacrifice be made ready. He says that he will propitiate his Lares (family gods) as well.
lines 12.93–130 – Catullus has heirs, so the narrator is acting as a friend not a legacy-hunter (). Legacy hunters would sacrifice one hundred cattle, elephants, slaves, or even their own child if it secured an inheritance for them.
Book V (incomplete)
Satire XIII: Don’t Obsess over Liars and Crooks
249 lines. This poem is a dissuasion from excessive rage and the desire for revenge when one is defrauded. The narrator recommends a philosophical moderation and the perspective that comes from realizing that there are many things worse than financial loss.
lines 13.1–18 – Guilt is its own punishment. One should not overreact to ill-use.
lines 13.19–70 – Philosophy and life-experience offer a defense against Fortuna. There are hardly as many good people as the gates of Egyptian Thebes (100) or even as the mouths of the Nile (9). The Golden Age was infinitely superior to the present age, an age so corrupt there is not even an appropriate metal to name it.
lines 13.71–85 – Perjurers will swear on the arms of all the gods to deny their debts.
lines 13.86–119 – Some believe that everything is a product of chance, and so do not fear to perjure themselves on the altars of the gods. Others rationalize that the wrath of the gods, though great, is very slow in coming.
lines 13.120–134 – It takes no philosopher to realize that there are many worse wrongs than being defrauded. A financial loss is mourned more than a death, and it is mourned with real tears.
lines 13.135–173 – It is silly to be surprised by the number and magnitude of the crimes put to trial at Rome, as silly as to be surprised by a German having blue eyes.
lines 13.174–209 – Even execution of a criminal would not undo their crime; only the uneducated think that revenge is a Good. That is not what the philosophers Chrysippos, Thales, or Socrates would say. The narrator makes an extended reference to the story of a corrupt Spartan's consultation of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi from Herodotus (6.86). The mere intention to do evil is guilt.
lines 13.210–249 – Consciousness of one's guilt is its own punishment, with anxiety and fear of divine retribution. The (nature) of criminals is (stuck) and (unable to be changed), and it rushes back to ways they have admitted are wrong (239–240). Thus, criminals tend to repeat their crimes, and eventually end up facing execution or exile.
Satire XIV: Avarice is not a Family Value
331 lines. The narrator stresses that children most readily learn all forms of vice from their parents. Avarice must actually be taught since it runs counter to nature. This vice is particularly pernicious, since it has the appearance of a virtue and is the source of a myriad of crimes and cruelties.
lines 14.1–37 – The greatest danger to the morals of children comes from the vices of their parents.
lines 14.38–58 – People should restrain themselves from vice for the sake of their children. It is unjust for a father to criticize and punish a son who takes after himself.
lines 14.59–85 – People are more concerned to present a clean atrium to outsiders than to keep their house free of vice for their children. The tastes acquired in childhood persist into adulthood.
lines 14.86–95 – Caetronius squandered much of his wealth by building many fine houses; his son squandered the rest by doing the same.
lines 14.96–106 – People learn to be Jewish from their parents.
lines 14.107–134 – Avarice has the appearance of a virtue, but it leads to cruel deprivation of one's slaves and one's own self.
lines 14.135–188 – It is madness to live like an indigent just to die rich. There is no amount of money or land that will satisfy greed, but ancient Romans veterans of the Punic wars or of the war against Pyrrhus were content with only two (acres) of land in return for all their wounds. Impatient greed leads to crime.
lines 14.189–209 – Become a lawyer, join the army, or become a merchant. Profit smells good, wherever it is from. Nobody inquires into where you got it, but you have to have it.
lines 14.210–255 – The greedy son will surpass his father as much as Achilles did Peleus. Instilling avarice is the same as teaching a child every form of crime. A son whom you have taught to have no mercy will have no mercy on you either.
lines 14.256–283 – Those who take risks to increase their fortunes are like tightrope walkers. Fleets sail wherever there is hope of profit.
lines 14.284–302 – Avaricious men are willing to risk their lives and fortunes just to have a few more pieces of silver with someone's face and inscription on them.
lines 14.303–316 – The anxiety of protecting wealth and possessions is a misery. Alexander the Great realized that the cynic Diogenes was happier than himself while living in his pottery home, since Alexander's anxieties and dangers matched his ambitions, while Diogenes was content with what he had and could easily replace.
lines 14.316–331 – How much is enough then? As much as Epicurus or Socrates was content to possess is best, or – in the Roman manner – a fortune equal to the equestrian order. If twice or three times that does not suffice, then not even the wealth of Croesus or of Persia will suffice.
Satire XV: People without Compassion are Worse than Animals
174 lines. The narrator discusses the centrality of compassion for other people to the preservation of civilization. While severe circumstances have at times called for desperate measures to preserve life, even the most savage tribes have refrained from cannibalism. We were given minds to allow us to live together in mutual assistance and security. Without limits on rage against our enemies, we are worse than animals.
lines 15.1–26 – In Egypt they worship bizarre animal-headed gods, but not the familiar Roman ones. Similarly, they will not eat normal things, but do practice cannibalism. Ulysses must have been thought a liar for his tale of the Laestrygonians or the Cyclopes.
lines 15.27–32 – Recently in upper Egypt, an entire people was guilty of this crime.
lines 15.33–92 – Two neighboring cities hated each other. One attacked while the other held a feast. Fists gave way to stones and then to arrows; as one side fled, one man slipped and was caught. He was ripped to pieces and eaten raw.
lines 15.93–131 – The Vascones, however, were blameless, because they were compelled to cannibalism by the siege of Pompey the Great. Even at the altar of Artemis in Taurus, humans are only sacrificed, not eaten.
lines 15.131–158 – Compassion is what separates humans from animals. The creator gave humans mind () as well as life (), so that people could live together in a civil society.
Satire XVI: Soldiers are above the Law
60 lines preserved. The primary theme of the preserved lines is the advantages of soldiers over mere citizens.
lines 16.1–6 – The narrator wishes that he could join the legions, since soldiers have many advantages over civilians.
lines 16.7–34 – Soldiers are immune to justice since they have to be tried in the camp among other soldiers, where a plaintiff will get no help prosecuting them, and may get a beating in addition for their trouble.
lines 16.35–50 – Soldiers do not have to wait for legal action like civilians
lines 16.51–60 – Only soldiers have the right to make a will while their father lives – leading to an inversion of power with the soldier son being above his father.
Notes
References
Anderson, William S.. 1982. Essays on Roman Satire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Adams, J. N.. 1982. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Braund, Susanna M.. 1988. Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal's Third Book of Satires. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.
Braund, Susanna. 1996. Juvenal Satires Book I. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.
Braund, Susanna. 1996. The Roman Satirists and their Masks. London: Bristol Classical Press.
Courtney, E.. 1980. A Commentary of the Satires of Juvenal. London: Athlone Press.
Edwards, Catherine. 1993. The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edwards, Catherine. 1996. Writing Rome: Textual Approached to the City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freudenburg, Kirk. 1993. The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gleason, Maud. W. 1995. Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gowers, Emily. 1993. The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Highet, Gilbert. 1961. Juvenal the Satirist. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hutchinson, G. O.. 1993. Latin Literature from Seneca to Juvenal. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Juvenal. 1992. The Satires. Trans. Niall Rudd. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Juvenal. 1992. Persi et Juvenalis Saturae. ed. W. V. Clausen. London: Oxford University Press.
The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 1996. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Richlin, Amy. 1992. The Garden of Priapus. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rudd, Niall. 1982. Themes in Roman Satire. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Syme, Ronald. 1939. The Roman Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Uden, James. 2015. The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walters, Jonathan. 1997. Invading the Roman Body: Manliness and Impenetrability in Roman Thought. in J. Hallet and M. Skinner, eds., Roman Sexualities, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Juvenal. 1998. The Sixteen Satires. Trans. Peter Green. London: Penguin Books.
External links
Juvenal's 16 "Satires" in Latin, at The Latin Library
Juvenal's Satires 1, 2, and 3 in Latin and English (translation G. G. Ramsay) at the Internet Ancient History Sourcebook
Juvenal's Satire 3 in Latin and English, at Vroma
Juvenal's Satires 1, 10, and 16, English translation by Lamberto Bozzi (2016-2017)
Juvenal's Satires in English verse, through Google Books
The Satires of Juvenal, Persius, Sulpicia, and Lucilius in English prose, through Google Books
Commentary on the Satires by Edward Courtney
Works by Juvenal
Satirical poems
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15837 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean%20Cocteau | Jean Cocteau | Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (, , ; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost creatives of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements; and one of the most influential figures in early 20th-century art as a whole. The National Observer suggested that, “of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man.”
He is best known for his novels Le Grand Écart (1923), Le Livre Blanc (1928), and Les Enfants Terribles (1929); the stage plays La Voix Humaine (1930), La Machine Infernale (1934), Les Parents terribles (1938), La Machine à écrire (1941), and L'Aigle à deux têtes (1946); and the films The Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents Terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Orpheus (1950), and Testament of Orpheus (1960), which alongside Blood of a Poet and Orpheus constitute the so-called Orphic Trilogy. He was described as "one of [the] avant-garde's most successful and influential filmmakers" by AllMovie. Cocteau, according to Annette Insdorf, “left behind a body of work unequalled for its variety of artistic expression.”
Though his body of work encompassed many different mediums, Cocteau insisted on calling himself a poet, classifying the great variety of his works – poems, novels, plays, essays, drawings, films – as "poésie", "poésie de roman", "poésie de thêatre", "poésie critique", "poésie graphique" and "poésie cinématographique".
Biography
Early life
Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a town near Paris, to Georges Cocteau and his wife, Eugénie Lecomte; a socially prominent Parisian family. His father, a lawyer and amateur painter, committed suicide when Cocteau was nine. From 1900 to 1904, Cocteau attended the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a relationship with schoolmate Pierre Dargelos, who would reappear throughout Cocteau's oeuvre. He left home at fifteen. He published his first volume of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen. Cocteau soon became known in Bohemian artistic circles as The Frivolous Prince, the title of a volume he published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City..."
Early career
In his early twenties, Cocteau became associated with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Maurice Barrès. In 1912, he collaborated with Léon Bakst on Le Dieu bleu for the Ballets Russes; the principal dancers being Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky. During World War I, Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. This was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and numerous other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated. Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev persuaded Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which resulted in Parade in 1917. It was produced by Diaghilev, with sets by Picasso, the libretto by Apollinaire and the music by Erik Satie. "If it had not been for Apollinaire in uniform," wrote Cocteau, "with his skull shaved, the scar on his temple and the bandage around his head, women would have gouged our eyes out with hairpins."
An important exponent of avant-garde art, Cocteau had great influence on the work of others, including a group of composers known as Les six. In the early twenties, he and other members of Les six frequented a wildly popular bar named Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a name that Cocteau himself had a hand in picking. The popularity was due in no small measure to the presence of Cocteau and his friends.
Friendship with Raymond Radiguet
In 1918 he met the French poet Raymond Radiguet. They collaborated extensively, socialized, and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau also got Radiguet exempted from military service. Admiring of Radiguet's great literary talent, Cocteau promoted his friend's works in his artistic circle and arranged for the publication by Grasset of Le Diable au corps (a largely autobiographical story of an adulterous relationship between a married woman and a younger man), exerting his influence to have the novel awarded the "Nouveau Monde" literary prize. Some contemporaries and later commentators thought there might have been a romantic component to their friendship. Cocteau himself was aware of this perception, and worked earnestly to dispel the notion that their relationship was sexual in nature.
There is disagreement over Cocteau's reaction to Radiguet's sudden death in 1923, with some claiming that it left him stunned, despondent and prey to opium addiction. Opponents of that interpretation point out that he did not attend the funeral (he generally did not attend funerals) and immediately left Paris with Diaghilev for a performance of Les noces (The Wedding) by the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo. Cocteau himself much later characterised his reaction as one of "stupor and disgust." His opium addiction at the time, Cocteau said, was only coincidental, due to a chance meeting with Louis Laloy, the administrator of the Monte Carlo Opera. Cocteau's opium use and his efforts to stop profoundly changed his literary style. His most notable book, Les Enfants Terribles, was written in a week during a strenuous opium weaning. In , he recounts the experience of his recovery from opium addiction in 1929. His account, which includes vivid pen-and-ink illustrations, alternates between his moment-to-moment experiences of drug withdrawal and his current thoughts about people and events in his world. Cocteau was supported throughout his recovery by his friend and correspondent, Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Under Maritain's influence Cocteau made a temporary return to the sacraments of the Catholic Church. He again returned to the Church later in life and undertook a number of religious art projects.
Further works
On 15 June 1926 Cocteau's play Orphée was staged in Paris. It was quickly followed by an exhibition of drawings and "constructions" called Poésie plastique–objets, dessins. Cocteau wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, which had its original performance in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on 30 May 1927. In 1929 one of his most celebrated and well known works, the novel Les Enfants terribles was published.
In 1930 Cocteau made his first film The Blood of a Poet, publicly shown in 1932. Though now generally accepted as a surrealist film, the surrealists themselves did not accept it as a truly surrealist work. Although this is one of Cocteau's best known works, his 1930s are notable rather for a number of stage plays, above all La Voix humaine and Les Parents terribles, which was a popular success. His 1934 play La Machine infernale was Cocteau's stage version of the Oedipus legend and is considered to be his greatest work for the theater. During this period Cocteau also published two volumes of journalism, including Mon Premier Voyage: Tour du Monde en 80 jours, a neo-Jules Verne around the world travel reportage he made for the newspaper Paris-Soir.
1940–1944
Biographer James S. Williams describes Cocteau's politics as "naturally Right-leaning." During the Nazi occupation of France, he
was in a "round-table" of French and German intellectuals who met at the Georges V Hotel in Paris, including Cocteau, the writers Ernst Jünger, Paul Morand and Henry Millon de Montherlant, the publisher Gaston Gallimard and the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt.
His friend Arno Breker convinced him that Adolf Hitler was a pacifist and patron of the arts with France's best interests in mind. In his diary, Cocteau accused France of disrespect towards Hitler and speculated on the Führer's sexuality. Cocteau effusively praised Breker's sculptures in an article entitled 'Salut à Breker' published in 1942. This piece caused him to be arraigned on charges of collaboration after the war, though he was cleared of any wrongdoing and had used his contacts to his failed attempt to save friends such as Max Jacob.
In 1940, Le Bel Indifférent, Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf (who died the day before Cocteau), was enormously successful.
Later years
Cocteau's later years are mostly associated with his films. Cocteau's films, most of which he both wrote and directed, were particularly important in introducing the avant-garde into French cinema and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave genre.
Following The Blood of a Poet (1930), his best known films include Beauty and the Beast (1946), Les Parents terribles (1948), and Orpheus (1949). His final film, Le Testament d'Orphée (The Testament of Orpheus) (1960), featured appearances by Picasso and matador Luis Miguel Dominguín, along with Yul Brynner, who also helped finance the film.
In 1945 Cocteau was one of several designers who created sets for the Théâtre de la Mode. He drew inspiration from filmmaker René Clair while making Tribute to René Clair: I Married a Witch. The maquette is described in his "Journal 1942–1945," in his entry for 12 February 1945:
In 1956 Cocteau decorated the Chapelle Saint-Pierre in Villefranche-sur-Mer with mural paintings. The following year he also decorated the marriage hall at the Hôtel de Ville in Menton.
Private life
Jean Cocteau never hid his homosexuality. He was the author of the mildly homoerotic and semi-autobiographical Le livre blanc (translated as The White Paper or The White Book), published anonymously in 1928. He never repudiated its authorship and a later edition of the novel features his foreword and drawings. The novel begins:
Frequently his work, either literary (Les enfants terribles), graphic (erotic drawings, book illustration, paintings) or cinematographic (The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, Beauty and the Beast), is pervaded with homosexual undertones, homoerotic imagery/symbolism or camp. In 1947 Paul Morihien published a clandestine edition of Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet, featuring 29 very explicit erotic drawings by Cocteau. In recent years several albums of Cocteau's homoerotica have been available to the general public.
It is widely believed that Cocteau had affairs with Raymond Radiguet, Jean Desbordes, Marcel Khill, and Panama Al Brown.
In the 1930s, Cocteau is rumoured to have had a very brief affair with Princess Natalie Paley, the daughter of a Romanov Grand Duke and herself a sometime actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong.
Cocteau's longest-lasting relationships were with French actors Jean Marais and Édouard Dermit, whom Cocteau formally adopted. Cocteau cast Marais in The Eternal Return (1943), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Ruy Blas (1947), and Orpheus (1949).
Death
Cocteau died of a heart attack at his château in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne, France, on 11 October 1963 at the age of 74. His friend, French singer Édith Piaf, died the day before but that was announced on the morning of Cocteau's day of death; it has been said, in a story which is almost certainly apocryphal, that his heart failed upon hearing of Piaf's death. Cocteau's health had already been in decline for several months, and he had previously had a severe heart attack on 22 April 1963. A more plausible suggestion for the reason behind this decline in health has been proposed by author Roger Peyrefitte, who notes that Cocteau had been devastated by a breach with his longtime friend, socialite and notable patron Francine Weisweiller, as a result of an affair she had been having with a minor writer. Weisweiller and Cocteau did not reconcile until shortly before Cocteau's death.
According to his wishes Cocteau is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint-Blaise des Simples in Milly-la-Forêt. The epitaph on his gravestone set in the floor of the chapel reads: "I stay with you" ("Je reste avec vous").
Honours and awards
In 1955, Cocteau was made a member of the Académie Française and The Royal Academy of Belgium.
During his life, Cocteau was commander of the Legion of Honor, Member of the Mallarmé Academy, German Academy (Berlin), American Academy, Mark Twain (U.S.A) Academy, Honorary President of the Cannes Film Festival, Honorary President of the France-Hungary Association and President of the Jazz Academy and of the Academy of the Disc.
Filmography
Works
Literature
Poetry
Novels
Theatre
Poetry and criticism
Journalistic poetry
Film
Director
Scriptwriter
Dialogue writer
Director of Photography
Artworks
Recordings
Colette par Jean Cocteau, discours de réception à l'Académie Royale de Belgique, Ducretet-Thomson 300 V 078 St.
Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel and Portraits-Souvenir, La Voix de l'Auteur LVA 13
Plain-chant by Jean Marais, extracts from the piece Orphée by Jean-Pierre Aumont, Michel Bouquet, Monique Mélinand, Les Parents terribles by Yvonne de Bray and Jean Marais, L'Aigle à deux têtes par Edwige Feuillère and Jean Marais, L'Encyclopédie Sonore 320 E 874, 1971
Collection of three vinyl recordings of Jean Cocteau including La Voix humaine by Simone Signoret, 18 songs composed by Louis Bessières, Bee Michelin and Renaud Marx, on double-piano Paul Castanier, Le Discours de réception à l'Académie française, Jacques Canetti JC1, 1984
Derniers propos à bâtons rompus avec Jean Cocteau, 16 September 1963 à Milly-la-Forêt, Bel Air 311035
Les Enfants terribles, radio version with Jean Marais, Josette Day, Silvia Monfort and Jean Cocteau, CD Phonurgia Nova , 1992
Anthology, 4 CD containing numerous poems and texts read by the author, Anna la bonne, La Dame de Monte-Carlo and Mes sœurs, n'aimez pas les marins by Marianne Oswald, Le Bel Indifférent by Edith Piaf, La Voix humaine by Berthe Bovy, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel with Jean Le Poulain, Jacques Charon and Jean Cocteau, discourse on the reception at the Académie française, with extracts from Les Parents terribles, La Machine infernale, pieces from Parade on piano with two hands by Georges Auric and Francis Poulenc, Frémeaux & Associés FA 064, 1997
Poems by Jean Cocteau read by the author, CD EMI 8551082, 1997
Hommage à Jean Cocteau, mélodies d'Henri Sauguet, Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, Darius Milhaud, Erik Satie, Jean Wiener, Max Jacob, Francis Poulenc, Maurice Delage, Georges Auric, Guy Sacre, by Jean-François Gardeil (baritone) and Billy Eidi (piano), CD Adda 581177, 1989
Le Testament d'Orphée, journal sonore, by Roger Pillaudin, 2 CD INA / Radio France 211788, 1998
Journals
Stamps
1960: Marianne de Cocteau
See also
Jean Cocteau Repertory
List of ambulance drivers during World War I
Footnotes
References
Breton, André (1953). La Clé des champs, p. 77. Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire.Crucifixion translated into Bengali by Malay Roy Choudhury
Steegmuller, Francis (1970). Cocteau: A Biography. Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown & Company. .
Further reading
Evans, Arthur B. (1977). Jean Cocteau and his Films of Orphic Identity. Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press. .
Peters, Arthur King. (1986) Jean Cocteau and His World. New York: Vendôme Press.
Tsakiridou, Cornelia A., ed. (1997). Reviewing Orpheus: Essays on the Cinema and Art of Jean Cocteau. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press. .
Album Cocteau. Biographie et iconographie de Pierre Bergé. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Éditions Gallimard, 2006. .
External links
Cocteau/cinema Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
Cocteau CMEF Cap d'Ail
Cocteau et La chapelle Saint-Blaise-des-Simples
Raquel Bitton: The Sparrow and the Birdman'', a drama focusing on the relationship of Cocteau to Edith Piaf
Maison Jean Cocteau – Cocteau's former home
1889 births
1963 deaths
People from Maisons-Laffitte
Lycée Condorcet alumni
French ballet librettists
20th-century French dramatists and playwrights
French experimental filmmakers
French fantasy writers
French film directors
French illustrators
French novelists
20th-century French painters
20th-century male artists
French male painters
French poets
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Writers from Île-de-France
Prince des poètes
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Commandeurs of the Légion d'honneur
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Painters of the Return to Order
20th-century French screenwriters | [
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15838 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20Donne | John Donne | John Donne ( ; 22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a cleric in the Church of England. Under royal patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1621–1631). He is considered the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His poetical works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, and satires. He is also known for his sermons.
Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorised. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.
Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after his education on womanising, literature, pastimes, and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615 he was ordained Anglican deacon and then priest, although he did not want to take holy orders and only did so because the king ordered it. He also served as a member of Parliament in 1601 and in 1614.
Biography
Early life
Donne was born in London in 1571 or 1572, into a recusant Roman Catholic family when practice of that religion was illegal in England. Donne was the third of six children. His father, also named John Donne, married to one Elizabeth Heywood, was of Welsh descent and a warden of the Ironmongers Company in the City of London. However, he avoided unwelcome government attention out of fear of persecution.
His father died in 1576, when Donne was four years old, leaving his mother, Elizabeth, with the responsibility of raising the children alone. Heywood was also from a recusant Roman Catholic family, the daughter of John Heywood, the playwright, and sister of the Reverend Jasper Heywood, a Jesuit priest and translator. She was also a great-niece of Thomas More. A few months after her husband died, Donne's mother married Dr. John Syminges, a wealthy widower with three children of his own.
Donne was educated privately; however, there is no evidence to support the popular claim that he was taught by Jesuits. In 1583, at the age of 11, he began studies at Hart Hall, now Hertford College, Oxford. After three years of studies there, Donne was admitted to the University of Cambridge, where he studied for another three years. Donne, however, could not obtain a degree from either institution because of his Catholicism, since he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy required to graduate. In 1591 he was accepted as a student at the Thavies Inn legal school, one of the Inns of Chancery in London. On 6 May 1592 he was admitted to Lincoln's Inn, one of the Inns of Court.
In 1593, five years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada and during the intermittent Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), Queen Elizabeth issued the first English statute against sectarian dissent from the Church of England, titled "An Act for restraining Popish recusants". It defined "Popish recusants" as those "convicted for not repairing to some Church, Chapel, or usual place of Common Prayer to hear Divine Service there, but forbearing the same contrary to the tenor of the laws and statutes heretofore made and provided in that behalf". Donne's brother Henry was also a university student prior to his arrest in 1593 for harbouring a Catholic priest, William Harrington, and died in Newgate Prison of bubonic plague, leading Donne to begin questioning his Catholic faith.
During and after his education, Donne spent much of his considerable inheritance on women, literature, pastimes and travel. Although no record details precisely where Donne travelled, he did cross Europe and later fought alongside the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh against the Spanish at Cadiz (1596) and the Azores (1597), and witnessed the loss of the Spanish flagship, the San Felipe. According to his earliest biographer,
By the age of 25 he was well prepared for the diplomatic career he appeared to be seeking. He was appointed chief secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, and was established at Egerton's London home, York House, Strand close to the Palace of Whitehall, then the most influential social centre in England.
Marriage to Anne More
During the next four years, Donne fell in love with Egerton's niece Anne More, and they were secretly married just before Christmas in 1601, against the wishes of both Egerton and Anne's father George More, who was Lieutenant of the Tower. Upon discovery, this wedding ruined Donne's career, getting him dismissed and put in Fleet Prison, along with the Church of England priest Samuel Brooke, who married them, and his brother Chistopher, who stood in in the absence of George More to give Anne away. Donne was released shortly thereafter when the marriage was proved to be valid, and he soon secured the release of the other two. Walton tells us that when Donne wrote to his wife to tell her about losing his post, he wrote after his name: John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done. It was not until 1609 that Donne was reconciled with his father-in-law and received his wife's dowry.
After his release, Donne had to accept a retired country life in a small house in Pyrford, Surrey, owned by Anne's cousin, Sir Francis Wooley, where they resided until the end of 1604. In spring 1605 they moved to another small house in Mitcham, London, where he scraped a meager living as a lawyer, while Anne Donne bore a new baby almost every year. Though he also worked as an assistant pamphleteer to Thomas Morton writing anti-Catholic pamphlets, Donne was in a constant state of financial insecurity.
Anne gave birth to twelve children in sixteen years of marriage, (including two stillbirths—their eighth and then, in 1617, their last child); indeed, she spent most of her married life either pregnant or nursing. The ten surviving children were Constance, John, George, Francis, Lucy (named after Donne's patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford, her godmother), Bridget, Mary, Nicholas, Margaret, and Elizabeth. Three (Francis, Nicholas, and Mary) died before they were ten. In a state of despair that almost drove him to kill himself, Donne noted that the death of a child would mean one mouth fewer to feed, but he could not afford the burial expenses. During this time, Donne wrote but did not publish Biathanatos, his defense of suicide. His wife died on 15 August 1617, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, a still-born baby. Donne mourned her deeply, and wrote of his love and loss in his 17th Holy Sonnet.
Career and later life
In 1602 John Donne was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Brackley, but the post was not a paid position. Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, being succeeded by King James VI of Scotland as King James I of England. The fashion for coterie poetry of the period gave Donne a means to seek patronage, and many of his poems were written for wealthy friends or patrons, especially for MP Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted (1575–1615), whom he met in 1610 and who became his chief patron, furnishing him and his family an apartment in his large house in Drury Lane.
In 1610 and 1611 Donne wrote two anti-Catholic polemics: Pseudo-Martyr and Ignatius His Conclave for Morton. He then wrote two Anniversaries, An Anatomy of the World (1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul (1612) for Drury.
Donne sat as an MP again, this time for Taunton, in the Addled Parliament of 1614 but though he attracted five appointments within its business he made no recorded speech. Although King James was pleased with Donne's work, he refused to reinstate him at court and instead urged him to take holy orders. At length, Donne acceded to the king's wishes, and in 1615 was ordained priest in the Church of England.
In 1615 Donne was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity from Cambridge University, and became a Royal Chaplain in the same year, and a reader of divinity at Lincoln's Inn in 1616, where he served in the chapel as minister until 1622. In 1618 he became chaplain to Viscount Doncaster, who was on an embassy to the princes of Germany. Donne did not return to England until 1620. In 1621 Donne was made Dean of St Paul's, a leading and well-paid position in the Church of England, which he held until his death in 1631.
At the same time he was granted the living as rector of a number of parishes, including Blunham, in Bedfordshire. Blunham Parish Church has an imposing stained glass window commemorating Donne, designed by Derek Hunt. During Donne's period as dean his daughter Lucy died, aged eighteen. In late November and early December 1623 he suffered a nearly fatal illness, thought to be either typhus or a combination of a cold followed by a period of fever.
During his convalescence he wrote a series of meditations and prayers on health, pain, and sickness that were published as a book in 1624 under the title of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. One of these meditations, Meditation XVII, contains the well known phrases "No man is an Iland" (often modernised as "No man is an island") and "...for whom the bell tolls". In 1624 he became vicar of St Dunstan-in-the-West, and 1625 a prolocutor to Charles I. He earned a reputation as an eloquent preacher and 160 of his sermons have survived, including Death's Duel, his famous sermon delivered at the Palace of Whitehall before King Charles I in February 1631.
Death
Donne died on 31 March 1631 and was buried in old St Paul's Cathedral, where a memorial statue of him by Nicholas Stone was erected with a Latin epigraph probably composed by himself. The memorial was one of the few to survive the Great Fire of London in 1666 and is now in St Paul's Cathedral. The statue was said by Izaac Walton in his biography to have been modelled from the life by Donne in order to suggest his appearance at the resurrection; it was to start a vogue in such monuments during the course of the 17th century. In 2012 a bust of the poet by Nigel Boonham was unveiled outside in the cathedral churchyard.
Writings
Donne's earliest poems showed a developed knowledge of English society coupled with sharp criticism of its problems. His satires dealt with common Elizabethan topics, such as corruption in the legal system, mediocre poets, and pompous courtiers. His images of sickness, vomit, manure, and plague reflected his strongly satiric view of a society populated by fools and knaves. His third satire, however, deals with the problem of true religion, a matter of great importance to Donne. He argued that it was better to examine carefully one's religious convictions than blindly to follow any established tradition, for none would be saved at the Final Judgment, by claiming "A Harry, or a Martin taught [them] this."
Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphors, such as a flea biting two lovers being compared to sex. Donne did not publish these poems, although they circulated widely in manuscript form. One such, a previously unknown manuscript that is believed to be one of the largest contemporary collections of Donne's work (among that of others), was found at Melford Hall in November 2018.
Some have speculated that Donne's numerous illnesses, financial strain, and the deaths of his friends all contributed to the development of a more sombre and pious tone in his later poems. The change can be clearly seen in "An Anatomy of the World" (1611), a poem that Donne wrote in memory of Elizabeth Drury, daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, Suffolk. This poem treats Elizabeth's demise with extreme gloominess, using it as a symbol for the Fall of Man and the destruction of the universe.
The increasing gloominess of Donne's tone may also be observed in the religious works that he began writing during the same period. Having converted to the Anglican Church, Donne quickly became noted for his sermons and religious poems. Towards the end of his life Donne wrote works that challenged death, and the fear that it inspired in many men, on the grounds of his belief that those who die are sent to Heaven to live eternally. One example of this challenge is his Holy Sonnet X, "Death Be Not Proud".
Even as he lay dying during Lent in 1631, he rose from his sickbed and delivered the Death's Duel sermon, which was later described as his own funeral sermon. Death's Duel portrays life as a steady descent to suffering and death; death becomes merely another process of life, in which the 'winding sheet' of the womb is the same as that of the grave. Hope is seen in salvation and immortality through an embrace of God, Christ and the Resurrection.
Style
His work has received much criticism over the years, especially concerning his metaphysical form. Donne is generally considered the most prominent member of the metaphysical poets, a phrase coined in 1781 by Samuel Johnson, following a comment on Donne by John Dryden. Dryden had written of Donne in 1693: "He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love."
In Life of Cowley (from Samuel Johnson's 1781 work of biography and criticism Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets), Johnson refers to the beginning of the seventeenth century in which there "appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets". Donne's immediate successors in poetry therefore tended to regard his works with ambivalence, with the Neoclassical poets regarding his conceits as abuse of the metaphor. However he was revived by Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Browning, though his more recent revival in the early twentieth century by poets such as T. S. Eliot and critics like F R Leavis tended to portray him, with approval, as an anti-Romantic.
Donne is considered a master of the metaphysical conceit, an extended metaphor that combines two vastly different ideas into a single idea, often using imagery. An example of this is his equation of lovers with saints in "The Canonization". Unlike the conceits found in other Elizabethan poetry, most notably Petrarchan conceits, which formed clichéd comparisons between more closely related objects (such as a rose and love), metaphysical conceits go to a greater depth in comparing two completely unlike objects. One of the most famous of Donne's conceits is found in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" where he compares the apartness of two separated lovers to the working of the legs of a compass.
Donne's works are also witty, employing paradoxes, puns, and subtle yet remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic and cynical, especially regarding love and human motives. Common subjects of Donne's poems are love (especially in his early life), death (especially after his wife's death), and religion.
John Donne's poetry represented a shift from classical forms to more personal poetry. Donne is noted for his poetic metre, which was structured with changing and jagged rhythms that closely resemble casual speech (it was for this that the more classical-minded Ben Jonson commented that "Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging").
Some scholars believe that Donne's literary works reflect the changing trends of his life, with love poetry and satires from his youth and religious sermons during his later years. Other scholars, such as Helen Gardner, question the validity of this dating—most of his poems were published posthumously (1633). The exception to these is his Anniversaries, which were published in 1612 and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions published in 1624. His sermons are also dated, sometimes specifically by date and year.
Legacy
Donne is remembered with a commemoration as a priest and poet in the calendar of the Church of England and in the Calendar of Saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on 31 March.
During his lifetime several likenesses were made of the poet. The earliest was the anonymous portrait of 1594 now in the National Portrait Gallery, London which has been recently restored. One of the earliest Elizabethan portraits of an author, the fashionably dressed poet is shown darkly brooding on his love. The portrait was described in Donne's will as "that picture of myne wych is taken in the shaddowes", and bequeathed by him to Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancram. Other paintings include a 1616 head and shoulders after Isaac Oliver, also in the National Portrait Gallery, and a 1622 head and shoulders in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1911 the young Stanley Spencer devoted a visionary painting to John Donne arriving in heaven (1911) which is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Donne's reception until the twentieth century was influenced by the publication of his writings in the seventeenth century. Because Donne avoided publication during his life, the majority of his works were brought to the press by others in the decades after his death. These publications present what Erin McCarthy calls a "teleological narrative of Donne’s growth" from young rake "Jack Donne" to reverend divine "Dr. Donne." For example, while the first edition of Poems, by J. D. (1633) mingled amorous and pious verse indiscriminately, all editions after 1635 separated poems into "Songs and Sonnets" and "Divine Poems." This organization "promulgated the tale of Jack Donne’s transformation into Doctor Donne and made it the dominant way of understanding Donne’s life and work."
A similar effort to justify Donne's early writings appeared in the publication of his prose. This pattern can be seen in a 1652 volume that combines texts from throughout Donne's career, including flippant works like Ignatius his Conclave and more pious writings like Essays in Divinity. In the preface, Donne's son "unifies the otherwise disparate texts around an impression of Donne’s divinity" by comparing his father's varied writing to Jesus' miracles. Christ “began his first Miracle here, by turning Water into Wine, and made it his last to ascend from Earth to Heaven.”
Donne first wrote “things conducing to cheerfulness & entertainment of Mankind," and later "change[d] his conversation from Men to Angels.” Another figure who contributed to Donne's legacy as a rake-turned-preacher was Donne's first biographer Izaak Walton. Walton's biography separated Donne's life into two stages, comparing Donne's life to the transformation of St. Paul. Walton writes, "where [Donne] had been a Saul… in his irregular youth,” he became “a Paul, and preach[ed] salvation to his brethren.”
The idea that Donne's writings reflect two distinct stages of his life remains common; however, many scholars have challenged this understanding. In 1948, Evelyn Simpson wrote, "a close study of his works... makes it clear that his was no case of dual personality. He was not a Jekyll-Hyde in Jacobean dress... There is an essential unity underlying the flagrant and manifold contradictions of his temperament."
In literature
After Donne's death, a number of poetical tributes were paid to him, of which one of the principal (and most difficult to follow) was his friend Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "Elegy for Doctor Donne". Posthumous editions of Donne's poems were accompanied by several "Elegies upon the Author" over the course of the next two centuries. Six of these were written by fellow churchmen, others by such courtly writers as Thomas Carew, Sidney Godolphin and Endymion Porter. In 1963 came Joseph Brodsky's "The Great Elegy for John Donne".
Beginning in the 20th century, several historical novels appeared taking as their subject various episodes in Donne's life. His courtship of Anne More is the subject of Elizabeth Gray Vining's Take Heed of Loving Me: A novel about John Donne (1963) and Maeve Haran's The Lady and the Poet (2010). Both characters also make interspersed appearances in Mary Novik's Conceit (2007), where the main focus is on their rebellious daughter Pegge. English treatments include Garry O'Connor's Death's Duel: a novel of John Donne (2015), which deals with the poet as a young man.
He also plays a significant role in Christie Dickason's The Noble Assassin (2012), a novel based on the life of Donne's patron and (the author claims) his lover, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford. Finally there is Bryan Crockett's Love's Alchemy: a John Donne Mystery (2015), in which the poet, blackmailed into service in Robert Cecil's network of spies, attempts to avert political disaster and at the same time outwit Cecil.
Musical settings
There were musical settings of Donne's lyrics even during his lifetime and in the century following his death. These included Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger's ("So, so, leave off this last lamenting kisse" in his 1609 Ayres); John Cooper's ("The Message"); Henry Lawes' ("Break of Day"); John Dowland's ("Break of Day" and "To ask for all thy love"); and settings of "A Hymn to God the Father" by John Hilton the younger and Pelham Humfrey (published 1688).
After the 17th century there were no more until the start of the 20th century with Havergal Brian ("A nocturnal on St Lucy's Day", first performed in 1905), Eleanor Everest Freer ("Break of Day, published in 1905) and Walford Davies ("The Cross", 1909) among the earliest. In 1916–18, the composer Hubert Parry set Donne's "Holy Sonnet 7" ("At the round earth's imagined corners") to music in his choral work, Songs of Farewell. Regina Hansen Willman (1914-1965) set Donne’s “First Holy Sonnet” for voice and string trio. In 1945, Benjamin Britten set nine of Donne's Holy Sonnets in his song cycle for voice and piano The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. in 1968, Williametta Spencer used Donne’s text for her choral work “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners.” Among them is also the choral setting of "Negative Love" that opens Harmonium (1981), as well as the aria setting of "Holy Sonnet XIV" at the end of the 1st act of Doctor Atomic, both by John Adams.
There have been settings in popular music as well. One is the version of the song "Go and Catch a Falling Star" on John Renbourn's debut album John Renbourn (1966), in which the last line is altered to "False, ere I count one, two, three". On their 1992 album Duality, the English Neoclassical Dark Wave band In The Nursery used a recitation of the entirety of Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" for the track "Mecciano" and an augmented version of "A Fever" for the track "Corruption."
Prose texts by Donne have also been set to music. In 1954, Priaulx Rainier set some in her Cycle for Declamation for solo voice. In 2009, the American Jennifer Higdon composed the choral piece On the Death of the Righteous, based on Donne's sermons. Still more recent is the Russian minimalist Anton Batagov's " I Fear No More, selected songs and meditations of John Donne" (2015).
Works
Biathanatos (1608)
Pseudo-Martyr (1610)
Ignatius His Conclave (1611)
The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World (1611)
The Second Anniversary: Of the Progress of the Soul (1612)
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624)
Poems (1633)
Juvenilia: or Certain Paradoxes and Problems (1633)
LXXX Sermons (1640)
Fifty Sermons (1649)
Essays in Divinity (1651)
Letters to severall persons of honour (1651)
XXVI Sermons (1661)
References
Citations
Sources
Further reading
Bald, R. C.: Donne's Influence in English Literature. Peter Smith, Gloucester, Massachusetts USA, 1965
Revised and republished 1990.
In two volumes
External links
John Donne on Encyclopædia Britannica
Poems by John Donne at PoetryFoundation.org
John Donne's Monument, St Paul's Cathedral
John Donne: Sparknotes
Digital Donne (digital images of early Donne editions and manuscripts)
Poems by John Donne at English Poetry
1572 births
1631 deaths
16th-century English poets
16th-century translators
17th-century English Anglican priests
17th-century English poets
17th-century male writers
17th-century translators
Alumni of Hart Hall, Oxford
Alumni of the University of Cambridge
Anglican poets
Christian poets
Anglican saints
Burials at St Paul's Cathedral
Converts to Anglicanism from Roman Catholicism
Deans of St Paul's
English male non-fiction writers
English people of Welsh descent
English MPs 1601
English MPs 1614
English songwriters
English translators
Epigrammatists
People celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar
People from the City of London
Inmates of Fleet Prison
Sonneteers
Writers from London
17th-century Anglican theologians | [
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15839 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey%20Ramone | Joey Ramone | Jeffrey Ross Hyman (May 19, 1951 – April 15, 2001), known professionally as Joey Ramone, was an American musician, singer, composer, and lead vocalist of the punk rock band the Ramones. Ramone's image, voice, and tenure as frontman of the Ramones made him a countercultural icon.
Early life
Jeffrey Ross Hyman was born on May 19, 1951, in Queens, New York City, New York to a Jewish family. His parents were Charlotte (née Mandell) and Noel Hyman. He was born with a parasitic twin growing out of his back, which was incompletely formed and surgically removed. The family resided in Forest Hills, Queens, where Hyman and his future Ramones bandmates attended Forest Hills High School. He grew up with his brother Mickey Leigh. Though generally a happy person, Hyman was something of an outcast, diagnosed at 18 with obsessive–compulsive disorder and schizophrenia. His mother, Charlotte Lesher, divorced her first husband, Noel Hyman. She married a second time but was widowed when he died in a car accident while she was on vacation.
Hyman was a fan of the Beatles, the Who, David Bowie, and the Stooges among other bands, particularly oldies and the Phil Spector-produced "girl groups". His idol was Keith Moon of the Who. Hyman took up the drums at 13, and played them throughout his teen years before picking up an acoustic guitar at age 17.
Sniper
In 1972 Hyman joined the glam punk band Sniper. Sniper played at the Mercer Arts Center, Max's Kansas City and the Coventry, alongside the New York Dolls, Suicide, and Queen Elizabeth III. Hyman played with Sniper under the name Jeff Starship.
Hyman continued playing with Sniper until early 1974, when he was replaced by Alan Turner.
Ramones
In 1974, Jeffrey Hyman co-founded the punk rock band the Ramones with friends John Cummings and Douglas Colvin. Colvin was already using the pseudonym "Dee Dee Ramone" and the others also adopted stage names using "Ramone" as their surname: Cummings became Johnny Ramone and Hyman became Joey Ramone. The name "Ramone" stems from Paul McCartney: he briefly used the stage name "Paul Ramon" during 1960/1961, when the Beatles, still an unknown five-piece band called the Silver Beetles, did a tour of Scotland and all took up pseudonyms; and again on the 1969 Steve Miller album Brave New World, where he played the drums on one song using that name.
Joey initially served as the group's drummer while Dee Dee Ramone was the original vocalist. However, when Dee Dee's vocal cords proved unable to sustain the demands of consistent live performances, Ramones manager Thomas Erdelyi suggested Joey switch to vocals. Mickey Leigh: "I was shocked when the band came out. Joey was the lead singer and I couldn't believe how good he was. Because he'd been sitting in my house with my acoustic guitar, writing these songs like 'I Don't Care', fucking up my guitar, and suddenly he's this guy on stage who you can't take your eyes off of." After a series of unsuccessful auditions in search of a new drummer, Erdelyi took over on drums, assuming the name Tommy Ramone.
The Ramones were a major influence on the punk rock movement in the United States, though they achieved only minor commercial success. Their only record with enough U.S. sales to be certified gold in Joey's lifetime was the compilation album Ramones Mania. Recognition of the band's importance built over the years, and they are now regularly represented in many assessments of all-time great rock music, such as the Rolling Stone lists of the 50 Greatest Artists of All Time and 25 Greatest Live Albums of All Time, VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock, and Mojo's 100 Greatest Albums. In 2002, the Ramones were voted the second greatest rock and roll band ever in Spin, behind the Beatles.
In 1996, after a tour with the Lollapalooza music festival, the band played its final show and then disbanded.
Vocal style
Ramone's signature cracks, hiccups, snarls, crooning, and youthful voice made Joey one of punk rock's most recognizable voices. Allmusic.com wrote that "Joey Ramone's signature bleat was the voice of punk rock in America." As his vocals matured and deepened through his career, so did the Ramones' songwriting, leaving a notable difference from his initial melodic and callow style—two notable tracks serving as examples are "Somebody Put Something in My Drink" and "Mama's Boy". Dee Dee Ramone was quoted as saying "All the other singers [in New York] were copying David Johansen (of the New York Dolls), who was copying Mick Jagger... But Joey was unique, totally unique."
Other projects
In 1985, Ramone joined Steven Van Zandt's music industry activist group Artists United Against Apartheid, which campaigned against the Sun City resort in South Africa. Ramone and 49 other recording artists – including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, Lou Reed and Run DMC — collaborated on the song "Sun City", in which they pledged they would never perform at the resort.
In 1994, Ramone appeared on the Helen Love album Love and Glitter, Hot Days and Music, singing the track "Punk Boy". Helen Love returned the favor, singing on Ramone's song "Mr. Punchy".
In October 1996, Ramone headlined the "Rock the Reservation" alternative rock festival in Tuba City, Arizona. 'Joey Ramone & the Resistance' (Daniel Rey on guitar, John Connor on bass guitar and Roger Murdock on drums) debuted Ramone's interpretation of Louis Armstrong's "Wonderful World' live, as well as Ramone's choice of Ramones classics and some of his other favorite songs, such as The Dave Clark Five's "Any Way You Want It", The Who's "The Kids are Alright" and The Stooges' "No Fun".
Ramone co-wrote and recorded the song "Meatball Sandwich" with Youth Gone Mad. For a short time before his death, he took the role of manager and producer for the punk rock band the Independents.
His last recording as a vocalist was backup vocals on the CD One Nation Under by the Dine Navajo rock group Blackfire. He appeared on two tracks, "What Do You See" and "Lying to Myself". The 2002 CD won "Best Pop/Rock Album of the Year" at the 2002 Native American Music Awards.
Ramone produced the Ronnie Spector EP She Talks to Rainbows in 1999. It was critically acclaimed but was not very commercially successful. The title track was previously on the Ramones' final studio album, ¡Adios Amigos!.
Illness and death
In 1995, Joey Ramone was diagnosed with lymphoma. He kept his condition private until it was revealed on March 19, 2001, that he was battling the disease. He died of the illness at New York-Presbyterian Hospital on April 15, 2001, a month before he would have turned 50. He was reportedly listening to the song "In a Little While" by U2 when he died. In an interview in 2014 for Radio 538, U2 lead singer Bono confirmed that Joey Ramone's family told him that Ramone listened to the song before he died, which Andy Shernoff (The Dictators) also confirmed.
His solo album Don't Worry About Me was released posthumously in 2002, and features the single "What a Wonderful World", a cover of the Louis Armstrong standard. MTV News claimed: "With his trademark rose-colored shades, black leather jacket, shoulder-length hair, ripped jeans and alternately snarling and crooning vocals, Joey was the iconic godfather of punk."
Influence
On November 30, 2003, a block of East 2nd Street in New York City was officially renamed Joey Ramone Place. It is the block where Hyman once lived with bandmate Dee Dee Ramone and is near the former site of the music club CBGB, where the Ramones began their career. Hyman's birthday is celebrated annually by rock 'n' roll nightclubs, hosted in New York City by his brother and, until 2007, his mother, Charlotte. Joey Ramone is interred at New Mount Zion Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. (New Mount Zion is a Jewish Cemetery located within Hillside Cemetery).
The Ramones were named as inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the class of 2002.
Several songs have been written in tribute to Joey Ramone. Tommy, CJ and Marky Ramone and Daniel Rey came together in 2002 to record Jed Davis' Joey Ramone tribute album, The Bowery Electric. Other tributes include "Hello Joe" by Blondie from the album The Curse of Blondie, "You Can't Kill Joey Ramone" by Sloppy Seconds, Joey by Raimundos, "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" by Sleater-Kinney, "Red and White Stripes" by Moler and "Joey" by the Corin Tucker Band, "I Heard Ramona Sing" by Frank Black, Amy Rigby's "Dancin' With Joey Ramone" and "The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)" by U2.
In September 2010, the Associated Press reported that "Joey Ramone Place," a sign at the corner of Bowery and East Second Street, was New York City's most stolen sign. Later, the sign was moved to above ground level. Drummer Marky Ramone thought Joey would appreciate that his sign would be the most stolen, adding "Now you have to be an NBA player to see it."
After several years in development, Ramone's second posthumous album was released on May 22, 2012. Titled ...Ya Know?, it was preceded on Record Store Day by a 7" single re-release of "Blitzkrieg Bop"/"Havana Affair".
On April 15, 2021, the 20th anniversary of Ramone's death, it was announced that Pete Davidson would portray Ramone in the upcoming Netflix biopic, I Slept with Joey Ramone which is based on the memoir of the same name written by Ramone's brother Mickey Leigh. Leigh will serve as an executive producer. The film is being made with the full cooperation and support of Ramone's estate, with a treatment written by Davidson and director Jason Orley.
Discography
Solo
Don't Worry About Me (2002)
...Ya Know? (2012)
A Closer Look (2020)
EPs
In a Family Way – Sibling Rivalry (1994)
Ramones: Leathers from New York – The Ramones and Joey Ramone (solo) (1997)
Christmas Spirit...In My House (2002)
Singles
"I Got You Babe" (1982) (Duet with Holly Beth Vincent)
"Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight) (Revised)" (2001)
"What a Wonderful World" (2002)
"Rock and Roll Is the Answer" / "There's Got to Be More to Life" (2012)
References
External links
1951 births
2001 deaths
American male drummers
American male guitarists
American male singer-songwriters
American punk rock drummers
American punk rock guitarists
American punk rock singers
American rock songwriters
Burials at Hillside Cemetery (Lyndhurst, New Jersey)
Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
Deaths from lymphoma
Guitarists from New York (state)
Forest Hills High School (New York) alumni
Jewish American musicians
Jewish singers
Jewish rock musicians
Jews in punk rock
Singer-songwriters from New York (state)
People from Forest Hills, Queens
People with parasitic twins
People with obsessive–compulsive disorder
People with schizophrenia
Joey
Record producers from New York (state)
20th-century American drummers
20th-century American guitarists
20th-century American singers
New York (state) Democrats
20th-century American male singers | [
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15842 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2029 | June 29 |
Events
Pre-1600
226 – Cao Rui succeeds his father as emperor of the Kingdom of Wei.
1149 – Raymond of Poitiers is defeated and killed at the Battle of Inab by Nur ad-Din Zangi.
1194 – Sverre is crowned King of Norway, leading to his excommunication by the Catholic Church and civil war.
1444 – Skanderbeg defeats an Ottoman invasion force at Torvioll.
1457 – The Dutch city of Dordrecht is devastated by fire
1534 – Jacques Cartier is the first European to reach Prince Edward Island.
1601–1900
1613 – The Globe Theatre in London, built by William Shakespeare playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, burns to the ground.
1620 – English crown bans tobacco growing in England, giving the Virginia Company a monopoly in exchange for tax of one shilling per pound.
1644 – Charles I of England defeats a Parliamentarian detachment at the Battle of Cropredy Bridge.
1659 – At the Battle of Konotop the Ukrainian armies of Ivan Vyhovsky defeat the Russians led by Prince Trubetskoy.
1786 – Alexander Macdonell and over five hundred Roman Catholic highlanders leave Scotland to settle in Glengarry County, Ontario.
1807 – Russo-Turkish War: Admiral Dmitry Senyavin destroys the Ottoman fleet in the Battle of Athos.
1850 – Autocephaly officially granted by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Church of Greece.
1864 – At least 99 people, mostly German and Polish immigrants, are killed in Canada's worst railway disaster after a train fails to stop for an open drawbridge and plunges into the Rivière Richelieu near St-Hilaire, Quebec.
1874 – Greek politician Charilaos Trikoupis publishes a manifesto in the Athens daily Kairoi entitled "Who's to Blame?" leveling complaints against King George. Trikoupis is elected Prime Minister of Greece the next year.
1880 – France annexes Tahiti, renaming the independent Kingdom of Tahiti as "Etablissements de français de l'Océanie".
1881 – In Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad declares himself to be the Mahdi, the messianic redeemer of Islam.
1888 – George Edward Gouraud records Handel's Israel in Egypt onto a phonograph cylinder, thought for many years to be the oldest known recording of music.
1889 – Hyde Park and several other Illinois townships vote to be annexed by Chicago, forming the largest United States city in area and second largest in population at the time.
1901–present
1915 – The North Saskatchewan River flood of 1915 is the worst flood in Edmonton history.
1916 – British diplomat turned Irish nationalist Roger Casement is sentenced to death for his part in the Easter Rising.
1922 – France grants 1 km2 at Vimy Ridge "freely, and for all time, to the Government of Canada, the free use of the land exempt from all taxes".
1927 – The Bird of Paradise, a U.S. Army Air Corps Fokker tri-motor, completes the first transpacific flight, from the mainland United States to Hawaii.
1945 – The Soviet Union annexes the Czechoslovak province of Carpathian Ruthenia.
1950 – Korean War: U.S. President Harry S. Truman authorizes a sea blockade of Korea.
1952 – The First Miss Universe pageant is held. Armi Kuusela from Finland wins the title of Miss Universe 1952.
1956 – The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 is signed by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, officially creating the United States Interstate Highway System.
1971 – Prior to re-entry (following a record-setting stay aboard the Soviet Union’s Salyut 1 space station), the crew capsule of the Soyuz 11 spacecraft depressurizes, killing the three cosmonauts on board. Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev are the first humans to die in space.
1972 – The United States Supreme Court rules in the case Furman v. Georgia that arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
1972 – A Convair CV-580 and De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter collide above Lake Winnebago near Appleton, Wisconsin, killing 13.
1974 – Vice President Isabel Perón assumes powers and duties as Acting President of Argentina, while her husband President Juan Perón is terminally ill.
1974 – Mikhail Baryshnikov defects from the Soviet Union to Canada while on tour with the Kirov Ballet.
1975 – Steve Wozniak tests his first prototype of the Apple I computer.
1976 – The Seychelles become independent from the United Kingdom.
1976 – The Conference of Communist and Workers Parties of Europe convenes in East Berlin.
1987 – Vincent van Gogh's painting, the Le Pont de Trinquetaille, is bought for $20.4 million at an auction in London, England.
1995 – Space Shuttle program: STS-71 Mission (Atlantis) docks with the Russian space station Mir for the first time.
1995 – The Sampoong Department Store collapses in the Seocho District of Seoul, South Korea, killing 501 and injuring 937.
2002 – Naval clashes between South Korea and North Korea lead to the death of six South Korean sailors and sinking of a North Korean vessel.
2006 – Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that President George W. Bush's plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violates U.S. and international law.
2007 – Apple Inc. releases its first mobile phone, the iPhone.
2012 – A derecho sweeps across the eastern United States, leaving at least 22 people dead and millions without power.
2014 – The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant self-declares its caliphate in Syria and northern Iraq.
Births
Pre-1600
1136 – Petronilla of Aragon (d. 1173)
1326 – Murad I, Ottoman Sultan (d. 1389)
1398 – John II of Aragon and Navarre (d. 1479)
1443 – Anthony Browne, English knight (d. 1506)
1482 – Maria of Aragon, Queen of Portugal (d. 1517)
1488 – Pedro Pacheco de Villena, Catholic cardinal (d. 1560)
1517 – Rembert Dodoens, Flemish physician and botanist (d. 1585)
1525 – Peter Agricola, German humanist, theologian, diplomat and statesman (d. 1585)
1528 – Julius, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (d. 1589)
1543 – Christine of Hesse, Duchess consort of Holstein-Gottorp (d. 1604)
1596 – Emperor Go-Mizunoo of Japan (d. 1680)
1601–1900
1621 – Willem van der Zaan, Dutch Admiral (d. 1669)
1686 – Pietro Paolo Troisi, Maltese artist (d. 1743)
1746 – Joachim Heinrich Campe, German linguist, author, and educator (d. 1818)
1768 – Vincenzo Dimech, Maltese sculptor (d. 1831)
1787 – Lavinia Stoddard, American poet, school founder (d. 1820)
1793 – Josef Ressel, Czech-Austrian inventor, invented the propeller (d. 1857)
1798 – Willibald Alexis, German author and poet (d. 1871)
1798 – Giacomo Leopardi, Italian poet and philosopher (d. 1837)
1801 – Frédéric Bastiat, French economist and theorist (d. 1850)
1803 – John Newton Brown, American minister and author (d. 1868)
1818 – Angelo Secchi, Italian astronomer and academic (d. 1878)
1819 – Thomas Dunn English, American poet, playwright, and politician (d. 1902)
1833 – Peter Waage, Norwegian chemist and academic (d. 1900)
1835 – Celia Thaxter, American poet and story writer (d. 1894)
1844 – Peter I of Serbia (d. 1921)
1849 – Pedro Montt, Chilean lawyer and politician, 15th President of Chile (d. 1910)
1849 – Sergei Witte, Russian politician, 1st Chairmen of Council of Ministers of the Russian Empire (d. 1915)
1849 – John Hunn, American businessman and politician, 51st Governor of Delaware (d. 1926)
1858 – George Washington Goethals, American general and engineer, co-designed the Panama Canal (d. 1928)
1858 – Julia Lathrop, American activist and politician (d. 1932)
1861 – William James Mayo, American physician and surgeon, co-founded the Mayo Clinic (d. 1939)
1863 – Wilbert Robinson, American baseball player, coach, and manager (d. 1934)
1866 – Bartholomeus Roodenburch, Dutch swimmer (d. 1939)
1868 – George Ellery Hale, American astronomer and journalist (d. 1938)
1870 – Joseph Carl Breil, American tenor, composer, and director (d. 1926)
1873 – Leo Frobenius, German ethnologist and archaeologist (d. 1938)
1879 – Benedetto Aloisi Masella, Italian cardinal (d. 1970)
1880 – Ludwig Beck, German general (d. 1944)
1881 – Harry Frazee, American director, producer, and agent (d. 1929)
1881 – Curt Sachs, German-American composer and musicologist (d. 1959)
1882 – Henry Hawtrey, English runner (d. 1961)
1882 – Franz Seldte, German captain and politician, Reich Minister for Labour (d. 1947)
1885 – Izidor Kürschner, Hungarian football player and coach (d. 1941)
1886 – Robert Schuman, Luxembourgian-French lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of France (d. 1963)
1888 – Squizzy Taylor, Australian gangster (d. 1927)
1889 – Willie Macfarlane, Scottish-American golfer (d. 1961)
1890 – Robert Laurent, American sculptor and academic (d. 1970)
1890 – Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, Dutch supercentenarian (d. 2005)
1893 – Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, Indian economist and statistician (d. 1972)
1893 – Aarre Merikanto, Finnish composer and educator (d. 1958)
1897 – Fulgence Charpentier, Canadian journalist and publisher (d. 2001)
1898 – Yvonne Lefébure, French pianist and educator (d. 1986)
1900 – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, French poet and pilot (d. 1944)
1901–present
1901 – Nelson Eddy, American singer and actor (d. 1967)
1903 – Alan Blumlein, English engineer, developed the H2S radar (d. 1942)
1904 – Witold Hurewicz, Polish mathematician (d. 1956)
1906 – Ivan Chernyakhovsky, Ukrainian general (d. 1945)
1906 – Heinz Harmel, German general (d. 2000)
1908 – Leroy Anderson, American composer and conductor (d. 1975)
1908 – Erik Lundqvist, Swedish javelin thrower (d. 1963)
1910 – Frank Loesser, American composer and conductor (d. 1969)
1910 – Burgess Whitehead, American baseball player (d. 1993)
1911 – Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld (d. 2004)
1911 – Katherine DeMille, Canadian-American actress (d. 1995)
1911 – Bernard Herrmann, American composer and conductor (d. 1975)
1912 – José Pablo Moncayo, Mexican pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1958)
1912 – Émile Peynaud, French oenologist and academic (d. 2004)
1912 – John Toland, American historian and author (d. 2004)
1913 – Earle Meadows, American pole vaulter (d. 1992)
1914 – Rafael Kubelík, Czech-American conductor and composer (d. 1996)
1914 – Christos Papakyriakopoulos, Greek-American mathematician and academic (d. 1976)
1916 – Ruth Warrick, American actress and activist (d. 2005)
1917 – Ling Yun, Chinese politician (d. 2018)
1918 – Heini Lohrer, Swiss ice hockey player (d. 2011)
1918 – Gene La Rocque, U.S admiral (d. 2016)
1918 – Francis W. Nye, United States Air Force major general (d. 2019)
1919 – Ernesto Corripio y Ahumada, Mexican cardinal (d. 2008)
1919 – Walter Babington Thomas, Commander of British Far East Land Forces (d. 2017)
1919 – Slim Pickens, American actor and rodeo performer (d. 1983)
1919 – Lloyd Richards, Canadian-American theatre director, actor, and dean (d. 2006)
1920 – César Rodríguez Álvarez, Spanish footballer and manager (d. 1995)
1920 – Ray Harryhausen, American animator and producer (d. 2013)
1920 – Nicole Russell, Duchess of Bedford (d. 2012)
1921 – Frédéric Dard, French author and screenwriter (d. 2000)
1921 – Jean Kent, English actress (d. 2013)
1921 – Reinhard Mohn, German businessman (d. 2009)
1921 – Harry Schell, French-American race car driver (d. 1960)
1922 – Ralph Burns, American songwriter, bandleader, composer, conductor, arranger and pianist (d. 2001)
1922 – Vasko Popa, Serbian poet and academic (d. 1991)
1922 – John William Vessey, Jr., American general (d. 2016)
1923 – Chou Wen-chung, Chinese-American composer and educator (d. 2019)
1924 – Ezra Laderman, American composer and educator (d. 2015)
1924 – Roy Walford, American pathologist and gerontologist (d. 2004)
1924 – Philip H. Hoff, American politician (d. 2018)
1925 – Francis S. Currey, American World War II Medal of Honor recipient (d. 2019)
1925 – Giorgio Napolitano, Italian journalist and politician, 11th President of Italy
1925 – Chan Parker, American dancer and author (d. 1999)
1925 – Jackie Lynn Taylor, American actress (d. 2014)
1925 – Cara Williams, American actress (d. 2021)
1926 – Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, Kuwaiti ruler, 3rd Emir of Kuwait (d. 2006)
1926 – Julius W. Becton, Jr., U.S lieutenant general
1926 – Roger Stuart Bacon, Nova Scotia politician
1926 – Bobby Morgan, American professional baseball player
1927 – Pierre Perrault, Canadian director and screenwriter (d. 1999)
1927 – Marie Thérèse Killens, Canadian politician
1928 – Ian Bannen, Scottish actor (d. 1999)
1928 – Jean-Louis Pesch, French author and illustrator
1928 – Radius Prawiro, Indonesian economist and politician (d. 2005)
1929 – Pat Crawford Brown, American actress (d. 2019)
1929 – Pete George, American weightlifter (d. 2021)
1929 – Oriana Fallaci, Italian journalist and author (d. 2006)
1930 – Ernst Albrecht, German economist and politician, 6th Prime Minister of Lower Saxony (d. 2014)
1930 – Robert Evans, American actor and producer (d. 2019)
1930 – Viola Léger, American-Canadian actress and politician
1930 – Sławomir Mrożek, Polish-French author and playwright (d. 2013)
1931 – Sevim Burak, Turkish author (d. 1983)
1932 – Brian Hutton, Baron Hutton, British jurist; Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland
1933 – Bob Shaw, American baseball player and manager (d. 2010)
1933 – John Bradshaw, American theologian and author (d. 2016)
1934 – Corey Allen, American actor, director, and producer (d. 2010)
1935 – Vassilis C. Constantakopoulos, Greek captain and businessman (d. 2011)
1935 – Katsuya Nomura, Japanese baseball player and manager
1936 – Harmon Killebrew, American baseball player (d. 2011)
1939 – Alan Connolly, Australian cricketer
1939 – Amarildo Tavares da Silveira, Brazilian footballer and coach
1940 – Vyacheslav Artyomov, Russian composer
1940 – John Dawes, Welsh rugby player and coach (d. 2021)
1941 – John Boccabella, American baseball player
1941 – Stokely Carmichael, Trinidadian-American activist (d. 1998)
1942 – Charlotte Bingham, English author and screenwriter
1942 – Mike Willesee, Australian journalist and producer (d. 2019)
1943 – Little Eva, American singer (d. 2003)
1943 – Louis Nicollin, French entrepreneur and chairman of Montpellier HSC (d. 2017)
1944 – Gary Busey, American actor
1944 – Andreu Mas-Colell, Spanish economist, academic, and politician
1944 – Seán Patrick O'Malley, American cardinal
1945 – Chandrika Kumaratunga, Sri Lankan journalist and politician, 5th President of Sri Lanka
1946 – Ernesto Pérez Balladares, Panamanian politician, 33rd President of Panama
1946 – Egon von Fürstenberg, Swiss fashion designer (d. 2004)
1947 – Richard Lewis, American actor and screenwriter
1948 – Sean Bergin, South African-Dutch saxophonist and flute player (d. 2012)
1948 – Fred Grandy, American actor and politician
1948 – Ian Paice, English drummer, songwriter, and producer
1948 – Usha Prashar, Baroness Prashar, Kenyan-English politician
1949 – Dan Dierdorf, American football player and sportscaster
1949 – Joan Clos, Spanish anesthesiologist and politician, 116th Mayor of Barcelona
1949 – Ann Veneman, American lawyer and politician, 27th United States Secretary of Agriculture
1950 – Bobby London, American illustrator
1950 – Don Moen, American singer and songwriter
1951 – Craig Sager, American sportscaster (d. 2016)
1953 – Don Dokken, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1953 – Colin Hay, Scottish-Australian singer and guitarist
1954 – Rick Honeycutt, American baseball player and coach
1954 – Leovegildo Lins da Gama Júnior, Brazilian footballer, coach, and manager
1955 – Charles J. Precourt, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut
1956 – Nick Fry, English economist and businessman
1956 – David Burroughs Mattingly, American illustrator and painter
1956 – Pedro Guerrero, Dominican-American baseball player and manager
1956 – Pedro Santana Lopes, Portuguese lawyer and politician, 118th Prime Minister of Portugal
1956 – Pyotr Vasilevsky, Belarusian footballer and manager (d. 2012)
1957 – Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, Turkmen dentist and politician, 2nd President of Turkmenistan
1957 – María Conchita Alonso, Cuban-Venezuelan singer and actress
1957 – Robert Forster, Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist
1957 – Michael Nutter, American politician, 98th Mayor of Philadelphia
1957 – Terry Wyatt, English physicist and academic
1958 – Dieter Althaus, German politician
1958 – Rosa Mota, Portuguese runner
1961 – Sharon Lawrence, American actress, singer, and dancer
1962 – Amanda Donohoe, English actress
1962 – Joan Laporta, Spanish lawyer and politician
1962 – George D. Zamka, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut
1963 – Anne-Sophie Mutter, German violinist
1963 – Judith Hoag, American actress and educator
1964 – Stedman Pearson, English singer-songwriter and dancer
1965 – Tripp Eisen, American guitarist
1965 – Paul Jarvis, English cricketer
1966 – Yoko Kamio, Japanese author and comic artist
1967 – Jeff Burton, American race car driver
1967 – Melora Hardin, American actress and singer
1967 – Seamus McGarvey, Northern Irish cinematographer
1968 – Brian d'Arcy James, American actor and musician
1968 – Theoren Fleury, Canadian ice hockey player
1969 – Claude Béchard, Canadian politician (d. 2010)
1969 – Pavlos Dermitzakis, Greek footballer and manager
1969 – Tōru Hashimoto, Japanese lawyer and politician
1970 – Melanie Paschke, German sprinter
1970 – Emily Skinner, American actress and singer
1971 – Matthew Good, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist
1973 – George Hincapie, American cyclist
1976 – Daniel Carlsson, Swedish race car driver
1976 – Bret McKenzie, New Zealand comedian, actor, musician, songwriter, and producer
1977 – Sotiris Liberopoulos, Greek footballer
1977 – Zuleikha Robinson, English actress
1978 – Nicole Scherzinger, American singer-songwriter, dancer, and actress
1979 – Matthew Bode, Australian footballer
1979 – Andy O'Brien, English footballer
1979 – Marleen Veldhuis, Dutch swimmer
1980 – Katherine Jenkins, Welsh soprano and actress
1981 – Luke Branighan, Australian rugby league player
1981 – Joe Johnson, American basketball player
1981 – Nicolás Vuyovich, Argentinian race car driver (d. 2005)
1981 – Shmuly Yanklowitz, American rabbi, author, and educator
1982 – Colin Jost, American comedian
1982 – Dusty Hughes, American baseball player
1982 – Lily Rabe, American actress
1983 – Aundrea Fimbres, American singer-songwriter and dancer
1983 – Jeremy Powers, American cyclist
1984 – Aleksandr Shustov, Russian high jumper
1985 – Quintin Demps, American football player
1986 – José Manuel Jurado, Spanish footballer
1986 – Edward Maya, Romanian singer-songwriter and producer
1988 – Éver Banega, Argentinian footballer
1990 – Kim Little, Scottish footballer
1990 – Yann M'Vila, French footballer
1991 – Suk Hyun-jun, South Korean footballer
1991 – Kawhi Leonard, American basketball player
1991 – Addison Timlin, American actress
1993 – Harrison Gilbertson, Australian actor
1994 – Camila Mendes, American actress and model
1996 – Joseph Manu, New Zealand rugby league player
1998 – Michael Porter Jr., American basketball player
2001 – Aaron Schoupp, Australian rugby league player
2006 – Sam Lavagnino, American child voice actor
Deaths
Pre-1600
226 – Cao Pi, Chinese emperor (b. 187)
884 – Yang Shili, general of the Tang Dynasty
976 – Gero, archbishop of Cologne
1059 – Bernard II, Duke of Saxony (b. 995)
1149 – Raymond of Poitiers, Prince of Antioch (b. 1115)
1153 – Óláfr Guðrøðarson, King of the Isles
1252 – Abel, King of Denmark (b. 1218)
1293 – Henry of Ghent, philosopher (b. c.1217)
1315 – Ramon Llull, Spanish philosopher (b. 1235)
1344 – Joan of Savoy, duchess consort of Brittany, throne claimant of Savoy (b. 1310)
1374 – Jan Milíč of Kroměříž, Czech priest and reformer
1432 – Janus of Cyprus (b. 1375)
1509 – Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (b. 1443)
1520 – Moctezuma II, Aztec ruler (b. 1466)
1575 – Baba Nobuharu, Japanese samurai (b. 1515)
1594 – Niels Kaas, Danish politician, Chancellor of Denmark (b. 1535)
1601–1900
1626 – Scipione Cobelluzzi, Italian cardinal and archivist (b. 1564)
1646 – Laughlin Ó Cellaigh, Gaelic-Irish Lord
1725 – Arai Hakuseki, Japanese philosopher, academic, and politician (b. 1657)
1729 – Edward Taylor, American-English poet, pastor, and physician (b. circa 1642)
1744 – André Campra, French composer and conductor (b. 1660)
1764 – Ralph Allen, English businessman and philanthropist (b. 1693)
1779 – Anton Raphael Mengs, German painter (b. 1728)
1831 – Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein, Prussian minister and politician (b. 1757)
1840 – Lucien Bonaparte, French prince (b. 1775)
1852 – Henry Clay, American lawyer and politician, 9th United States Secretary of State (b. 1777)
1853 – Adrien-Henri de Jussieu, French botanist and academic (b. 1797)
1855 – John Gorrie, American physician and humanitarian (b. 1803)
1860 – Thomas Addison, English physician and endocrinologist (b. 1793)
1861 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poet and translator (b. 1806)
1873 – Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Indian poet and playwright (b. 1824)
1875 – Ferdinand I of Austria (b. 1793)
1895 – Thomas Henry Huxley, English biologist (b. 1825)
1900 – Ivan Mikheevich Pervushin, Russian mathematician and academic (b. 1827)
1901–present
1907 – Konstantinos Volanakis, Greek painter and academic (b. 1837)
1919 – José Gregorio Hernández Venezuelan physician and educator (b. 1864)
1931 – Nérée Beauchemin, Canadian poet and physician (b. 1850)
1933 – Roscoe Arbuckle, American actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1887)
1935 – Jack O'Neill, Irish-American baseball player and manager (b. 1873)
1936 – János Szlepecz, Slovene priest and missionary (b. 1872)
1940 – Paul Klee, Swiss painter and illustrator (b. 1879)
1941 – Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Polish pianist, composer, and politician, 2nd Prime Minister of Poland (b. 1860)
1942 – Paul Troje, German politician, Mayor of Marburg (b. 1864)
1949 – Themistoklis Sofoulis, Greek politician, 115th Prime Minister of Greece (b. 1860)
1955 – Max Pechstein, German painter and academic (b. 1881)
1960 – Frank Patrick, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (b. 1885)
1962 – Charles Lyon Chandler, American historian (b. 1883)
1964 – Eric Dolphy, American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader (b. 1928)
1967 – Primo Carnera, Italian boxer and actor (b. 1906)
1967 – Jayne Mansfield, American actress (b. 1933)
1969 – Moise Tshombe, Congolese accountant and politician, Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (b. 1919)
1971 – Nestor Mesta Chayres, Mexican operatic tenor and bolero vocalist (b. 1908)
1975 – Tim Buckley, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1947)
1978 – Bob Crane, American actor (b. 1928)
1979 – Lowell George, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1945)
1980 – Jorge Basadre, Peruvian historian (b. 1903)
1981 – Russell Drysdale, English-Australian painter (b. 1912)
1982 – Pierre Balmain, French fashion designer, founded Balmain (b. 1914)
1982 – Henry King, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1886)
1986 – Frank Wise, Australian politician, 16th Premier of Western Australia (b. 1897)
1990 – Irving Wallace, American author and screenwriter (b. 1916)
1992 – Mohamed Boudiaf, Algerian soldier and politician, President of Algeria (b. 1919)
1993 – Héctor Lavoe, Puerto Rican-American singer-songwriter (b. 1946)
1994 – Kurt Eichhorn, German conductor and educator (b. 1908)
1995 – Lana Turner, American actress (b. 1921)
1997 – William Hickey, American actor (b. 1927)
1997 – Marjorie Linklater, Scottish campaigner for the arts and environment of Orkney (b. 1909)
1998 – Horst Jankowski, German pianist and composer (b. 1936)
1999 – Karekin I, Syrian-Armenian patriarch (b. 1950)
1999 – Allan Carr, American screenwriter and producer (b. 1937)
2000 – Vittorio Gassman, Italian actor and director (b. 1922)
2000 – Jane Birdwood, Baroness Birdwood, Canadian-English publisher and politician (b. 1913)
2002 – Rosemary Clooney, American singer and actress (b. 1928)
2003 – Katharine Hepburn, American actress (b. 1907)
2004 – Bernard Babior, American physician and biochemist (b. 1935)
2004 – Alvin Hamilton, Canadian lieutenant and politician, 18th Canadian Minister of Agriculture (b. 1912)
2006 – Fabián Bielinsky, Argentinian director and screenwriter (b. 1959)
2006 – Lloyd Richards, Canadian-American theatre director, actor, and dean (b. 1919)
2006 – Randy Walker, American football player and coach (b. 1954)
2007 – Fred Saberhagen, American soldier and author (b. 1930)
2007 – Joel Siegel, American journalist and critic (b. 1943)
2009 – Joe Bowman, American, target shooter and boot-maker (b. 1925)
2011 – K. D. Sethna, Indian poet, scholar, writer, philosopher, and cultural critic (b. 1904)
2012 – Yong Nyuk Lin, Singaporean politician, Singaporean Minister of Health (b. 1918)
2012 – Vincent Ostrom, American political scientist and academic (b. 1919)
2012 – Juan Reccius, Chilean triple jumper (b. 1911)
2012 – Floyd Temple, American baseball player, coach, and manager (b. 1926)
2013 – Peter Fitzgerald, Irish footballer and manager (b. 1937)
2013 – Jack Gotta, American-Canadian football player, coach, and manager (b. 1929)
2013 – Margherita Hack, Italian astrophysicist and author (b. 1922)
2013 – Gilma Jiménez, Colombian politician (b. 1956)
2014 – Damian D'Oliveira, South African cricketer (b. 1960)
2014 – Dermot Healy, Irish author, poet, and playwright (b. 1947)
2015 – Hisham Barakat, Egyptian lawyer and judge (b. 1950)
2015 – Josef Masopust, Czech footballer and coach (b. 1931)
2015 – Charles Pasqua, French businessman and politician, French Minister of the Interior (b. 1927)
2016 – Jan Hettema, Springbok cyclist and five times South African National Rally Champion (b. 1933)
2017 – Louis Nicollin, French entrepreneur and chairman of Montpellier HSC from 1974 to his death (b. 1943)
2017 – Dave Semenko, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1957)
2018 – Steve Ditko, American comic writer and illustrator (b. 1927)
2020 – Carl Reiner, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1922)
2020 – Stepa J. Groggs, American rap artist (b. 1988)
2020 – Hachalu Hundessa, Ethiopian singer, songwriter (b. 1986)
2021 – Donald Rumsfeld, American captain and politician, 13th United States Secretary of Defense (b. 1932)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Cassius of Narni
Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (Western Christianity), and its related observances:
Haro Wine Festival (Haro, La Rioja)
l-Imnarja (Malta)
June 29 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Engineer's Day (Ecuador)
Independence Day (Seychelles), celebrates the independence of Seychelles from the United Kingdom in 1976.
Veterans' Day (Netherlands)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15843 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2030 | June 30 |
Events
Pre-1600
296 – Pope Marcellinus begins his papacy.
763 – The Byzantine army of emperor Constantine V defeats the Bulgarian forces in the Battle of Anchialus.
1422 – Battle of Arbedo between the duke of Milan and the Swiss cantons.
1521 – Spanish forces defeat a combined French and Navarrese army at the Battle of Noáin during the Spanish conquest of Iberian Navarre.
1559 – King Henry II of France is mortally wounded in a jousting match against Gabriel, comte de Montgomery.
1598 – The Spanish held Castillo San Felipe del Morro in San Juan, Puerto Rico having been besieged for fifteen days, surrenders to an English force under Sir George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland.
1601–1900
1632 – The University of Tartu was founded.
1651 – The Deluge: Khmelnytsky Uprising: The Battle of Berestechko ends with a Polish victory.
1688 – The Immortal Seven issue the Invitation to William, which would culminate in the Glorious Revolution.
1758 – Seven Years' War: Habsburg Austrian forces destroy a Prussian reinforcement and supply convoy in the Battle of Domstadtl, helping to expel Prussian King Frederick the Great from Moravia.
1794 – Northwest Indian War: Native American forces under Blue Jacket attack Fort Recovery.
1805 – Under An act to divide the Indiana Territory into two separate governments, adopted by the U.S. Congress on January 11, 1805, the Michigan Territory is organized.
1859 – French acrobat Charles Blondin crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope.
1860 – The 1860 Oxford evolution debate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History takes place.
1864 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln grants Yosemite Valley to California for "public use, resort and recreation".
1882 – Charles J. Guiteau is hanged in Washington, D.C. for the assassination of U.S. President James Garfield.
1886 – The first transcontinental train trip across Canada departs from Montreal, Quebec. It arrives in Port Moody, British Columbia on July 4.
1892 – The Homestead Strike begins near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
1900 – A savage fire wrecked three steamships docked at a pier in Hoboken, New Jersey. Over 200 crew members and passengers are killed, and hundreds injured.
1901–present
1905 – Albert Einstein sends the article On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, in which he introduces special relativity, for publication in Annalen der Physik.
1906 – The United States Congress passes the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act.
1908 – The Tunguska Event, the largest impact event on Earth in human recorded history, resulting in a massive explosion over Eastern Siberia.
1912 – The Regina Cyclone, Canada's deadliest tornado event, kills 28 people in Regina, Saskatchewan.
1916 – World War I: In "the day Sussex died", elements of the Royal Sussex Regiment take heavy casualties in the Battle of the Boar's Head at Richebourg-l'Avoué in France.
1921 – U.S. President Warren G. Harding appoints former President William Howard Taft as Chief Justice of the United States.
1922 – In Washington D.C., U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and Dominican Ambassador Francisco J. Peynado sign the Hughes–Peynado agreement, which ends the United States occupation of the Dominican Republic.
1934 – The Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler's violent purge of his political rivals in Germany, takes place.
1936 – Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia appeals for aid to the League of Nations against Italy's invasion of his country.
1937 – The world's first emergency telephone number, 999, is introduced in London.
1944 – World War II: The Battle of Cherbourg ends with the fall of the strategically valuable port to American forces.
1953 – The first Chevrolet Corvette rolls off the assembly line in Flint, Michigan.
1956 – A TWA Super Constellation and a United Airlines DC-7 collide above the Grand Canyon in Arizona and crash, killing all 128 on board both airliners.
1959 – A United States Air Force F-100 Super Sabre from Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, crashes into a nearby elementary school, killing 11 students plus six residents from the local neighborhood.
1960 – Belgian Congo gains independence as Republic of the Congo (Léopoldville).
1963 – Ciaculli bombing: a car bomb, intended for Mafia boss Salvatore Greco, kills seven police officers and military personnel near Palermo.
1966 – The National Organization for Women, the United States' largest feminist organization, is founded.
1968 – Pope Paul VI issues the Credo of the People of God.
1971 – The crew of the Soviet Soyuz 11 spacecraft are killed when their air supply escapes through a faulty valve.
1972 – The first leap second is added to the UTC time system.
1974 – The Baltimore municipal strike of 1974 begins.
1977 – The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization disbands.
1985 – Thirty-nine American hostages from the hijacked TWA Flight 847 are freed in Beirut after being held for 17 days.
1986 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Bowers v. Hardwick that states can outlaw homosexual acts between consenting adults.
1990 – East Germany and West Germany merge their economies.
1994 – During a test flight of an Airbus A330-300 at Toulouse–Blagnac Airport, the aircraft crashes killing all seven people on board.
1997 – The United Kingdom transfers sovereignty over Hong Kong to China.
2005 – MTV Canada is rebranded as Razer
2007 – A Jeep Cherokee filled with propane canisters drives into the entrance of Glasgow Airport, Scotland in a failed terrorist attack. This was linked to the 2007 London car bombs that had taken place the day before.
2009 – Yemenia Flight 626, an Airbus A310-300, crashes into the Indian Ocean near Comoros, killing 152 of the 153 people on board. A 14-year-old girl named Bahia Bakari survives the crash.
2013 – Nineteen firefighters die controlling a wildfire near Yarnell, Arizona.
2013 – Protests begin around Egypt against President Mohamed Morsi and the ruling Freedom and Justice Party, leading to their overthrow during the 2013 Egyptian coup d'état.
2015 – A Hercules C-130 military aircraft with 113 people on board crashes in a residential area in Medan, Indonesia, resulting in at least 116 deaths.
2019 – Donald Trump becomes the first sitting US President to visit the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).
Births
Pre-1600
1286 – John de Warenne, 7th Earl of Surrey, English magnate (d. 1347)
1468 – John, Elector of Saxony (d. 1532)
1470 – Charles VIII of France (d. 1498)
1478 – John, Prince of Asturias, Son of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile (d. 1497)
1503 – John Frederick I, Elector of Saxony (d. 1554)
1533 – Martín de Rada, Spanish missionary (d. 1578)
1588 – Giovanni Maria Sabino, Italian organist, composer, and educator (d. 1649)
1601–1900
1641 – Meinhardt Schomberg, 3rd Duke of Schomberg, German-English general (d. 1719)
1685 – John Gay, English poet and playwright (d. 1732)
1688 – Abu l-Hasan Ali I, ruler of Tunisia (d. 1756)
1722 – Jiří Antonín Benda, Czech composer, violinist and Kapellmeister (d. 1795)
1755 – Paul Barras, French soldier and politician (d. 1829)
1789 – Horace Vernet, French painter and academic (d. 1863)
1791 – Félix Savart, French physicist and psychologist (d. 1841)
1803 – Thomas Lovell Beddoes, English poet, playwright, and physician (d. 1849)
1807 – Friedrich Theodor Vischer, German author, poet, and playwright (d.1887)
1817 – Joseph Dalton Hooker, English botanist and explorer (d. 1911)
1843 – Ernest Mason Satow, English orientalist and diplomat (d. 1929)
1864 – Frederick Bligh Bond, English architect and archaeologist (d. 1945)
1884 – Georges Duhamel, French author and critic (d. 1966)
1889 – Archibald Frazer-Nash, English motor car designer, engineer and founder of Frazer Nash (d. 1965)
1890 – Paul Boffa, Maltese physician and politician, 5th Prime Minister of Malta (d. 1962)
1891 – Man Mountain Dean, American wrestler and sergeant (d. 1953)
1891 – Ed Lewis, American wrestler and manager (d. 1966)
1891 – Stanley Spencer, English painter (d. 1959)
1892 – Pierre Blanchar, Algerian-French actor and director (d. 1963)
1893 – Nellah Massey Bailey, American politician and librarian (d. 1956)
1893 – Walter Ulbricht, German soldier and politician (d. 1973)
1895 – Heinz Warneke, German-American sculptor and educator (d. 1983)
1899 – Madge Bellamy, American actress (d. 1990)
1901–present
1905 – John Van Ryn, American tennis player (d. 1999)
1906 – Anthony Mann, American actor and director (d. 1967)
1907 – Roman Shukhevych, Ukrainian general and politician (d. 1950)
1908 – Winston Graham, English author (d. 2003)
1908 – Luigi Rovere, Italian film producer (d. 1996)
1908 – Rob Nieuwenhuys, Dutch writer (d. 1999)
1909 – Juan Bosch, 43rd President of the Dominican Republic (d. 2001)
1911 – Czesław Miłosz, Polish novelist, essayist, and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2004)
1911 – Nagarjun, Indian poet (d. 1998)
1912 – Ludwig Bölkow, German engineer (d. 2003)
1912 – Dan Reeves, American businessman and philanthropist (d. 1971)
1912 – María Luisa Dehesa Gómez Farías, Mexican architect (d. 2009)
1913 – Alfonso López Michelsen, Colombian lawyer and politician, 24th President of Colombia (d. 2007)
1913 – Harry Wismer, American sportscaster (d. 1967)
1914 – Francisco da Costa Gomes, Portuguese general and politician, 15th President of Portugal (d. 2001)
1914 – Allan Houser, American sculptor and painter (d. 1994)
1917 – Susan Hayward, American actress (d. 1975)
1917 – Lena Horne, American actress, singer, and activist (d. 2010)
1917 – Willa Kim, American costume designer (d. 2016)
1919 – Ed Yost, American inventor of the modern hot air balloon (d. 2007)
1920 – Eleanor Ross Taylor, American poet and educator (d. 2011)
1921 – Washington SyCip, American-Filipino accountant (d. 2017)
1922 – Al Besselink, American professional golfer
1923 – Andy Jack, English footballer
1924 – Max Trepp, Swiss sprinter
1925 – Fred Schaus, American basketball player and coach (d. 2010)
1925 – Ebrahim Amini, Iranian politician (d. 2020)
1926 – Paul Berg, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1926 – David Berglas, American magician and mentalist
1927 – Shirley Fry Irvin, American tennis player (d. 2021)
1927 – James Goldman, American screenwriter and playwright (d. 1998)
1927 – Mario Lanfranchi, Italian director, screenwriter, producer, collector and actor (d. 2022)
1927 – Frank McCabe, American basketball player (d. 2021)
1928 – Hassan Hassanzadeh Amoli, Islamic philosopher, theologian, mathematician and mystic (d. 2021)
1928 – Nathaniel Tarn, American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator
1929 – Yang Ti-liang, Chinese judge
1930 – Ben Atchley, American politician (d. 2018)
1930 – Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabian politician (d. 2021)
1930 – Ignatius Peter VIII Abdalahad, Syrian bishop (d. 2018)
1931 – Yo-Yo Davalillo, Venezuelan baseball player and manager (d. 2013)
1931 – Andrew Hill, American pianist and composer (d. 2007)
1931 – Ronald Rene Lagueux, American judge
1931 – Kaye Vaughan, American football player
1933 – Tomislav Ivić, Croatian football coach and manager (d. 2011)
1933 – M. J. K. Smith, English cricketer and rugby player
1933 – Orval Tessier, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1933 – Joan Murrell Owens, American educator and marine biologist (d. 2011)
1934 – Harry Blackstone Jr., American magician and author (d. 1997)
1935 – John Harlin, American pilot and mountaineer (d. 1966)
1936 – Assia Djebar, Algerian-French author and translator (d. 2015)
1936 – Nancy Dussault, American actress and singer
1936 – Tony Musante, American actor and screenwriter (d. 2013)
1936 – Dave Van Ronk, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2002)
1937 – Larry Henley, American singer-songwriter (d. 2014)
1938 – Billy Mills, American sprinter
1939 – Tony Hatch, English pianist, composer, and producer
1939 – Barry Hines, English author and screenwriter (d. 2016)
1939 – José Emilio Pacheco, Mexican poet and author (d. 2014)
1940 – Mark Spoelstra, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2007)
1941 – Peter Pollock, South African cricketer and author
1942 – Robert Ballard, American lieutenant and oceanographer
1942 – Ron Harris, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1943 – Florence Ballard, American pop/soul singer (d. 1976)
1943 – Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Indian director and screenwriter
1944 – Raymond Moody, American parapsychologist and author
1944 – Glenn Shorrock, English-Australian singer-songwriter
1944 – Ron Swoboda, American baseball player and sportscaster
1949 – Uwe Kliemann, German footballer, coach, and manager
1949 – Andy Scott, Welsh singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1951 – Stanley Clarke, American bass player and composer
1952 – Athanassios S. Fokas, Greek mathematician and academic
1952 – David Garrison, American actor and singer
1953 – Hal Lindes, American-English guitarist and film score composer
1954 – Stephen Barlow, English organist, composer, and conductor
1954 – Pierre Charles, Dominican educator and politician, 5th Prime Minister of Dominica (d. 2004)
1954 – Serzh Sargsyan, Armenian politician, 3rd President of Armenia
1954 – Wayne Swan, Australian academic and politician, 14th Deputy Prime Minister of Australia
1955 – Brian Vollmer, Canadian singer
1955 – Egils Levits, Latvian judge, jurist, 10th President of Latvia
1956 – Volker Beck, German hurdler and coach
1956 – David Lidington, English historian, academic, and politician, Minister of State for Europe
1956 – David Alan Grier, American actor, singer, and comedian
1957 – Bud Black, American baseball player and manager
1957 – Sterling Marlin, American race car driver
1958 – Pam Royle, British television presenter, journalist and voice coach
1958 – Esa-Pekka Salonen, Finnish conductor and composer
1959 – Vincent D'Onofrio, American actor
1959 – Daniel Goldhagen, American political scientist, author, and academic
1959 – Brendan Perry, English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1959 – Sakis Tsiolis, Greek footballer and manager
1959 – Sandip Verma, Baroness Verma, Indian-English businesswoman and politician
1960 – Jack McConnell, Scottish educator and politician, 3rd First Minister of Scotland
1960 – Murray Cook, Australian musician, actor, songwriter and producer
1961 – Lynne Jolitz, American computer scientist and programmer
1961 – Clive Nolan, English musician, composer and producer
1962 – Tony Fernández, Dominican baseball player (d. 2020)
1962 – Julianne Regan, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1963 – Olha Bryzhina, Ukrainian sprinter
1963 – Rupert Graves, English actor, director, and screenwriter
1963 – Yngwie Malmsteen, Swedish guitarist and songwriter
1964 – Alexandra, Countess of Frederiksborg
1964 – Mark Waters, American director and producer
1965 – Steve Duchesne, Canadian-American ice hockey player and coach
1965 – Cho Jae-hyun, South Korean actor
1965 – Anna Levandi, Russian figure skater and coach
1965 – Gary Pallister, English footballer and sportscaster
1965 – Mitch Richmond, American basketball player
1966 – Mike Tyson, American boxer and actor
1967 – Patrik Bodén, Swedish javelin thrower
1967 – David Busst, English footballer and manager
1967 – Victoria Kaspi, American-Canadian astrophysicist and academic
1968 – Phil Anselmo, American singer-songwriter and producer
1969 – Sanath Jayasuriya, Sri Lankan cricketer and politician
1969 – Uta Rohländer, German sprinter
1969 – Sébastien Rose, Canadian director and screenwriter
1970 – Brian Bloom, American actor and screenwriter
1970 – Antonio Chimenti, Italian footballer and manager
1970 – Mark Grudzielanek, American baseball player and manager
1971 – Monica Potter, American actress
1972 – Sandra Cam, Belgian swimmer
1973 – Chan Ho Park, South Korean baseball player
1973 – Frank Rost, German footballer and manager
1974 – Hezekiél Sepeng, South African runner
1975 – James Bannatyne, New Zealand footballer
1975 – Ralf Schumacher, German race car driver
1978 – Ben Cousins, Australian footballer
1978 – Patrick Ivuti, Kenyan runner
1978 – Claudio Rivalta, Italian footballer
1979 – Sylvain Chavanel, French cyclist
1980 – Rade Prica, Swedish footballer
1980 – Seyi Olofinjana, Nigerian footballer
1980 – Ryan ten Doeschate, Dutch cricketer
1981 – Can Artam, Turkish race car driver
1981 – Matt Kirk, Canadian football player
1981 – Barbora Špotáková, Czech javelin thrower
1981 – Ben Utecht, American football player
1982 – Lizzy Caplan, American actress
1982 – Ignacio Carrasco, Mexican footballer
1983 – Marcus Burghardt, German cyclist
1983 – Katherine Ryan, UK-based Canadian comedian and presenter
1983 – Cheryl, English singer and TV personality
1984 – Fantasia Barrino, American singer-songwriter and actress
1984 – Tunku Ismail Idris, Crown Prince of Johor, Malaysia
1985 – Trevor Ariza, American basketball player
1985 – Michael Phelps, American swimmer
1985 – Fabiana Vallejos, Argentinian footballer
1986 – Alicia Fox, American wrestler, model, and actress
1986 – Fredy Guarín, Colombian footballer
1986 – Nicola Pozzi, Italian footballer
1986 – Allegra Versace, Italian-American businesswoman
1987 – Ryan Cook, American baseball player
1987 – Andrew Hedgman, New Zealand runner
1988 – Elisa Jordana, American singer-songwriter, radio and TV personality
1989 – Asbel Kiprop, Kenyan runner
1989 – Steffen Liebig, German rugby player
1989 – David Myers, Australian footballer
1997 – Reuben Garrick, Australian rugby league player
1998 – Tom Davies, English footballer
Deaths
Pre-1600
350 – Nepotianus, Roman ruler
710 – Erentrude, Frankish abbess
888 – Æthelred, archbishop of Canterbury
1181 – Hugh de Kevelioc, 5th Earl of Chester, Welsh politician (b. 1147)
1224 – Adolf of Osnabrück, German monk and bishop (b. 1185)
1278 – Pierre de la Broce, French courtier
1337 – Eleanor de Clare, English noblewoman (b. 1290)
1364 – Arnošt of Pardubice, Czech archbishop (b. 1297)
1538 – Charles II, Duke of Guelders (b. 1467)
1522 – Johann Reuchlin, German humanist and Hebrew scholar (b. 1455)
1601–1900
1607 – Caesar Baronius, Italian cardinal and historian (b. 1538)
1649 – Simon Vouet, French painter (b. 1590)
1660 – William Oughtred, English minister and mathematician (b. 1575)
1666 – Alexander Brome, English poet and playwright (b. 1620)
1670 – Henrietta of England (b. 1644)
1704 – John Quelch, English pirate (b. 1665)
1708 – Tekle Haymanot I of Ethiopia (b. 1684)
1709 – Edward Lhuyd, Welsh botanist, linguist, and geographer (b. 1660)
1785 – James Oglethorpe, English general and politician, 1st Colonial Governor of Georgia (b. 1696)
1796 – Abraham Yates Jr., American lawyer and politician (b. 1724)
1857 – Alcide d'Orbigny, French zoologist and paleontologist (b. 1802)
1882 – Charles J. Guiteau, American preacher and lawyer, assassin of James A. Garfield (b. 1841)
1882 – Alberto Henschel, German-Brazilian photographer and businessman (b. 1827)
1890 – Samuel Parkman Tuckerman, American organist and composer (b. 1819)
1901–present
1908 – Thomas Hill, American painter (b. 1829)
1913 – Alphonse Kirchhoffer, French fencer (b. 1873)
1916 – Eunice Eloisae Gibbs Allyn, American correspondent, author, and poet (b. 1847)
1917 – Antonio de La Gándara, French painter and illustrator (b. 1861)
1917 – Dadabhai Naoroji, Parsi intellectual, educator, cotton trader, and an early Indian political and social leader (b. 1825)
1919 – John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, English physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1842)
1932 – Bruno Kastner, German actor, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1890)
1934 – Karl Ernst, German soldier (b. 1904)
1934 – Erich Klausener, German soldier and politician (b. 1885)
1934 – Gustav Ritter von Kahr, German lawyer and politician, Minister-President of Bavaria (b. 1862)
1934 – Gregor Strasser, German lieutenant and politician (b. 1892)
1934 – Kurt von Schleicher, German general and politician, 23rd Chancellor of Germany (b. 1882)
1941 – Yefim Fomin, Belarusian politician (b. 1909)
1941 – Aleksander Tõnisson, Estonian general and politician, 5th Estonian Minister of War (b. 1875)
1948 – Prince Sabahaddin, Turkish-Swiss sociologist and academic (b. 1879)
1949 – Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild, French financier and polo player (b. 1868)
1951 – Yrjö Saarela, Finnish wrestler and coach (b. 1884)
1953 – Elsa Beskow, Swedish author and illustrator (b. 1874)
1953 – Charles William Miller, Brazilian footballer and civil servant (b. 1874)
1954 – Andrass Samuelsen, Faroese politician, 1st Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands (b. 1873)
1956 – Thorleif Lund, Norwegian actor (b. 1880)
1959 – José Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher and politician (b. 1882)
1961 – Lee de Forest, American inventor, invented the audion tube (b. 1873)
1966 – Giuseppe Farina, Italian race car driver (b. 1906)
1966 – Margery Allingham, English author of detective fiction (b. 1904)
1968 – Ernst Marcus, German zoologist (b. 1893)
1971 – Georgi Asparuhov, Bulgarian footballer (b. 1943)
1971 – Herbert Biberman, American director and screenwriter (b. 1900)
1971 – Georgy Dobrovolsky Ukrainian pilot and astronaut (b. 1928)
1971 – Nikola Kotkov, Bulgarian footballer (b. 1938)
1971 – Viktor Patsayev, Kazakh engineer and astronaut (b. 1933)
1971 – Vladislav Volkov, Russian engineer and astronaut (b. 1935)
1973 – Nancy Mitford, English journalist and author (b. 1904)
1973 – Vasyl Velychkovsky, Ukrainian-Canadian bishop and martyr (b. 1903)
1974 – Alberta Williams King, Civil rights activist (b. 1904)
1976 – Firpo Marberry, American baseball player and umpire (b. 1898)
1984 – Lillian Hellman, American author and playwright (b. 1905)
1985 – Haruo Remeliik, Palauan politician, 1st President of Palau (b. 1933)
1995 – Georgy Beregovoy, Ukrainian general and astronaut (b. 1921)
1995 – Gale Gordon, American actor and voice artist (b. 1906)
1996 – Lakis Petropoulos, Greek footballer and manager (b. 1932)
2001 – Chet Atkins, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1924)
2001 – Joe Henderson, American saxophonist and composer (b. 1937)
2002 – Chico Xavier, Brazilian medium and author (b. 1910)
2003 – Buddy Hackett, American actor and comedian (b. 1924)
2003 – Robert McCloskey, American author and illustrator (b. 1915)
2004 – Eddie Burns, Australian rugby league player (b. 1916)
2007 – Sahib Singh Verma, Indian librarian and politician, 4th Chief Minister of Delhi (b. 1943)
2009 – Pina Bausch, German dancer, choreographer, and director (b. 1940)
2009 – Harve Presnell, American actor and singer (b. 1933)
2012 – Michael Abney-Hastings, 14th Earl of Loudoun, English-Australian politician (b. 1942)
2012 – Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli politician, 7th Prime Minister of Israel (b. 1915)
2012 – Michael J. Ybarra, American journalist and author (b. 1966)
2013 – Alan Campbell, Baron Campbell of Alloway, English lawyer and judge (b. 1917)
2013 – Akpor Pius Ewherido, Nigerian politician (b. 1963)
2013 – Kathryn Morrison, American educator and politician (b. 1942)
2013 – Thompson Oliha, Nigerian footballer (b. 1968)
2013 – Keith Seaman, Australian politician, 29th Governor of South Australia (b. 1920)
2014 – Frank Cashen, American businessman (b. 1925)
2014 – Paul Mazursky, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1930)
2014 – Željko Šturanović, Montenegrin lawyer and politician, 31st Prime Minister of Montenegro (b. 1960)
2015 – Charles W. Bagnal, American general (b. 1934)
2015 – Robert Dewar, English-American computer scientist and academic (b. 1945)
2015 – Arthur Porter, Canadian physician and academic (b. 1956)
2015 – Leonard Starr, American author and illustrator (b. 1925)
2017 – Barry Norman, English television presenter (b. 1933)
2017 – Simone Veil, French lawyer and politician (b. 1927)
2018 – Smoke Dawg, Canadian rapper (b. 1996)
2021 – Raj Kaushal, Indian Film Director and Producer (b. 1971)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Martial
Theobald of Provins
First Martyrs of the Church of Rome
June 30 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Armed Forces Day (Guatemala)
Asteroid Day (International observance)
General Prayer Day (Central African Republic)
Independence Day (Democratic Republic of the Congo), celebrates the independence of Democratic Republic of the Congo from Belgium in 1960.
Navy Day (Israel)
Philippine–Spanish Friendship Day (Philippines)
Revolution Day (Sudan)
Teachers' Day (Dominican Republic)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15844 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July%201 | July 1 | It is the last day of the first half of the year. The end of this day marks the halfway point of a leap year. It also falls on the same day of the week as New Year's Day in a leap year.
The midpoint of the year for southern hemisphere DST countries occurs at 11:00 p.m.
Events
Pre-1600
69 – Tiberius Julius Alexander orders his Roman legions in Alexandria to swear allegiance to Vespasian as Emperor.
552 – Battle of Taginae: Byzantine forces under Narses defeat the Ostrogoths in Italy, and the Ostrogoth king, Totila, is mortally wounded.
1097 – Battle of Dorylaeum: Crusaders led by prince Bohemond of Taranto defeat a Seljuk army led by sultan Kilij Arslan I.
1431 – The Battle of La Higueruela takes place in Granada, leading to a modest advance of the Kingdom of Castile during the Reconquista.
1520 – Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés fight their way out of Tenochtitlan after nightfall.
1523 – Jan van Essen and Hendrik Vos become the first Lutheran martyrs, burned at the stake by Roman Catholic authorities in Brussels.
1569 – Union of Lublin: The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania confirm a real union; the united country is called the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Republic of Both Nations.
1601–1900
1643 – First meeting of the Westminster Assembly, a council of theologians ("divines") and members of the Parliament of England appointed to restructure the Church of England, at Westminster Abbey in London.
1690 – Glorious Revolution: Battle of the Boyne in Ireland (as reckoned under the Julian calendar).
1766 – François-Jean de la Barre, a young French nobleman, is tortured and beheaded before his body is burnt on a pyre along with a copy of Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique nailed to his torso for the crime of not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession in Abbeville, France.
1770 – Lexell's Comet is seen closer to the Earth than any other comet in recorded history, approaching to a distance of .
1782 – Raid on Lunenburg: American privateers attack the British settlement of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.
1819 – Johann Georg Tralles discovers the Great Comet of 1819, (C/1819 N1). It was the first comet analyzed using polarimetry, by François Arago.
1837 – A system of civil registration of births, marriages and deaths is established in England and Wales.
1855 – Signing of the Quinault Treaty: The Quinault and the Quileute cede their land to the United States.
1858 – Joint reading of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace's papers on evolution to the Linnean Society of London.
1862 – The Russian State Library is founded as the Library of the Moscow Public Museum.
1862 – Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, second daughter of Queen Victoria, marries Prince Louis of Hesse, the future Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse.
1862 – American Civil War: The Battle of Malvern Hill takes place. It is the last of the Seven Days Battles, part of George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign.
1863 – Keti Koti (Emancipation Day) in Suriname, marking the abolition of slavery by the Netherlands.
1863 – American Civil War: The Battle of Gettysburg begins.
1867 – The British North America Act takes effect as the Province of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia join into confederation to create the modern nation of Canada. John A. Macdonald is sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Canada. This date is commemorated annually in Canada as Canada Day, a national holiday.
1870 – The United States Department of Justice formally comes into existence.
1873 – Prince Edward Island joins into Canadian Confederation.
1874 – The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, the first commercially successful typewriter, goes on sale.
1878 – Canada joins the Universal Postal Union.
1879 – Charles Taze Russell publishes the first edition of the religious magazine The Watchtower.
1881 – The world's first international telephone call is made between St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, and Calais, Maine, United States.
1881 – General Order 70, the culmination of the Cardwell and Childers reforms of the British Army, comes into effect.
1885 – The United States terminates reciprocity and fishery agreement with Canada.
1885 – The Congo Free State is established by King Leopold II of Belgium.
1890 – Canada and Bermuda are linked by telegraph cable.
1898 – Spanish–American War: The Battle of San Juan Hill is fought in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba.
1901–present
1901 – French government enacts its anti-clerical legislation Law of Association prohibiting the formation of new monastic orders without governmental approval.
1901 – France: New electric railway inaugurated in Paris.
1903 – Start of first Tour de France bicycle race.
1908 – SOS is adopted as the international distress signal.
1911 – Germany despatches the gunship to Morocco, sparking the Agadir Crisis.
1915 – Leutnant Kurt Wintgens of the then-named German Deutsches Heer's Fliegertruppe army air service achieves the first known aerial victory with a synchronized machine-gun armed fighter plane, the Fokker M.5K/MG Eindecker.
1916 – World War I: First day on the Somme: On the first day of the Battle of the Somme 19,000 soldiers of the British Army are killed and 40,000 wounded.
1921 – the Chinese Communist Party is founded by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, with the help of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), who seized power in Russia after the 1917 October Revolution, and the Far Eastern Secretariat of the Communist International.
1922 – The Great Railroad Strike of 1922 begins in the United States.
1923 – The Parliament of Canada suspends all Chinese immigration.
1931 – United Airlines begins service (as Boeing Air Transport).
1931 – Wiley Post and Harold Gatty become the first people to circumnavigate the globe in a single-engined monoplane aircraft.
1932 – Australia's national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, was formed.
1935 – Regina, Saskatchewan police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police ambush strikers participating in the On-to-Ottawa Trek.
1942 – World War II: First Battle of El Alamein.
1942 – The Australian Federal Government becomes the sole collector of income tax in Australia as State Income Tax is abolished.
1943 – The City of Tokyo and the Prefecture of Tokyo are both replaced by the Tokyo Metropolis.
1946 – Crossroads Able is the first postwar nuclear weapon test.
1947 – The Philippine Air Force is established.
1948 – Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Quaid-i-Azam) inaugurates Pakistan's central bank, the State Bank of Pakistan.
1949 – The merger of two princely states of India, Cochin and Travancore, into the state of Thiru-Kochi (later re-organized as Kerala) in the Indian Union ends more than 1,000 years of princely rule by the Cochin royal family.
1957 – The International Geophysical Year begins.
1958 – The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation links television broadcasting across Canada via microwave.
1958 – Flooding of Canada's Saint Lawrence Seaway begins.
1959 – Specific values for the international yard, avoirdupois pound and derived units (e.g. inch, mile and ounce) are adopted after agreement between the US, the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries.
1960 – The Trust Territory of Somaliland (the former Italian Somaliland) gains its independence from Italy. Concurrently, it unites as scheduled with the five-day-old State of Somaliland (the former British Somaliland) to form the Somali Republic.
1960 – Ghana becomes a republic and Kwame Nkrumah becomes its first President as Queen Elizabeth II ceases to be its head of state.
1962 – Independence of Rwanda and Burundi.
1963 – ZIP codes are introduced for United States mail.
1963 – The British Government admits that former diplomat Kim Philby had worked as a Soviet agent.
1966 – The first color television transmission in Canada takes place from Toronto.
1967 – Merger Treaty: The European Community is formally created out of a merger with the Common Market, the European Coal and Steel Community, and the European Atomic Energy Commission.
1968 – The United States Central Intelligence Agency's Phoenix Program is officially established.
1968 – The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is signed in Washington, D.C., London and Moscow by sixty-two countries.
1968 – Formal separation of the United Auto Workers from the AFL–CIO in the United States.
1972 – The first Gay pride march in England takes place.
1976 – Portugal grants autonomy to Madeira.
1978 – The Northern Territory in Australia is granted self-government.
1979 – Sony introduces the Walkman.
1980 – "O Canada" officially becomes the national anthem of Canada.
1983 – A North Korean Ilyushin Il-62M jet en route to Conakry Airport in Guinea crashes into the Fouta Djallon mountains in Guinea-Bissau, killing all 23 people on board.
1984 – The PG-13 rating is introduced by the MPAA.
1987 – The American radio station WFAN in New York City is launched as the world's first all-sports radio station.
1990 – German reunification: East Germany accepts the Deutsche Mark as its currency, thus uniting the economies of East and West Germany.
1991 – Cold War: The Warsaw Pact is officially dissolved at a meeting in Prague.
1997 – China resumes sovereignty over the city-state of Hong Kong, ending 156 years of British colonial rule. The handover ceremony is attended by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Charles, Prince of Wales, Chinese President Jiang Zemin, and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
1999 – The Scottish Parliament is officially opened by Elizabeth II on the day that legislative powers are officially transferred from the old Scottish Office in London to the new devolved Scottish Executive in Edinburgh. In Wales, the powers of the Welsh Secretary are transferred to the National Assembly.
2002 – The International Criminal Court is established to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.
2002 – Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937, a Tupolev Tu-154, and DHL Flight 611, a Boeing 757, collide in mid-air over Überlingen, southern Germany, killing all 71 on board both planes.
2003 – Over 500,000 people protest against efforts to pass anti-sedition legislation in Hong Kong.
2004 – Saturn orbit insertion of Cassini–Huygens begins at 01:12 UTC and ends at 02:48 UTC.
2006 – The first operation of Qinghai–Tibet Railway is conducted in China.
2007 – Smoking in England is banned in all public indoor spaces.
2008 – Riots erupt in Mongolia in response to allegations of fraud surrounding the 2008 legislative elections.
2013 – Croatia becomes the 28th member of the European Union.
2020 – The United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement replaces NAFTA.
Births
Pre-1600
1311 – Liu Bowen, Chinese military strategist, statesman and poet (d. 1375)
1464 – Clara Gonzaga, Italian noble (d. 1503)
1481 – Christian II of Denmark (d. 1559)
1506 – Louis II of Hungary (d. 1526)
1534 – Frederick II of Denmark (d. 1588)
1553 – Peter Street, English carpenter and builder (d. 1609)
1574 – Joseph Hall, English bishop and mystic (d. 1656)
1586 – Claudio Saracini, Italian lute player and composer (d. 1630)
1601–1900
1633 – Johann Heinrich Heidegger, Swiss theologian and author (d. 1698)
1646 – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German mathematician and philosopher (d. 1716)
1663 – Franz Xaver Murschhauser, German composer and theorist (d. 1738)
1725 – Rhoda Delaval, English painter and aristocrat (d. 1757)
1725 – Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, French general (d. 1807)
1726 – Acharya Bhikshu, Jain saint (d. 1803)
1731 – Adam Duncan, 1st Viscount Duncan, Scottish-English admiral (d. 1804)
1742 – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, German physicist and academic (d. 1799)
1771 – Ferdinando Paer, Italian composer and conductor (d. 1839)
1788 – Jean-Victor Poncelet, French mathematician and engineer (d. 1867)
1804 – Charles Gordon Greene, American journalist and politician (d. 1886)
1804 – George Sand, French author and playwright (d. 1876)
1807 – Thomas Green Clemson, American politician and educator, founded Clemson University (d. 1888)
1808 – Ygnacio del Valle, Mexican-American landowner (d. 1880)
1818 – Ignaz Semmelweis, Hungarian-Austrian physician and obstetrician (d. 1865)
1818 – Karl von Vierordt, German physician, psychologist and academic (d. 1884)
1822 – Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, Vietnamese poet and activist (d. 1888)
1834 – Jadwiga Łuszczewska, Polish poet and author (d. 1908)
1850 – Florence Earle Coates, American poet (d. 1927)
1858 – Willard Metcalf, American painter (d. 1925)
1858 – Velma Caldwell Melville, American editor and writer of prose and poetry (d. 1924)
1863 – William Grant Stairs, Canadian-English captain and explorer (d. 1892)
1869 – William Strunk Jr., American author and educator (d. 1946)
1872 – Louis Blériot, French pilot and engineer (d. 1936)
1872 – William Duddell, English physicist and engineer (d. 1917)
1873 – Alice Guy-Blaché, French-American film director, producer and screenwriter (d. 1968)
1873 – Andrass Samuelsen, Faroese politician, 1st Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands (d. 1954)
1875 – Joseph Weil, American con man (d. 1976)
1876 – T. J. Ryan, Australian politician, 19th Premier of Queensland (d. 1921)
1878 – Jacques Rosenbaum, Estonian-German architect (d. 1944)
1879 – Léon Jouhaux, French union leader, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1954)
1881 – Edward Battersby Bailey, English geologist (d. 1965)
1882 – Bidhan Chandra Roy, Indian physician and politician, 2nd Chief Minister of West Bengal (d. 1962)
1883 – Arthur Borton, English colonel, Victoria Cross recipient (d. 1933)
1885 – Dorothea Mackellar, Australian author and poet (d. 1968)
1887 – Amber Reeves, New Zealand-English author and scholar (d. 1981)
1892 – James M. Cain, American author and journalist (d. 1977)
1892 – László Lajtha, Hungarian composer and conductor (d. 1963)
1899 – Thomas A. Dorsey, American pianist and composer (d. 1993)
1899 – Charles Laughton, English-American actor and director (d. 1962)
1899 – Konstantinos Tsatsos, Greek scholar and politician, President of Greece (d. 1987)
1901–present
1901 – Irna Phillips, American screenwriter (d. 1973)
1902 – William Wyler, French-American film director, producer and screenwriter (d. 1981)
1903 – Amy Johnson, English pilot (d. 1941)
1903 – Beatrix Lehmann, English actress (d. 1979)
1906 – Jean Dieudonné, French mathematician and academic (d. 1992)
1906 – Estée Lauder, American businesswoman, co-founded the Estée Lauder Companies (d. 2004)
1907 – Norman Pirie, Scottish-English biochemist and virologist (d. 1997)
1909 – Emmett Toppino, American sprinter (d. 1971)
1910 – Glenn Hardin, American hurdler (d. 1975)
1911 – Arnold Alas, Estonian landscape architect and artist (d. 1990)
1911 – Sergey Sokolov, Russian marshal and politician, Soviet Minister of Defence (d. 2012)
1912 – David Brower, American environmentalist, founded Sierra Club Foundation (d. 2000)
1912 – Sally Kirkland, American journalist (d. 1989)
1913 – Frank Barrett, American baseball player (d. 1998)
1913 – Lee Guttero, American basketball player (d. 2004)
1913 – Vasantrao Naik, Indian politician, 3rd Chief Minister of Maharashtra (d. 1979)
1914 – Thomas Pearson, British Army officer (d. 2019)
1914 – Christl Cranz, German alpine skier (d. 2004)
1914 – Bernard B. Wolfe, American politician (d. 2016)
1915 – Willie Dixon, American blues singer-songwriter, bass player, guitarist and producer (d. 1992)
1915 – Philip Lever, 3rd Viscount Leverhulme, British peer (d. 2000)
1915 – Boots Poffenberger, American baseball pitcher (d. 1999)
1915 – Joseph Ransohoff, American soldier and neurosurgeon (d. 2001)
1915 – Nguyễn Văn Linh, Vietnamese politician (d. 1998)
1916 – Olivia de Havilland, British-American actress (d. 2020)
1916 – Iosif Shklovsky, Ukrainian astronomer and astrophysicist (d. 1985)
1916 – George C. Stoney, American director and producer (d. 2012)
1917 – Humphry Osmond, English-American lieutenant and psychiatrist (d. 2004)
1917 – Álvaro Domecq y Díez, Spanish aristocrat (d. 2005)
1918 – Ralph Young, American singer and actor (d. 2008)
1918 – Ahmed Deedat, South African writer and public speaker (d. 2005)
1918 – Pedro Yap, Filipino lawyer (d. 2003)
1919 – Arnold Meri, Estonian colonel (d. 2009)
1919 – Malik Dohan al-Hassan, Iraqi politician (d. 2021)
1919 – Gerald E. Miller, American vice admiral (d. 2014)
1920 – Henri Amouroux, French historian and journalist (d. 2007)
1920 – Harold Sakata, Japanese-American wrestler and actor (d. 1982)
1920 – George I. Fujimoto, American-Japanese chemist
1921 – Seretse Khama, Batswana lawyer and politician, 1st President of Botswana (d. 1980)
1921 – Michalina Wisłocka, Polish gynecologist and sexologist (d. 2005)
1921 – Arthur Johnson, Canadian canoeist (d. 2003)
1922 – Toshi Seeger, German-American activist, co-founded the Clearwater Festival (d. 2013)
1922 – Mordechai Bibi, Israeli politician
1923 – Scotty Bowers, American marine, author and pimp (d. 2019)
1924 – Antoni Ramallets, Spanish footballer and manager (d. 2013)
1924 – Florence Stanley, American actress (d. 2003)
1924 – Georges Rivière, French actor
1925 – Farley Granger, American actor (d. 2011)
1925 – Art McNally, American football referee
1926 – Robert Fogel, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2013)
1926 – Carl Hahn, German businessman
1926 – Mohamed Abshir Muse, Somali general (d. 2017)
1926 – Hans Werner Henze, German composer and educator (d. 2012)
1927 – Alan J. Charig, English paleontologist and author (d. 1997)
1927 – Joseph Martin Sartoris, American bishop
1927 – Chandra Shekhar, 8th Prime Minister of India (d. 2007)
1929 – Gerald Edelman, American biologist and immunologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2014)
1930 – Moustapha Akkad, Syrian-American director and producer (d. 2005)
1930 – Carol Chomsky, American linguist and academic (d. 2008)
1931 – Leslie Caron, French actress and dancer
1932 – Ze'ev Schiff, French-Israeli journalist and author (d. 2007)
1933 – C. Scott Littleton, American anthropologist and academic (d. 2010)
1934 – Claude Berri, French actor, director and screenwriter (d. 2009)
1934 – Jamie Farr, American actor
1934 – Jean Marsh, English actress and screenwriter
1934 – Sydney Pollack, American actor, director and producer (d. 2008)
1935 – James Cotton, American singer-songwriter and harmonica player (d. 2017)
1935 – David Prowse, English actor (d. 2020)
1936 – Wally Amos, American entrepreneur and founder of Famous Amos
1938 – Craig Anderson, American baseball player and coach
1938 – Hariprasad Chaurasia, Indian flute player and composer
1939 – Karen Black, American actress (d. 2013)
1939 – Delaney Bramlett, American singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer (d. 2008)
1940 – Craig Brown, Scottish footballer and manager
1940 – Ela Gandhi, South African activist and politician
1940 – Cahit Zarifoğlu, Turkish poet and author (d. 1987)
1941 – Rod Gilbert, Canadian-American ice hockey player (d. 2021)
1941 – Alfred G. Gilman, American pharmacologist and biochemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2015)
1941 – Myron Scholes, Canadian-American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1941 – Twyla Tharp, American dancer and choreographer
1942 – Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Iraqi field marshal and politician (d. 2020)
1942 – Geneviève Bujold, Canadian actress
1942 – Andraé Crouch, American singer-songwriter, producer and pastor (d. 2015)
1942 – Julia Higgins, English chemist and academic
1943 – Philip Brunelle, American conductor and organist
1943 – Peeter Lepp, Estonian politician, 37th Mayor of Tallinn
1943 – Jeff Wayne, American composer, musician and lyricist
1944 – Nurul Haque Miah, Bangladeshi professor and writer (d. 2021)
1945 – Mike Burstyn, American actor and singer
1945 – Debbie Harry, American singer-songwriter and actress
1946 – Mick Aston, English archaeologist and academic (d. 2013)
1946 – Erkki Tuomioja, Finnish sergeant and politician, Finnish Minister for Foreign Affairs
1946 – Kojo Laing, Ghanaian novelist and poet (d. 2017)
1947 – Kazuyoshi Hoshino, Japanese race car driver
1947 – Malcolm Wicks, English academic and politician (d. 2012)
1948 – John Ford, English-American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1949 – Néjia Ben Mabrouk, Tunisian-Belgian director and screenwriter
1949 – John Farnham, English-Australian singer-songwriter
1949 – David Hogan, American composer and educator (d. 1996)
1949 – Venkaiah Naidu, Indian lawyer and politician
1950 – David Duke, American white supremacist, politician and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard
1951 – Trevor Eve, English actor and producer
1951 – Anne Feeney, American singer-songwriter and activist (d. 2021)
1951 – Julia Goodfellow, English physicist and academic
1951 – Klaus-Peter Justus, German runner
1951 – Tom Kozelko, American basketball player
1951 – Terrence Mann, American actor, singer and dancer
1951 – Fred Schneider, American singer-songwriter and keyboard player
1951 – Victor Willis, American singer-songwriter, pianist and actor
1952 – Dan Aykroyd, Canadian actor, producer and screenwriter
1952 – David Arkenstone, American composer and performer
1952 – David Lane, English oncologist and academic
1952 – Steve Shutt, Canadian ice hockey player and sportscaster
1952 – Timothy J. Tobias, American pianist and composer (d. 2006)
1953 – Lawrence Gonzi, Maltese lawyer and politician, 12th Prime Minister of Malta
1953 – Jadranka Kosor, Croatian journalist and politician, 9th Prime Minister of Croatia
1954 – Keith Whitley, American singer and guitarist (d. 1989)
1954 – Hossein Nuri, Iranian artist and director
1955 – Nikolai Demidenko, Russian pianist and educator
1955 – Li Keqiang, Chinese economist and politician, 7th Premier of the People's Republic of China
1955 – Lisa Scottoline, American lawyer and author
1955 – Maʻafu Tukuiʻaulahi, Tongan politician and military officer, Deputy Prime Minister (d. 2021)
1957 – Lisa Blount, American actress and producer (d. 2010)
1957 – Hannu Kamppuri, Finnish ice hockey player
1957 – Sean O'Driscoll, English footballer and manager
1958 – Jack Dyer Crouch II, American diplomat, United States Deputy National Security Advisor
1960 – Michael Beattie, Australian rugby league player and coach
1960 – Lynn Jennings, American runner
1960 – Evelyn "Champagne" King, American soul/disco singer
1960 – Kevin Swords, American rugby player
1961 – Malcolm Elliott, English cyclist
1961 – Ivan Kaye, English actor
1961 – Carl Lewis, American long jumper and runner
1961 – Diana, Princess of Wales (d. 1997)
1961 – Michelle Wright, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist
1962 – Andre Braugher, American actor and producer
1962 – Mokhzani Mahathir, Malaysian businessman
1963 – Roddy Bottum, American singer and keyboard player
1963 – Nick Giannopoulos, Australian actor
1963 – David Wood, American lawyer and environmentalist (d. 2006)
1964 – Bernard Laporte, French rugby player and coach
1965 – Carl Fogarty, English motorcycle racer
1965 – Garry Schofield, English rugby player and coach
1965 – Harald Zwart, Norwegian director and producer
1966 – Enrico Annoni, Italian footballer and coach
1966 – Shawn Burr, Canadian-American ice hockey player (d. 2013)
1967 – Pamela Anderson, Canadian-American model and actress
1969 – Séamus Egan, American-Irish singer-songwriter and guitarist
1971 – Missy Elliott, American rapper, producer, dancer and actress
1971 – Julianne Nicholson, American actress
1974 – Jefferson Pérez, Ecuadorian race walker
1975 – Sean Colson, American basketball player and coach
1975 – Sufjan Stevens, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1976 – Patrick Kluivert, Dutch footballer and coach
1976 – Hannu Tihinen, Finnish footballer
1976 – Albert Torrens, Australian rugby league player
1976 – Ruud van Nistelrooy, Dutch footballer and manager
1976 – Szymon Ziółkowski, Polish hammer thrower
1977 – Tom Frager, Senegalese-French singer-songwriter and guitarist
1977 – Keigo Hayashi, Japanese musician
1977 – Jarome Iginla, Canadian ice hockey player
1979 – Forrest Griffin, American mixed martial artist and actor
1981 – Carlo Del Fava, South African-Italian rugby player
1981 – Tadhg Kennelly, Irish-Australian footballer
1982 – Justin Huber, Australian baseball player
1982 – Joachim Johansson, Swedish tennis player
1982 – Adrian Ward, American football player
1982 – Hilarie Burton, American actress
1984 – Donald Thomas, Bahamian high jumper
1985 – Chris Perez, American baseball player
1986 – Charlie Blackmon, American baseball player
1986 – Andrew Lee, Australian footballer
1986 – Julian Prochnow, German footballer
1987 – Michael Schrader, German decathlete
1988 – Dedé, Brazilian footballer
1988 – Aleksander Lesun, Russian modern pentathlete
1989 – Kent Bazemore, American basketball player
1989 – Daniel Ricciardo, Australian race car driver
1990 – Ben Coker, English footballer
1991 – Michael Wacha, American baseball player
1992 – Aaron Sanchez, American baseball player
1995 – Boli Bolingoli-Mbombo, Belgian footballer
1995 – Savvy Shields, Miss America 2017
1996 – Adelina Sotnikova, Russian figure skater
1998 – Aleksandra Golovkina, Lithuanian figure skater
2000 – Lalu Muhammad Zohri, Indonesian sprinter
2001 – Chosen Jacobs, American entertainer
2003 – Tate McRae, Canadian singer, songwriter, and dancer
Deaths
Pre-1600
552 – Totila, Ostrogoth king
992 – Heonjeong, Korean queen (b. 966)
1109 – Alfonso VI, king of León and Castile (b. 1040)
1224 – Hōjō Yoshitoki, regent of the Kamakura shogunate of Japan (b. 1163)
1242 – Chagatai Khan, Mongol ruler (b. 1183)
1277 – Baibars, Egyptian sultan (b. 1223)
1287 – Narathihapate, Burmese king (b. 1238)
1321 – María de Molina, queen of Castile and León
1348 – Joan, English princess
1555 – John Bradford, English reformer, prebendary of St. Paul's (b. 1510)
1589 – Lady Saigō, Japanese concubine (b. 1552)
1592 – Marc'Antonio Ingegneri, Italian composer and educator (b. 1535)
1601–1900
1614 – Isaac Casaubon, French philologist and scholar (b. 1559)
1622 – William Parker, 4th Baron Monteagle, English politician (b. 1575)
1681 – Oliver Plunkett, Irish archbishop and saint (b. 1629)
1736 – Ahmed III, Ottoman sultan (b. 1673)
1749 – William Jones, Welsh mathematician and academic (b. 1675)
1774 – Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland, English politician, Secretary of State for the Southern Department (b. 1705)
1782 – Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, English admiral and politician, Prime Minister of Great Britain (b. 1730)
1784 – Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, German organist and composer (b. 1710)
1787 – Charles de Rohan, French marshal (b. 1715)
1819 – the Public Universal Friend, American evangelist (b. 1752)
1839 – Mahmud II, Ottoman sultan (b. 1785)
1860 – Charles Goodyear, American chemist and engineer (b. 1800)
1863 – John F. Reynolds, American general (b. 1820)
1884 – Allan Pinkerton, Scottish-American detective and spy (b. 1819)
1896 – Harriet Beecher Stowe, American author and activist (b. 1811)
1901–present
1905 – John Hay, American journalist and politician, 37th United States Secretary of State (b. 1838)
1912 – Harriet Quimby, American pilot and screenwriter (b. 1875)
1925 – Erik Satie, French pianist and composer (b. 1866)
1934 – Ernst Röhm, German paramilitary commander (b. 1887)
1942 – Peadar Toner Mac Fhionnlaoich, Irish writer (b. 1857)
1943 – Willem Arondeus, Dutch artist, author and anti-Nazi resistance fighter (b. 1894)
1944 – Carl Mayer, Austrian-English screenwriter (b. 1894)
1944 – Tanya Savicheva, Russian author (b. 1930)
1948 – Achille Varzi, Italian race car driver (b. 1904)
1950 – Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Swiss composer and educator (b. 1865)
1950 – Eliel Saarinen, Finnish-American architect, co-designed the National Museum of Finland (b. 1873)
1951 – Tadeusz Borowski, Polish poet, novelist and journalist (b. 1922)
1961 – Louis-Ferdinand Céline, French physician and author (b. 1894)
1962 – Purushottam Das Tandon, Indian lawyer and politician (b. 1882)
1962 – Bidhan Chandra Roy, Indian physician and politician, 2nd Chief Minister of West Bengal (b. 1882)
1964 – Pierre Monteux, French-American viola player and conductor (b. 1875)
1965 – Wally Hammond, English cricketer (b. 1903)
1965 – Robert Ruark, American journalist and author (b. 1915)
1966 – Frank Verner, American runner (b. 1883)
1967 – Gerhard Ritter, German historian and academic (b. 1888)
1968 – Fritz Bauer, German judge and politician (b. 1903)
1971 – William Lawrence Bragg, Australian-English physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1890)
1971 – Learie Constantine, Trinidadian-English cricketer, lawyer and politician (b. 1901)
1974 – Juan Perón, Argentinian general and politician, President of Argentina (b. 1895)
1978 – Kurt Student, German general and pilot (b. 1890)
1981 – Carlos de Oliveira, Portuguese author and poet (b. 1921)
1983 – Buckminster Fuller, American architect, designed the Montreal Biosphère (b. 1895)
1984 – Moshé Feldenkrais, Ukrainian-Israeli physicist and academic (b. 1904)
1991 – Michael Landon, American actor, director and producer (b. 1936)
1992 – Franco Cristaldi, Italian screenwriter and producer (b. 1924)
1994 – Merriam Modell, American author (b. 1908)
1995 – Wolfman Jack, American radio host (b. 1938)
1995 – Ian Parkin, English guitarist (Be-Bop Deluxe) (b. 1950)
1996 – William T. Cahill, American lawyer and politician, 46th Governor of New Jersey (b. 1904)
1996 – Margaux Hemingway, American model and actress (b. 1954)
1996 – Steve Tesich, Serbian-American author and screenwriter (b. 1942)
1997 – Robert Mitchum, American actor (b. 1917)
1997 – Charles Werner, American cartoonist (b. 1909)
1999 – Edward Dmytryk, Canadian-American director and producer (b. 1908)
1999 – Forrest Mars Sr., American businessman, created M&M's and the Mars bar (b. 1904)
1999 – Sylvia Sidney, American actress (b. 1910)
1999 – Sola Sierra, Chilean human rights activist (b. 1935)
2000 – Walter Matthau, American actor (b. 1920)
2001 – Nikolay Basov, Russian physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1922)
2001 – Jean-Louis Rosier, French race car driver (b. 1925)
2003 – Herbie Mann, American flute player and saxophonist (b. 1930)
2004 – Peter Barnes, English playwright and screenwriter (b. 1931)
2004 – Marlon Brando, American actor and director (b. 1924)
2004 – Todor Skalovski, Macedonian composer and conductor (b. 1909)
2005 – Renaldo Benson, American singer-songwriter (Four Tops) (b. 1936)
2005 – Gus Bodnar, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (b. 1923)
2005 – Luther Vandross, American singer-songwriter and producer (Change) (b. 1951)
2006 – Ryutaro Hashimoto, Japanese politician, 53rd Prime Minister of Japan (b. 1937)
2006 – Robert Lepikson, Estonian race car driver and politician, Estonian Minister of the Interior (b. 1952)
2006 – Fred Trueman, English cricketer and sportscaster (b. 1931)
2008 – Mel Galley, English guitarist (b. 1948)
2009 – Karl Malden, American actor (b. 1912)
2009 – Onni Palaste, Finnish soldier and author (b. 1917)
2009 – Mollie Sugden, English actress (b. 1922)
2010 – Don Coryell, American football player and coach (b. 1924)
2010 – Arnold Friberg, American painter and illustrator (b. 1913)
2010 – Ilene Woods, American actress and singer (b. 1929)
2012 – Peter E. Gillquist, American priest and author (b. 1938)
2012 – Ossie Hibbert, Jamaican-American keyboard player and producer (b. 1950)
2012 – Evelyn Lear, American operatic soprano (b. 1926)
2012 – Alan G. Poindexter, American captain, pilot and astronaut (b. 1961)
2012 – Jack Richardson, American author and playwright (b. 1934)
2013 – Sidney Bryan Berry, American general (b. 1926)
2013 – Charles Foley, American game designer, co-created Twister (b. 1930)
2013 – William H. Gray, American minister and politician (b. 1941)
2014 – Jean Garon, Canadian economist, lawyer and politician (b. 1938)
2014 – Stephen Gaskin, American activist, co-founder of The Farm (b. 1935)
2014 – Bob Jones, English lawyer and politician (b. 1955)
2014 – Anatoly Kornukov, Ukrainian-Russian general (b. 1942)
2014 – Walter Dean Myers, American author and poet (b. 1937)
2015 – Val Doonican, Irish singer and television host (b. 1927)
2015 – Czesław Olech, Polish mathematician and academic (b. 1931)
2015 – Nicholas Winton, English lieutenant and humanitarian (b. 1909)
2016 – Robin Hardy, English author and film director (b. 1929)
2021 – Louis Andriessen, Dutch composer (b. 1939)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Aaron (Syriac Christianity)
Blessed Antonio Rosmini-Serbati
Felix of Como
Junípero Serra
Julius and Aaron
Leontius of Autun
Servanus
Veep
July 1 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Feast of the Most Precious Blood (removed from official Roman Catholic calendar since 1969)
Earliest day on which Alexanderson Day can fall, celebrated on the Sunday closest to July 2. (Sweden)
Earliest day on which CARICOM Day can fall, celebrated on the first Monday of July. (Guyana)
Earliest day on which Constitution Day can fall, celebrated on the first Monday of July. (Cayman Islands)
Earliest day on which Día del Amigo can fall, celebrated on the first Saturday of July. (Peru)
Earliest day on which Fishermen's Holiday can fall, celebrated on the first Friday of July (Marshall Islands)
Earliest day on which Heroes' Day can fall, celebrated on the first Monday ofJuly. (Zambia)
Earliest day on which International Co-operative Day can fall, celebrated on the first Saturday of July.
Earliest day on which International Free Hugs Day can fall, celebrated on the first Saturday of July.
Earliest day on which Navy Day can fall, celebrated on the first Sunday of July. (Ukraine)
Earliest day on which Navy Days can fall, celebrated on the first Saturday and Sunday of July. (Netherlands)
Earliest day on which Youth Day can fall, celebrated on the first Sunday pf July. (Singapore)
Armed Forces Day (Singapore)
Bobby Bonilla Day (United States)
Canada Day, formerly Dominion Day (Canada)
Children's Day (Pakistan)
Communist Party of China Founding Day (China)
Day of Officials and Civil Servants (Hungary)
Doctors' Day (India)
Emancipation Day (Sint Maarten and Sint Eustatius)
Engineer's Day (Bahrain, Mexico)
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day (Hong Kong, China)
Independence Day (Burundi), celebrates the independence of Burundi from Belgium in 1962.
Independence Day (Rwanda)
Independence Day (Somalia)
International Tartan Day
July Morning (Bulgaria)
Keti Koti (Emancipation Day) (Suriname)
Madeira Day (Madeira, Portugal)
Moving Day (Quebec) (Canada)
Newfoundland and Labrador Memorial Day
Republic Day (Ghana)
Sir Seretse Khama Day (Botswana)
Territory Day (British Virgin Islands)
The first day of Van Mahotsav, celebrated until July 7. (India)
References
External links
Days of the year
July | [
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15845 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January%2025 | January 25 |
Events
Pre-1600
41 – After a night of negotiation, Claudius is accepted as Roman emperor by the Senate.
750 – In the Battle of the Zab, the Abbasid rebels defeat the Umayyad Caliphate, leading to the overthrow of the dynasty.
1348 – A strong earthquake strikes the South Alpine region of Friuli in modern Italy, causing considerable damage to buildings as far away as Rome.
1494 – Alfonso II becomes King of Naples.
1515 – Coronation of Francis I of France takes place at Reims Cathedral, where the new monarch is anointed with the oil of Clovis and girt with the sword of Charlemagne.
1533 – Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second wife Anne Boleyn.
1554 – São Paulo, Brazil, is founded by Jesuit priests.
1573 – Battle of Mikatagahara: In Japan, Takeda Shingen defeats Tokugawa Ieyasu.
1575 – Luanda, the capital of Angola, is founded by the Portuguese navigator Paulo Dias de Novais.
1585 – Walter Raleigh is knighted, shortly after renaming North America region "Virginia", in honor of Elizabeth I, Queen of England, sometimes referred to as the "Virgin Queen".
1601–1900
1704 – The Battle of Ayubale results in the destruction of most of the Spanish missions in Florida.
1755 – Moscow University is established on Tatiana Day.
1765 – Port Egmont, the first British settlement in the Falkland Islands near the southern tip of South America, is founded.
1787 – Shays's Rebellion: The rebellion's largest confrontation, outside the Springfield Armory, results in the killing of four rebels and the wounding of twenty.
1791 – The British Parliament passes the Constitutional Act of 1791 and splits the old Province of Quebec into Upper Canada and Lower Canada.
1792 – The London Corresponding Society is founded.
1819 – University of Virginia chartered by Commonwealth of Virginia, with Thomas Jefferson one of its founders.
1858 – The Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn is played at the marriage of Queen Victoria's daughter, Victoria, and Friedrich of Prussia, and becomes a popular wedding processional.
1879 – The Bulgarian National Bank is founded.
1881 – Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Telephone Company.
1890 – Nellie Bly completes her round-the-world journey in 72 days.
1901–present
1909 – Richard Strauss's opera Elektra receives its debut performance at the Dresden State Opera.
1915 – Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates U.S. transcontinental telephone service, speaking from New York to Thomas Watson in San Francisco.
1917 – Sinking of the SS Laurentic after hitting two German mines off the coast of Northern Ireland.
1918 – The Ukrainian People's Republic declares independence from Soviet Russia.
1918 – The Finnish Defence Forces (The White Guards) are established as the official army of independent Finland, and Baron C. G. E. Mannerheim is appointed its Commander-in-Chief.
1924 – The 1924 Winter Olympics opens in Chamonix, in the French Alps, inaugurating the Winter Olympic Games.
1932 – Second Sino-Japanese War: The Chinese National Revolutionary Army begins the defense of Harbin.
1937 – The Guiding Light debuts on NBC radio from Chicago. In 1952 it moves to CBS television, where it remains until September 18, 2009.
1941 – Pope Pius XII elevates the Apostolic Vicariate of the Hawaiian Islands to the dignity of a diocese. It becomes the Roman Catholic Diocese of Honolulu.
1942 – World War II: Thailand declares war on the United States and United Kingdom.
1945 – World War II: The Battle of the Bulge ends.
1946 – The United Mine Workers rejoins the American Federation of Labor.
1946 – United Nations Security Council Resolution 1 relating to Military Staff Committee is adopted.
1947 – Thomas Goldsmith Jr. files a patent for a "Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device", the first ever electronic game.
1949 – The first Emmy Awards are presented in the United States; the venue is the Hollywood Athletic Club.
1960 – The National Association of Broadcasters in the United States reacts to the "payola" scandal by threatening fines for any disc jockeys who accept money for playing particular records.
1961 – In Washington, D.C., US President John F. Kennedy delivers the first live presidential television news conference.
1964 – Blue Ribbon Sports, which would later become Nike, is founded by University of Oregon track and field athletes.
1967 – South Vietnamese junta leader and Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky fires rival, Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Nguyen Huu Co, while the latter is overseas on a diplomatic visit.
1969 – Brazilian Army captain Carlos Lamarca deserts in order to fight against the military dictatorship, taking with him ten machine guns and 63 rifles.
1971 – Charles Manson and four "Family" members (three of them female) are found guilty of the 1969 Tate–LaBianca murders.
1971 – Idi Amin leads a coup deposing Milton Obote and becomes Uganda's president.
1979 – Pope John Paul II starts his first official papal visits outside Italy to The Bahamas, Dominican Republic, and Mexico.
1980 – Mother Teresa is honored with India's highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna.
1986 – The National Resistance Movement topples the government of Tito Okello in Uganda.
1990 – Avianca Flight 52 crashes in Cove Neck, New York, killing 73.
1993 – Five people are shot outside the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Two are killed and three wounded.
1994 – The spacecraft Clementine by BMDO and NASA is launched.
1995 – The Norwegian rocket incident: Russia almost launches a nuclear attack after it mistakes Black Brant XII, a Norwegian research rocket, for a US Trident missile.
1996 – Billy Bailey becomes the last person to be hanged in the United States.
1998 – During a historic visit to Cuba, Pope John Paul II demands political reforms and the release of political prisoners while condemning US attempts to isolate the country.
1998 – A suicide attack by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam on Sri Lanka's Temple of the Tooth kills eight and injures 25 others.
1999 – A 6.0 magnitude earthquake hits western Colombia killing at least 1,000.
2003 – Invasion of Iraq: A group of people leave London, England, for Baghdad, Iraq, to serve as human shields, intending to prevent the U.S.-led coalition troops from bombing certain locations.
2005 – A stampede at the Mandhradevi temple in Maharashtra, India kills at least 258.
2006 – Mexican professional wrestler Juana Barraza is arrested in connection with the serial killing of at least ten elderly women.
2010 – Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 crashes into the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Na'ameh, Lebanon, killing 90.
2011 – The first wave of the Egyptian revolution begins throughout the country, marked by street demonstrations, rallies, acts of civil disobedience, riots, labour strikes, and violent clashes.
2013 – At least 50 people are killed and 120 people are injured in a prison riot in Barquisimeto, Venezuela.
2015 – A clash in Mamasapano, Maguindanao in the Philippines kills 44 members of Special Action Force (SAF), at least 18 from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and five from the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters.
2019 – A mining company's dam collapses in Brumadinho, Brazil, a south-eastern city, killing at least seven people and leaving 200 missing.
Births
Pre-1600
750 – Leo IV the Khazar, Byzantine emperor (d. 780)
1408 – Katharina of Hanau, German countess regent (d. 1460)
1459 – Paul Hofhaimer, Austrian organist and composer (d. 1537)
1477 – Anne of Brittany (probable; d. 1514)
1509 – Giovanni Morone, Italian cardinal (d. 1580)
1526 – Adolf, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp (d. 1586)
1540 – Edmund Campion, English priest and martyr (d. 1581)
1601–1900
1615 – Govert Flinck, Dutch painter (d. 1660)
1618 – Nicolaes Visscher I, Dutch engraver and cartographer (d. 1679)
1627 – Robert Boyle, Anglo-Irish chemist and physicist (d. 1691)
1634 – Gaspar Fagel, Dutch politician and diplomat (d. 1688)
1635 – Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, German writer, diplomat and lawyer (d. 1683)
1640 – William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire, English soldier and politician, Lord Steward of the Household (d. 1707)
1736 – Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Italian-French mathematician and astronomer (d. 1813)
1739 – Charles François Dumouriez, French general and politician, French Minister of Defence (d. 1823)
1743 – Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, German philosopher and author (d. 1819)
1750 – Johann Gottfried Vierling, German organist and composer (d. 1813)
1755 – Paolo Mascagni, Italian physician and anatomist (probable; d. 1815)
1759 – Robert Burns, Scottish poet and songwriter (d. 1796)
1783 – William Colgate, English-American businessman and philanthropist, founded Colgate-Palmolive (d. 1857)
1794 – François-Vincent Raspail, French chemist, physician, physiologist, and lawyer (d. 1878)
1796 – William MacGillivray, Scottish ornithologist and biologist (d. 1852)
1813 – J. Marion Sims, American gynecologist and physician (d. 1883)
1816 – Anna Gardner, American abolitionist and teacher (d. 1901)
1822 – Charles Reed Bishop, American businessman, philanthropist, and politician, founded the Bishop Museum (d. 1915)
1822 – William McDougall, Canadian lawyer and politician, Lieutenant Governor of the Northwest Territories (d. 1905)
1823 – José María Iglesias, Mexican politician and interim President (d. 1891)
1824 – Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Indian poet and playwright (d. 1873)
1841 – John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, English admiral (d. 1920)
1858 – Mikimoto Kōkichi, Japanese businessman (d. 1954)
1860 – Charles Curtis, American lawyer and politician, 31st Vice President of the United States (d. 1936)
1864 – Julije Kempf, Croatian historian and author (d. 1934)
1868 – Juventino Rosas, Mexican violinist and composer (d. 1894)
1874 – W. Somerset Maugham, British playwright, novelist, and short story writer (d. 1965)
1878 – Ernst Alexanderson, Swedish-American engineer (d. 1975)
1882 – Virginia Woolf, English novelist, essayist, short story writer, and critic (d. 1941)
1885 – Kitahara Hakushū, Japanese poet and author (d. 1942)
1886 – Wilhelm Furtwängler, German conductor and composer (d. 1954)
1894 – Aino Aalto, Finnish architect and designer (d. 1949)
1895 – Florence Mills, American singer, dancer, and actress (d. 1927)
1899 – Sleepy John Estes, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1977)
1899 – Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian lawyer and politician, 46th Prime Minister of Belgium (d. 1972)
1900 – István Fekete, Hungarian author (d. 1970)
1900 – Yōjirō Ishizaka, Japanese author and educator (d. 1986)
1900 – Theodosius Dobzhansky, Russian-American geneticist and pioneer of evolutionary biology (d. 1975)
1901–present
1901 – Martín de Álzaga, Argentinian racing driver and pilot (d. 1982)
1901 – Mildred Dunnock, American actress (d. 1991)
1905 – Maurice Roy, Canadian cardinal (d. 1985)
1905 – Margery Sharp, English author and educator (d. 1991)
1906 – Toni Ulmen, German racing driver and motorcycle racer (d. 1976)
1908 – Hsieh Tung-min, Taiwanese politicians and Vice President of the Republic of China (d. 2001)
1910 – Edgar V. Saks, Estonian historian, author, and politician, Estonian Minister of Education (d. 1984)
1913 – Huang Hua, Chinese translator and politician, 5th Foreign Minister of the People's Republic of China (d. 2010)
1913 – Witold Lutosławski, Polish composer and conductor (d. 1994)
1913 – Luis Marden, American photographer and journalist (d. 2003)
1914 – William Strickland, American conductor and organist (d. 1991)
1915 – Ewan MacColl, English singer-songwriter, actor and producer (d. 1989)
1916 – Pop Ivy, American football player and coach (d. 2003)
1917 – Ilya Prigogine, Russian-Belgian chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2003)
1917 – Jânio Quadros, Brazilian lawyer and politician, 22nd President of Brazil (d. 1992)
1919 – Edwin Newman, American journalist and author (d. 2010)
1921 – Samuel T. Cohen, American physicist and academic (d. 2010)
1921 – Josef Holeček, Czechoslovakian canoeist (d. 2005)
1922 – Raymond Baxter, English television host and pilot (d. 2006)
1923 – Arvid Carlsson, Swedish pharmacologist and physician, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2018)
1923 – Shirley Ardell Mason, American psychiatric patient (d. 1998)
1923 – Sally Starr, American actress and television host (d. 2013)
1923 – Jean Taittinger, French politician, French Minister of Justice (d. 2012)
1924 – Lou Groza, American football player and coach (d. 2000)
1924 – Husein Mehmedov, Bulgarian-Turkish wrestler and coach (d. 2014)
1924 – Speedy West, American guitarist and producer (d. 2003)
1925 – Gordy Soltau, American football player and sportscaster (d. 2014)
1925 – Giorgos Zampetas, Greek bouzouki player and songwriter (d. 1992)
1926 – Dick McGuire, American basketball player and coach (d. 2010)
1927 – Antônio Carlos Jobim, Brazilian singer-songwriter and pianist (d. 1994)
1928 – Jérôme Choquette, Canadian lawyer and politician (d. 2017)
1928 – Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgian general and politician, 2nd President of Georgia (d. 2014)
1928 – Cor van der Hart, Dutch footballer and manager (d. 2006)
1929 – Elizabeth Allen, American actress and singer (d. 2006)
1929 – Robert Faurisson, English-French author and academic (d. 2018)
1929 – Benny Golson, American saxophonist and composer
1930 – Tanya Savicheva, Russian child diarist (d. 1944)
1931 – Dean Jones, American actor and singer (d. 2015)
1933 – Corazon Aquino, Filipino politician, 11th President of the Philippines (d. 2009)
1935 – Conrad Burns, American journalist, and politician (d. 2016)
1935 – António Ramalho Eanes, Portuguese general and politician, 16th President of Portugal
1936 – Diana Hyland, American actress (d. 1977)
1936 – Onat Kutlar, Turkish author and poet (d. 1995)
1937 – Ange-Félix Patassé, Central African engineer and politician, President of the Central African Republic (d. 2011)
1938 – Shotaro Ishinomori, Japanese author and illustrator (d. 1998)
1938 – Etta James, American singer (d. 2012)
1938 – Leiji Matsumoto, Japanese author, illustrator, and animator
1938 – Vladimir Vysotsky, Russian singer-songwriter, actor, and poet (d. 1980)
1941 – Buddy Baker, American race car driver and sportscaster (d. 2015)
1942 – Carl Eller, American football player and sportscaster
1942 – Eusébio, Mozambican-Portuguese footballer (d. 2014)
1943 – Tobe Hooper, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2017)
1945 – Leigh Taylor-Young, American actress
1947 – Ángel Nieto, Spanish motorcycle racer (d. 2017)
1947 – Tostão, Brazilian footballer, journalist, and physician
1948 – Ros Kelly, Australian educator and politician, 1st Australian Minister for Defence Science and Personnel
1948 – Georgy Shishkin, Russian painter and illustrator
1949 – John Cooper Clarke, English poet and critic
1949 – Paul Nurse, English geneticist and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate
1950 – Gloria Naylor, American novelist (d. 2016)
1951 – Steve Prefontaine, American runner (d. 1975)
1952 – Peter Tatchell, Australian-English journalist and activist
1952 – Timothy White, American journalist, author, and critic (d. 2002)
1954 – Ricardo Bochini, Argentinian footballer and manager
1954 – Kay Cottee, Australian sailor
1954 – Renate Dorrestein, Dutch journalist and author (d. 2018)
1956 – Andy Cox, English guitarist
1956 – Dinah Manoff, American actress
1957 – Eskil Erlandsson, Swedish technologist and politician, Swedish Minister for Rural Affairs
1957 – Andrew Harris, American politician
1957 – Jenifer Lewis, American actress and singer
1958 – Franco Pancheri, Italian footballer and manager
1961 – Vivian Balakrishnan, Singaporean ophthalmologist and politician, Singaporean Ministry of National Development
1962 – Chris Chelios, American ice hockey player and manager
1963 – Fernando Haddad, Brazilian academic and politician, 61st Mayor of São Paulo
1963 – Molly Holzschlag, American computer scientist and author
1964 – Stephen Pate, Australian cyclist
1965 – Esa Tikkanen, Finnish ice hockey player and coach
1966 – Chet Culver, American educator and politician, 41st Governor of Iowa
1966 – Yiannos Ioannou, Cypriot footballer and manager
1967 – Nelson Asaytono, Filipino basketball player
1967 – David Ginola, French footballer
1967 – Randy McKay, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1968 – Eric Orie, Dutch footballer and manager
1969 – Sergei Ovchinnikov, Russian volleyball player and coach (d. 2012)
1970 – Stephen Chbosky, American author, screenwriter, and director
1970 – Chris Mills, American basketball player
1970 – Milt Stegall, American football player and sportscaster
1971 – Luca Badoer, Italian racing driver
1971 – Philip Coppens, Belgian journalist and author (d. 2012)
1971 – Ana Ortiz, American actress
1972 – Shinji Takehara, Japanese boxer
1973 – Geoff Johns, American author, screenwriter, and producer
1974 – Robert Budreau, Canadian director, producer, and screenwriter
1974 – Emily Haines, Canadian singer-songwriter and keyboard player
1974 – Attilio Nicodemo, Italian footballer
1975 – Duncan Jupp, Anglo-Scottish footballer
1975 – Mia Kirshner, Canadian actress
1976 – Stephanie Bellars, American wrestler and manager
1976 – Mário Haberfeld, Brazilian racing driver
1976 – Dimitris Nalitzis, Greek footballer
1977 – Michael Brown, English footballer, manager and pundit
1978 – Ahmet Dursun, Turkish footballer
1978 – Denis Menchov, Russian cyclist
1978 – Derrick Turnbow, American baseball player
1979 – Rodrigo Ribeiro, Brazilian racing driver
1980 – Alayna Burns, Australian track cyclist
1980 – Xavi, Spanish footballer
1981 – Francis Jeffers, English footballer
1981 – Alicia Keys, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and actress
1981 – Toše Proeski, Macedonian singer (d. 2007)
1984 – Stefan Kießling, German footballer
1984 – Robinho, Brazilian footballer
1984 – Fara Williams, English footballer
1985 – Brent Celek, American football player
1985 – Patrick Willis, American football player
1985 – Hwang Jung-eum, South Korean actress
1986 – Chris O'Grady, English footballer
1987 – Maria Kirilenko, Russian tennis player
1988 – Tatiana Golovin, French tennis player
1988 – Ryota Ozawa, Japanese actor
1990 – Apostolos Giannou, Greek-Australian footballer
1990 – Lee Jun-ho, South Korean singer and actor
Deaths
Pre-1600
390 – Gregory Nazianzus, theologian and Patriarch of Constantinople (b. 329)
477 – Gaiseric, king of the Vandals (b. 389)
750 – Ibrahim ibn al-Walid, Umayyad caliph
844 – Pope Gregory IV (b. 795)
863 – Charles of Provence, Frankish king (b. 845)
951 – Ma Xiguang, ruler of Chu (Ten Kingdoms)
1003 – Lothair I, Margrave of the Nordmark
1067 – Emperor Yingzong of Song (b. 1032)
1138 – Antipope Anacletus II
1139 – Godfrey I, Count of Louvain and Duke of Lower Lorraine (as Godfrey VI)
1366 – Henry Suso, German priest and mystic (b. 1300)
1413 – Maud de Ufford, Countess of Oxford (b. 1345)
1431 – Charles II, Duke of Lorraine (b. 1364)
1492 – Ygo Gales Galama, Frisian warlord and rebel (b. 1443)
1494 – Ferdinand I of Naples (b. 1423)
1559 – Christian II of Denmark (b. 1481)
1578 – Mihrimah Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (b. 1522)
1586 – Lucas Cranach the Younger, German painter (b. 1515)
1601–1900
1640 – Robert Burton, English physician and scholar (b. 1577)
1670 – Nicholas Francis, Duke of Lorraine (b. 1612)
1726 – Guillaume Delisle, French cartographer (b. 1675)
1733 – Sir Gilbert Heathcote, 1st Baronet, English banker and politician, Lord Mayor of London (b. 1652)
1742 – Edmond Halley, English astronomer (b. 1656)
1751 – Paul Dudley, American lawyer, jurist, and politician (b. 1675)
1852 – Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, Russian admiral, cartographer, and explorer (b. 1778)
1872 – Richard S. Ewell, American general (b. 1817)
1881 – Konstantin Thon, Russian architect, designed the Grand Kremlin Palace and Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (b. 1794)
1884 – Périclès Pantazis, Greek-Belgian painter (b. 1849)
1891 – Theo van Gogh, Art dealer, the brother of Vincent van Gogh (b. 1857)
1900 – Princess Adelheid of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, German Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein (b. 1835)
1901–present
1907 – René Pottier, French cyclist (b. 1879)
1908 – Ouida, English-Italian author (b. 1839)
1908 – Mikhail Chigorin, Russian chess player and theoretician (b. 1850)
1910 – W. G. Read Mullan, American Jesuit and academic (1860)
1914 – Frank Avery Hutchins, American librarian and educator (b. 1851)
1912 – Dmitry Milyutin, Russian field marshal and politician (b. 1816)
1925 – Juan Vucetich, Croatian-Argentinian anthropologist and police officer (b. 1858)
1939 – Charles Davidson Dunbar, Scottish soldier and bagpipe player (b. 1870)
1947 – Al Capone, American gangster and mob boss (b. 1899)
1949 – Makino Nobuaki, Japanese politician, 15th Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs (b. 1861)
1957 – Ichizō Kobayashi, Japanese businessman, founded Hankyu Hanshin Holdings (b. 1873)
1957 – Kiyoshi Shiga, Japanese physician and bacteriologist (b. 1871)
1958 – Cemil Topuzlu, Turkish surgeon and politician, Mayor of Istanbul (b. 1866)
1958 – Robert R. Young, American businessman and financier (b. 1897)
1960 – Diana Barrymore, American actress (b. 1921)
1966 – Saul Adler, Belarusian-English microbiologist and parasitologist (b. 1895)
1968 – Louie Myfanwy Thomas, Welsh writer (b. 1908)
1970 – Jane Bathori, French soprano (b. 1877)
1970 – Eiji Tsuburaya, Japanese director and producer (b. 1901)
1971 – Barry III, Guinean lawyer and politician (b. 1923)
1972 – Erhard Milch, German field marshal (b. 1892)
1975 – Charlotte Whitton, Canadian journalist and politician, 46th Mayor of Ottawa (b. 1896)
1978 – Skender Kulenović, Bosnian author, poet, and playwright (b. 1910)
1981 – Adele Astaire, American actress, singer, and dancer (b. 1896)
1982 – Mikhail Suslov, Russian economist and politician (b. 1902)
1985 – Ilias Iliou, Greek jurist and politician (b. 1904)
1987 – Frank J. Lynch, American lawyer, judge, and politician (b. 1922)
1988 – Colleen Moore, American actress (b. 1899)
1990 – Ava Gardner, American actress (b. 1922)
1991 – Frank Soo, English footballer and manager (b. 1914)
1992 – Mir Khalil ur Rehman, Founder and editor of the Jang Group of Newspapers (b. 1927)
1994 – Stephen Cole Kleene, American mathematician, computer scientist, and academic (b. 1909)
1996 – Jonathan Larson, American playwright and composer (b. 1960)
1997 – Dan Barry, American author and illustrator (b. 1923)
1999 – Sarah Louise Delany, American author and educator (b. 1889)
1999 – Robert Shaw, American conductor (b. 1916)
2001 – Alice Ambrose, American philosopher and logician (b. 1906)
2002 – Cliff Baxter, employee at Enron (b. 1958)
2003 – Sheldon Reynolds, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1923)
2003 – Samuel Weems, American lawyer and author (b. 1936)
2004 – Fanny Blankers-Koen, Dutch runner and hurdler (b. 1918)
2004 – Miklós Fehér, Hungarian footballer (b. 1979)
2005 – Stanisław Albinowski, Polish economist and journalist (b. 1923)
2005 – William Augustus Bootle, American lawyer and judge (b. 1902)
2005 – Philip Johnson, American architect, designed the PPG Place and Crystal Cathedral (b. 1906)
2005 – Manuel Lopes, Cape Verdean author and poet (b. 1907)
2005 – Netti Witziers-Timmer, Dutch runner (b. 1923)
2009 – Eleanor F. Helin, American astronomer (b. 1932)
2009 – Ewald Kooiman, Dutch organist and educator (b. 1938)
2009 – Kim Manners, American director and producer (b. 1951)
2010 – Ali Hassan al-Majid, Iraqi general and politician, Iraqi Minister of Defence (b. 1941)
2011 – Vassilis C. Constantakopoulos Greek captain and businessman (b. 1935)
2011 – Vincent Cronin, Welsh historian and author (b. 1924)
2012 – Paavo Berglund, Finnish violinist and conductor (b. 1929)
2012 – Jacques Maisonrouge, French businessman (b. 1924)
2012 – Franco Pacini, Italian astrophysicist and academic (b. 1939)
2012 – Robert Sheran, American lawyer, judge, and politician (b. 1916)
2013 – Martial Asselin, Canadian lawyer and politician, 25th Lieutenant Governor of Quebec (b. 1924)
2013 – Kevin Heffernan, Irish footballer and manager (b. 1929)
2013 – Aase Nordmo Løvberg, Norwegian soprano and actress (b. 1923)
2014 – Arthur Doyle, American singer-songwriter, saxophonist, and flute player (b. 1944)
2014 – Heini Halberstam, Czech-English mathematician and academic (b. 1926)
2014 – Dave Strack, American basketball player and coach (b. 1923)
2015 – John Leggett, American author and academic (b. 1917)
2015 – Richard McBrien, American priest, theologian, and academic (b. 1936)
2015 – Bill Monbouquette, American baseball player and coach (b. 1936)
2015 – Demis Roussos, Egyptian-Greek singer (b. 1946)
2017 – Stephen P. Cohen, Canadian academic (b. 1945)
2017 – Robert Garcia, American politician (b. 1933)
2017 – John Hurt, English actor (b. 1940)
2017 – Harry Mathews, American novelist and poet (b. 1930)
2017 – Marcel Prud'homme, Canadian politician (b. 1934)
2017 – Mary Tyler Moore, American actress and producer (b. 1936)
2018 – Neagu Djuvara, Romanian historian, essayist, philosopher, journalist, novelist and diplomat (b. 1916)
Holidays and observances
Betico Day (Aruba)
Burns Night (Scotland)
Christian feast day:
Dydd Santes Dwynwen (Wales)
Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul (Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran churches, which concludes the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity)
Gregory the Theologian (Eastern (Byzantine) Catholic Church)
The last day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (Christian ecumenism)
January 25 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
National Nutrition Day (Indonesia)
National Police Day (Egypt)
National Voters' Day (India)
Revolution Day 2011 (Egypt)
Tatiana Day or Russian Students Day (Russia, Eastern Orthodox)
References
External links
BBC: On This Day
Historical Events on January 25
Today in Canadian History
Days of the year
January | [
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15846 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July%202 | July 2 | This day is the first day of the second half of the year, as well as the midpoint of a common year because there are 182 days before and 182 days after it in common years. There are 183 days before and 182 after it in leap years. The exact time of the middle of the year is at noon. In countries that use summer time the actual exact time of the midpoint in a common year is at 1:00 p.m for locations in the northern hemisphere, or 11:00 a.m for locations in the southern hemisphere; this is when 182 days and 12 hours have elapsed and there are 182 days and 12 hours remaining. In a leap year in those countries, the middle of the year is at midnight. In countries that use summer time, the midpoint occurs at 1:00 a.m. on July 2, or 11:00 p.m. on July 1 in the southern hemisphere. This is due to summer time having advanced the time by one hour. It falls on the same day of the week as New Year's Day in common years.
Events
Pre-1600
437 – Emperor Valentinian III begins his reign over the Western Roman Empire. His mother Galla Placidia ends her regency, but continues to exercise political influence at the court in Rome.
626 – Li Shimin, the future Emperor Taizong of Tang, ambushes and kills his rival brothers Li Yuanji and Li Jiancheng in the Xuanwu Gate Incident.
706 – In China, Emperor Zhongzong of Tang inters the bodies of relatives in the Qianling Mausoleum, located on Mount Liang outside Chang'an.
866 – Battle of Brissarthe: The Franks led by Robert the Strong are defeated by a joint Breton-Viking army.
936 – King Henry the Fowler dies in his royal palace in Memleben. He is succeeded by his son Otto I, who becomes the ruler of East Francia.
963 – The Byzantine army proclaims Nikephoros II Phokas Emperor of the Romans on the plains outside Cappadocian Caesarea.
1298 – The Battle of Göllheim is fought between Albert I of Habsburg and Adolf of Nassau-Weilburg.
1494 – The Treaty of Tordesillas is ratified by Spain.
1504 – Bogdan III the One-Eyed becomes Voivode of Moldavia.
1555 – Ottoman Admiral Turgut Reis sacks the Italian city of Paola.
1561 – Menas, emperor of Ethiopia, defeats a revolt in Emfraz.
1582 – Battle of Yamazaki: Toyotomi Hideyoshi defeats Akechi Mitsuhide.
1601–1900
1613 – The first English expedition (from Virginia) against Acadia led by Samuel Argall takes place.
1644 – English Civil War: Battle of Marston Moor.
1645 – Battle of Alford: Wars of the Three Kingdoms.
1698 – Thomas Savery patents the first steam engine.
1776 – American Revolution: The Continental Congress adopts a resolution severing ties with the Kingdom of Great Britain although the wording of the formal Declaration of Independence is not published until July 4.
1816 – The strikes the Bank of Arguin and 151 people on board have to be evacuated on an improvised raft, a case immortalised by Géricault's painting The Raft of the Medusa.
1822 – Thirty-five slaves, including Denmark Vesey, are hanged in South Carolina after being accused of organizing a slave rebellion.
1823 – Bahia Independence Day: The end of Portuguese rule in Brazil, with the final defeat of the Portuguese crown loyalists in the province of Bahia.
1839 – Twenty miles off the coast of Cuba, 53 kidnapped Africans led by Joseph Cinqué mutiny and take over the slave ship Amistad.
1853 – The Russian Army crosses the Prut river into the Danubian Principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia), providing the spark that will set off the Crimean War.
1864 – Dimitri Atanasescu founds the first Romanian school in the Balkans for the Aromanians in Trnovo, in the Ottoman Empire (now in North Macedonia). By the early 20th century, the number of these schools will have risen to 106.
1871 – Victor Emmanuel II of Italy enters Rome after having conquered it from the Papal States.
1881 – Charles J. Guiteau shoots and fatally wounds U.S. President James A. Garfield (who will die of complications from his wounds on September 19).
1890 – The U.S. Congress passes the Sherman Antitrust Act.
1897 – British-Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi obtains a patent for radio in London.
1900 – The first Zeppelin flight takes place on Lake Constance near Friedrichshafen, Germany.
1900 – Jean Sibelius' Finlandia receives its première performance in Helsinki with the Helsinki Philharmonic Society conducted by Robert Kajanus.
1901–present
1921 – World War I: U.S. President Warren G. Harding signs the Knox–Porter Resolution formally ending the war between the United States and Germany.
1934 – The Night of the Long Knives ends with the death of Ernst Röhm.
1937 – Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan are last heard from over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to make the first equatorial round-the-world flight.
1940 – Indian independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose is arrested and detained in Calcutta.
1940 – The SS Arandora Star is sunk by U-47 in the North Atlantic with the loss of over 800 lives, mostly civilians.
1962 – The first Walmart store, then known as Wal-Mart, opens for business in Rogers, Arkansas.
1964 – Civil rights movement: U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant to prohibit segregation in public places.
1966 – France conducts its first nuclear weapon test in the Pacific, on Moruroa Atoll.
1976 – End of South Vietnam; Communist North Vietnam annexes the former South Vietnam to form the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
1986 – Rodrigo Rojas and Carmen Gloria Quintana are burnt alive during a street demonstration against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
1986 – Aeroflot Flight 2306 crashes while attempting an emergency landing at Syktyvkar Airport in Syktyvkar, in present-day Komi Republic, Russia, killing 54 people.
1988 – Marcel Lefebvre and the four bishops he consecrated were excommunicated by the Holy See.
1990 – In the 1990 Mecca tunnel tragedy, 1,400 Muslim pilgrims are suffocated to death and trampled upon in a pedestrian tunnel leading to the holy city of Mecca.
1994 – USAir Flight 1016 crashes near Charlotte Douglas International Airport, killing 37 of the 57 people on board.
1997 – The Bank of Thailand floats the baht, triggering the Asian financial crisis.
2000 – Vicente Fox Quesada is elected the first President of México from an opposition party, the Partido Acción Nacional, after more than 70 years of continuous rule by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional.
2001 – The AbioCor self-contained artificial heart is first implanted.
2002 – Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly solo around the world nonstop in a balloon.
2005 – The Live 8 benefit concerts takes place in the G8 states and in South Africa. More than 1,000 musicians perform and are broadcast on 182 television networks and 2,000 radio networks.
2008 – Colombian conflict: Íngrid Betancourt, a member of the Chamber of Representatives of Colombia, is released from captivity after being held for six and a half years by FARC.
2010 – The South Kivu tank truck explosion in the Democratic Republic of the Congo kills at least 230 people.
2013 – The International Astronomical Union names Pluto's fourth and fifth moons, Kerberos and Styx.
2013 – A magnitude 6.1 earthquake strikes Aceh, Indonesia, killing at least 42 people and injuring 420 others.
Births
Pre-1600
419 – Valentinian III, Roman emperor (d. 455)
1363 – Maria, Queen of Sicily (d. 1401)
1478 – Louis V, Elector Palatine (d. 1544)
1486 – Jacopo Sansovino, Italian sculptor and architect (d. 1570)
1489 – Thomas Cranmer, English archbishop, theologian, and saint (d. 1556)
1492 – Elizabeth Tudor, English daughter of Henry VII of England (d. 1495)
1500 – Federico Cesi (cardinal), Italian cardinal (d. 1565)
1575 – Elizabeth de Vere, Countess of Derby, English noblewoman and head of state of the Isle of Man (d. 1627)
1597 – Theodoor Rombouts, Flemish painter (d. 1637)
1601–1900
1647 – Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham, English politician, Lord President of the Council (d. 1730)
1648 – Arp Schnitger, German organ builder (d. 1719)
1665 – Samuel Penhallow, English-American soldier and historian (d. 1726)
1667 – Pietro Ottoboni, Italian cardinal and art collector (d. 1740)
1714 – Christoph Willibald Gluck, German composer (d. 1787)
1724 – Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, German poet and author (d. 1803)
1797 – Francisco Javier Echeverría, Mexican businessman and politician. President of Mexico (1841) (d. 1852)
1819 – Charles-Louis Hanon, French pianist and composer (d. 1900)
1820 – George Law Curry, American publisher and politician, 5th Governor of the Oregon Territory (d. 1878)
1820 – Juan N. Méndez, Mexican general and interim president, 1876-1877 (d. 1894)
1821 – Charles Tupper, Canadian physician and politician, 6th Prime Minister of Canada (d. 1915)
1825 – Émile Ollivier, French statesman (d. 1913)
1834 – Hendrick Peter Godfried Quack, Dutch economist and historian (d. 1917)
1849 – Maria Theresa of Austria-Este (d. 1919)
1862 – William Henry Bragg, English physicist, chemist, and mathematician, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1942)
1865 – Lily Braun, German author and publicist (d. 1916)
1869 – Liane de Pougy, French-Swiss dancer and author (d. 1950)
1876 – Harriet Brooks, Canadian physicist and academic (d. 1933)
1876 – Wilhelm Cuno, German businessman and politician, Chancellor of Germany (d. 1933)
1877 – Hermann Hesse, German-born Swiss poet, novelist, and painter, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1962)
1877 – Rinaldo Cuneo, American artist ("the painter of San Francisco") (d. 1939)
1881 – Royal Hurlburt Weller, American lawyer and politician (d. 1929)
1884 – Alfons Maria Jakob, German neurologist and author (d. 1931)
1893 – Ralph Hancock, Welsh gardener and author (d. 1950)
1900 – Tyrone Guthrie, English actor and director (d. 1971)
1900 – Sophie Harris, English costume and scenic designer for theatre and opera (d. 1966)
1901–present
1902 – K. Kanapathypillai, Sri Lankan author and academic (d. 1968)
1903 – Alec Douglas-Home, English cricketer and politician, 66th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1995)
1903 – Olav V of Norway (d. 1991)
1904 – René Lacoste, French tennis player and businessman, created the polo shirt (d. 1996)
1906 – Hans Bethe, German-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2005)
1906 – Károly Kárpáti, Hungarian Jewish wrestler (d. 1996)
1906 – Séra Martin, French middle-distance runner (d. 1993)
1908 – Thurgood Marshall, American lawyer and civil rights activist, 32nd Solicitor General of the United States, and former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (d. 1993)
1911 – Reg Parnell, English race car driver and manager (d. 1964)
1913 – Max Beloff, Baron Beloff, English historian and academic (d. 1999)
1914 – Frederick Fennell, American conductor and educator (d. 2004)
1914 – Ethelreda Leopold, American actress (d. 1988)
1914 – Mário Schenberg, Brazilian physicist and engineer (d. 1990)
1914 – Erich Topp, German admiral (d. 2005)
1915 – Valerian Wellesley, 8th Duke of Wellington, British peer, politician and soldier (d. 2014)
1916 – Ken Curtis, American actor and singer (d. 1991)
1916 – Hans-Ulrich Rudel, German colonel and pilot (d. 1982)
1916 – Reino Kangasmäki, Finnish wrestler (d. 2010)
1916 – Zélia Gattai, Brazilian author and photographer (d. 2008)
1917 – Leonard J. Arrington, American author and academic, founded the Mormon History Association (d. 1999)
1918 – Athos Bulcão, Brazilian painter and sculptor (d. 2008)
1918 – Indumati Bhattacharya, Indian politician (d. 1990)
1919 – Jean Craighead George, American author (d. 2012)
1920 – John Kneubuhl, Samoan-American historian, screenwriter, and playwright (d. 1992)
1922 – Pierre Cardin, Italian-French fashion designer (d. 2020)
1922 – Paula Valenska, Czech actress (d. 1994)
1923 – Cyril M. Kornbluth, American soldier and author (d. 1958)
1923 – Wisława Szymborska, Polish poet and translator, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2012)
1925 – Medgar Evers, American soldier and activist (d. 1963)
1925 – Patrice Lumumba, Congolese politician, 1st Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (d. 1961)
1925 – Marvin Rainwater, American singer-songwriter (d. 2013)
1926 – Octavian Paler, Romanian journalist and politician (d. 2007)
1927 – Lee Allen, American saxophone player (d. 1994)
1927 – James Mackay, Baron Mackay of Clashfern, Scottish lawyer and politician, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain
1927 – Brock Peters, American actor (d. 2005)
1929 – Imelda Marcos, Filipino politician; 10th First Lady of the Philippines
1930 – Carlos Menem, Argentinian lawyer and politician, 50th President of Argentina (d. 2021)
1931 – Mohammad Yazdi, Iranian cleric (d. 2020)
1932 – Dave Thomas, American businessman and philanthropist, founded Wendy's (d. 2002)
1933 – Peter Desbarats, Canadian journalist, author, and playwright (d. 2014)
1933 – Kenny Wharram, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 2017)
1934 – Tom Springfield, English musician
1935 – Gilbert Kalish, American pianist and educator
1936 – Omar Suleiman, Egyptian general and politician, 16th Vice President of Egypt (d. 2012)
1937 – Polly Holliday, American actress
1937 – Richard Petty, American race car driver and sportscaster
1938 – David Owen, English physician and politician, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
1939 – Alexandros Panagoulis, Greek poet and politician (d. 1976)
1939 – John H. Sununu, American engineer and politician, 14th White House Chief of Staff
1939 – Paul Williams, American singer and choreographer (d. 1973)
1940 – Kenneth Clarke, English politician, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain
1941 – William Guest, American singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2015)
1941 – Wendell Mottley, Trinidadian sprinter, economist, and politician
1942 – John Eekelaar, South African-English lawyer and scholar
1942 – Vicente Fox, Mexican businessman and politician, 35th President of Mexico
1943 – Ivi Eenmaa, Estonian politician, 36th Mayor of Tallinn
1943 – Larry Lake, American-Canadian trumpet player and composer (d. 2013)
1946 – Richard Axel, American neuroscientist and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate
1946 – Ron Silver, American actor, director, and political activist (d. 2009)
1947 – Larry David, American actor, comedian, producer, and screenwriter
1947 – Ann Taylor, Baroness Taylor of Bolton, English politician, Minister for International Security Strategy
1948 – Mutula Kilonzo, Kenyan lawyer and politician (d. 2013)
1949 – Greg Brown, American musician
1949 – Robert Paquette, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist
1950 – Lynne Brindley, English librarian and academic
1950 – Jon Trickett, English politician
1952 – Sylvia Rivera, American transgender rights activist (d. 2002)
1952 – Anatoliy Solomin, Ukrainian race walker and coach
1954 – Chris Huhne, English journalist and politician, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
1955 – Kim Carr, Australian educator and politician, 31st Australian Minister for Human Services
1956 – Jerry Hall, American model and actress
1957 – Bret Hart, Canadian wrestler
1957 – Jüri Raidla, Estonian lawyer and politician, Estonian Minister of Justice
1957 – Purvis Short, American basketball player
1958 – Pavan Malhotra, Indian actor
1960 – Maria Lourdes Sereno, Filipino lawyer and jurist, 24th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines
1961 – Clark Kellogg, American basketball player and sportscaster
1962 – Neil Williams, English cricketer (d. 2006)
1964 – Jose Canseco, Cuban-American baseball player and mixed martial artist
1964 – Ozzie Canseco, Cuban-American baseball player, coach, and manager
1964 – Joe Magrane, American baseball player and sportscaster
1964 – Alan Tait, English-Scottish rugby player and coach
1965 – Norbert Röttgen, German lawyer and politician
1969 – Tim Rodber, English rugby player
1970 – Derrick Adkins, American hurdler
1970 – Steve Morrow, Northern Irish footballer and manager
1971 – Troy Brown, American football player and actor
1971 – Bryan Redpath, Scottish rugby player and coach
1972 – Darren Shan, English author
1974 – Sean Casey, American baseball player and sportscaster
1975 – Éric Dazé, Canadian ice hockey player
1975 – Kristen Michal, Estonian lawyer and politician
1975 – Erik Ohlsson, Swedish singer and guitarist
1975 – Stefan Terblanche, South African rugby player
1976 – Krisztián Lisztes, Hungarian footballer
1976 – Tomáš Vokoun, Czech-American ice hockey player
1977 – Deniz Barış, Turkish footballer
1978 – Jüri Ratas, Estonian politician, 42nd Mayor of Tallinn
1979 – Walter Davis, American triple jumper
1979 – Ahmed al-Ghamdi, Saudi Arabian terrorist, hijacker of United Airlines Flight 175 (d. 2001)
1979 – Sam Hornish Jr., American race car driver
1979 – Joe Thornton, Canadian ice hockey player
1980 – Nyjer Morgan, American baseball player
1981 – Nathan Ellington, English footballer
1981 – Carlos Rogers, American football player
1983 – Michelle Branch, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1983 – Kyle Hogg, English cricketer
1984 – Thomas Kortegaard, Danish footballer
1984 – Johnny Weir, American figure skater
1985 – Rhett Bomar, American football player
1985 – Chad Henne, American football player
1985 – Ashley Tisdale, American actress, singer, and producer
1986 – Brett Cecil, American baseball player
1986 – Lindsay Lohan, American actress and singer
1987 – Esteban Granero, Spanish footballer
1988 – Lee Chung-yong, South Korean footballer
1989 – Nadezhda Grishaeva, Russian basketball player
1989 – Alex Morgan, American soccer player
1990 – Kayla Harrison, American judoka
1990 – Merritt Mathias, American soccer player
1990 – Morag McLellan, Scottish field hockey player
1990 – Margot Robbie, Australian actress and producer
1990 – Danny Rose, English footballer
1990 – Bill Tupou, New Zealand rugby league player
1992 – Madison Chock, American ice dancer
1993 – Vince Staples, American rapper and actor
1993 – Diamonté Harper, American rapper
1994 – Henrik Kristoffersen, Norwegian skier
1995 – Ryan Murphy, American swimmer
1996 – Julia Grabher, Austrian tennis player
Deaths
Pre-1600
626 – Li Jiancheng, Chinese prince (b. 589)
626 – Li Yuanji, Chinese prince (b. 603)
649 – Li Jing, Chinese general (b. 571)
862 – Swithun, English bishop and saint (b. 789)
866 – Robert the Strong, Frankish nobleman
936 – Henry the Fowler, German king (b. 876)
1215 – Eisai, Japanese Buddhist priest (b. 1141)
1298 – Adolf, King of the Romans (b. 1220)
1504 – Stephen III of Moldavia (b. 1434)
1566 – Nostradamus, French astrologer and author (b. 1503)
1578 – Thomas Doughty, English explorer
1582 – Akechi Mitsuhide, Japanese samurai and warlord (b. 1528)
1591 – Vincenzo Galilei, Italian lute player and composer (b. 1520)
1601–1900
1619 – Francis II, Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg (b. 1547)
1621 – Thomas Harriot, English astronomer, mathematician, and ethnographer (b. 1560)
1656 – François-Marie, comte de Broglie, Italian-French general (b. 1611)
1674 – Eberhard III, Duke of Württemberg (b. 1614)
1743 – Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington, English politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1673)
1746 – Thomas Baker, English antiquarian and author (b. 1656)
1778 – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Swiss philosopher and composer (b. 1712)
1833 – Gervasio Antonio de Posadas, Argentinian lawyer and politician, 1st Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (b. 1757)
1843 – Samuel Hahnemann, German physician and academic (b. 1755)
1850 – Robert Peel, English lieutenant and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1788)
1857 – Carlo Pisacane, Italian soldier and philosopher (b. 1818)
1901–present
1903 – Ed Delahanty, American baseball player (b. 1867)
1912 – Tom Richardson, English cricketer (b. 1870)
1914 – Joseph Chamberlain, English businessman and politician, Secretary of State for the Colonies (b. 1836)
1915 – Porfirio Díaz, Mexican general and politician, 29th President of Mexico (b. 1830)
1920 – William Louis Marshall, American general and engineer (b. 1846)
1926 – Émile Coué, French psychologist and pharmacist (b. 1857)
1929 – Gladys Brockwell, American actress (b. 1894)
1932 – Manuel II of Portugal (b. 1889)
1950 – Thomas William Burgess, English swimmer and water polo player (b. 1872)
1955 – Edward Lawson, English soldier, Victoria Cross recipient (b. 1873)
1961 – Ernest Hemingway, American novelist, short story writer, and journalist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1899)
1963 – Alicia Patterson, American publisher, co-founded Newsday (b. 1906)
1964 – Fireball Roberts, American race car driver (b. 1929)
1966 – Jan Brzechwa, Polish poet and author (b. 1900)
1970 – Jessie Street, Australian suffragette and feminist (b. 1889)
1972 – Joseph Fielding Smith, American religious leader, 10th President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (b. 1876)
1973 – Betty Grable, American actress, singer, and dancer (b. 1916)
1973 – George McBride, American baseball player and manager (b. 1880)
1973 – Ferdinand Schörner, German field marshal (b. 1892)
1975 – James Robertson Justice, English actor (b. 1907)
1977 – Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-born novelist and critic (b. 1899)
1978 – Aris Alexandrou, Greek author and poet (b. 1922)
1986 – Peanuts Lowrey, American baseball player and manager (b. 1917)
1988 – Vibert Douglas, Canadian astronomer and astrophysicist (b. 1894)
1989 – Andrei Gromyko, Soviet economist and politician, Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1909)
1990 – Snooky Lanson, American singer (b. 1914)
1991 – Lee Remick, American actress (b. 1935)
1993 – Fred Gwynne, American actor (b. 1926)
1994 – Andrés Escobar, Colombian footballer (b. 1967)
1995 – Lloyd MacPhail, Canadian businessman and politician, 23rd Lieutenant Governor of Prince Edward Island (b. 1920)
1997 – James Stewart, American actor (b. 1908)
1999 – Mario Puzo, American author and screenwriter (b. 1920)
2000 – Joey Dunlop, Northern Irish motorcycle racer (b. 1952)
2002 – Ray Brown, American bassist and composer (b. 1926)
2003 – Briggs Cunningham, American race car driver and businessman (b. 1907)
2004 – Mochtar Lubis, Indonesian journalist and author (b. 1922)
2005 – Ernest Lehman, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1915)
2005 – Norm Prescott, American actor, composer, and producer, co-founded Filmation Studios (b. 1927)
2006 – Jan Murray, American comedian, actor, and game show host (b. 1916)
2007 – Beverly Sills, American operatic soprano and television personality (b. 1929)
2008 – Natasha Shneider, Russian-American singer, keyboard player, and actress (b. 1956)
2008 – Elizabeth Spriggs, English actress and screenwriter (b. 1929)
2010 – Beryl Bainbridge, English screenwriter and author (b. 1932)
2011 – Itamar Franco, Brazilian engineer and politician, 33rd President of Brazil (b. 1930)
2012 – Maurice Chevit, French actor and screenwriter (b. 1923)
2012 – Julian Goodman, American journalist (b. 1922)
2012 – Angelo Mangiarotti, Italian architect and academic (b. 1921)
2012 – Betty Meggers, American archaeologist and academic (b. 1921)
2012 – Ed Stroud, American baseball player (b. 1939)
2013 – Anthony G. Bosco, American bishop (b. 1927)
2013 – Douglas Engelbart, American computer scientist, invented the computer mouse (b. 1925)
2013 – Armand Gaudreault, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1921)
2013 – Anthony Llewellyn, Welsh-American chemist, academic, and astronaut (b. 1933)
2014 – Emilio Álvarez Montalván, Nicaraguan ophthalmologist and politician (b. 1919)
2014 – Manuel Cardona, Spanish physicist and academic (b. 1934)
2014 – Mary Innes-Ker, Duchess of Roxburghe (b. 1915)
2014 – Harold W. Kuhn, American mathematician and academic (b. 1925)
2014 – Louis Zamperini, American runner and World War II US Army Air Forces captain (b. 1917)
2015 – Ronald Davison, New Zealand lawyer and judge, 10th Chief Justice of New Zealand (b. 1920)
2015 – Charlie Sanders, American football player and sportscaster (b. 1946)
2015 – Jim Weaver, American football player and coach (b. 1945)
2015 – Jacobo Zabludovsky, Mexican journalist (b. 1928)
2016 – Caroline Aherne, English actress and comedian (b. 1963)
2016 – Michael Cimino, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1939)
2016 – Patrick Manning, 4th & 6th Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago (b. 1946)
2016 – Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, activist, and author (b. 1928)
2017 – Vladislav Rastorotsky, a Russian (and former Soviet) artistic gymnastics coach, (b. 1933)
2017 – Smith Hart, American-born Canadian professional wrestler (b. 1948)
2018 – Alan Longmuir, Scottish musician (b. 1948)
2019 – Lee Iacocca, American automotive executive (b.1924)
2020 – Ángela Jeria, Chilean archaeologist (b. 1926)
2020 – Byron Bernstein, American Twitch streamer (b. 1989)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Aberoh and Atom (Coptic Church)
Bernardino Realino
Feast of the Visitation (Anglicanism; Levoča at Mariánska hora)
Monegundis
Otto of Bamberg
Oudoceus
Martinian and Processus
Pishoy (Coptic Church)
Stephen III of Moldavia
July 2 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Earliest day on which Unity Day can fall, while July 8 is the latest; celebrated on Tuesday following Heroes' Day. (Zambia)
Flag Day (Curaçao)
Palio di Provenzano (Siena, Italy)
Police Day (Azerbaijan)
References
External links
Days of the year
July | [
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0.3725014925003052,
-0.14743512868881226,
-0.053219862282276154,
-0.3488047420978546,
0.5428309440612793,
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-0.32759571075439453,
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15847 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January%2011 | January 11 |
Events
Pre-1600
532 – Nika riots in Constantinople: A quarrel between supporters of different chariot teams—the Blues and the Greens—in the Hippodrome escalates into violence.
630 – Conquest of Mecca: The prophet Muhammad and his followers conquer the city, Quraysh surrender.
947 – Emperor Tai Zong of the Khitan-led Liao Dynasty invades the Later Jin, resulting in the destruction of the Later Jin.
1055 – Theodora is crowned empress of the Byzantine Empire.
1158 – Vladislaus II, Duke of Bohemia becomes King of Bohemia.
1569 – First recorded lottery in England.
1601–1900
1654 – Arauco War: A Spanish army is defeated by local Mapuche-Huilliches as it tries to cross Bueno River in Southern Chile.
1693 – A powerful earthquake destroys parts of Sicily and Malta.
1759 – The first American life insurance company, the Corporation for Relief of Poor and Distressed Presbyterian Ministers and of the Poor and Distressed Widows and Children of the Presbyterian Ministers (now part of Unum Group), is incorporated in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1779 – Ching-Thang Khomba is crowned King of Manipur.
1787 – William Herschel discovers Titania and Oberon, two moons of Uranus.
1805 – The Michigan Territory is created.
1861 – American Civil War: Alabama secedes from the United States.
1863 – American Civil War: Battle of Arkansas Post: General John McClernand and Admiral David Dixon Porter capture the Arkansas River for the Union.
1863 – American Civil War: encounters and sinks the off Galveston Lighthouse in Texas.
1879 – The Anglo-Zulu War begins.
1901–present
1908 – Grand Canyon National Monument is created.
1912 – Immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, go on strike when wages are reduced in response to a mandated shortening of the work week.
1917 – The Kingsland munitions factory explosion occurs as a result of sabotage.
1922 – Leonard Thompson becomes the first person to be injected with insulin.
1923 – Occupation of the Ruhr: Troops from France and Belgium occupy the Ruhr area to force Germany to make its World War I reparation payments.
1927 – Louis B. Mayer, head of film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), announces the creation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, at a banquet in Los Angeles, California.
1935 – Amelia Earhart becomes the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California.
1942 – World War II: Japanese forces capture Kuala Lumpur, the capital of the Federated Malay States.
1942 – World War II: Japanese forces attack Tarakan in Borneo, Netherlands Indies (Battle of Tarakan)
1943 – The Republic of China agrees to the Sino-British New Equal Treaty and the Sino-American New Equal Treaty.
1943 – Italian-American anarchist Carlo Tresca is assassinated in New York City.
1946 – Enver Hoxha, Secretary General of the Communist Party of Albania, declares the People's Republic of Albania with himself as head of state.
1949 – The first "networked" television broadcasts took place as KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania goes on the air connecting the east coast and mid-west programming.
1957 – The African Convention is founded in Dakar, Senegal.
1961 – Throgs Neck Bridge over the East River, linking New York City's boroughs of The Bronx and Queens, opens to road traffic.
1962 – Cold War: While tied to its pier in Polyarny, the Soviet submarine B-37 is destroyed when fire breaks out in its torpedo compartment.
1962 – An avalanche on Huascarán in Peru causes around 4,000 deaths.
1964 – Surgeon General of the United States Dr. Luther Terry, M.D., publishes the landmark report Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States saying that smoking may be hazardous to health, sparking national and worldwide anti-smoking efforts.
1972 – East Pakistan renames itself Bangladesh.
1973 – Major League Baseball owners vote in approval of the American League adopting the designated hitter position.
1986 – The Gateway Bridge, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia is officially opened.
1994 – The Irish Government announces the end of a 15-year broadcasting ban on the IRA and its political arm Sinn Féin.
1998 – Over 100 people are killed in the Sidi-Hamed massacre in Algeria.
2003 – Illinois Governor George Ryan commutes the death sentences of 167 prisoners on Illinois's death row based on the Jon Burge scandal.
2013 – One French soldier and 17 militants are killed in a failed attempt to free a French hostage in Bulo Marer, Somalia.
2020 – COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei: Municipal health officials in Wuhan announce the first recorded death from COVID-19.
Births
Pre-1600
347 – Theodosius I, Roman emperor (d. 395)
889 – Abd-ar-Rahman III, first Caliph of Córdoba (d. 961)
1113 – Wang Chongyang, Chinese religious leader and poet (d. 1170)
1209 – Möngke Khan, Mongolian emperor (d. 1259)
1322 – Emperor Kōmyō of Japan (d. 1380)
1359 – Emperor Go-En'yū of Japan (d. 1393)
1395 – Michele of Valois, daughter of Charles VI of France (d. 1422)
1503 – Parmigianino, Italian artist (d. 1540)
1589 – William Strode, English politician (d. 1666)
1591 – Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, English general and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Staffordshire (d. 1646)
1601–1900
1624 – Bastiaan Govertsz van der Leeuw, Dutch painter (d. 1680)
1630 – John Rogers, English-American minister, physician, and academic (d. 1684)
1638 – Nicolas Steno, Danish bishop and anatomist (d. 1686)
1642 – Johann Friedrich Alberti, German organist and composer (d. 1710)
1650 – Diana Glauber, Dutch-German painter (d. 1721)
1671 – François-Marie, 1st duc de Broglie, French general and diplomat (d. 1745)
1755 – Alexander Hamilton, Nevisian-American general, economist and politician, 1st United States Secretary of the Treasury (d. 1804)
1757 – Samuel Bentham, English engineer and architect (d. 1831)
1760 – Oliver Wolcott Jr., American lawyer and politician, 2nd United States Secretary of the Treasury, 24th Governor of Connecticut (d. 1833)
1777 – Vincenzo Borg, Maltese merchant and rebel leader (d. 1837)
1786 – Joseph Jackson Lister, English physicist (d. 1869)
1788 – William Thomas Brande, English chemist and academic (d. 1866)
1800 – Ányos Jedlik, Hungarian physicist and engineer (d. 1895)
1807 – Ezra Cornell, American businessman and philanthropist, founded Western Union and Cornell University (d. 1874)
1814 – James Paget, English surgeon and pathologist (d. 1899)
1814 – Socrates Nelson, American businessman and politician (d. 1867)
1815 – John A. Macdonald, Scottish-Canadian lawyer and politician, 1st Prime Minister of Canada (d. 1891)
1825 – Bayard Taylor, American poet, author, and critic (d. 1878)
1839 – Eugenio María de Hostos, Puerto Rican lawyer, philosopher, and sociologist (d. 1903)
1842 – William James, American psychologist and philosopher (d. 1910)
1843 – Adolf Eberle, German painter (d. 1914)
1845 – Albert Victor Bäcklund, Swedish mathematician and physicist (d. 1912)
1850 – Joseph Charles Arthur, American pathologist and mycologist (d. 1942)
1852 – Constantin Fehrenbach, German lawyer and politician, 4th Chancellor of Weimar Germany (d. 1926)
1853 – Georgios Jakobides, Greek painter and sculptor (d. 1932)
1856 – Christian Sinding, Norwegian pianist and composer (d. 1941)
1857 – Fred Archer, English jockey (d. 1886)
1858 – Harry Gordon Selfridge, American-English businessman, founded Selfridges (d. 1947)
1859 – George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, English politician, 35th Governor-General of India (d. 1925)
1864 – Thomas Dixon, Jr., American minister, lawyer, and politician (d. 1946)
1867 – Edward B. Titchener, English psychologist and academic (d. 1927)
1868 – Cai Yuanpei, Chinese philosopher, academic, and politician (d. 1940)
1870 – Alexander Stirling Calder, American sculptor and educator (d. 1945)
1872 – G. W. Pierce, American physicist and academic (d. 1956)
1873 – John Callan O'Laughlin, American soldier and journalist (d. 1949)
1875 – Reinhold Glière, Russian composer and academic (d. 1956)
1876 – Elmer Flick, American baseball player (d. 1971)
1876 – Thomas Hicks, American runner (d. 1952)
1878 – Theodoros Pangalos, Greek general and politician, President of Greece (d. 1952)
1885 – Alice Paul, American activist and suffragist (d. 1977)
1887 – Aldo Leopold, American ecologist and author (d. 1948)
1888 – Joseph B. Keenan, American jurist and politician (d. 1954)
1889 – Calvin Bridges, American geneticist and academic (d. 1938)
1890 – Max Carey, American baseball player and manager (d. 1976)
1890 – Oswald de Andrade, Brazilian poet and critic (d. 1954)
1891 – Andrew Sockalexis, American runner (d. 1919)
1893 – Ellinor Aiki, Estonian painter (d. 1969)
1893 – Charles Fraser, Australian rugby league player and coach (d. 1981)
1893 – Anthony M. Rud, American journalist and author (d. 1942)
1895 – Laurens Hammond, American engineer and businessman, founded the Hammond Clock Company (d. 1973)
1897 – Bernard DeVoto, American historian and author (d. 1955)
1897 – August Heissmeyer, German SS officer (d. 1979)
1899 – Eva Le Gallienne, English-American actress, director, and producer (d. 1991)
1901–present
1901 – Kwon Ki-ok, Korean pilot (d. 1988)
1902 – Maurice Duruflé, French organist and composer (d. 1986)
1903 – Alan Paton, South African author and activist (d. 1988)
1905 – Clyde Kluckhohn, American anthropologist and theorist (d. 1960)
1906 – Albert Hofmann, Swiss chemist and academic, discoverer of LSD (d. 2008)
1907 – Pierre Mendès France, French lawyer and politician, 142nd Prime Minister of France (d. 1982)
1907 – Abraham Joshua Heschel, Polish-American rabbi, theologian, and philosopher (d. 1972)
1908 – Lionel Stander, American actor and activist (d. 1994)
1910 – Arthur Lambourn, New Zealand rugby player (d. 1999)
1910 – Shane Paltridge, Australian soldier and politician (d. 1966)
1911 – Tommy Duncan, American singer-songwriter (d. 1967)
1911 – Nora Heysen, Australian painter (d. 2003)
1911 – Zenkō Suzuki, Japanese politician, 70th Prime Minister of Japan (d. 2004)
1912 – Don "Red" Barry, American actor, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1980)
1913 – Karl Stegger, Danish actor (d. 1980)
1915 – Luise Krüger, German javelin thrower (d. 2001)
1915 – Paddy Mayne, British colonel and lawyer (d. 1955)
1916 – Bernard Blier, Argentinian-French actor (d. 1989)
1917 – John Robarts, Canadian lawyer and politician, 17th Premier of Ontario (d. 1982)
1918 – Robert C. O'Brien, American author and journalist (d. 1973)
1918 – Spencer Walklate, Australian rugby league player and soldier (d. 1945)
1920 – Mick McManus, English wrestler (d. 2013)
1921 – Gory Guerrero, American wrestler and trainer (d. 1990)
1921 – Juanita M. Kreps, American economist and politician, 24th United States Secretary of Commerce (d. 2010)
1923 – Jerome Bixby, American author and screenwriter (d. 1998)
1923 – Ernst Nolte, German historian and philosopher (d. 2016)
1923 – Carroll Shelby, American race car driver, engineer, and businessman, founded Carroll Shelby International (d. 2012)
1924 – Roger Guillemin, French-American physician and endocrinologist, Nobel Prize laureate
1924 – Sam B. Hall, Jr., American lawyer, judge, and politician (d. 1994)
1924 – Slim Harpo, American blues singer-songwriter and musician (d. 1970)
1925 – Grant Tinker, American television producer, co-founded MTM Enterprises (d. 2016)
1926 – Lev Dyomin, Russian colonel, pilot, and astronaut (d. 1998)
1928 – David L. Wolper, American director and producer (d. 2010)
1929 – Dmitri Bruns, Estonian architect and theorist (d. 2020)
1930 – Ron Mulock, Australian lawyer and politician, 10th Deputy Premier of New South Wales (d. 2014)
1930 – Rod Taylor, Australian-American actor and screenwriter (d. 2015)
1931 – Betty Churcher, Australian painter, historian, and curator (d. 2015)
1931 – Mary Rodgers, American composer and author (d. 2014)
1932 – Alfonso Arau, Mexican actor and director
1933 – Goldie Hill, American country singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2005)
1934 – Jean Chrétien, Canadian lawyer and politician, 20th Prime Minister of Canada
1936 – Eva Hesse, German-American sculptor and educator (d. 1970)
1938 – Arthur Scargill, English miner, activist, and politician
1939 – Anne Heggtveit, Canadian alpine skier
1940 – Andres Tarand, Estonian geographer and politician, 10th Prime Minister of Estonia
1941 – Gérson, Brazilian footballer
1942 – Bud Acton, American basketball player
1942 – Clarence Clemons, American saxophonist and actor (d. 2011)
1944 – Mohammed Abdul-Hayy, Sudanese poet and academic (d. 1989)
1944 – Shibu Soren, Indian politician, 3rd Chief Minister of Jharkhand
1945 – Christine Kaufmann, German actress, author, and businesswoman (d. 2017)
1946 – Naomi Judd, American singer-songwriter and actress
1946 – Tony Kaye, English progressive rock keyboard player and songwriter
1946 – John Piper, American theologian and author
1947 – Hamish Macdonald, New Zealand rugby player
1948 – Fritz Bohla, German footballer and manager
1948 – Joe Harper, Scottish footballer and manager
1948 – Madeline Manning, American runner and coach
1948 – Wajima Hiroshi, Japanese sumo wrestler, the 54th Yokozuna (d. 2018)
1948 – Terry Williams, Welsh drummer
1949 – Daryl Braithwaite, Australian singer-songwriter
1949 – Mohammad Reza Rahimi, Iranian lawyer and politician, 2nd Vice President of Iran
1951 – Charlie Huhn, American rock singer and guitarist
1951 – Willie Maddren, English footballer and manager (d. 2000)
1951 – Philip Tartaglia, Scottish archbishop (d. 2021)
1952 – Bille Brown, Australian actor and playwright (d. 2013)
1952 – Ben Crenshaw, American golfer and architect
1952 – Michael Forshaw, Australian lawyer and politician
1952 – Diana Gabaldon, American author
1952 – Lee Ritenour, American guitarist, composer, and producer
1953 – Graham Allen, English politician, Vice-Chamberlain of the Household
1953 – Kostas Skandalidis, Greek engineer and politician, Greek Minister of Agricultural Development and Food
1954 – Jaak Aaviksoo, Estonian physicist and politician, 26th Estonian Minister of Defence
1954 – Kailash Satyarthi, Indian engineer, academic, and activist, Nobel Prize laureate
1956 – Big Bank Hank, American rapper (d. 2014)
1956 – David Grant, Australian rugby league player (d. 1994)
1957 – Darryl Dawkins, American basketball player and coach (d. 2015)
1957 – Peter Moore, Australian rules footballer and coach
1957 – Bryan Robson, English footballer and manager
1958 – Vicki Peterson, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1959 – Brett Bodine, American NASCAR driver
1959 – Rob Ramage, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1961 – Lars-Erik Torph, Swedish racing driver (d. 1989)
1962 – Chris Bryant, Welsh politician, Minister of State for Europe
1962 – Susan Lindauer, American journalist and activist
1962 – Brian Moore, English rugby player
1963 – Tracy Caulkins, American-Australian swimmer
1963 – Petra Schneider, German swimmer
1964 – Ralph Recto, Filipino lawyer and politician
1964 – Albert Dupontel, French actor and director
1965 – Mascarita Sagrada, Mexican wrestler
1965 – Aleksey Zhukov, Russian footballer and coach
1966 – Marc Acito, American author and screenwriter
1967 – Michael Healy-Rae, Irish politician
1968 – Anders Borg, Swedish economist and politician, Swedish Minister for Finance
1968 – Tom Dumont, American guitarist and producer
1968 – Steve Mavin, Australian rugby league player
1969 – Manny Acta, Dominican-American baseball player, coach, manager, and sportscaster
1970 – Manfredi Beninati, Italian painter and sculptor
1970 – Chris Jent, American basketball player and coach
1970 – Malcolm D. Lee, American director, producer, screenwriter, and actor
1970 – Ken Ueno, American composer
1971 – Mary J. Blige, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actress
1971 – Jeff Orford, Australian rugby league player
1971 – Chris Willsher, English singer-songwriter, drummer, and actor
1972 – Christian Jacobs, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actor
1972 – Anthony Lledo, Danish composer
1972 – Amanda Peet, American actress and playwright
1973 – Rockmond Dunbar, American actor
1973 – Rahul Dravid, Indian cricketer and captain
1974 – Roman Görtz, German footballer
1974 – Cody McKay, Canadian baseball player
1974 – Jens Nowotny, German footballer
1975 – Rory Fitzpatrick, American ice hockey player
1975 – Dan Luger, English rugby player and coach
1975 – Matteo Renzi, Italian politician, 56th Prime Minister of Italy
1976 – Efthimios Rentzias, Greek basketball player
1977 – Shamari Buchanan, American football player
1977 – Anni Friesinger-Postma, German speed skater
1977 – Shane Kelly, Australian rugby league player
1977 – Olexiy Lukashevych, Ukrainian long jumper
1978 – Vallo Allingu, Estonian basketball player
1978 – Holly Brisley, Australian actress
1978 – Michael Duff, Irish footballer
1978 – Emile Heskey, English footballer
1979 – Darren Lynn Bousman, American director and screenwriter
1979 – Michael Lorenz, German footballer
1979 – Terence Morris, American basketball player
1979 – Henry Shefflin, Irish hurler
1979 – Siti Nurhaliza, Malaysian singer-songwriter and businesswoman
1980 – Josh Hannay, Australian rugby league player and coach
1980 – Mike Williams, American football player
1982 – Tony Allen, American basketball player
1982 – Clint Greenshields, Australian-French rugby league player
1982 – Blake Heron, American actor (d. 2017)
1982 – Son Ye-jin, South Korean actress
1983 – Turner Battle, American basketball player
1983 – André Myhrer, Swedish skier
1983 – Ted Richards, Australian rules footballer
1983 – Adrian Sutil, German racing driver
1984 – Kevin Boss, American football player
1984 – Dario Krešić, Croatian footballer
1984 – Matt Mullenweg, American web developer and businessman, co-created WordPress
1984 – Stijn Schaars, Dutch footballer
1984 – Glenn Stewart, Australian rugby league player
1985 – Newton Faulkner, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1985 – Lucy Knisley, American author and illustrator
1987 – Scotty Cranmer, American Professional BMX rider
1987 – Danuta Kozák, Hungarian sprint canoer
1987 – Daniel Semenzato, Italian footballer
1987 – Jamie Vardy, English footballer
1987 – Kim Young-kwang, South Korean actor and model
1988 – Rodrigo José Pereira, Brazilian footballer
1989 – Kane Linnett, Australian rugby league player
1990 – Ryan Griffin, American football player
1991 – Andrea Bertolacci, Italian footballer
1992 – Dani Carvajal, Spanish footballer
1992 – Lee Seung-hoon, South Korean rapper and dancer
1993 – Michael Keane, English footballer
1993 – Will Keane, Irish footballer
1996 – Leroy Sané, German footballer
1997 – Cody Simpson, Australian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor
1998 – Thomas Mikaele, New Zealand rugby league player
1999 – Brandon Wakeham, Australian-Fijian rugby league player
Deaths
Pre-1600
140 – Pope Hyginus, Bishop of Rome (b. 74)
705 – Pope John VI (b. 655)
782 – Emperor Kōnin of Japan (b. 709)
812 – Staurakios, Byzantine emperor
844 – Michael I Rangabe, Byzantine emperor (b. 770)
887 – Boso of Provence, Frankish nobleman
937 – Cao, empress of Later Tang
937 – Li Chongmei, prince of Later Tang
937 – Li Congke, emperor of Later Tang (b. 885)
937 – Liu, empress of Later Tang
1055 – Constantine IX Monomachos, Byzantine emperor (b. 1000)
1068 – Egbert I, Margrave of Meissen
1083 – Otto of Nordheim (b. 1020)
1266 – Swietopelk II, Duke of Pomerania
1344 – Thomas Charlton, Bishop of Hereford and Lord Chancellor of Ireland
1372 – Eleanor of Lancaster, English noblewoman (b. 1318)
1396 – Isidore Glabas, Metropolitan bishop of Thessalonica (b.c. 1341)
1397 – Skirgaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania
1494 – Domenico Ghirlandaio, Italian painter (b. 1449)
1495 – Pedro González de Mendoza, Spanish cardinal (b. 1428)
1546 – Gaudenzio Ferrari, Italian painter and sculptor (b. c. 1471)
1554 – Min Bin, king of Arakan (b. 1493)
1601–1900
1641 – Juan Martínez de Jáuregui y Aguilar, Spanish poet and painter (b. 1583)
1696 – Charles Albanel, French priest, missionary, and explorer (b. 1616)
1703 – Johann Georg Graevius, German scholar and critic (b. 1632)
1713 – Pierre Jurieu, French priest and theologian (b. 1637)
1735 – Danilo I, Metropolitan of Cetinje (b. 1670)
1753 – Hans Sloane, Irish-English physician and academic (b. 1660)
1757 – Louis Bertrand Castel, French mathematician and philosopher (b. 1688)
1762 – Louis-François Roubiliac, French-English sculptor (b. 1695)
1763 – Caspar Abel, German poet, historian, and theologian (b. 1676)
1771 – Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens, French philosopher and author (b. 1704)
1788 – François Joseph Paul de Grasse, French admiral (b. 1722)
1791 – William Williams Pantycelyn, Welsh composer and poet (b. 1717)
1798 – Heraclius II of Georgia (b. 1720)
1801 – Domenico Cimarosa, Italian composer and educator (b. 1749)
1824 – Thomas Mullins, 1st Baron Ventry, Anglo-Irish politician and peer (b. 1736)
1836 – John Molson, Canadian businessman, founded the Molson Brewing Company (b. 1763)
1843 – Francis Scott Key, American lawyer, author, and songwriter (b. 1779)
1866 – Gustavus Vaughan Brooke, Irish actor (b. 1818)
1866 – John Woolley, English minister and academic (b. 1816)
1867 – Stuart Donaldson, English-Australian businessman and politician, 1st Premier of New South Wales (b. 1812)
1882 – Theodor Schwann, German physiologist and biologist (b. 1810)
1891 – Georges-Eugène Haussmann, French urban planner (b. 1809)
1901–present
1902 – Johnny Briggs, English cricketer and rugby player (b. 1862)
1904 – William Sawyer, Canadian merchant and politician (b. 1815)
1914 – Carl Jacobsen, Danish brewer and philanthropist (b. 1842)
1920 – Steinar Schjøtt, Norwegian philologist and lexicographer (b. 1844)
1923 – Constantine I of Greece (b. 1868)
1928 – Thomas Hardy, English novelist and poet (b. 1840)
1929 – Elfrida Andrée, Swedish organist, composer, and conductor (b. 1841)
1931 – James Milton Carroll, American pastor, historian, and author (b. 1852)
1937 – Nuri Conker, Turkish colonel and politician (b. 1882)
1941 – Emanuel Lasker, German mathematician, philosopher, and chess player (b. 1868)
1944 – Galeazzo Ciano, Italian politician, Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1903)
1947 – Eva Tanguay, Canadian singer (b. 1879)
1952 – Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, French general (b. 1889)
1952 – Aureliano Pertile, Italian tenor and educator (b. 1885)
1953 – Noe Zhordania, Georgian journalist and politician, Prime Minister of Georgia (b. 1868)
1953 – Roberta Fulbright, American businesswoman (b.1874)
1954 – Oscar Straus, Austrian composer (b. 1870)
1957 – Robert Garran, Australian lawyer and politician, Solicitor-General of Australia (b. 1867)
1961 – Elena Gerhardt, German soprano and actress (b. 1883)
1963 – Arthur Nock, English-American scholar, theologian, and academic (b. 1902)
1965 – Wally Pipp, American baseball player (b. 1893)
1966 – Alberto Giacometti, Swiss sculptor and painter (b. 1901)
1966 – Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indian academic and politician, 2nd Prime Minister of India (b. 1904)
1968 – Moshe Zvi Segal, Israeli linguist and scholar (b. 1876)
1969 – Richmal Crompton, English author and educator (b. 1890)
1972 – Padraic Colum, Irish poet and playwright (b. 1881)
1975 – Max Lorenz, German tenor and actor (b. 1901)
1980 – Barbara Pym, English author (b. 1913)
1981 – Beulah Bondi, American actress (b. 1889)
1985 – Edward Buzzell, American actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1895)
1985 – William McKell, Australian lawyer and politician, 12th Governor-General of Australia (b. 1891)
1986 – Sid Chaplin, English author and screenwriter (b. 1916)
1986 – Andrzej Czok, Polish mountaineer (b. 1948)
1987 – Albert Ferber, Swiss-English pianist, composer, and conductor (b. 1911)
1988 – Pappy Boyington, American colonel and pilot, Medal of Honor recipient (b. 1912)
1988 – Isidor Isaac Rabi, Polish-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1898)
1989 – Ray Moore, English radio host (b. 1942)
1990 – Carolyn Haywood, American author and illustrator (b. 1898)
1991 – Carl David Anderson, American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1905)
1994 – Helmut Poppendick, German physician (b. 1902)
1995 – Josef Gingold, Belarusian-American violinist and educator (b. 1909)
1995 – Onat Kutlar, Turkish author and poet (b. 1936)
1995 – Lewis Nixon, U.S. Army captain (b. 1918)
1995 – Theodor Wisch, German general (b. 1907)
1996 – Roger Crozier, Canadian-American ice hockey player (b. 1942)
1999 – Fabrizio De André, Italian singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1940)
1999 – Naomi Mitchison, Scottish author and poet (b. 1897)
1999 – Brian Moore, Irish-Canadian author and screenwriter (b. 1921)
2000 – Ivan Combe, American businessman, invented Clearasil (b. 1911)
2000 – Bob Lemon, American baseball player and manager (b. 1920)
2000 – Betty Archdale, English-Australian cricketer and educator (b. 1907)
2001 – Denys Lasdun, English architect, co-designed the Royal National Theatre (b. 1914)
2002 – Henri Verneuil, French-Armenian director and playwright (b. 1920)
2003 – Jože Pučnik, Slovenian sociologist and politician (b. 1932)
2007 – Solveig Dommartin, French-German actress (b. 1961)
2007 – Robert Anton Wilson, American psychologist, author, poet, and playwright (b. 1932)
2008 – Edmund Hillary, New Zealand mountaineer and explorer (b. 1919)
2008 – Carl Karcher, American businessman, co-founded Carl's Jr. (b. 1917)
2010 – Miep Gies, Austrian-Dutch humanitarian (b. 1909)
2010 – Éric Rohmer, French director, screenwriter, and critic (b. 1920)
2011 – David Nelson, American actor, director, and producer (b. 1936)
2012 – Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, Iranian physicist and academic (b. 1980)
2012 – Gilles Jacquier, French journalist and photographer (b. 1968)
2012 – Edgar Kaiser, Jr, American-Canadian businessman and philanthropist (b. 1942)
2012 – Wally Osterkorn, American basketball player (b. 1928)
2012 – Steven Rawlings, English astrophysicist, astronomer, and academic (b. 1961)
2012 – David Whitaker, English composer and conductor (b. 1931)
2013 – Aaron Swartz, American programmer (b. 1986)
2013 – Guido Forti, Italian businessman, founded the Forti Racing Team (b. 1940)
2013 – Nguyễn Khánh, Vietnamese general and politician, 3rd President of South Vietnam (b. 1927)
2013 – Mariangela Melato, Italian actress (b. 1941)
2013 – Tom Parry Jones, Welsh chemist, invented the breathalyzer (b. 1935)
2013 – Alemayehu Shumye, Ethiopian runner (b. 1988)
2014 – Keiko Awaji, Japanese actress (b. 1933)
2014 – Muhammad Habibur Rahman, Indian-Bangladeshi jurist and politician, Prime Minister of Bangladesh (b. 1928)
2014 – Chai Trong-rong, Taiwanese educator and politician (b. 1935)
2014 – Ariel Sharon, Israeli general and politician, 11th Prime Minister of Israel (b. 1928)
2015 – Jenő Buzánszky, Hungarian footballer and coach (b. 1925)
2015 – Anita Ekberg, Swedish-Italian model and actress (b. 1931)
2015 – Chashi Nazrul Islam, Bangladeshi director and producer (b. 1941)
2015 – Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle, American neuroscientist and academic (b. 1918)
2016 – Monte Irvin, American baseball player (b. 1919)
2016 – David Margulies, American actor (b. 1937)
2017 – Adenan Satem, Malaysian politician and Chief Minister of Sarawak, Malaysia (b. 1944)
2018 – Edgar Ray Killen, American murderer (b.1925)
2019 – Michael Atiyah, British-Lebanese mathematician (b.1929)
Holidays and observances
Children's Day (Tunisia)
Christian feast day:
Anastasius of Suppentonia (Roman Catholic)
Leucius of Brindisi (Roman Catholic)
Mary Slessor (Church of England)
Paulinus II of Aquileia
Pope Hyginus
Theodosius the Cenobiarch
Thomas of Cori
Vitalis of Gaza (Roman Catholic)
January 11 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Eugenio María de Hostos Day (Puerto Rico)
Independence Resistance Day (Morocco)
Kagami biraki (Japan)
National Human Trafficking Awareness Day (United States)
Republic Day (Albania)
Carmentalia (January 11th and January 15th) (Rome)
Prithvi Jayanti (Nepal)
References
External links
BBC: On This Day
Historical Events on January 11
Today in Canadian History
Days of the year
January | [
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15848 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July%203 | July 3 |
Events
Pre-1600
324 – Battle of Adrianople: Constantine I defeats Licinius, who flees to Byzantium.
987 – Hugh Capet is crowned King of France, the first of the Capetian dynasty that would rule France until the French Revolution in 1792.
1035 – William the Conqueror becomes the Duke of Normandy, reigns until 1087.
1601–1900
1608 – Québec City is founded by Samuel de Champlain.
1754 – French and Indian War: George Washington surrenders Fort Necessity to French forces.
1767 – Pitcairn Island is discovered by Midshipman Robert Pitcairn on an expeditionary voyage commanded by Philip Carteret.
1767 – Norway's oldest newspaper still in print, Adresseavisen, is founded and the first edition is published.
1775 – American Revolutionary War: George Washington takes command of the Continental Army at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
1778 – American Revolutionary War: Iroquois allied to Britain kill 360 people in the Wyoming Valley massacre.
1819 – The Bank for Savings in the City of New-York, the first savings bank in the United States, opens.
1839 – The first state normal school in the United States, the forerunner to today's Framingham State University, opens in Lexington, Massachusetts with three students.
1848 – Governor-General Peter von Scholten emancipates all remaining slaves in the Danish West Indies.
1849 – France invades the Roman Republic and restores the Papal States.
1852 – Congress establishes the United States' 2nd mint in San Francisco.
1863 – American Civil War: The final day of the Battle of Gettysburg culminates with Pickett's Charge.
1866 – Austro-Prussian War is decided at the Battle of Königgrätz, resulting in Prussia taking over as the prominent German nation from Austria.
1884 – Dow Jones & Company publishes its first stock average.
1886 – Karl Benz officially unveils the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, the first purpose-built automobile.
1886 – The New-York Tribune becomes the first newspaper to use a linotype machine, eliminating typesetting by hand.
1890 – Idaho is admitted as the 43rd U.S. state.
1898 – A Spanish squadron, led by Pascual Cervera y Topete, is defeated by an American squadron under William T. Sampson in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba.
1901–present
1913 – Confederate veterans at the Great Reunion of 1913 reenact Pickett's Charge; upon reaching the high-water mark of the Confederacy they are met by the outstretched hands of friendship from Union survivors.
1938 – World speed record for a steam locomotive is set in England, by the Mallard, which reaches a speed of .
1938 – United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicates the Eternal Light Peace Memorial and lights the eternal flame at Gettysburg Battlefield.
1940 – World War II: The Royal Navy attacks the French naval squadron in Algeria, to ensure that it will not fall under German control. Of the four French battleships present, one is sunk, two are damaged, and one escapes back to France.
1944 – World War II: The Minsk Offensive clears German troops from the city.
1952 – The Constitution of Puerto Rico is approved by the United States Congress.
1952 – The sets sail on her maiden voyage to Southampton. During the voyage, the ship takes the Blue Riband away from the .
1967 – The Aden Emergency: The Battle of the Crater in which the British Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders retake the Crater district following the Arab Police mutiny.
1969 – Space Race: The biggest explosion in the history of rocketry occurs when the Soviet N-1 rocket explodes and subsequently destroys its launchpad.
1970 – The Troubles: The "Falls Curfew" begins in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
1970 – Dan-Air Flight 1903 crashes into the Les Agudes mountain in the Montseny Massif near the village of Arbúcies in Catalonia, Spain, killing all 112 people aboard.
1979 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter signs the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.
1988 – United States Navy warship shoots down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people aboard.
1988 – The Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey is completed, providing the second connection between the continents of Europe and Asia over the Bosphorus.
1996 – British Prime Minister John Major announced the Stone of Scone would be returned to Scotland.
2013 – Egyptian coup d'état: President of Egypt Mohamed Morsi is overthrown by the military after four days of protests all over the country calling for Morsi's resignation, to which he did not respond. President of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt Adly Mansour is declared acting president.
Births
Pre-1600
321 – Valentinian I, Roman emperor (d. 375)
1423 – Louis XI of France (d. 1483)
1442 – Emperor Go-Tsuchimikado of Japan (d. 1500)
1518 – Li Shizhen, Chinese physician and mineralogist (d. 1593)
1530 – Claude Fauchet, French historian and author (d. 1601)
1534 – Myeongjong of Joseon, Ruler of Korea (d. 1567)
1550 – Jacobus Gallus, Slovenian composer (d. 1591)
1569 – Thomas Richardson, English politician and judge (d. 1635)
1601–1900
1683 – Edward Young, English poet, dramatist and literary critic (Night-Thoughts) (d. 1765)
1685 – Sir Robert Rich, 4th Baronet, English field marshal and politician (d. 1768)
1728 – Robert Adam, Scottish-English architect, designed Culzean Castle (d. 1792)
1738 – John Singleton Copley, American painter (d. 1815)
1778 – Carl Ludvig Engel, German architect (d. 1840)
1789 – Johann Friedrich Overbeck, German-Italian painter and engraver (d. 1869)
1814 – Ferdinand Didrichsen, Danish botanist and physicist (d. 1887)
1823 – Ahmed Vefik Pasha, Greek-Ottoman statesman, diplomat, playwright, and translator (d. 1891)
1844 – Dankmar Adler, German-born American architect and engineer (d. 1900)
1846 – Achilles Alferaki, Russian composer and politician, Governor of Taganrog (d. 1919)
1851 – Charles Bannerman, English-Australian cricketer and umpire (d. 1930)
1854 – Leoš Janáček, Czech composer and theorist (d. 1928)
1860 – Charlotte Perkins Gilman, American sociologist and author (d. 1935)
1866 – Albert Gottschalk, Danish painter (d. 1906)
1869 – Svend Kornbeck, Danish actor (d. 1933)
1870 – R. B. Bennett, Canadian lawyer and politician, 11th Prime Minister of Canada (d. 1947)
1871 – William Henry Davies, Welsh poet and writer (d.1940)
1874 – Jean Collas, French rugby player and tug of war competitor (d. 1928)
1875 – Ferdinand Sauerbruch, German surgeon and academic (d. 1951)
1876 – Ralph Barton Perry, American philosopher and academic (d. 1957)
1878 – George M. Cohan, American songwriter, actor, singer, and dancer (d. 1942)
1879 – Alfred Korzybski, Polish-American mathematician, linguist, and philosopher (d. 1950)
1880 – Carl Schuricht, Polish-German conductor (d. 1967)
1883 – Franz Kafka, Czech-Austrian author (d. 1924)
1885 – Anna Dickie Olesen, American politician (d. 1971)
1886 – Raymond A. Spruance, American admiral and diplomat, United States Ambassador to the Philippines (d. 1969)
1888 – Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Spanish author and playwright (d. 1963)
1889 – Richard Cramer, American actor (d. 1960)
1893 – Sándor Bortnyik, Hungarian painter and graphic designer (d. 1976)
1896 – Doris Lloyd, English actress (d. 1968)
1897 – Jesse Douglas, American mathematician and academic (d. 1965)
1898 – Stefanos Stefanopoulos, Greek politician, Prime Minister of Greece (d. 1982)
1900 – Alessandro Blasetti, Italian director and screenwriter (d. 1987)
1901–present
1901 – Ruth Crawford Seeger, American composer (d. 1953)
1903 – Ace Bailey, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (d. 1992)
1905 – Johnny Gibson, American hurdler and coach (d. 2006)
1906 – George Sanders, Russian-born British actor (d. 1972)
1908 – M. F. K. Fisher, American author (d. 1992)
1908 – Robert B. Meyner, American lawyer and politician, 44th Governor of New Jersey (d. 1990)
1909 – Stavros Niarchos, Greek shipping magnate (d.1996)
1910 – Fritz Kasparek, Austrian mountaineer (d. 1954)
1911 – Joe Hardstaff Jr., English cricketer (d. 1990)
1913 – Dorothy Kilgallen, American journalist, actress, and author (d. 1965)
1916 – John Kundla, American basketball player and coach (d. 2017)
1917 – João Saldanha, Brazilian footballer, manager, and journalist (d. 1990)
1918 – S. V. Ranga Rao, Indian actor, director, and producer (d. 1974)
1918 – Johnny Palmer, American golfer (d. 2006)
1919 – Cecil FitzMaurice, 8th Earl of Orkney (d. 1998)
1919 – Gerald W. Thomas, American soldier and academic (d. 2013)
1920 – Eddy Paape, Belgian illustrator (d. 2012)
1920 – Paul O'Dea, American baseball player and manager (d. 1978)
1921 – Flor María Chalbaud, First Lady of Venezuela (d. 2013)
1921 – Susan Peters, American actress (d. 1952)
1921 – François Reichenbach, French director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1993)
1922 – Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo, Belgian painter and sculptor (d. 2010)
1922 – Theo Brokmann Jr., Dutch football player (d. 2003)
1924 – Amalia Aguilar, Cuban-Mexican film actress and dancer (d. 2021)
1924 – S. R. Nathan, 6th President of Singapore (d. 2016)
1925 – Terry Moriarty, Australian rules footballer (d. 2011)
1925 – Danny Nardico, American professional boxer (d. 2010)
1925 – Philip Jamison, American artist (d. 2021)
1926 – Johnny Coles, American trumpet player (d. 1997)
1926 – Rae Allen, American actress, singer, and director
1926 – Laurence Street, Australian jurist and former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales (d. 2018)
1927 – Ken Russell, English actor, director, and producer (d. 2011)
1927 – Tim O'Connor, American actor (d. 2018)
1928 – Evelyn Anthony, English author (d. 2018)
1929 – Clément Perron, Canadian director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1999)
1929 – Joanne Herring, American socialite, businesswoman, political activist, philanthropist, diplomat, and television talk show host
1930 – Pete Fountain, American clarinet player (d. 2016)
1930 – Carlos Kleiber, German-Austrian conductor (d. 2004)
1930 – Tommy Tedesco, American guitarist (d. 1997)
1932 – Richard Mellon Scaife, American businessman (d. 2014)
1933 – Edward Brandt, Jr., American physician and mathematician (d. 2007)
1935 – Cheo Feliciano, Puerto Rican-American singer-songwriter (d. 2014)
1935 – Harrison Schmitt, American geologist, astronaut, and politician
1936 – Anthony Lester, Baron Lester of Herne Hill, English lawyer and politician (d. 2020)
1936 – Baard Owe, Norwegian-Danish actor (d. 2017)
1937 – Nicholas Maxwell, English philosopher and academic
1937 – Tom Stoppard, Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
1938 – Jean Aitchison, English linguist and academic
1938 – Sjaak Swart, Dutch footballer
1939 – Brigitte Fassbaender, German soprano and director
1939 – László Kovács, Hungarian politician and diplomat, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs
1939 – Coco Laboy, Puerto Rican baseball player
1940 – Lamar Alexander, American lawyer and politician, 5th United States Secretary of Education
1940 – Jerzy Buzek, Polish engineer and politician, 9th Prime Minister of Poland
1940 – Lance Larson, American swimmer
1940 – César Tovar, Venezuelan baseball player (d. 1994)
1941 – Gloria Allred, American lawyer and activist
1941 – Liamine Zéroual, Algerian politician, 4th President of Algeria
1942 – Eddy Mitchell, French singer-songwriter
1943 – Gary Waldhorn, British actor (d. 2022)
1943 – Judith Durham, Australian folk-pop singer-songwriter and musician
1943 – Kurtwood Smith, American actor
1943 – Norman E. Thagard, American astronaut
1945 – Michael Cole, American actor
1945 – Michael Martin, Baron Martin of Springburn, Scottish politician, Speaker of the House of Commons (d. 2018)
1946 – Johnny Lee, American singer and guitarist
1946 – Leszek Miller, Polish political scientist and politician, 10th Prime Minister of Poland
1946 – Michael Shea, American author (d. 2014)
1947 – Dave Barry, American journalist and author
1947 – Betty Buckley, American actress and singer
1947 – Mike Burton, American swimmer
1948 – Paul Barrere, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2019)
1948 – Tarmo Koivisto, Finnish author and illustrator
1949 – Susan Penhaligon, English actress
1949 – John Verity, English guitarist
1949 – Johnnie Wilder, Jr., American singer (d. 2006)
1949 – Bo Xilai, Chinese politician, Chinese Minister of Commerce
1950 – Ewen Chatfield, New Zealand cricketer
1950 – James Hahn, American judge and politician, 40th Mayor of Los Angeles
1951 – Jean-Claude Duvalier, Haitian politician, 41st President of Haiti (d. 2014)
1951 – Richard Hadlee, New Zealand cricketer and footballer
1952 – Laura Branigan, American singer-songwriter (d. 2004)
1952 – Lu Colombo, Italian singer
1952 – Andy Fraser, English singer-songwriter and bass player (d. 2015)
1952 – Carla Olson, American singer-songwriter and music producer
1952 – Wasim Raja, Pakistani cricketer (d. 2006)
1952 – Amit Kumar, Indian film playback singer, actor, director, music director and musician
1953 – Lotta Sollander, Swedish alpine skier
1954 – Les Cusworth, English rugby player
1955 – Claude Rajotte, Canadian radio and television host
1956 – Montel Williams, American talk show host and television personality
1957 – Poly Styrene, British musician (d. 2011)
1958 – Matthew Fraser, Canadian-English journalist and academic
1958 – Charlie Higson, English actor, singer, and author
1958 – Siân Lloyd, Welsh meteorologist and journalist
1958 – Didier Mouron, Swiss-Canadian painter
1958 – Aaron Tippin, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1959 – Julie Burchill, English journalist and author
1959 – Ian Maxtone-Graham, American screenwriter and producer
1959 – Stephen Pearcy, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1959 – David Shore, Canadian screenwriter and producer
1960 – Vince Clarke, English singer-songwriter, keyboard player, and producer
1962 – Scott Borchetta, American record executive and entrepreneur
1962 – Tom Cruise, American actor and producer
1962 – Thomas Gibson, American actor and director
1964 – Yeardley Smith, American actress, voice actress, comedian and writer
1965 – Shinya Hashimoto, Japanese wrestler (d. 2005)
1965 – Connie Nielsen, Danish-American actress
1965 – Komsan Pohkong, Thai lawyer and academic
1965 – Christophe Ruer, French pentathlete (d. 2007)
1966 – Moisés Alou, American baseball player
1967 – Katy Clark, Scottish lawyer and politician
1968 – Ramush Haradinaj, Kosovo-Albanian soldier and politician, 4th Prime Minister of Kosovo
1970 – Serhiy Honchar, Ukrainian cyclist
1970 – Audra McDonald, American actress and singer
1970 – Teemu Selänne, Finnish ice hockey player
1971 – Julian Assange, Australian journalist, publisher, and activist, founded WikiLeaks
1973 – Paul Rauhihi, New Zealand rugby league player
1973 – Ólafur Stefánsson, Icelandic handball player
1973 – Fyodor Tuvin, Russian footballer (d. 2013)
1976 – Wade Belak, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 2011)
1976 – Henry Olonga, Zimbabwean cricketer and sportscaster
1976 – Wanderlei Silva, Brazilian-American mixed martial artist
1976 – Bobby Skinstad, Zimbabwean-South African rugby union player
1977 – David Bowens, American football player
1978 – Mizuki Noguchi, Japanese runner
1979 – Jamie Grove, English cricketer
1980 – Mazharul Haque, Bangladeshi cricketer (d. 2013)
1980 – Roland Schoeman, South African swimmer
1980 – Harbhajan Singh, Indian cricketer
1983 – Edinson Vólquez, Dominican baseball player
1984 – Manny Lawson, American football player
1984 – Churandy Martina, Dutch sprinter
1984 – Corey Sevier, Canadian actor and producer
1986 – Marco Antônio de Mattos Filho, Brazilian footballer
1986 – Kisenosato Yutaka, Japanese sumo wrestler
1987 – Sebastian Vettel, German race car driver
1988 – Winston Reid, New Zealand-Danish footballer
1988 – Vladislav Sesganov, Russian figure skater
1988 – James Troisi, Australian footballer
1989 – Mitchell Dodds, Australian rugby league player
1989 – Elle King, American singer, songwriter, and actress
1990 – Nathan Gardner, Australian rugby league player
1990 – Bobby Hopkinson, English footballer
1990 – Lucas Mendes, Brazilian footballer
1991 – Alison Howie, Scottish field hockey player
1991 – Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, Russian tennis player
1992 – Crystal Dunn, American footballer
Deaths
Pre-1600
458 – Anatolius of Constantinople, Byzantine patriarch and saint (b. 449)
710 – Emperor Zhongzong of Tang (b. 656)
896 – Dong Chang, Chinese warlord
964 – Henry I, Frankish nobleman and archbishop
1090 – Egbert II, Margrave of Meissen (b. c. 1060)
1288 – Stephen de Fulbourn, English-born Irish cleric and politician
1503 – Pierre d'Aubusson, Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes (b. 1423)
1570 – Aonio Paleario, Italian academic and reformer (b. 1500)
1601–1900
1642 – Marie de' Medici, French queen consort and regent (b. 1573)
1672 – Francis Willughby, English ornithologist and ichthyologist (b. 1635)
1790 – Jean-Baptiste L. Romé de l'Isle, French geologist and mineralogist (b. 1736)
1795 – Louis-Georges de Bréquigny, French scholar and author (b. 1714)
1795 – Antonio de Ulloa, Spanish general, astronomer, and politician, 1st Colonial Governor of Louisiana (b. 1716)
1809 – Joseph Quesnel, French-Canadian composer and playwright (b. 1746)
1863 – George Hull Ward, American general (b. 1826)
1863 – Little Crow, American tribal leader (b. 1810)
1881 – Hasan Tahsini, Albanian astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher (b. 1811)
1887 – Clay Allison, American rancher (b. 1841)
1888 – Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, Vietnamese poet and author (b. 1822)
1901–present
1904 – Édouard Beaupré, Canadian giant and strongman (b. 1881)
1904 – Theodor Herzl, Austrian journalist, playwright, and father of modern political Zionism (b. 1860)
1908 – Joel Chandler Harris, American journalist and author (b. 1845)
1916 – Hetty Green, American businesswoman and financier (b. 1834)
1918 – Mehmed V, Ottoman sultan (b. 1844)
1921 – James Mitchel, Irish-American weight thrower (b. 1864)
1927 – Gérard de Courcelles, French race car driver
1933 – Hipólito Yrigoyen, Argentinian educator and politician, 19th President of Argentina (b. 1852)
1935 – André Citroën, French engineer and businessman, founded the Citroën Company (b. 1878)
1937 – Jacob Schick, American-Canadian captain and businessman, invented the electric razor (b. 1877)
1941 – Friedrich Akel, Estonian physician and politician, Head of State of Estonia (b. 1871)
1954 – Siegfried Handloser, German physician and general (b. 1895)
1954 – Reginald Marsh, French-American painter, illustrator, and academic (b. 1898)
1957 – Dolf Luque, Cuban baseball player and manager (b. 1890)
1957 – Richard Mohaupt, German composer and Kapellmeister (b. 1904)
1958 – Charles Bathurst, 1st Viscount Bledisloe, English politician, 4th Governor-General of New Zealand (b. 1867)
1969 – Brian Jones, English guitarist, songwriter, and producer (b. 1942)
1971 – Jim Morrison, American singer-songwriter (b. 1943)
1974 – John Crowe Ransom, American poet and critic (b. 1888)
1977 – Alexander Volkov, Russian mathematician and author (b. 1891)
1978 – James Daly, American actor (b. 1918)
1979 – Louis Durey, French pianist and composer (b. 1888)
1981 – Ross Martin, American actor and director (b. 1920)
1985 – Frank J. Selke, Canadian ice hockey player and manager (b. 1893)
1986 – Rudy Vallée, American singer, saxophonist, and actor (b. 1901)
1989 – Jim Backus, American actor and voice artist (b. 1913)
1993 – Don Drysdale, American baseball player and sportscaster (b. 1936)
1994 – Lew Hoad, Australian tennis player and coach (b. 1934)
1995 – Pancho Gonzales, American tennis player (b. 1928)
1995 – Eddie Mazur, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1929)
1998 – Danielle Bunten Berry, American game designer and programmer (b. 1949)
1999 – Mark Sandman, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1952)
1999 – Pelageya Polubarinova-Kochina, Russian mathematician (b. 1899)
2001 – Mordecai Richler, Canadian author and screenwriter (b. 1931)
2001 – Johnny Russell, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1940)
2004 – Andriyan Nikolayev, Russian general, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1929)
2005 – Alberto Lattuada, Italian actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1914)
2005 – Gaylord Nelson, American lawyer and politician, 35th Governor of Wisconsin (b. 1916)
2006 – Joseph Goguen, American computer scientist, developed the OBJ programming language (b. 1941)
2007 – Boots Randolph, American saxophonist (b. 1927)
2008 – Clive Hornby, English actor and drummer (b. 1944)
2008 – Oliver Schroer, Canadian fiddler, composer, and producer (b. 1956)
2009 – Alauddin Al-Azad, Bangladeshi author and poet (b.1932)
2009 – John Keel, American journalist and author (b. 1930)
2010 – Abu Daoud, Palestinian terrorist, planned the Munich massacre (b. 1937)
2011 – Ali Bahar, Bahraini singer and guitarist (b. 1960)
2012 – Nguyễn Hữu Có, Vietnamese general and politician (b. 1925)
2012 – Andy Griffith, American actor, singer, and producer (b. 1926)
2012 – Yvonne B. Miller, American educator and politician (b. 1934)
2012 – Sergio Pininfarina, Italian engineer and politician (b. 1926)
2012 – Richard Alvin Tonry, American lawyer and politician (b. 1935)
2013 – Roman Bengez, Slovenian footballer and manager (b. 1964)
2013 – Francis Ray, American author (b. 1944)
2013 – PJ Torokvei, Canadian actress and screenwriter (b. 1951)
2013 – Radu Vasile, Romanian historian and politician, 57th Prime Minister of Romania (b. 1942)
2013 – Bernard Vitet, French trumpet player and composer (b. 1934)
2013 – Snoo Wilson, English playwright and screenwriter (b. 1948)
2014 – Jini Dellaccio, American photographer (b. 1917)
2014 – Tim Flood, Irish hurler and coach (b. 1927)
2014 – Volkmar Groß, German footballer (b. 1948)
2014 – Ira Ruskin, American politician (b. 1943)
2014 – Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Ukrainian-American rabbi and author (b. 1924)
2015 – Diana Douglas, British-American actress (b. 1923)
2015 – Boyd K. Packer, American religious leader and educator (b. 1924)
2015 – Wayne Townsend, American farmer and politician (b. 1926)
2015 – Phil Walsh, Australian footballer and coach (b. 1960)
2020 – Saroj Khan, Indian dance choreographer (b. 1948)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Anatolius of Constantinople
Anatolius of Laodicea
Dathus
Germanus of Man
Gurthiern
Heliodorus of Altino
Mucian
Peregrina Mogas Fontcuberta
Pope Leo II
Thomas the Apostle
July 3 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Emancipation Day (United States Virgin Islands)
Independence Day, celebrates the liberation of Minsk from Nazi occupation by Soviet troops in 1944 (Belarus)
The start of the Dog Days according to the Old Farmer's Almanac but not according to established meaning in most European cultures
Women's Day (Myanmar)
References
External links
Days of the year
July | [
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0.2795238494873047,
-0.0778307318687439,
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0.40155279636383057,
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0.390858143568... |
15849 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July%204 | July 4 | The Aphelion, the point in the year when the Earth is farthest from the Sun, occurs around this date.
Events
Pre-1600
362 BC – Battle of Mantinea: The Thebans, led by Epaminondas, defeated the Spartans.
414 – Emperor Theodosius II, age 13, yields power to his older sister Aelia Pulcheria, who reigned as regent and proclaimed herself empress (Augusta) of the Eastern Roman Empire.
836 – Pactum Sicardi, a peace treaty between the Principality of Benevento and the Duchy of Naples, is signed.
993 – Ulrich of Augsburg is canonized as a saint.
1054 – A supernova, called SN 1054, is seen by Chinese Song dynasty, Arab, and possibly Amerindian observers near the star Zeta Tauri. For several months it remains bright enough to be seen during the day. Its remnants form the Crab Nebula.
1120 – Jordan II of Capua is anointed as prince after his infant nephew's death.
1187 – The Crusades: Battle of Hattin: Saladin defeats Guy of Lusignan, King of Jerusalem.
1253 – Battle of West-Capelle: John I of Avesnes defeats Guy of Dampierre.
1359 – Francesco II Ordelaffi of Forlì surrenders to the Papal commander Gil de Albornoz.
1456 – Ottoman–Hungarian wars: The Siege of Nándorfehérvár (Belgrade) begins.
1534 – Christian III is elected King of Denmark and Norway in the town of Rye.
1584 – Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe arrive at Roanoke Island
1601–1900
1610 – The Battle of Klushino is fought between forces of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia during the Polish–Muscovite War.
1634 – The city of Trois-Rivières is founded in New France (now Quebec, Canada).
1744 – The Treaty of Lancaster, in which the Iroquois cede lands between the Allegheny Mountains and the Ohio River to the British colonies, was signed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
1774 – Orangetown Resolutions are adopted in the Province of New York, one of many protests against the British Parliament's Coercive Acts.
1776 – American Revolution: The United States Declaration of Independence is adopted by the Second Continental Congress.
1778 – American Revolutionary War: U.S. forces under George Clark capture Kaskaskia during the Illinois campaign.
1802 – At West Point, New York, the United States Military Academy opens.
1803 – The Louisiana Purchase is announced to the American people.
1817 – In Rome, New York, construction on the Erie Canal begins.
1826 – John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, respectively the second and third presidents of the United States, die on the same day, on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the United States Declaration of Independence. Adams' last words were, "Thomas Jefferson survives," not knowing that Jefferson had died hours earlier.
1827 – Slavery is abolished in the State of New York.
1831 – Samuel Francis Smith writes "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" for the Boston, Massachusetts July 4 festivities.
1832 – John Neal delivers the first public lecture in the US to advocate the rights of women.
1837 – Grand Junction Railway, the world's first long-distance railway, opens between Birmingham and Liverpool.
1838 – The Iowa Territory is organized.
1845 – Henry David Thoreau moves into a small cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau's account of his two years there, Walden, will become a touchstone of the environmental movement.
1855 – The first edition of Walt Whitman's book of poems, Leaves of Grass, is published in Brooklyn.
1862 – Lewis Carroll tells Alice Liddell a story that would grow into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequels.
1863 – American Civil War: Siege of Vicksburg: Vicksburg, Mississippi surrenders to U.S. forces under Ulysses S. Grant after 47 days of siege.
1863 – American Civil War: Union forces repulse a Confederate army at the Battle of Helena in Arkansas. The Confederate loss fails to relieve pressure on the besieged city of Vicksburg, and paves the way for the Union to capture Little Rock.
1863 – American Civil War: The Army of Northern Virginia withdraws from the battlefield after losing the Battle of Gettysburg, signalling an end to the Confederate invasion of U.S. territory.
1879 – Anglo-Zulu War: The Zululand capital of Ulundi is captured by British troops and burned to the ground, ending the war and forcing King Cetshwayo to flee.
1881 – In Alabama, the Tuskegee Institute opens.
1886 – The Canadian Pacific Railway's first scheduled train from Montreal arrives in Port Moody on the Pacific coast, after six days of travel.
1887 – The founder of Pakistan, Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, joins Sindh-Madrasa-tul-Islam, Karachi.
1892 – Western Samoa changes the International Date Line, causing Monday (July 4) to occur twice, resulting in a year with 367 days.
1894 – The short-lived Republic of Hawaii is proclaimed by Sanford B. Dole.
1898 – En route from New York to Le Havre, the SS La Bourgogne collides with another ship and sinks off the coast of Sable Island, with the loss of 549 lives.
1901–present
1901 – William Howard Taft becomes American governor of the Philippines.
1903 – The Philippine–American War is officially concluded.
1910 – The Johnson–Jeffries riots occur after African-American boxer Jack Johnson knocks out white boxer Jim Jeffries in the 15th round. Between 11 and 26 people are killed and hundreds more injured.
1911 – A massive heat wave strikes the northeastern United States, killing 380 people in eleven days and breaking temperature records in several cities.
1913 – President Woodrow Wilson addresses American Civil War veterans at the Great Reunion of 1913.
1914 – The funeral of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie takes place in Vienna, six days after their assassinations in Sarajevo.
1918 – Mehmed V died at the age of 73 and Ottoman sultan Mehmed VI ascends to the throne.
1918 – World War I: The Battle of Hamel, a successful attack by the Australian Corps against German positions near the town of Le Hamel on the Western Front.
1918 – Bolsheviks kill Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family (Julian calendar date).
1927 – First flight of the Lockheed Vega.
1939 – Lou Gehrig, recently diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, informs a crowd at Yankee Stadium that he considers himself "The luckiest man on the face of the earth", then announces his retirement from major league baseball.
1941 – Nazi crimes against the Polish nation: Nazi troops massacre Polish scientists and writers in the captured Ukrainian city of Lviv.
1941 – World War II: The Burning of the Riga synagogues: The Great Choral Synagogue in German-occupied Riga is burnt with 300 Jews locked in the basement.
1942 – World War II: The 250-day Siege of Sevastopol in the Crimea ends when the city falls to Axis forces.
1943 – World War II: The Battle of Kursk, the largest full-scale battle in history and the world's largest tank battle, begins in the village of Prokhorovka.
1943 – World War II: In Gibraltar, a Royal Air Force B-24 Liberator bomber crashes into the sea in an apparent accident moments after takeoff, killing sixteen passengers on board, including general Władysław Sikorski, the commander-in-chief of the Polish Army and the Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile; only the pilot survives.
1946 – The Kielce pogrom against Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland.
1946 – After 381 years of near-continuous colonial rule by various powers, the Philippines attains full independence from the United States.
1947 – The "Indian Independence Bill" is presented before the British House of Commons, proposing the independence of the Provinces of British India into two sovereign countries: India and Pakistan.
1950 – Cold War: Radio Free Europe first broadcasts.
1951 – Cold War: A court in Czechoslovakia sentences American journalist William N. Oatis to ten years in prison on charges of espionage.
1951 – William Shockley announces the invention of the junction transistor.
1954 – Rationing ends in the United Kingdom.
1960 – Due to the post-Independence Day admission of Hawaii as the 50th U.S. state on August 21, 1959, the 50-star flag of the United States debuts in Philadelphia, almost ten and a half months later (see Flag Acts (United States)).
1961 – On its maiden voyage, the Soviet nuclear-powered submarine K-19 suffers a complete loss of coolant to its reactor. The crew are able to effect repairs, but 22 of them die of radiation poisoning over the following two years.
1966 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Freedom of Information Act into United States law. The act went into effect the next year.
1976 – Israeli commandos raid Entebbe airport in Uganda, rescuing all but four of the passengers and crew of an Air France jetliner seized by Palestinian terrorists.
1976 – The U.S. celebrates its Bicentennial.
1977 – The George Jackson Brigade plants a bomb at the main power substation for the Washington state capitol in Olympia, in solidarity with a prison strike at the Walla Walla State Penitentiary Intensive Security Unit.
1982 – Three Iranian diplomats and a journalist are kidnapped in Lebanon by Phalange forces, and their fate remains unknown.
1987 – In France, former Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie (a.k.a. the "Butcher of Lyon") is convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment.
1994 – Rwandan genocide: Kigali, the Rwandan capital, is captured by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, ending the genocide in the city.
1997 – NASA's Pathfinder space probe lands on the surface of Mars.
1998 – Japan launches the Nozomi probe to Mars, joining the United States and Russia as a space exploring nation.
2001 – Vladivostock Air Flight 352 crashes on approach to Irkutsk Airport killing all 145 people on board.
2002 – A Boeing 707 crashes near Bangui M'Poko International Airport in Bangui, Central African Republic, killing 28.
2004 – The cornerstone of the Freedom Tower is laid on the World Trade Center site in New York City.
2004 – Greece beats Portugal in the UEFA Euro 2004 Final and becomes European Champion for first time in its history.
2005 – The Deep Impact collider hits the comet Tempel 1.
2006 – Space Shuttle program: Discovery launches STS-121 to the International Space Station. The event gained wide media attention as it was the only shuttle launch in the program's history to occur on the United States' Independence Day.
2009 – The Statue of Liberty's crown reopens to the public after eight years of closure due to security concerns following the September 11 attacks.
2009 – The first of four days of bombings begins on the southern Philippine island group of Mindanao.
2012 – The discovery of particles consistent with the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider is announced at CERN.
2015 – Chile claims its first title in international football by defeating Argentina in the 2015 Copa América Final.
Births
Pre-1600
68 – Salonina Matidia, Roman daughter of Ulpia Marciana (d. 119)
1095 – Usama ibn Munqidh, Muslim poet, author and faris (Knight) (d. 1188)
1330 – Ashikaga Yoshiakira, Japanese shōgun (d. 1367)
1477 – Johannes Aventinus, Bavarian historian and philologist (d. 1534)
1546 – Murad III, Ottoman sultan (d. 1595)
1601–1900
1656 – John Leake, Royal Navy admiral (d. 1720)
1694 – Louis-Claude Daquin, French organist and composer (d. 1772)
1715 – Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, German poet and academic (d. 1769)
1719 – Michel-Jean Sedaine, French playwright (d. 1797)
1729 – George Leonard, American lawyer, jurist and politician (d. 1819)
1753 – Jean-Pierre Blanchard, French inventor, best known as a pioneer in balloon flight (d. 1809)
1790 – George Everest, Welsh geographer and surveyor (d. 1866)
1799 – Oscar I of Sweden (d. 1859)
1804 – Nathaniel Hawthorne, American novelist and short story writer (d. 1864)
1807 – Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italian general and politician (d. 1882)
1816 – Hiram Walker, American businessman, founded Canadian Club whisky (d. 1899)
1826 – Stephen Foster, American songwriter and composer (d. 1864)
1842 – Hermann Cohen, German philosopher (d. 1918)
1845 – Thomas John Barnardo, Irish philanthropist and humanitarian (d. 1905)
1847 – James Anthony Bailey, American circus ringmaster, co-founded Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus (d. 1906)
1854 – Victor Babeș, Romanian physician and biologist (d. 1926)
1868 – Henrietta Swan Leavitt, American astronomer and academic (d. 1921)
1886 – Tom Longboat, Canadian runner and soldier (d. 1949)
1871 – Hubert Cecil Booth, English engineer (d. 1955)
1872 – Calvin Coolidge, American lawyer and politician, 30th President of the United States (d. 1933)
1874 – John McPhee, Australian journalist and politician, 27th Premier of Tasmania (d. 1952)
1880 – Victor Kraft, Austrian philosopher from the Vienna Circle (d. 1975)
1881 – Ulysses S. Grant III, American general (d. 1968)
1883 – Rube Goldberg, American sculptor, cartoonist, and engineer (d. 1970)
1887 – Pio Pion, Italian engineer and businessman (d. 1965)
1888 – Henry Armetta, Italian-American actor and singer (d. 1945)
1895 – Irving Caesar, American songwriter and composer (d. 1996)
1896 – Mao Dun, Chinese journalist, author, and critic (d. 1981)
1897 – Alluri Sitarama Raju, Indian activist (d. 1924)
1898 – Pilar Barbosa, Puerto Rican-American historian and activist (d. 1997)
1898 – Gertrude Lawrence, British actress, singer, and dancer (d. 1952)
1898 – Gulzarilal Nanda, Indian politician (d. 1998)
1898 – Gertrude Weaver, American supercentenarian (d. 2015)
1900 – Belinda Dann, Indigenous Australian who was one of the Stolen Generation, reunited with family aged 107 (d. 2007)
1900 – Nellie Mae Rowe, American folk artist (d. 1982)
1901–present
1902 – Meyer Lansky, American gangster (d. 1983)
1902 – George Murphy, American actor and politician (d. 1992)
1903 – Flor Peeters, Belgian organist, composer, and educator (d. 1986)
1904 – Angela Baddeley, English actress (d. 1976)
1905 – Irving Johnson, American sailor and author (d. 1991)
1905 – Robert Hankey, 2nd Baron Hankey, British diplomat and public servant (d. 1996)
1905 – Lionel Trilling, American critic, essayist, short story writer, and educator (d. 1975)
1906 – Vincent Schaefer, American chemist and meteorologist (d. 1993)
1907 – John Anderson, American discus thrower (d. 1948)
1907 – Howard Taubman, American author and critic (d. 1996)
1909 – Alec Templeton, Welsh composer, pianist and satirist (d. 1963)
1910 – Robert K. Merton, American sociologist and scholar (d. 2003)
1910 – Gloria Stuart, American actress (d. 2010)
1911 – Bruce Hamilton, Australian public servant (d. 1989)
1911 – Mitch Miller, American singer and producer (d. 2010)
1911 – Elizabeth Peratrovich, Alaskan-American civil rights activist (d. 1958)
1914 – Nuccio Bertone, Italian automobile designer (d. 1997)
1915 – Timmie Rogers, American actor and singer-songwriter (d. 2006)
1916 – Iva Toguri D'Aquino, American typist and broadcaster (d. 2006)
1918 – Eppie Lederer, American journalist and radio host (d. 2002)
1918 – Johnnie Parsons, American race car driver (d. 1984)
1918 – King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV of Tonga, (d. 2006)
1918 – Alec Bedser, English cricketer (d. 2010)
1918 – Eric Bedser, English cricketer (d. 2006)
1918 – Pauline Phillips, American journalist and radio host, created Dear Abby (d. 2013)
1920 – Norm Drucker, American basketball player and referee (d. 2015)
1920 – Leona Helmsley, American businesswoman (d. 2007)
1920 – Fritz Wilde, German footballer and manager (d. 1977)
1920 – Paul Bannai, American politician (d. 2019)
1921 – Gérard Debreu, French economist and mathematician, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2004)
1921 – Nasser Sharifi, Iranian sports shooter
1921 – Metropolitan Mikhail of Asyut (d. 2014)
1921 – Philip Rose, American actor, playwright, and producer (d. 2011)
1921 – Tibor Varga, Hungarian violinist and conductor (d. 2003)
1922 – R. James Harvey, American politician (d. 2019)
1923 – Rudolf Friedrich, Swiss lawyer and politician (d. 2013)
1924 – Eva Marie Saint, American actress
1924 – Delia Fiallo, Cuban author and screenwriter (d. 2021)
1925 – Ciril Zlobec, Slovene poet, writer, translator, journalist and politician (d. 2018)
1925 – Dorothy Head Knode, American tennis player (d. 2015)
1926 – Alfredo Di Stéfano, Argentinian-Spanish footballer and coach (d. 2014)
1926 – Lake Underwood, American race car driver and businessman (d. 2008)
1927 – Gina Lollobrigida, Italian actress and photographer
1927 – Neil Simon, American playwright and screenwriter (d. 2018)
1928 – Giampiero Boniperti, Italian footballer and politician (d. 2021)
1928 – Teofisto Guingona Jr., Filipino politician; 11th Vice President of the Philippines
1928 – Jassem Alwan, Syrian Army Officer (d. 2018)
1928 – Shan Ratnam, Sri Lankan physician and academic (d. 2001)
1928 – Chuck Tanner, American baseball player and manager (d. 2011)
1929 – Al Davis, American football player, coach, and manager (d. 2011)
1929 – Bill Tuttle, American baseball player (d. 1998)
1930 – George Steinbrenner, American businessman (d. 2010)
1931 – Stephen Boyd, Northern Ireland-born American actor (d. 1977)
1931 – Rick Casares, American football player and soldier (d. 2013)
1931 – Sébastien Japrisot, French author, director, and screenwriter (d. 2003)
1931 – Peter Richardson, English cricketer (d. 2017)
1932 – Aurèle Vandendriessche, Belgian runner
1934 – Yvonne B. Miller, American academic and politician (d. 2012)
1934 – Colin Welland, English actor and screenwriter (d. 2015)
1935 – Paul Scoon, Grenadian politician, 2nd Governor-General of Grenada (d. 2013)
1936 – Zdzisława Donat, Polish soprano and actress
1937 – Thomas Nagel, American philosopher and academic
1937 – Queen Sonja of Norway
1937 – Richard Rhodes, American journalist and historian
1937 – Eric Walters, Australian journalist (d. 2010)
1938 – Steven Rose, English biologist and academic
1938 – Bill Withers, American singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2020)
1940 – Pat Stapleton, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 2020)
1941 – Sam Farr, American politician
1941 – Tomaž Šalamun, Croatian-Slovenian poet and academic (d. 2014)
1941 – Pavel Sedláček, Czech singer-songwriter and guitarist
1941 – Brian Willson, American soldier, lawyer, and activist
1942 – Hal Lanier, American baseball player, coach, and manager
1942 – Floyd Little, American football player and coach (d. 2021)
1942 – Stefan Meller, French-Polish academic and politician, Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs (d. 2008)
1942 – Prince Michael of Kent
1942 – Peter Rowan, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1943 – Conny Bauer, German trombonist
1943 – Emerson Boozer, American football player and sportscaster
1943 – Adam Hart-Davis, English historian, author, and photographer
1943 – Geraldo Rivera, American lawyer, journalist, and author
1943 – Fred Wesley, American jazz and funk trombonist
1943 – Alan Wilson, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1970)
1945 – Andre Spitzer, Romanian-Israeli fencer and coach (d. 1972)
1946 – Ron Kovic, American author and activist
1946 – Michael Milken, American businessman and philanthropist
1947 – Lembit Ulfsak, Estonian actor and director (d. 2017)
1948 – René Arnoux, French race car driver
1948 – Tommy Körberg, Swedish singer and actor
1948 – Jeremy Spencer, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1950 – Philip Craven, English basketball player and swimmer
1950 – David Jensen, Canadian-English radio and television host
1951 – John Alexander, Australian tennis player and politician
1951 – Ralph Johnson, American R&B drummer and percussionist
1951 – Vladimir Tismăneanu, Romanian-American political scientist, sociologist, and academic
1951 – Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, American lawyer and politician, 6th Lieutenant Governor of Maryland
1952 – Álvaro Uribe, Colombian lawyer and politician, 39th President of Colombia
1952 – Carol MacReady, English actress
1952 – John Waite, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1952 – Paul Rogat Loeb, American author and activist
1953 – Francis Maude, English lawyer and politician, Minister for the Cabinet Office
1954 – Jim Beattie, American baseball player, coach, and manager
1954 – Morganna, American model, actress, and dancer
1954 – Devendra Kumar Joshi, 21st Chief of Naval Staff of the Indian Navy
1955 – Eero Heinäluoma, Finnish politician
1955 – Kevin Nichols, Australian cyclist
1956 – Robert Sinclair MacKay, British academic and educator
1957 – Rein Lang, Estonian politician and diplomat, 25th Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs
1958 – Vera Leth, Greenlandic Ombudsman
1958 – Kirk Pengilly, Australian guitarist, saxophonist, and songwriter
1958 – Carl Valentine, English-Canadian footballer, coach, and manager
1959 – Victoria Abril, Spanish actress and singer
1960 – Roland Ratzenberger, Austrian race car driver (d. 1994)
1961 – Richard Garriott, English-American video game designer, created the Ultima series
1962 – Pam Shriver, American tennis player and sportscaster
1963 – Henri Leconte, French tennis player and sportscaster
1963 – Laureano Márquez, Spanish-Venezuelan political scientist and journalist
1963 – José Oquendo, Puerto Rican-American baseball player and coach
1963 – Sonia Pierre, Haitian-Dominican human rights activist (d. 2011)
1964 – Cle Kooiman, American soccer player and manager
1964 – Elie Saab, Lebanese fashion designer
1964 – Edi Rama, Albanian politician
1964 – Mark Slaughter, American singer-songwriter and producer
1964 – Mark Whiting, American actor, director, and screenwriter
1965 – Harvey Grant, American basketball player and coach
1965 – Horace Grant, American basketball player and coach
1965 – Kiriakos Karataidis, Greek footballer and manager
1965 – Gérard Watkins, English actor and playwright
1966 – Ronni Ancona, Scottish actress and screenwriter
1966 – Minas Hantzidis, German-Greek footballer
1966 – Lee Reherman, American actor (d. 2016)
1967 – Vinny Castilla, Mexican baseball player and manager
1967 – Sébastien Deleigne, French athlete
1969 – Al Golden, American football player and coach
1969 – Todd Marinovich, American football player and coach
1969 – Wilfred Mugeyi, Zimbabwean footballer and coach
1972 – Stephen Giles, Canadian canoe racer and engineer
1972 – Mike Knuble, Canadian-American ice hockey player and coach
1973 – Keiko Ihara, Japanese race car driver
1973 – Gackt, Japanese musician, singer, songwriter, record producer and actor
1973 – Michael Johnson, English-Jamaican footballer and manager
1973 – Anjelika Krylova, Russian ice dancer and coach
1973 – Jan Magnussen, Danish race car driver
1973 – Tony Popovic, Australian footballer and manager
1974 – Jill Craybas, American tennis player
1974 – La'Roi Glover, American football player and sportscaster
1974 – Adrian Griffin, American basketball player and coach
1976 – Daijiro Kato, Japanese motorcycle racer (d. 2003)
1976 – Yevgeniya Medvedeva, Russian skier
1978 – Marcos Daniel, Brazilian tennis player
1978 – Émile Mpenza, Belgian footballer
1979 – Siim Kabrits, Estonian politician
1979 – Josh McCown, American football player
1979 – Renny Vega, Venezuelan footballer
1980 – Kwame Steede, Bermudan footballer
1981 – Dedé, Angolan footballer
1981 – Brock Berlin, American football player
1981 – Christoph Preuß, German footballer
1981 – Francisco Cruceta, Dominican baseball player
1981 – Will Smith, American football player (d. 2016)
1982 – Vladimir Boisa, Georgian basketball player
1982 – Vladimir Gusev, Russian cyclist
1982 – Jeff Lima, New Zealand rugby league player
1982 – Michael "The Situation" Sorrentino, American model, author and television personality
1983 – Melanie Fiona, Canadian singer-songwriter
1983 – Amantle Montsho, Botswanan sprinter
1983 – Miguel Pinto, Chilean footballer
1983 – Amol Rajan, Indian-English journalist
1983 – Mattia Serafini, Italian footballer
1984 – Jin Akanishi, Japanese singer-songwriter
1984 – Miguel Santos Soares, Timorese footballer
1985 – Kane Tenace, Australian footballer
1985 – Dimitrios Mavroeidis, Greek basketball player
1985 – Wason Rentería, Colombian footballer
1986 – Ömer Aşık, Turkish basketball player
1986 – Nguyen Ngoc Duy, Vietnamese footballer
1986 – Rafael Arévalo, Salvadoran tennis player
1986 – Willem Janssen, Dutch footballer
1986 – Terrance Knighton, American football player
1986 – Marte Elden, Norwegian skier
1987 – Wude Ayalew, Ethiopian runner
1987 – Guram Kashia, Georgian footballer
1988 – Angelique Boyer, French-Mexican actress
1989 – Benjamin Büchel, Liechtensteiner footballer
1990 – Jake Gardiner, American ice hockey player
1990 – Richard Mpong, Ghanaian footballer
1990 – Naoki Yamada, Japanese footballer
1990 – Ihar Yasinski, Belarusian footballer
1992 – Ángel Romero, Paraguayan footballer
1992 – Óscar Romero, Paraguayan footballer
1993 – Tom Barkhuizen, English footballer
1995 – Post Malone, American rapper, singer, songwriter and record producer
1999 – Moa Kikuchi, Japanese musician
2003 – Polina Bogusevich, Russian singer
Deaths
Pre-1600
673 – Ecgberht, king of Kent
907 – Luitpold, margrave of Bavaria
907 – Dietmar I, archbishop of Salzburg
910 – Luo Shaowei, Chinese warlord (b. 877)
940 – Wang Jianli, Chinese general (b. 871)
943 – Taejo of Goryeo, Korean king (b. 877)
945 – Zhuo Yanming, Chinese Buddhist monk and emperor
965 – Benedict V, pope of the Catholic Church
973 – Ulrich of Augsburg, German bishop and saint (b. 890)
975 – Gwangjong of Goryeo, Korean king (b. 925)
1187 – Raynald of Châtillon, French knight (b. 1125)
1307 – Rudolf I of Bohemia (b. 1281)
1336 – Saint Elizabeth of Portugal (b. 1271)
1429 – Carlo I Tocco, ruler of Epirus (b. 1372)
1533 – John Frith, English priest, writer, and martyr (b. 1503)
1541 – Pedro de Alvarado, Spanish general and explorer (b. 1495)
1546 – Hayreddin Barbarossa, Ottoman admiral (b. 1478)
1551 – Gregory Cromwell, 1st Baron Cromwell, English politician (b. 1514)
1601–1900
1603 – Philippe de Monte, Flemish composer and educator (b. 1521)
1623 – William Byrd, English composer (b. c. 1540)
1644 – Brian Twyne, English academic, antiquarian and archivist (b. 1581)
1648 – Antoine Daniel, French missionary and saint, one of the eight Canadian Martyrs (b. 1601)
1742 – Luigi Guido Grandi, Italian monk, mathematician, and engineer (b. 1671)
1754 – Philippe Néricault Destouches, French playwright and author (b. 1680)
1761 – Samuel Richardson, English author and painter (b. 1689)
1780 – Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine (b. 1712)
1787 – Charles, Prince of Soubise, Marshal of France (b. 1715)
1821 – Richard Cosway, English painter and academic (b. 1742)
1826 – John Adams, American lawyer and politician, 2nd President of the United States (b. 1735)
1826 – Thomas Jefferson, American architect, lawyer, and politician, 3rd President of the United States (b. 1743)
1831 – James Monroe, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 5th President of the United States (b. 1758)
1848 – François-René de Chateaubriand, French historian and politician (b. 1768)
1850 – William Kirby, English entomologist and author (b. 1759)
1854 – Karl Friedrich Eichhorn, German academic and jurist (b. 1781)
1857 – William L. Marcy, American lawyer, judge, and politician, 21st United States Secretary of State (b. 1786)
1881 – Johan Vilhelm Snellman, Finnish philosopher and politician (b. 1806)
1882 – Joseph Brackett, American composer and author (b. 1797)
1886 – Poundmaker, Canadian tribal chief (b. 1797)
1891 – Hannibal Hamlin, American lawyer and politician, 15th Vice President of the United States (b. 1809)
1901–present
1901 – Johannes Schmidt, German linguist and academic (b. 1843)
1902 – Vivekananda, Indian monk and saint (b. 1863)
1905 – Élisée Reclus, French geographer and author (b. 1830)
1910 – Melville Fuller, American lawyer and jurist, Chief Justice of the United States (b. 1833)
1910 – Giovanni Schiaparelli, Italian astronomer and historian (b. 1835)
1916 – Alan Seeger, American soldier and poet (b. 1888)
1922 – Lothar von Richthofen, German lieutenant and pilot (b. 1894)
1926 – Pier Giorgio Frassati, Italian activist and saint (b. 1901)
1934 – Marie Curie, French-Polish physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1867)
1938 – Otto Bauer, Austrian philosopher and politician, Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1881)
1938 – Suzanne Lenglen, French tennis player (b. 1899)
1941 – Antoni Łomnicki, Polish mathematician and academic (b. 1881)
1943 – Władysław Sikorski, Polish general and politician, 9th Prime Minister of the Second Republic of Poland (b. 1881)
1946 – Taffy O'Callaghan, Welsh footballer and coach (b. 1906)
1948 – Monteiro Lobato, Brazilian journalist and author (b. 1882)
1949 – François Brandt, Dutch rower and engineer (b. 1874)
1963 – Bernard Freyberg, 1st Baron Freyberg, New Zealand general and politician, 7th Governor-General of New Zealand (b. 1889)
1963 – Clyde Kennard, American activist and martyr (b. 1927)
1963 – Pingali Venkayya, Indian activist, designed the Flag of India (b. 1876)
1964 – Gaby Morlay, French actress and singer (b. 1893)
1969 – Henri Decoin, French director and screenwriter (b. 1890)
1970 – Barnett Newman, American painter and illustrator (b. 1905)
1970 – Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, American sailor and businessman (b. 1884)
1971 – August Derleth, American anthologist and author (b. 1909)
1971 – Thomas C. Hart, American admiral and politician (b. 1877)
1974 – Georgette Heyer, English author (b. 1902)
1974 – André Randall, French actor (b. 1892)
1976 – Yonatan Netanyahu, Israeli colonel (b. 1946)
1976 – Antoni Słonimski, Polish poet and playwright (b. 1895)
1977 – Gersh Budker, Ukrainian physicist and academic (b. 1918)
1979 – Lee Wai Tong, Chinese footballer and manager (b. 1905)
1980 – Maurice Grevisse, Belgian linguist and author (b. 1895)
1984 – Jimmie Spheeris, American singer-songwriter (b. 1949)
1986 – Paul-Gilbert Langevin, French musicologist, critique musical and physicist (b. 1933)
1986 – Flor Peeters, Belgian organist and composer (b. 1903)
1986 – Oscar Zariski, Belarusian-American mathematician and academic (b. 1899)
1988 – Adrian Adonis, American wrestler (b. 1954)
1990 – Olive Ann Burns, American journalist and author (b. 1924)
1991 – Victor Chang, Chinese-Australian surgeon and physician (b. 1936)
1991 – Art Sansom, American cartoonist (b. 1920)
1992 – Astor Piazzolla, Argentinian bandoneon player and composer (b. 1921)
1993 – Bona Arsenault, Canadian historian, genealogist, and politician (b. 1903)
1994 – Joey Marella, American wrestling referee (b. 1964)
1995 – Eva Gabor, Hungarian-American actress and singer (b. 1919)
1995 – Bob Ross, American painter and television host (b. 1942)
1997 – Charles Kuralt, American journalist (b. 1934)
1997 – John Zachary Young, English zoologist and neurophysiologist (b. 1907)
1999 – Leo Garel, American illustrator and educator (b. 1917)
2000 – Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Polish journalist and author (b. 1919)
2002 – Gerald Bales, Canadian organist and composer (b. 1919)
2002 – Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., American general (b. 1912)
2003 – Larry Burkett, American author and radio host (b. 1939)
2003 – André Claveau, French singer (b. 1915)
2003 – Barry White, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and producer (b. 1944)
2004 – Jean-Marie Auberson, Swiss violinist and conductor (b. 1920)
2005 – Cliff Goupille, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1915)
2005 – Hank Stram, American football player and coach (b. 1923)
2007 – Bill Pinkney, American singer (b. 1925)
2008 – Thomas M. Disch, American author and poet (b. 1940)
2008 – Jesse Helms, American politician (b. 1921)
2008 – Evelyn Keyes, American actress (b. 1916)
2008 – Terrence Kiel, American football player (b. 1980)
2008 – Charles Wheeler, German-English soldier and journalist (b. 1923)
2009 – Brenda Joyce, American actress (b. 1917)
2009 – Allen Klein, American businessman and talent agent, founded ABKCO Records (b. 1931)
2009 – Drake Levin, American guitarist (b. 1946)
2009 – Steve McNair, American football player (b. 1973)
2009 – Lasse Strömstedt, Swedish author and actor (b. 1935)
2009 – Jean-Baptiste Tati Loutard, Congolese poet and politician (b. 1938)
2010 – Robert Neil Butler, American physician and author (b. 1927)
2012 – Hiren Bhattacharyya, Indian poet and author (b. 1932)
2012 – Jimmy Bivins, American boxer (b. 1919)
2012 – Jeong Min-hyeong, South Korean footballer (b. 1987)
2012 – Eric Sykes, English actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1923)
2013 – Onllwyn Brace, Welsh rugby player and sportscaster (b. 1932)
2013 – Jack Crompton, English footballer and manager (b. 1921)
2013 – James Fulton, American dermatologist and academic (b. 1940)
2013 – Charles A. Hines, American general (b. 1935)
2013 – Bernie Nolan, Irish singer (b. 1960)
2014 – Giorgio Faletti, Italian author, screenwriter, and actor (b. 1950)
2014 – C. J. Henderson, American author and critic (b. 1951)
2014 – Earl Robinson, American baseball player (b. 1936)
2014 – Richard Mellon Scaife, American businessman (b. 1932)
2015 – Nedelcho Beronov, Bulgarian judge and politician (b. 1928)
2015 – William Conrad Gibbons, American historian, author, and academic (b. 1926)
2016 – Abbas Kiarostami, Iranian film director, screenwriter, poet, and photographer (b. 1940)
2017 – John Blackwell, American R&B, funk, and jazz drummer (b. 1973)
2017 – Daniil Granin, Soviet and Russian author (b. 1919)
2017 – Gene Conley, American MLB player and NBA player (b. 1930)
2018 – Henri Dirickx, Belgian footballer (b. 1927)
2018 – Robby Müller, Dutch cinematographer (b. 1940)
2021 – Harmoko, Indonesian politician, former parliament speaker and government minister (b. 1939)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Andrew of Crete
Bertha of Artois
Blessed Catherine Jarrige
Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati
Elizabeth of Aragon (or of Portugal)
Oda of Canterbury
Ulrich of Augsburg
July 4 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Birthday of Queen Sonja (Norway)
The first evening of Dree Festival, celebrated until July 7 (Apatani people, Arunachal Pradesh, India)
Independence Day, celebrates the Declaration of Independence of the United States from Great Britain in 1776 (United States and its dependencies)
Liberation Day (Northern Mariana Islands)
Liberation Day (Rwanda)
Republic Day (Philippines)
References
External links
Days of the year
July | [
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15852 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20Lennon | John Lennon | John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon; 9 October 19408 December 1980) was an English singer, songwriter, musician and peace activist who achieved worldwide fame as the founder, co-songwriter, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. Lennon was characterised by the rebellious nature and acerbic wit in his music, writing and drawings, on film, and in interviews. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history.
Born in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager. In 1956, he formed the Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960. Sometimes called "the smart Beatle", he was initially the group's de facto leader, a role gradually ceded to McCartney. In the mid-1960s, Lennon authored In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, two collections of nonsense writings and line drawings. Starting with "All You Need Is Love", his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement and the larger counterculture. In 1969, he started the Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, the multimedia artist Yoko Ono, held the two-week-long anti-war demonstration Bed-Ins for Peace, and quit the Beatles to embark on a solo career.
Between 1968 and 1972, Lennon and Ono collaborated on many records, including a trilogy of avant-garde albums, his solo debut John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, and the international top 10 singles "Give Peace a Chance", "Instant Karma!", "Imagine" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". Moving to New York City in 1971, his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a three-year attempt by the Richard Nixon administration to deport him. Lennon and Ono separated from 1973 to 1975, a period that included chart-topping collaborations with Elton John ("Whatever Gets You thru the Night") and David Bowie ("Fame"). Following a five-year hiatus, Lennon returned to music in 1980 with the Ono collaboration Double Fantasy. He was shot and killed by a Beatles fan, Mark David Chapman, three weeks after the album's release.
As a performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number-one singles in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Double Fantasy, his best-selling album, won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. In 1982, Lennon won the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. In 2002, Lennon was voted eighth in a BBC history poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer and thirty-eighth greatest artist of all time. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1997) and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (twice, as a member of the Beatles in 1988 and as a solo artist in 1994).
Early years: 1940–1956
Lennon was born on 9 October 1940 at Liverpool Maternity Hospital to Julia (née Stanley) (1914–1958) and Alfred Lennon (1912–1976). Alfred was a merchant seaman of Irish descent who was away at the time of his son's birth. His parents named him John Winston Lennon after his paternal grandfather, John "Jack" Lennon, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. His father was often away from home but sent regular pay cheques to 9Newcastle Road, Liverpool, where Lennon lived with his mother; the cheques stopped when he went absent without leave in February 1944. When he eventually came home six months later, he offered to look after the family, but Julia, by then pregnant with another man's child, rejected the idea. After her sister Mimi complained to Liverpool's Social Services twice, Julia gave her custody of Lennon.
In July 1946, Lennon's father visited her and took his son to Blackpool, secretly intending to emigrate to New Zealand with him. Julia followed them – with her partner at the time, Bobby Dykins – and after a heated argument, his father forced the five-year-old to choose between them. In one account of this incident, Lennon twice chose his father, but as his mother walked away, he began to cry and followed her. According to author Mark Lewisohn, however, Lennon's parents agreed that Julia should take him and give him a home. A witness who was there that day, Billy Hall, has said that the dramatic portrayal of a young John Lennon being forced to make a decision between his parents is inaccurate. Lennon had no further contact with Alf for close to 20 years.
Throughout the rest of his childhood and adolescence, Lennon lived at Mendips, 251Menlove Avenue, Woolton, with Mimi and her husband George Toogood Smith, who had no children of their own. His aunt purchased volumes of short stories for him, and his uncle, a dairyman at his family's farm, bought him a mouth organ and engaged him in solving puzzles. Julia visited Mendips on a regular basis, and John often visited her at 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, where she played him Elvis Presley records, taught him the banjo, and showed him how to play "Ain't That a Shame" by Fats Domino. In September 1980, Lennon commented about his family and his rebellious nature:
He regularly visited his cousin, Stanley Parkes, who lived in Fleetwood and took him on trips to local cinemas. During the school holidays Parkes often visited Lennon with Leila Harvey, another cousin, and the threesome often travelled to Blackpool two or three times a week to watch shows. They would visit the Blackpool Tower Circus and see artists such as Dickie Valentine, Arthur Askey, Max Bygraves and Joe Loss, with Parkes recalling that Lennon particularly liked George Formby. After Parkes's family moved to Scotland, the three cousins often spent their school holidays together there. Parkes recalled, "John, cousin Leila and I were very close. From Edinburgh we would drive up to the family croft at Durness, which was from about the time John was nine years old until he was about 16." Lennon's uncle George died of a liver haemorrhage on 5 June 1955, aged 52.
Lennon was raised as an Anglican and attended Dovedale Primary School. After passing his eleven-plus exam, he attended Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool from September 1952 to 1957, and was described by Harvey at the time as a "happy-go-lucky, good-humoured, easy going, lively lad". He often drew comical cartoons that appeared in his own, self-made school magazine called the Daily Howl.
In 1956, Julia bought John his first guitar. The instrument was an inexpensive Gallotone Champion acoustic for which she lent her son five pounds and ten shillings on the condition that the guitar be delivered to her own house and not Mimi's, knowing well that her sister was not supportive of her son's musical aspirations. Mimi was sceptical of his claim that he would be famous one day, and she hoped that he would grow bored with music, often telling him, "The guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living out of it."
On 15 July 1958, Julia Lennon was struck and killed by a car while she was walking home after visiting the Smiths' house. His mother's death traumatised the teenage Lennon, who, for the next two years, drank heavily and frequently got into fights, consumed by a "blind rage". Julia's memory would later serve as a major creative inspiration for Lennon, inspiring songs such as the 1968 Beatles song "Julia".
Lennon's senior school years were marked by a shift in his behaviour. Teachers at Quarry Bank High School described him thus: "He has too many wrong ambitions and his energy is often misplaced", and "His work always lacks effort. He is content to 'drift' instead of using his abilities." Lennon's misbehaviour created a rift in his relationship with his aunt.
Lennon failed his O-level examinations, and was accepted into the Liverpool College of Art after his aunt and headmaster intervened. At the college he began to wear Teddy Boy clothes and was threatened with expulsion for his behaviour. In the description of Cynthia Powell, Lennon's fellow student and subsequently his wife, he was "thrown out of the college before his final year".
The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970
Formation, fame and touring: 1956–1966
At the age of 15, Lennon formed a skiffle group, the Quarrymen. Named after Quarry Bank High School, the group was established by Lennon in September 1956. By the summer of 1957, the Quarrymen played a "spirited set of songs" made up of half-skiffle and half-rock and roll. Lennon first met Paul McCartney at the Quarrymen's second performance, which was held in Woolton on 6 July at the St Peter's Church garden fête. Lennon then asked McCartney to join the band.
McCartney said that Aunt Mimi "was very aware that John's friends were lower class", and would often patronise him when he arrived to visit Lennon. According to McCartney's brother Mike, their father similarly disapproved of Lennon, declaring that Lennon would get his son "into trouble". McCartney's father nevertheless allowed the fledgling band to rehearse in the family's front room at 20Forthlin Road. During this time Lennon wrote his first song, "Hello Little Girl", which became a UK top 10 hit for the Fourmost in 1963.
McCartney recommended that his friend George Harrison become the lead guitarist. Lennon thought that Harrison, then 14 years old, was too young. McCartney engineered an audition on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus, where Harrison played "Raunchy" for Lennon and was asked to join. Stuart Sutcliffe, Lennon's friend from art school, later joined as bassist. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Sutcliffe became "The Beatles" in early 1960. In August that year, the Beatles were engaged for a 48-night residency in Hamburg, in West Germany, and were desperately in need of a drummer. They asked Pete Best to join them. Lennon's aunt, horrified when he told her about the trip, pleaded with Lennon to continue his art studies instead. After the first Hamburg residency, the band accepted another in April 1961, and a third in April 1962. As with the other band members, Lennon was introduced to Preludin while in Hamburg, and regularly took the drug as a stimulant during their long, overnight performances.
Brian Epstein managed the Beatles from 1962 until his death in 1967. He had no previous experience managing artists, but he had a strong influence on the group's dress code and attitude on stage. Lennon initially resisted his attempts to encourage the band to present a professional appearance, but eventually complied, saying "I'll wear a bloody balloon if somebody's going to pay me." McCartney took over on bass after Sutcliffe decided to stay in Hamburg, and Best was replaced with drummer Ringo Starr; this completed the four-piece line-up that would remain until the group's break-up in 1970. The band's first single, "Love Me Do", was released in October 1962 and reached No. 17 on the British charts. They recorded their debut album, Please Please Me, in under 10 hours on 11 February 1963, a day when Lennon was suffering the effects of a cold, which is evident in the vocal on the last song to be recorded that day, "Twist and Shout". The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership yielded eight of its fourteen tracks. With a few exceptions, one being the album title itself, Lennon had yet to bring his love of wordplay to bear on his song lyrics, saying: "We were just writing songs... pop songs with no more thought of them than that – to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant". In a 1987 interview, McCartney said that the other Beatles idolised Lennon: "He was like our own little Elvis... We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest."
The Beatles achieved mainstream success in the UK early in 1963. Lennon was on tour when his first son, Julian, was born in April. During their Royal Variety Show performance, which was attended by the Queen Mother and other British royalty, Lennon poked fun at the audience: "For our next song, I'd like to ask for your help. For the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands... and the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewellery." After a year of Beatlemania in the UK, the group's historic February 1964 US debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show marked their breakthrough to international stardom. A two-year period of constant touring, filmmaking, and songwriting followed, during which Lennon wrote two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. The Beatles received recognition from the British establishment when they were appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1965 Queen's Birthday Honours.
Lennon grew concerned that fans who attended Beatles concerts were unable to hear the music above the screaming of fans, and that the band's musicianship was beginning to suffer as a result. Lennon's "Help!" expressed his own feelings in 1965: "I meant it... It was me singing 'help'". He had put on weight (he would later refer to this as his "Fat Elvis" period), and felt he was subconsciously seeking change. In March that year he and Harrison were unknowingly introduced to LSD when a dentist, hosting a dinner party attended by the two musicians and their wives, spiked the guests' coffee with the drug. When they wanted to leave, their host revealed what they had taken, and strongly advised them not to leave the house because of the likely effects. Later, in a lift at a nightclub, they all believed it was on fire; Lennon recalled: "We were all screaming... hot and hysterical."
In March 1966, during an interview with Evening Standard reporter Maureen Cleave, Lennon remarked, "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink... We're more popular than Jesus now – I don't know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity." The comment went virtually unnoticed in England but caused great offence in the US when quoted by a magazine there five months later. The furore that followed, which included the burning of Beatles records, Ku Klux Klan activity and threats against Lennon, contributed to the band's decision to stop touring.
Studio years, break-up and solo work: 1966–1970
After the band's final concert on 29 August 1966, Lennon filmed the anti-war black comedy How I Won the War – his only appearance in a non-Beatles feature film – before rejoining his bandmates for an extended period of recording, beginning in November. Lennon had increased his use of LSD and, according to author Ian MacDonald, his continuous use of the drug in 1967 brought him "close to erasing his identity". The year 1967 saw the release of "Strawberry Fields Forever", hailed by Time magazine for its "astonishing inventiveness", and the group's landmark album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which revealed lyrics by Lennon that contrasted strongly with the simple love songs of the group's early years.
In late June, the Beatles performed Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" as Britain's contribution to the Our World satellite broadcast, before an international audience estimated at up to 400 million. Intentionally simplistic in its message, the song formalised his pacifist stance and provided an anthem for the Summer of Love. After the Beatles were introduced to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the group attended an August weekend of personal instruction at his Transcendental Meditation seminar in Bangor, Wales. During the seminar, they were informed of Epstein's death. "I knew we were in trouble then", Lennon said later. "I didn't have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. I was scared – I thought, 'We've fucking had it now.'" McCartney organised the group's first post-Epstein project, the self-written, -produced and -directed television film Magical Mystery Tour, which was released in December that year. While the film itself proved to be their first critical flop, its soundtrack release, featuring Lennon's Lewis Carroll-inspired "I Am the Walrus", was a success.
Led by Harrison and Lennon's interest, the Beatles travelled to the Maharishi's ashram in India in February 1968 for further guidance. While there, they composed most of the songs for their double album The Beatles, but the band members' mixed experience with Transcendental Meditation signalled a sharp divergence in the group's camaraderie. On their return to London, they became increasingly involved in business activities with the formation of Apple Corps, a multimedia corporation composed of Apple Records and several other subsidiary companies. Lennon described the venture as an attempt to achieve "artistic freedom within a business structure". Released amid the Protests of 1968, the band's debut single for the Apple label included Lennon's B-side "Revolution", in which he called for a "plan" rather than committing to Maoist revolution. The song's pacifist message led to ridicule from political radicals in the New Left press. Adding to the tensions at the Beatles' recording sessions that year, Lennon insisted on having his new girlfriend, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, beside him, thereby contravening the band's policy regarding wives and girlfriends in the studio. He was especially pleased with his songwriting contributions to the double album and identified it as a superior work to Sgt. Pepper. At the end of 1968, Lennon participated in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, a television special that was not broadcast. Lennon performed with the Dirty Mac, a supergroup composed of Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell. The group also backed a vocal performance by Ono. A film version was released in 1996.
By late 1968, Lennon's increased drug use and growing preoccupation with Ono, combined with the Beatles' inability to agree on how the company should be run, left Apple in need of professional management. Lennon asked Lord Beeching to take on the role but he declined, advising Lennon to go back to making records. Lennon was approached by Allen Klein, who had managed the Rolling Stones and other bands during the British Invasion. In early 1969, Klein was appointed as Apple's chief executive by Lennon, Harrison and Starr but McCartney never signed the management contract.
Lennon and Ono were married on 20 March 1969 and soon released a series of 14 lithographs called "Bag One" depicting scenes from their honeymoon, eight of which were deemed indecent and most of which were banned and confiscated. Lennon's creative focus continued to move beyond the Beatles, and between 1968 and 1969 he and Ono recorded three albums of experimental music together: Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (known more for its cover than for its music), Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions and Wedding Album. In 1969, they formed the Plastic Ono Band, releasing Live Peace in Toronto 1969. Between 1969 and 1970, Lennon released the singles "Give Peace a Chance", which was widely adopted as an anti-Vietnam War anthem, "Cold Turkey", which documented his withdrawal symptoms after he became addicted to heroin, and "Instant Karma!".
In protest at Britain's involvement in "the Nigeria-Biafra thing" (namely, the Nigerian Civil War), its support of America in the Vietnam War and (perhaps jokingly) against "Cold Turkey" slipping down the charts, Lennon returned his MBE medal to the Queen. This gesture had no effect on his MBE status, which could not be renounced. The medal, together with Lennon's letter, is held at the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood.
Lennon left the Beatles in September 1969, but agreed not to inform the media while the group renegotiated their recording contract. He was outraged that McCartney publicised his own departure on releasing his debut solo album in April 1970. Lennon's reaction was, "Jesus Christ! He gets all the credit for it!" He later wrote, "I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that." In a December 1970 interview with Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine, he revealed his bitterness towards McCartney, saying, "I was a fool not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record." Lennon also spoke of the hostility he perceived the other members had towards Ono, and of how he, Harrison and Starr "got fed up with being sidemen for Paul ... After Brian Epstein died we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us when we went round in circles?"
Solo career: 1970–1980
Initial solo success and activism: 1970–1972
In 1970, Lennon and Ono went through primal therapy with Arthur Janov in Los Angeles, California. Designed to release emotional pain from early childhood, the therapy entailed two half-days a week with Janov for four months; he had wanted to treat the couple for longer, but they felt no need to continue and returned to London. Lennon's debut solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970), was received with praise by many music critics, but its highly personal lyrics and stark sound limited its commercial performance. The album featured the song "Mother", in which Lennon confronted his feelings of childhood rejection, and the Dylanesque "Working Class Hero", a bitter attack against the bourgeois social system which, due to the lyric "you're still fucking peasants", fell foul of broadcasters.
In January 1971, Tariq Ali expressed his revolutionary political views when he interviewed Lennon, who immediately responded by writing "Power to the People". In his lyrics to the song, Lennon reversed the non-confrontational approach he had espoused in "Revolution", although he later disowned "Power to the People", saying that it was borne out of guilt and a desire for approval from radicals such as Ali. Lennon became involved with Ali in a protest against the prosecution of Oz magazine for alleged obscenity. Lennon denounced the proceedings as "disgusting fascism", and he and Ono (as Elastic Oz Band) released the single "God Save Us/Do the Oz" and joined marches in support of the magazine.
Eager for a major commercial success, Lennon adopted a more accessible sound for his next album, Imagine (1971). Rolling Stone reported that "it contains a substantial portion of good music" but warned of the possibility that "his posturings will soon seem not merely dull but irrelevant". The album's title track later became an anthem for anti-war movements, while the song "How Do You Sleep?" was a musical attack on McCartney in response to lyrics on Ram that Lennon felt, and McCartney later confirmed, were directed at him and Ono. In "Jealous Guy", Lennon addressed his demeaning treatment of women, acknowledging that his past behaviour was the result of long-held insecurity.
In gratitude for his guitar contributions to Imagine, Lennon initially agreed to perform at Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh benefit shows in New York. Harrison refused to allow Ono to participate at the concerts, however, which resulted in the couple having a heated argument and Lennon pulling out of the event.
Lennon and Ono moved to New York in August 1971 and immediately embraced US radical left politics. The couple released their "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" single in December. During the new year, the Nixon administration took what it called a "strategic counter-measure" against Lennon's anti-war and anti-Nixon propaganda. The administration embarked on what would be a four-year attempt to deport him. Lennon was embroiled in a continuing legal battle with the immigration authorities, and he was denied permanent residency in the US; the issue would not be resolved until 1976.
Some Time in New York City was recorded as a collaboration with Ono and was released in 1972 with backing from the New York band Elephant's Memory. A double LP, it contained songs about women's rights, race relations, Britain's role in Northern Ireland and Lennon's difficulties in obtaining a green card. The album was a commercial failure and was maligned by critics, who found its political sloganeering heavy-handed and relentless. The NMEs review took the form of an open letter in which Tony Tyler derided Lennon as a "pathetic, ageing revolutionary". In the US, "Woman Is the Nigger of the World" was released as a single from the album and was televised on 11 May, on The Dick Cavett Show. Many radio stations refused to broadcast the song because of the word "nigger".
Lennon and Ono gave two benefit concerts with Elephant's Memory and guests in New York in aid of patients at the Willowbrook State School mental facility. Staged at Madison Square Garden on 30 August 1972, they were his last full-length concert appearances. After George McGovern lost the 1972 presidential election to Richard Nixon, Lennon and Ono attended a post-election wake held in the New York home of activist Jerry Rubin. Lennon was depressed and got intoxicated; he left Ono embarrassed after he had sex with a female guest. Ono's song "Death of Samantha" was inspired by the incident.
"Lost weekend": 1973–1975
As Lennon was about to record Mind Games in 1973, he and Ono decided to separate. The ensuing 18-month period apart, which he later called his "lost weekend" in reference to the film of the same name, was spent in Los Angeles and New York City in the company of May Pang. Mind Games, credited to the "Plastic U.F.Ono Band", was released in November 1973. Lennon also contributed "I'm the Greatest" to Starr's album Ringo (1973), released the same month. With Harrison joining Starr and Lennon at the recording session for the song, it marked the only occasion when three former Beatles recorded together between the band's break-up and Lennon's death.
In early 1974, Lennon was drinking heavily and his alcohol-fuelled antics with Harry Nilsson made headlines. In March, two widely publicised incidents occurred at The Troubadour club. In the first incident, Lennon stuck an unused menstrual pad on his forehead and scuffled with a waitress. The second incident occurred two weeks later, when Lennon and Nilsson were ejected from the same club after heckling the Smothers Brothers. Lennon decided to produce Nilsson's album Pussy Cats, and Pang rented a Los Angeles beach house for all the musicians. After a month of further debauchery, the recording sessions were in chaos, and Lennon returned to New York with Pang to finish work on the album. In April, Lennon had produced the Mick Jagger song "Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup)" which was, for contractual reasons, to remain unreleased for more than 30 years. Pang supplied the recording for its eventual inclusion on The Very Best of Mick Jagger (2007).
Lennon had settled back in New York when he recorded the album Walls and Bridges. Released in October 1974, it included "Whatever Gets You thru the Night", which featured Elton John on backing vocals and piano, and became Lennon's only single as a solo artist to top the US Billboard Hot 100 chart during his lifetime. A second single from the album, "#9 Dream", followed before the end of the year. Starr's Goodnight Vienna (1974) again saw assistance from Lennon, who wrote the title track and played piano. On 28 November, Lennon made a surprise guest appearance at Elton John's Thanksgiving concert at Madison Square Garden, in fulfilment of his promise to join the singer in a live show if "Whatever Gets You thru the Night", a song whose commercial potential Lennon had doubted, reached number one. Lennon performed the song along with "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I Saw Her Standing There", which he introduced as "a song by an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul".
Lennon co-wrote "Fame", David Bowie's first US number one, and provided guitar and backing vocals for the January 1975 recording. In the same month, Elton John topped the charts with his cover of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", featuring Lennon on guitar and back-up vocals; Lennon is credited on the single under the moniker of "Dr. Winston O'Boogie". He and Ono were reunited shortly afterwards. Lennon released Rock 'n' Roll (1975), an album of cover songs, in February. "Stand by Me", taken from the album and a US and UK hit, became his last single for five years. He made what would be his final stage appearance in the ATV special A Salute to Lew Grade, recorded on 18 April and televised in June. Playing acoustic guitar and backed by an eight-piece band, Lennon performed two songs from Rock 'n' Roll ("Stand by Me", which was not broadcast, and "Slippin' and Slidin'") followed by "Imagine". The band, known as Etc., wore masks behind their heads, a dig by Lennon, who thought Grade was two-faced.
Hiatus and return: 1975–1980
Sean was Lennon's only child with Ono. Sean was born on 9 October 1975 (Lennon's thirty-fifth birthday), and John took on the role of househusband. Lennon began what would be a five-year hiatus from the music industry, during which time, he later said, he "baked bread" and "looked after the baby". He devoted himself to Sean, rising at 6am daily to plan and prepare his meals and to spend time with him. He wrote "Cookin' (In the Kitchen of Love)" for Starr's Ringo's Rotogravure (1976), performing on the track in June in what would be his last recording session until 1980. He formally announced his break from music in Tokyo in 1977, saying, "we have basically decided, without any great decision, to be with our baby as much as we can until we feel we can take time off to indulge ourselves in creating things outside of the family." During his career break he created several series of drawings, and drafted a book containing a mix of autobiographical material and what he termed "mad stuff", all of which would be published posthumously.
Lennon emerged from his hiatus in October 1980, when he released the single "(Just Like) Starting Over". In November, he and Ono released the album Double Fantasy, which included songs Lennon had written in Bermuda. In June, Lennon chartered a 43-foot sailboat and embarked on a sailing trip to Bermuda. En route, he and the crew encountered a storm, rendering everyone on board seasick, except Lennon, who took control and sailed the boat through the storm. This experience re-invigorated him and his creative muse. He spent three weeks in Bermuda in a home called Fairylands writing and refining the tracks for the upcoming album.
The music reflected Lennon's fulfilment in his new-found stable family life. Sufficient additional material was recorded for a planned follow-up album Milk and Honey, which was issued posthumously, in 1984. Double Fantasy was not well received initially and drew comments such as Melody Maker'''s "indulgent sterility... a godawful yawn".
Murder: 8 December 1980
At approximately 5:00 p.m. on 8 December 1980, Lennon autographed a copy of Double Fantasy for fan Mark David Chapman before leaving The Dakota with Ono for a recording session at the Record Plant. After the session, Lennon and Ono returned to their Manhattan apartment in a limousine at around 10:50p.m. EST. They exited the vehicle and walked through the archway of the building when Chapman shot Lennon twice in the back and twice in the shoulder at close range. Lennon was rushed in a police cruiser to the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:15p.m. (EST).
Ono issued a statement the next day, saying "There is no funeral for John", ending it with the words, "John loved and prayed for the human race. Please do the same for him." His remains were cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Ono scattered his ashes in New York's Central Park, where the Strawberry Fields memorial was later created. Chapman avoided going to trial when he ignored his lawyer's advice and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20-years-to-life.
In the weeks following the murder, "(Just Like) Starting Over" and Double Fantasy topped the charts in the UK and the US. In a further example of the public outpouring of grief, "Imagine" hit number one in the UK in January 1981 and "Happy Xmas" peaked at number two. "Imagine" was succeeded at the top of the UK chart by "Woman", the second single from Double Fantasy. Later that year, Roxy Music's cover version of "Jealous Guy", recorded as a tribute to Lennon, was also a UK number-one.
Personal relationships
Cynthia Lennon
Lennon met Cynthia Powell (1939–2015) in 1957, when they were fellow students at the Liverpool College of Art. Although Powell was intimidated by Lennon's attitude and appearance, she heard that he was obsessed with the French actress Brigitte Bardot, so she dyed her hair blonde. Lennon asked her out, but when she said that she was engaged, he shouted, "I didn't ask you to fuckin' marry me, did I?" She often accompanied him to Quarrymen gigs and travelled to Hamburg with McCartney's girlfriend to visit him.
Lennon was jealous by nature and eventually grew possessive, often terrifying Powell with his anger. In her 2005 memoir John, Powell recalled that, when they were dating, Lennon once struck her after he observed her dancing with Stuart Sutcliffe. She ended their relationship as a result, until three months later, when Lennon apologised and asked to reunite. She took him back and later noted that he was never again physically abusive towards her, although he could still be "verbally cutting and unkind". Lennon later said that until he met Ono, he had never questioned his chauvinistic attitude towards women. He said that the Beatles song "Getting Better" told his own story, "I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically – any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace."
Recalling his July 1962 reaction when he learned that Cynthia was pregnant, Lennon said, "There's only one thing for it Cyn. We'll have to get married." The couple wed on 23 August at the Mount Pleasant Register Office in Liverpool, with Brian Epstein serving as best man. His marriage began just as Beatlemania was taking off across the UK. He performed on the evening of his wedding day and would continue to do so almost daily from then on. Epstein feared that fans would be alienated by the idea of a married Beatle, and he asked the Lennons to keep their marriage secret. Julian was born on 8 April 1963; Lennon was on tour at the time and did not see his infant son until three days later.
Cynthia attributed the start of the marriage breakdown to Lennon's use of LSD, and she felt that he slowly lost interest in her as a result of his use of the drug. When the group travelled by train to Bangor, Wales in 1967 for the Maharishi Yogi's Transcendental Meditation seminar, a policeman did not recognise her and stopped her from boarding. She later recalled how the incident seemed to symbolise the end of their marriage. After spending a holiday in Greece, Cynthia arrived home at Kenwood to find Lennon sitting on the floor with Ono in terrycloth robes and left the house, feeling shocked and humiliated, to stay with friends. A few weeks later, Alexis Mardas informed Powell that Lennon was seeking a divorce and custody of Julian. She received a letter stating that Lennon was doing so on the grounds of her adultery with Italian hotelier Roberto Bassanini, an accusation which Powell denied. After negotiations, Lennon capitulated and agreed to let her divorce him on the same grounds. The case was settled out of court in November 1968, with Lennon giving her £100,000 ($240,000 in US dollars at the time), a small annual payment and custody of Julian.
Brian Epstein
The Beatles were performing at Liverpool's Cavern Club in November 1961 when they were introduced to Brian Epstein after a midday concert. Epstein was homosexual and closeted, and according to biographer Philip Norman, one of Epstein's reasons for wanting to manage the group was that he was attracted to Lennon. Almost as soon as Julian was born, Lennon went on holiday to Spain with Epstein, which led to speculation about their relationship. When he was later questioned about it, Lennon said, "Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship. It was my first experience with a homosexual that I was conscious was homosexual. We used to sit in a café in Torremolinos looking at all the boys and I'd say, 'Do you like that one? Do you like this one?' I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time: I am experiencing this." Soon after their return from Spain, at McCartney's twenty-first birthday party in June 1963, Lennon physically attacked Cavern Club master of ceremonies Bob Wooler for saying "How was your honeymoon, John?" The MC, known for his wordplay and affectionate but cutting remarks, was making a joke, but ten months had passed since Lennon's marriage, and the deferred honeymoon was still two months in the future. Lennon was drunk at the time and the matter was simple: "He called me a queer so I battered his bloody ribs in."
Lennon delighted in mocking Epstein for his homosexuality and for the fact that he was Jewish. When Epstein invited suggestions for the title of his autobiography, Lennon offered Queer Jew; on learning of the eventual title, A Cellarful of Noise, he parodied, "More like A Cellarful of Boys". He demanded of a visitor to Epstein's flat, "Have you come to blackmail him? If not, you're the only bugger in London who hasn't." During the recording of "Baby, You're a Rich Man", he sang altered choruses of "Baby, you're a rich fag Jew".
Julian Lennon
During his marriage to Cynthia, Lennon's first son Julian was born at the same time that his commitments with the Beatles were intensifying at the height of Beatlemania. Lennon was touring with the Beatles when Julian was born on 8 April 1963. Julian's birth, like his mother Cynthia's marriage to Lennon, was kept secret because Epstein was convinced that public knowledge of such things would threaten the Beatles' commercial success. Julian recalled that as a small child in Weybridge some four years later, "I was trundled home from school and came walking up with one of my watercolour paintings. It was just a bunch of stars and this blonde girl I knew at school. And Dad said, 'What's this?' I said, 'It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds.'" Lennon used it as the title of a Beatles song, and though it was later reported to have been derived from the initials LSD, Lennon insisted, "It's not an acid song." Lennon was distant from Julian, who felt closer to McCartney than to his father. During a car journey to visit Cynthia and Julian during Lennon's divorce, McCartney composed a song, "Hey Jules", to comfort him. It would evolve into the Beatles song "Hey Jude". Lennon later said, "That's his best song. It started off as a song about my son Julian ... he turned it into 'Hey Jude'. I always thought it was about me and Yoko but he said it wasn't."
Lennon's relationship with Julian was already strained, and after Lennon and Ono moved to New York in 1971, Julian did not see his father again until 1973. With Pang's encouragement, arrangements were made for Julian and his mother to visit Lennon in Los Angeles, where they went to Disneyland. Julian started to see his father regularly, and Lennon gave him a drumming part on a Walls and Bridges track. He bought Julian a Gibson Les Paul guitar and other instruments, and encouraged his interest in music by demonstrating guitar chord techniques. Julian recalls that he and his father "got on a great deal better" during the time he spent in New York: "We had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and had a great time in general."
In a Playboy interview with David Sheff shortly before his death, Lennon said, "Sean is a planned child, and therein lies the difference. I don't love Julian any less as a child. He's still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn't have pills in those days. He's here, he belongs to me, and he always will." He said he was trying to reestablish a connection with the then 17-year-old, and confidently predicted, "Julian and I will have a relationship in the future." After his death it was revealed that he had left Julian very little in his will.
Yoko Ono
Lennon first met Yoko Ono on 9 November 1966 at the Indica Gallery in London, where Ono was preparing her conceptual art exhibit. They were introduced by gallery owner John Dunbar. Lennon was intrigued by Ono's "Hammer A Nail": patrons hammered a nail into a wooden board, creating the art piece. Although the exhibition had not yet begun, Lennon wanted to hammer a nail into the clean board, but Ono stopped him. Dunbar asked her, "Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it." According to Lennon's recollection in 1980, Ono had not heard of the Beatles, but she relented on condition that Lennon pay her five shillings, to which Lennon said he replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." Ono subsequently related that Lennon had taken a bite out of the apple on display in her work Apple, much to her fury.
Ono began to telephone and visit Lennon at his home. When Cynthia asked him for an explanation, Lennon explained that Ono was only trying to obtain money for her "avant-garde bullshit". While his wife was on holiday in Greece in May 1968, Lennon invited Ono to visit. They spent the night recording what would become the Two Virgins album, after which, he said, they "made love at dawn". When Lennon's wife returned home she found Ono wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with Lennon who simply said, "Oh, hi." Ono became pregnant in 1968 and miscarried a male child on 21 November 1968, a few weeks after Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was granted.
Two years before the Beatles disbanded, Lennon and Ono began public protests against the Vietnam War. They were married in Gibraltar on 20 March 1969, and spent their honeymoon at the Hilton Amsterdam, campaigning with a week-long Bed-In for Peace. They planned another Bed-In in the United States, but were denied entry, so held one instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance". They often combined advocacy with performance art, as in their "Bagism", first introduced during a Vienna press conference. Lennon detailed this period in the Beatles song "The Ballad of John and Yoko". Lennon changed his name by deed poll on 22 April 1969, adding "Ono" as a middle name. The brief ceremony took place on the roof of the Apple Corps building, where the Beatles had performed their rooftop concert three months earlier. Although he used the name John Ono Lennon thereafter, some official documents referred to him as John Winston Ono Lennon. The couple settled at Tittenhurst Park at Sunninghill in Berkshire. After Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a king-size bed to be brought to the recording studio as he worked on the Beatles' album, Abbey Road.
Ono and Lennon moved to New York, to a flat on Bank Street, Greenwich Village. Looking for somewhere with better security, they relocated in 1973 to the more secure Dakota overlooking Central Park at 1West72nd Street.
May Pang
ABKCO Industries was formed in 1968 by Allen Klein as an umbrella company to ABKCO Records. Klein hired May Pang as a receptionist in 1969. Through involvement in a project with ABKCO, Lennon and Ono met her the following year. She became their personal assistant. In 1973, after she had been working with the couple for three years, Ono confided that she and Lennon were becoming estranged. She went on to suggest that Pang should begin a physical relationship with Lennon, telling her, "He likes you a lot." Astounded by Ono's proposition, Pang nevertheless agreed to become Lennon's companion. The pair soon left for Los Angeles, beginning an 18-month period he later called his "lost weekend". In Los Angeles, Pang encouraged Lennon to develop regular contact with Julian, whom he had not seen for two years. He also rekindled friendships with Starr, McCartney, Beatles roadie Mal Evans, and Harry Nilsson. While Lennon was drinking with Nilsson, he misunderstood something that Pang had said and attempted to strangle her. Lennon relented only after he was physically restrained by Nilsson.
In June, Lennon and Pang returned to Manhattan in their newly rented penthouse apartment where they prepared a spare room for Julian when he visited them. Lennon, who had been inhibited by Ono in this regard, began to reestablish contact with other relatives and friends. By December, he and Pang were considering a house purchase, and he refused to accept Ono's telephone calls. In January 1975, he agreed to meet Ono, who claimed to have found a cure for smoking. After the meeting, he failed to return home or call Pang. When Pang telephoned the next day, Ono told her that Lennon was unavailable because he was exhausted after a hypnotherapy session. Two days later, Lennon reappeared at a joint dental appointment; he was stupefied and confused to such an extent that Pang believed he had been brainwashed. Lennon told Pang that his separation from Ono was now over, although Ono would allow him to continue seeing her as his mistress.
Sean Lennon
Ono had previously suffered three miscarriages in her attempt to have a child with Lennon. When Ono and Lennon were reunited, she became pregnant again. She initially said that she wanted to have an abortion but changed her mind and agreed to allow the pregnancy to continue on the condition that Lennon adopt the role of househusband, which he agreed to do.
Following Sean's birth, Lennon's subsequent hiatus from the music industry would span five years. He had a photographer take pictures of Sean every day of his first year and created numerous drawings for him, which were posthumously published as Real Love: The Drawings for Sean. Lennon later proudly declared, "He didn't come out of my belly but, by God, I made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and to how he sleeps, and to the fact that he swims like a fish."
Former Beatles
While Lennon remained consistently friendly with Starr during the years that followed the Beatles' break-up in 1970, his relationships with McCartney and Harrison varied. He was initially close to Harrison, but the two drifted apart after Lennon moved to the US in 1971. When Harrison was in New York for his December 1974 Dark Horse tour, Lennon agreed to join him on stage but failed to appear after an argument over Lennon's refusal to sign an agreement that would finally dissolve the Beatles' legal partnership. Harrison later said that when he visited Lennon during his five years away from music, he sensed that Lennon was trying to communicate, but his bond with Ono prevented him. Harrison offended Lennon in 1980 when he published an autobiography that made little mention of him. Lennon told Playboy, "I was hurt by it. By glaring omission... my influence on his life is absolutely zilch... he remembers every two-bit sax player or guitarist he met in subsequent years. I'm not in the book."
Lennon's most intense feelings were reserved for McCartney. In addition to attacking him with the lyrics of "How Do You Sleep?", Lennon argued with him through the press for three years after the group split. The two later began to reestablish something of the close friendship they had once known, and in 1974, they even played music together again before eventually growing apart once more. During McCartney's final visit in April 1976, Lennon said that they watched the episode of Saturday Night Live in which Lorne Michaels made a $3,000 offer to get the Beatles to reunite on the show. According to Lennon, the pair considered going to the studio to make a joke appearance, attempting to claim their share of the money, but they were too tired. Lennon summarised his feelings towards McCartney in an interview three days before his death: "Throughout my career, I've selected to work with... only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono... That ain't bad picking."
Along with his estrangement from McCartney, Lennon always felt a musical competitiveness with him and kept an ear on his music. During his career break from 1975 until shortly before his death, according to Fred Seaman, Lennon and Ono's assistant at the time, Lennon was content to sit back as long as McCartney was producing what Lennon saw as mediocre material. Lennon took notice when McCartney released "Coming Up" in 1980, which was the year Lennon returned to the studio. "It's driving me crackers!" he jokingly complained, because he could not get the tune out of his head. That same year, Lennon was asked whether the group were dreaded enemies or the best of friends, and he replied that they were neither, and that he had not seen any of them in a long time. But he also said, "I still love those guys. The Beatles are over, but John, Paul, George and Ringo go on."
Political activism
Lennon and Ono used their honeymoon as a Bed-In for Peace at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel; the March 1969 event attracted worldwide media ridicule. During a second Bed-In three months later at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Lennon wrote and recorded "Give Peace a Chance". Released as a single, the song was quickly interpreted as an anti-war anthem and sung by a quarter of a million demonstrators against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC, on 15 November, the second Vietnam Moratorium Day. In December, they paid for billboards in 10 cities around the world which declared, in the national language, "War Is Over! If You Want It".
During the year, Lennon and Ono began to support efforts by the family of James Hanratty to prove his innocence. Hanratty had been hanged in 1962. According to Lennon, those who had condemned Hanratty were "the same people who are running guns to South Africa and killing blacks in the streets ... The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it's the whole bullshit bourgeois scene." In London, Lennon and Ono staged a "Britain Murdered Hanratty" banner march and a "Silent Protest For James Hanratty", and produced a 40-minute documentary on the case. At an appeal hearing more than thirty years later, Hanratty's conviction was upheld after DNA evidence was found to match.
Lennon and Ono showed their solidarity with the Clydeside UCS workers' work-in of 1971 by sending a bouquet of red roses and a cheque for £5,000. On moving to New York City in August that year, they befriended two of the Chicago Seven, Yippie peace activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Another political activist, John Sinclair, poet and co-founder of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for selling two joints of marijuana after previous convictions for possession of the drug. In December 1971 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, 15,000 people attended the "John Sinclair Freedom Rally", a protest and benefit concert with contributions from Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, and others. Lennon and Ono, backed by David Peel and Jerry Rubin, performed an acoustic set of four songs from their forthcoming Some Time in New York City album including "John Sinclair", whose lyrics called for his release. The day before the rally, the Michigan Senate passed a bill that significantly reduced the penalties for possession of marijuana and four days later Sinclair was released on an appeal bond. The performance was recorded and two of the tracks later appeared on John Lennon Anthology (1998).
Following the Bloody Sunday incident in Northern Ireland in 1972, in which fourteen unarmed civil rights protesters were shot dead by the British Army, Lennon said that given the choice between the army and the IRA (who were not involved in the incident) he would side with the latter. Lennon and Ono wrote two songs protesting British presence and actions in Ireland for their Some Time in New York City album: "The Luck of the Irish" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday". In 2000, David Shayler, a former member of Britain's domestic security service MI5, suggested that Lennon had given money to the IRA, though this was swiftly denied by Ono. Biographer Bill Harry records that following Bloody Sunday, Lennon and Ono financially supported the production of the film The Irish Tapes, a political documentary with an Irish Republican slant.
According to FBI surveillance reports, and confirmed by Tariq Ali in 2006, Lennon was sympathetic to the International Marxist Group, a Trotskyist group formed in Britain in 1968. However, the FBI considered Lennon to have limited effectiveness as a revolutionary, as he was "constantly under the influence of narcotics".
In 1972, Lennon contributed a drawing and limerick titled "Why Make It Sad to Be Gay?" to Len Richmond and Gary Noguera's The Gay Liberation Book. Lennon's last act of political activism was a statement in support of the striking minority sanitation workers in San Francisco on 5 December 1980. He and Ono planned to join the workers' protest on 14 December.
Deportation attempt
Following the impact of "Give Peace a Chance" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" on the anti-war movement, the Nixon administration heard rumours of Lennon's involvement in a concert to be held in San Diego at the same time as the Republican National Convention and tried to have him deported. Nixon believed that Lennon's anti-war activities could cost him his reelection; Republican Senator Strom Thurmond suggested in a February 1972 memo that "deportation would be a strategic counter-measure" against Lennon. The next month the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began deportation proceedings, arguing that his 1968 misdemeanour conviction for cannabis possession in London had made him ineligible for admission to the United States. Lennon spent the next three-and-a-half years in and out of deportation hearings until 8 October 1975, when a court of appeals barred the deportation attempt, stating "the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds". While the legal battle continued, Lennon attended rallies and made television appearances. He and Ono co-hosted The Mike Douglas Show for a week in February 1972, introducing guests such as Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale to mid-America. In 1972, Bob Dylan wrote a letter to the INS defending Lennon, stating:
John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to the country's so-called art institution. They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as Artist Art by the overpowering mass media. Hurray for John and Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country's got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!
On 23 March 1973, Lennon was ordered to leave the US within 60 days. Ono, meanwhile, was granted permanent residence. In response, Lennon and Ono held a press conference on 1 April 1973 at the New York City Bar Association, where they announced the formation of the state of Nutopia; a place with "no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people". Waving the white flag of Nutopia (two handkerchiefs), they asked for political asylum in the US. The press conference was filmed, and appeared in a 2006 documentary, The U.S. vs. John Lennon. Soon after the press conference, Nixon's involvement in a political scandal came to light, and in June the Watergate hearings began in Washington, DC. They led to the president's resignation 14 months later. In December 1974, when he and members of his tour entourage visited the White House, Harrison asked Gerald Ford, Nixon's successor, to intercede in the matter. Ford's administration showed little interest in continuing the battle against Lennon, and the deportation order was overturned in 1975. The following year, Lennon received his green card certifying his permanent residency, and when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, Lennon and Ono attended the Inaugural Ball.
FBI surveillance and declassified documents
After Lennon's death, historian Jon Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files that documented the Bureau's role in the deportation attempt. The FBI admitted it had 281 pages of files on Lennon, but refused to release most of them on the grounds that they contained national security information. In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. It took 14 years of litigation to force the FBI to release the withheld pages. The ACLU, representing Wiener, won a favourable decision in their suit against the FBI in the Ninth Circuit in 1991. The Justice Department appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in April 1992, but the court declined to review the case. In 1997, respecting President Bill Clinton's newly instigated rule that documents should be withheld only if releasing them would involve "foreseeable harm", the Justice Department settled most of the outstanding issues outside court by releasing all but 10 of the contested documents.
Wiener published the results of his 14-year campaign in January 2000. Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files contained facsimiles of the documents, including "lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges". The story is told in the documentary The US vs. John Lennon. The final 10 documents in Lennon's FBI file, which reported on his ties with London anti-war activists in 1971 and had been withheld as containing "national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality", were released in December 2006. They contained no indication that the British government had regarded Lennon as a serious threat; one example of the released material was a report that two prominent British leftists had hoped Lennon would finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room.
Writing
Beatles biographer Bill Harry wrote that Lennon began drawing and writing creatively at an early age with the encouragement of his uncle. He collected his stories, poetry, cartoons and caricatures in a Quarry Bank High School exercise book that he called the Daily Howl. The drawings were often of crippled people, and the writings satirical, and throughout the book was an abundance of wordplay. According to classmate Bill Turner, Lennon created the Daily Howl to amuse his best friend and later Quarrymen bandmate Pete Shotton, to whom he would show his work before he let anyone else see it. Turner said that Lennon "had an obsession for Wigan Pier. It kept cropping up", and in Lennon's story A Carrot in a Potato Mine, "the mine was at the end of Wigan Pier." Turner described how one of Lennon's cartoons depicted a bus stop sign annotated with the question, "Why?" Above was a flying pancake, and below, "a blind man wearing glasses leading along a blind dog – also wearing glasses".
Lennon's love of wordplay and nonsense with a twist found a wider audience when he was 24. Harry writes that In His Own Write (1964) was published after "Some journalist who was hanging around the Beatles came to me and I ended up showing him the stuff. They said, 'Write a book' and that's how the first one came about". Like the Daily Howl it contained a mix of formats including short stories, poetry, plays and drawings. One story, "Good Dog Nigel", tells the tale of "a happy dog, urinating on a lamp post, barking, wagging his tail – until he suddenly hears a message that he will be killed at three o'clock". The Times Literary Supplement considered the poems and stories "remarkable ... also very funny ... the nonsense runs on, words and images prompting one another in a chain of pure fantasy". Book Week reported, "This is nonsense writing, but one has only to review the literature of nonsense to see how well Lennon has brought it off. While some of his homonyms are gratuitous word play, many others have not only double meaning but a double edge." Lennon was not only surprised by the positive reception, but that the book was reviewed at all, and suggested that readers "took the book more seriously than I did myself. It just began as a laugh for me".
In combination with A Spaniard in the Works (1965), In His Own Write formed the basis of the stage play The Lennon Play: In His Own Write, co-adapted by Victor Spinetti and Adrienne Kennedy. After negotiations between Lennon, Spinetti and the artistic director of the National Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier, the play opened at The Old Vic in 1968. Lennon and Ono attended the opening night performance, their second public appearance together. In 1969, Lennon wrote "Four in Hand", a skit based on his teenage experiences of group masturbation, for Kenneth Tynan's play Oh! Calcutta! After Lennon's death, further works were published, including Skywriting by Word of Mouth (1986), Ai: Japan Through John Lennon's Eyes: A Personal Sketchbook (1992), with Lennon's illustrations of the definitions of Japanese words, and Real Love: The Drawings for Sean (1999). The Beatles Anthology (2000) also presented examples of his writings and drawings.
Art
In 1967, Lennon, who had attended art school, funded and anonymously participated in Ono's art exhibition Half-A-Room that was held at Lisson Gallery. Following his collaborating with Ono in the form of The Plastic Ono Band that began in 1968, Lennon became involved with the Fluxus art movement. In the summer of 1968, Lennon began showing his painting and conceptual art at his You Are Here art exhibition held at Robert Fraser Gallery in London. The show, that was dedicated to Ono, included a six foot in diameter round white monochrome painting called You Are Here (1968). Besides the white monochrome paint, its surface contained only the tiny hand written inscription "you are here". This painting, and the show in general, was conceived as a response to Ono's conceptual art piece This is Not Here (1966) that was part of her Fluxus installation of wall text pieces called Blue Room Event (1966). Blue Room Event consisted of sentences that Ono wrote directly on her white New York apartment walls and ceiling. Lennon's You Are Here show also included sixty charity collection boxes, a pair of Lennon's shoes with a sign that read "I take my shoes off to you", a ready made black bike (an apparent homage to Marcel Duchamp and his 1917 Bicycle Wheel), an overturned white hat labeled For The Artist, and a large glass jar full of free-to-take you are here white pin badges. A hidden camera secretly filmed the public reaction to the show. For the July 1st opening, Lennon, dressed all in white (as was Ono), released 365 white balloons into the city sky. Each ballon had attached to it a small paper card to be mailed back to Lennon at the Robert Fraser Gallery at 69 Duke Street, with the finder's comments.
After moving to New York City, from 18 April to 12 June 1970, Lennon and Ono presented a series of Fluxus conceptual art events and concerts at Joe Jones's Tone Deaf Music Store called GRAPEFRUIT FLUXBANQUET. Performances included Come Impersonating John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Grapefruit Banquet and Portrait of John Lennon as a Young Cloud by Yoko + Everybody. That same year, Lennon also made The Complete Yoko Ono Word Poem Game (1970): a conceptual art poem collage that utilized the cut-up (or découpé) aleatory technique typical of the work of John Cage and many Fluxus artists. The cut-up technique can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs. For The Complete Yoko Ono Word Poem Game, Lennon took the portrait photo of himself that was included in the packaging of the 1968 The Beatles LP (aka The White Album) and cut it into 134 small rectangles. A single word was written on the back of each fragment, to be read in any order. The portrait image was meant to be reassembled in any order. The Complete Yoko Ono Word Poem Game was presented by Lennon to Ono on July 28th in an inscribed envelope for her to randomly assemble and reassemble at will.
Lennon made whimsical drawings and fine art prints on occasion till the end of his life. For example, Lennon exhibited at Eugene Schuster's London Arts Gallery his Bag One lithographs in an exhibition that included several depicting erotic imagery. The show opened on 15 January 1970 and 24 hours later it was raided by police officers who confiscated 8 of the 14 lithos on the grounds of indecency. The lithographs had been drawn by Lennon in 1969 chronicling his wedding and honeymoon with Yoko Ono and one of their bed-ins staged in the interests of world peace.
In 1969, Lennon appeared in the Yoko Ono Fluxus art film Self-Portrait that was premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In 1971, Lennon made an experimental art film called Erection that was edited on 16 mm film by George Maciunas, founder of the Fluxus art movement and avant-garde contemporary of Ono. The film uses the songs "Airmale" and "You" from Ono's 1971 album Fly, as its soundtrack.
Musicianship
Instruments played
Lennon played a mouth organ during a bus journey to visit his cousin in Scotland; the music caught the driver's ear. Impressed, the driver told Lennon of a harmonica he could have if he came to Edinburgh the following day, where one had been stored in the bus depot since a passenger had left it on a bus. The professional instrument quickly replaced Lennon's toy. He would continue to play the harmonica, often using the instrument during the Beatles' Hamburg years, and it became a signature sound in the group's early recordings. His mother taught him how to play the banjo, later buying him an acoustic guitar. At 16, he played rhythm guitar with the Quarrymen.
As his career progressed, he played a variety of electric guitars, predominantly the Rickenbacker 325, Epiphone Casino and Gibson J-160E, and, from the start of his solo career, the Gibson Les Paul Junior. Double Fantasy producer Jack Douglas claimed that since his Beatle days Lennon habitually tuned his D-string slightly flat, so his Aunt Mimi could tell which guitar was his on recordings. Occasionally he played a six-string bass guitar, the Fender Bass VI, providing bass on some Beatles numbers ("Back in the U.S.S.R.", "The Long and Winding Road", "Helter Skelter") that occupied McCartney with another instrument. His other instrument of choice was the piano, on which he composed many songs, including "Imagine", described as his best-known solo work. His jamming on a piano with McCartney in 1963 led to the creation of the Beatles' first US number one, "I Want to Hold Your Hand". In 1964, he became one of the first British musicians to acquire a Mellotron keyboard, though it was not heard on a Beatles recording until "Strawberry Fields Forever" in 1967.
Vocal style
The British critic Nik Cohn observed of Lennon, "He owned one of the best pop voices ever, rasped and smashed and brooding, always fierce." Cohn wrote that Lennon, performing "Twist and Shout", would "rant his way into total incoherence, half rupture himself." When the Beatles recorded the song, the final track during the mammoth one-day session that produced the band's 1963 debut album, Please Please Me, Lennon's voice, already compromised by a cold, came close to giving out. Lennon said, "I couldn't sing the damn thing, I was just screaming." In the words of biographer Barry Miles, "Lennon simply shredded his vocal cords in the interests of rock 'n' roll." The Beatles' producer, George Martin, tells how Lennon "had an inborn dislike of his own voice which I could never understand. He was always saying to me: 'DO something with my voice! ... put something on it... Make it different.'" Martin obliged, often using double-tracking and other techniques.
As his Beatles era segued into his solo career, his singing voice found a widening range of expression. Biographer Chris Gregory writes of Lennon "tentatively beginning to expose his insecurities in a number of acoustic-led 'confessional' ballads, so beginning the process of 'public therapy' that will eventually culminate in the primal screams of 'Cold Turkey' and the cathartic John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band." Music critic Robert Christgau called this Lennon's "greatest vocal performance... from scream to whine, is modulated electronically... echoed, filtered, and double tracked." David Stuart Ryan described Lennon's vocal delivery as ranging from "extreme vulnerability, sensitivity and even naivety" to a hard "rasping" style. Wiener too described contrasts, saying the singer's voice can be "at first subdued; soon it almost cracks with despair". Music historian Ben Urish recalled hearing the Beatles' Ed Sullivan Show performance of "This Boy" played on the radio a few days after Lennon's murder: "As Lennon's vocals reached their peak... it hurt too much to hear him scream with such anguish and emotion. But it was my emotions I heard in his voice. Just like I always had."
Legacy
Music historians Schinder and Schwartz wrote of the transformation in popular music styles that took place between the 1950s and the 1960s. They said that the Beatles' influence cannot be overstated: having "revolutionised the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and opened rock and roll's doors to a tidal wave of British rock acts", the group then "spent the rest of the 1960s expanding rock's stylistic frontiers". On National Poetry Day in 1999, the BBC conducted a poll to identify the UK's favourite song lyric and announced "Imagine" as the winner.
In 1997, Yoko Ono and the BMI Foundation established an annual music competition programme for songwriters of contemporary musical genres to honour John Lennon's memory and his large creative legacy. Over $400,000 have been given through BMI Foundation's John Lennon Scholarships to talented young musicians in the United States.
In a 2006 Guardian article, Jon Wiener wrote: "For young people in 1972, it was thrilling to see Lennon's courage in standing up to [US President] Nixon. That willingness to take risks with his career, and his life, is one reason why people still admire him today." For music historians Urish and Bielen, Lennon's most significant effort was "the self-portraits ... in his songs [which] spoke to, for, and about, the human condition."
In 2013, Downtown Music Publishing signed a publishing administration agreement for the US with Lenono Music and Ono Music, home to the song catalogues of John Lennon and Yoko Ono respectively. Under the terms of the agreement, Downtown represents Lennon's solo works, including "Imagine", "Instant Karma (We All Shine On)", "Power to the People", "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", "Jealous Guy", "(Just Like) Starting Over" and others.
Lennon continues to be mourned throughout the world and has been the subject of numerous memorials and tributes. In 2002, the airport in Lennon's home town was renamed the Liverpool John Lennon Airport. On what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday in 2010, Cynthia and Julian Lennon unveiled the John Lennon Peace Monument in Chavasse Park, Liverpool. The sculpture, entitled Peace & Harmony, exhibits peace symbols and carries the inscription "Peace on Earth for the Conservation of Life · In Honour of John Lennon 1940–1980". In December 2013, the International Astronomical Union named one of the craters on Mercury after Lennon.
Accolades
The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership is regarded as one of the most influential and successful of the 20th century. As performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number one singles in the US Hot 100 chart. His album sales in the US stand at 14 million units. Double Fantasy was his best-selling album, at three million shipments in the US. Released shortly before his death, it won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. The following year, the BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music was given to Lennon.
Participants in a 2002 BBC poll voted him eighth of "100 Greatest Britons". Between 2003 and 2008, Rolling Stone recognised Lennon in several reviews of artists and music, ranking him fifth of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and 38th of "100 Greatest Artists of All Time", and his albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, 22nd and 76th respectively of "Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) with the other Beatles in 1965, but returned his medal in 1969 because of "Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts". Lennon was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
Discography
Solo
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (Apple, 1970)
Imagine (Apple, 1971)
Mind Games (Apple, 1973)
Walls and Bridges (Apple, 1974)
Rock 'n' Roll (Apple, 1975)
With Yoko Ono
Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (Apple, 1968)
Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions (Zapple, 1969)
Wedding Album (Apple, 1969)
Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (Apple, 1970)
Some Time in New York City (Apple, 1972)
Double Fantasy (Geffen, 1980)
Posthumously
Milk and Honey (Polydor, 1984)
Filmography
All releases after his death in 1980 use archival footage.
Film
Television
Bibliography
In His Own Write (1964)
A Spaniard in the Works (1965)
Skywriting by Word of Mouth (1986)
See also
List of peace activists
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
http://www.grammy.com/nominees/search
Further reading
Kane, Larry (2007). Lennon Revealed. Running Press.
Pang, May; Edwards, Henry (1983). Loving John: The Untold Story. Warner Books. .
Riley, Tim (2011). Lennon: Man, Myth, Music. Hyperion.
Wiener, Jon. The John Lennon FBI Files
Yorke, Richard (1969). "John Lennon: Ringo's Right, We Can't Tour Again", New Musical Express, 7 June 1969, reproduced by Crawdaddy!, 2007.
Burger, Jeff, ed: Lennon on Lennon: Conversations With John Lennon'' (2017) Chicago Review Press,
External links
BBC Archive on John Lennon
NPR Archive on John Lennon
FBI file on John Lennon
John Lennon hosted by EMI Group Limited
1940 births
1980 deaths
1980 murders in the United States
20th-century British guitarists
20th-century English male actors
20th-century English male singers
Alumni of Liverpool College of Art
Apple Records artists
Atco Records artists
Beat musicians
Best Original Music Score Academy Award winners
Brit Award winners
British harmonica players
British male pianists
Capitol Records artists
COINTELPRO targets
Critics of religions
Deaths by firearm in Manhattan
English anti-war activists
English emigrants to the United States
English expatriates in the United States
English experimental musicians
English male film actors
English male guitarists
English male singer-songwriters
English murder victims
English pacifists
English people convicted of drug offences
English people murdered abroad
English people of Irish descent
English pop guitarists
English pop pianists
English pop singers
English rock guitarists
English rock pianists
English rock singers
English social commentators
English socialists
Geffen Records artists
Grammy Award winners
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Ivor Novello Award winners
Juno Award for International Album of the Year winners
John
Male actors from Liverpool
Male murder victims
Members of the Order of the British Empire
Musicians from Liverpool
Nonviolence advocates
Parlophone artists
People educated at Quarry Bank High School
People from Woolton
People murdered in New York City
Plastic Ono Band members
Polydor Records artists
Rhythm guitarists
The Beatles members
The Dirty Mac members
The Quarrymen members
Transcendental Meditation exponents
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15854 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%203 | June 3 |
Events
Pre-1600
350 – The Roman usurper Nepotianus, of the Constantinian dynasty, proclaims himself Roman emperor, entering Rome at the head of a group of gladiators.
713 – The Byzantine emperor Philippicus is blinded, deposed and sent into exile by conspirators of the Opsikion army in Thrace. He is succeeded by Anastasios II, who begins the reorganization of the Byzantine army.
1098 – After 5-month siege during the First Crusade, the Crusaders seize Antioch (today's Turkey).
1140 – The French scholar Peter Abelard is found guilty of heresy.
1326 – The Treaty of Novgorod delineates borders between Russia and Norway in Finnmark.
1539 – Hernando de Soto claims Florida for Spain.
1601–1900
1602 – An English naval force defeats a fleet of Spanish galleys, and captures a large Portuguese carrack at the Battle of Sesimbra Bay
1608 – Samuel de Champlain lands at Tadoussac, Quebec, in the course of his third voyage to New France, and begins erecting fortifications.
1621 – The Dutch West India Company receives a charter for New Netherland.
1658 – Pope Alexander VII appoints François de Laval vicar apostolic in New France.
1665 – James Stuart, Duke of York (later to become King James II of England), defeats the Dutch fleet off the coast of Lowestoft.
1781 – Jack Jouett begins his midnight ride to warn Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia legislature of an impending raid by Banastre Tarleton.
1839 – In Humen, China, Lin Tse-hsü destroys 1.2 million kilograms of opium confiscated from British merchants, providing Britain with a casus belli to open hostilities, resulting in the First Opium War.
1844 – The last pair of great auks is killed.
1861 – American Civil War: Battle of Philippi (also called the Philippi Races): Union forces rout Confederate troops in Barbour County, Virginia, now West Virginia.
1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Cold Harbor: Union forces attack Confederate troops in Hanover County, Virginia.
1866 – The Fenians are driven out of Fort Erie, Ontario back into the United States.
1885 – In the last military engagement fought on Canadian soil, the Cree leader, Big Bear, escapes the North-West Mounted Police.
1889 – The first long-distance electric power transmission line in the United States is completed, running between a generator at Willamette Falls and downtown Portland, Oregon.
1901–present
1916 – The National Defense Act is signed into law, increasing the size of the United States National Guard by 450,000 men.
1935 – One thousand unemployed Canadian workers board freight cars in Vancouver, beginning a protest trek to Ottawa.
1937 – The Duke of Windsor marries Wallis Simpson.
1940 – World War II: The Luftwaffe bombs Paris.
1940 – World War II: The Battle of Dunkirk ends with a German victory and with Allied forces in full retreat.
1940 – Franz Rademacher proposes plans to make Madagascar the "Jewish homeland", an idea that had first been considered by 19th century journalist Theodor Herzl.
1941 – World War II: The Wehrmacht razes the Greek village of Kandanos to the ground and murders 180 of its inhabitants.
1942 – World War II: Japan begins the Aleutian Islands Campaign by bombing Unalaska Island.
1943 – In Los Angeles, California, white U.S. Navy sailors and Marines attack Latino youths in the five-day Zoot Suit Riots.
1950 – Herzog and Lachenal of the French Annapurna expedition become the first climbers to reach the summit of an 8,000-metre peak.
1962 – At Paris Orly Airport, Air France Flight 007 overruns the runway and explodes when the crew attempts to abort takeoff, killing 130.
1963 – Soldiers of the South Vietnamese Army attack protesting Buddhists in Huế with liquid chemicals from tear-gas grenades, causing 67 people to be hospitalized for blistering of the skin and respiratory ailments.
1965 – The launch of Gemini 4, the first multi-day space mission by a NASA crew. Ed White, a crew member, performs the first American spacewalk.
1969 – Melbourne–Evans collision: off the coast of South Vietnam, the Australian aircraft carrier cuts the U.S. Navy destroyer in half; resulting in 74 deaths.
1973 – A Soviet supersonic Tupolev Tu-144 crashes near Goussainville, France, killing 14, the first crash of a supersonic passenger aircraft.
1979 – A blowout at the Ixtoc I oil well in the southern Gulf of Mexico causes at least of oil to be spilled into the waters, the second-worst accidental oil spill ever recorded.
1980 – An explosive device is detonated at the Statue of Liberty. The FBI suspects Croatian nationalists.
1980 – The 1980 Grand Island tornado outbreak hits Nebraska, causing five deaths and $300 million (equivalent to $ million in ) worth of damage.
1982 – The Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, Shlomo Argov, is shot on a London street; he survives but is left paralysed.
1984 – Operation Blue Star, a military offensive, is launched by the Indian government at Harmandir Sahib, also known as the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine for Sikhs, in Amritsar. The operation continues until June 6, with casualties, most of them civilians, in excess of 5,000.
1989 – The government of China sends troops to force protesters out of Tiananmen Square after seven weeks of occupation.
1991 – Mount Unzen erupts in Kyūshū, Japan, killing 43 people, all of them either researchers or journalists.
1992 – Aboriginal land rights are granted in Australia in Mabo v Queensland (No 2), a case brought by Eddie Mabo.
1998 – After suffering a mechanical failure, a high speed train derails at Eschede, Germany, killing 101 people.
2006 – The union of Serbia and Montenegro comes to an end with Montenegro's formal declaration of independence.
2012 – A plane carrying 153 people on board crashes in a residential neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria, killing everyone on board and six people on the ground.
2012 – The pageant for the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II takes place on the River Thames.
2013 – The trial of United States Army private Chelsea Manning for leaking classified material to WikiLeaks begins in Fort Meade, Maryland.
2013 – At least 119 people are killed in a fire at a poultry farm in Jilin Province in northeastern China.
2015 – An explosion at a gasoline station in Accra, Ghana, killing more than 200 people.
2017 – London Bridge attack: Eight people are murdered and dozens of civilians are wounded by Islamist terrorists. Three of the attackers are shot dead by the police.
2019 – Khartoum massacre: In Sudan, over 100 people are killed when security forces accompanied by Janjaweed militiamen storm and open fire on a sit-in protest.
Births
Pre-1600
1139 – Conon of Naso, Basilian abbot (d. 1236)
1421 – Giovanni di Cosimo de' Medici, Italian noble (d. 1463)
1454 – Bogislaw X, Duke of Pomerania (1474–1523) (d. 1523)
1537 – João Manuel, Prince of Portugal (d. 1554)
1540 – Charles II, Archduke of Austria (d. 1590)
1554 – Pietro de' Medici, Italian noble (d. 1604)
1576 – Giovanni Diodati, Swiss-Italian minister, theologian, and academic (d. 1649)
1594 – César, Duke of Vendôme, French nobleman (d. 1665)
1601–1900
1603 – Pietro Paolini, Italian painter (d. 1681)
1635 – Philippe Quinault, French playwright and composer (d. 1688)
1636 – John Hale, American minister (d. 1700)
1659 – David Gregory, Scottish-English mathematician and astronomer (d. 1708)
1662 – Willem van Mieris, Dutch painter (d. 1747)
1723 – Giovanni Antonio Scopoli, Italian physician, geologist, and botanist (d. 1788)
1726 – James Hutton, Scottish geologist and physician (d. 1797)
1736 – Ignaz Fränzl, German violinist and composer (d. 1811)
1770 – Manuel Belgrano, Argentinian economist, lawyer, and politician (d. 1820)
1808 – Jefferson Davis, American colonel and politician, President of the Confederate States of America from 1861 - 1865 (d. 1889)
1818 – Louis Faidherbe, French general and politician, Governor of Senegal (d. 1889)
1819 – Anton Anderledy, Swiss religious leader, 23rd Superior General of the Society of Jesus (d. 1892)
1819 – Johan Jongkind, Dutch painter (d. 1891)
1832 – Charles Lecocq, French pianist and composer (d. 1918)
1843 – Frederick VIII of Denmark (d. 1912)
1844 – Garret Hobart, American lawyer and politician, 24th Vice President of the United States (d. 1899)
1844 – Detlev von Liliencron, German poet and author (d. 1909)
1852 – Theodore Robinson, American painter and academic (d. 1896)
1853 – Flinders Petrie, English archaeologist and academic (d. 1942)
1864 – Otto Erich Hartleben, German poet and playwright (d. 1905)
1864 – Ransom E. Olds, American businessman, founded Oldsmobile and REO Motor Car Company (d. 1950)
1865 – George V of the United Kingdom (d. 1936)
1866 – George Howells Broadhurst, English-American director and manager (d. 1952)
1873 – Otto Loewi, German-American pharmacologist and psychobiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1961)
1877 – Raoul Dufy, French painter and illustrator (d. 1953)
1879 – Alla Nazimova, Ukrainian-American actress, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1945)
1879 – Raymond Pearl, American biologist and botanist (d. 1940)
1879 – Vivian Woodward, English footballer and soldier (d. 1954)
1881 – Mikhail Larionov, Russian painter and set designer (d. 1964)
1890 – Baburao Painter, Indian actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1954)
1897 – Memphis Minnie, American singer-songwriter (d. 1973)
1899 – Georg von Békésy, Hungarian-American biophysicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1972)
1900 – Adelaide Ames, American astronomer and academic (d. 1932)
1900 – Leo Picard, German-Israeli geologist and academic (d. 1997)
1901–present
1901 – Maurice Evans, English actor (d. 1989)
1901 – Zhang Xueliang, Chinese general and warlord (d. 2001)
1903 – Eddie Acuff, American actor (d. 1956)
1904 – Charles R. Drew, American physician and surgeon (d. 1950)
1904 – Jan Peerce, American tenor and actor (d. 1984)
1905 – Martin Gottfried Weiss, German SS officer (d. 1946)
1906 – R. G. D. Allen, English economist, mathematician, and statistician (d. 1983)
1906 – Josephine Baker, French actress, singer, and dancer; French Resistance operative (d. 1975)
1906 – Walter Robins, English cricketer and footballer (d. 1968)
1907 – Paul Rotha, English director and producer (d. 1984)
1910 – Paulette Goddard, American actress and model (d. 1990)
1911 – Ellen Corby, American actress and screenwriter (d. 1999)
1913 – Pedro Mir, Dominican poet and author (d. 2000)
1914 – Ignacio Ponseti, Spanish physician and orthopedist (d. 2009)
1917 – Leo Gorcey, American actor (d. 1969)
1918 – Patrick Cargill, English actor and producer (d. 1996)
1918 – Lili St. Cyr, American burlesque dancer (d. 1999)
1921 – Forbes Carlile, Australian pentathlete and coach (d. 2016)
1921 – Jean Dréjac, French singer and composer (d. 2003)
1922 – Alain Resnais, French director, cinematographer, and screenwriter (d. 2014)
1923 – Igor Shafarevich, Russian mathematician and theorist (d. 2017)
1924 – Karunanidhi, Indian screenwriter and politician, 3rd Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu (d. 2018)
1924 – Colleen Dewhurst, Canadian-American actress (d. 1991)
1924 – Jimmy Rogers, American singer and guitarist (d. 1997)
1924 – Torsten Wiesel, Swedish neurophysiologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1925 – Tony Curtis, American actor (d. 2010)
1926 – Allen Ginsberg, American poet (d. 1997)
1926 – Flora MacDonald, Canadian banker and politician, 10th Canadian Minister of Communications (d. 2015)
1927 – Boots Randolph, American saxophonist and composer (d. 2007)
1928 – Donald Judd, American sculptor and painter (d. 1994)
1928 – John Richard Reid, New Zealand cricketer (d. 2020)
1929 – Werner Arber, Swiss microbiologist and geneticist, Nobel Prize laureate
1929 – Chuck Barris, American game show host and producer (d. 2017)
1930 – Marion Zimmer Bradley, American author and poet (d. 1999)
1930 – George Fernandes, Indian journalist and politician, Minister of Defence for India (d. 2019)
1930 – Dakota Staton, American singer (d. 2007)
1930 – Abbas Zandi, Iranian wrestler (d. 2017)
1930 – Ben Wada, Japanese director and producer (d. 2011)
1930 – Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe's (d. 2020)
1931 – Françoise Arnoul, Algerian-French actress (d. 2021)
1931 – Raúl Castro, Cuban commander and politician, 18th President of Cuba
1931 – John Norman, American philosopher and author
1931 – Lindy Remigino, American runner and coach (d. 2018)
1931 – Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa, Bahranian king (d. 1999)
1936 – Larry McMurtry, American novelist and screenwriter (d. 2021)
1936 – Colin Meads, New Zealand rugby player and coach (d. 2017)
1937 – Jean-Pierre Jaussaud, French racing driver (d. 2021)
1939 – Frank Blevins, English-Australian lawyer and politician, 7th Deputy Premier of South Australia (d. 2013)
1939 – Steve Dalkowski, American baseball player (d. 2020)
1939 – Ian Hunter, English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1942 – Curtis Mayfield, American singer-songwriter and producer (d. 1999)
1943 – Billy Cunningham, American basketball player and coach
1944 – Thomas Burns, British bishop
1944 – Edith McGuire, American sprinter and educator
1944 – Eddy Ottoz, Italian hurdler and coach
1945 – Hale Irwin, American golfer and architect
1945 – Ramon Jacinto, Filipino singer, guitarist, and businessman, founded the Rajah Broadcasting Network
1945 – Bill Paterson, Scottish actor
1946 – Michael Clarke, American drummer (d. 1993)
1946 – Eddie Holman, American pop/R&B/gospel singer
1946 – Penelope Wilton, English actress
1948 – Jan Reker, Dutch footballer and manager
1950 – Frédéric François, Belgian-Italian singer-songwriter
1950 – Melissa Mathison, American screenwriter and producer (d. 2015)
1950 – Juan José Muñoz, Argentinian businessman (d. 2013)
1950 – Larry Probst, American businessman
1950 – Suzi Quatro, American-English singer-songwriter and guitarist
1950 – Christos Verelis, Greek politician, Greek Minister of Transport and Communications
1950 – Deniece Williams, American singer-songwriter
1951 – Jill Biden, American educator, First Lady of the United States
1954 – Dan Hill, Canadian singer-songwriter
1954 – Susan Landau, American mathematician and engineer
1956 – George Burley, Scottish footballer and manager
1956 – Danny Wilde, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1957 – Horst-Ulrich Hänel, German field hockey player
1959 – Imbi Paju, Estonian-Finnish journalist and author
1960 – Catherine Davani, first female Papua New Guinean judge (d. 2016)
1960 – Tracy Grimshaw, Australian television host
1960 – Carl Rackemann, Australian cricketer and sportscaster
1961 – Lawrence Lessig, American lawyer, academic, and author, founded the Creative Commons
1961 – Peter Vidmar, American gymnast
1961 – Ed Wynne, English guitarist, songwriter, and producer
1962 – Susannah Constantine, English fashion designer, journalist, and author
1962 – Dagmar Neubauer, German sprinter
1963 – Rudy Demotte, Belgian politician, 8th Minister-President of Wallonia
1963 – Toshiaki Karasawa, Japanese actor
1964 – André Bellavance, Canadian politician
1964 – Kerry King, American guitarist and songwriter
1964 – James Purefoy, English actor
1965 – Hans Kroes, Dutch swimmer
1965 – Michael Moore, British accountant and politician, Secretary of State for Scotland
1966 – Wasim Akram, Pakistani cricketer, coach, and sportscaster
1967 – Anderson Cooper, American journalist and author
1967 – Tamás Darnyi, Hungarian swimmer
1969 – Takako Minekawa, Japanese singer-songwriter
1969 – Dean Pay, Australian rugby league player and coach
1971 – Luigi Di Biagio, Italian footballer and manager
1971 – Mary Grigson, Australian cross-country mountain biker
1972 – Julie Gayet, French actress
1974 – Kelly Jones, Welsh singer-songwriter and guitarist
1974 – Serhii Rebrov, Ukrainian international footballer and manager
1975 – Jose Molina, Puerto Rican-American baseball player
1976 – Nikos Chatzis, Greek basketball player
1976 – Jamie McMurray, American race car driver
1977 – Cris, Brazilian footballer
1978 – Lyfe Jennings, American singer-songwriter and producer
1979 – Luis Fernando López, Colombian race walker
1979 – Christian Malcolm, Welsh sprinter
1980 – Amauri, Brazilian-Italian footballer
1981 – Sosene Anesi, New Zealand rugby player
1982 – Yelena Isinbayeva, Russian pole vaulter
1982 – Manfred Mölgg, Italian skier
1983 – Pasquale Foggia, Italian footballer
1985 – Papiss Cissé, Senegalese footballer
1985 – Łukasz Piszczek, Polish footballer
1986 – Al Horford, Dominican basketball player
1986 – Micah Kogo, Kenyan runner
1986 – Rafael Nadal, Spanish tennis player
1986 – Tomáš Verner, Czech ice skater
1987 – Masami Nagasawa, Japanese actress
1989 – Katie Hoff, American swimmer
1991 – Yordano Ventura, Dominican baseball player (d. 2017)
1992 – Mario Götze, German footballer
Deaths
Pre-1600
628 – Liang Shidu, Chinese rebel leader
800 – Staurakios, Byzantine general
1052 – Prince Guaimar IV of Salerno
1397 – William de Montagu, 2nd Earl of Salisbury, English commander (b. 1328)
1411 – Leopold IV, Duke of Austria (b. 1371)
1453 – Loukas Notaras, last megas doux of the Byzantine Empire
1511 – Ahmad ibn Abi Jum'ah, Islamic scholar, author of the Oran fatwa
1548 – Juan de Zumárraga, Spanish-Mexican archbishop (b. 1468)
1553 – Wolf Huber, Austrian painter, printmaker and architect (b. 1485)
1594 – John Aylmer, English bishop and scholar (b. 1521)
1601–1900
1605 – Jan Zamoyski, Polish nobleman (b. 1542)
1615 – Sanada Yukimura, Japanese samurai (b. 1567)
1640 – Theophilus Howard, 2nd Earl of Suffolk, English politician, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports (b. 1584)
1649 – Manuel de Faria e Sousa, Portuguese historian and poet (b. 1590)
1657 – William Harvey, English physician and academic (b. 1578)
1659 – Morgan Llwyd, Welsh minister and poet (b. 1619)
1665 – Charles Weston, 3rd Earl of Portland, English noble (b. 1639)
1780 – Thomas Hutchinson, American businessman and politician, Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (b. 1711)
1826 – Nikolay Karamzin, Russian historian and poet (b. 1766)
1858 – Julius Reubke, German pianist and composer (b. 1834)
1861 – Stephen A. Douglas, American lawyer and politician, 7th Secretary of State of Illinois (b. 1813)
1865 – Okada Izō, Japanese samurai (b. 1838)
1875 – Georges Bizet, French pianist and composer (b. 1838)
1877 – Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, Austrian botanist, composer, and publisher (b. 1800)
1882 – Christian Wilberg, German painter and illustrator (b. 1839)
1894 – Karl Eduard Zachariae von Lingenthal, German lawyer and jurist (b. 1812)
1899 – Johann Strauss II, Austrian composer and educator (b. 1825)
1900 – Mary Kingsley, English explorer and author (b. 1862)
1901–present
1902 – Vital-Justin Grandin, French-Canadian bishop and missionary (b. 1829)
1906 – John Maxwell, American golfer (b. 1871)
1921 – Coenraad Hiebendaal, Dutch rower and physician (b. 1879)
1924 – Franz Kafka, Czech-Austrian lawyer and author (b. 1883)
1928 – Li Yuanhong, Chinese general and politician, 2nd President of the Republic of China (b. 1864)
1933 – William Muldoon, American wrestler (b. 1852)
1938 – John Flanagan, Irish-American hammer thrower and tug of war competitor (b. 1873)
1946 – Mikhail Kalinin, Russian civil servant and politician (b. 1875)
1963 – Edmond Decottignies, French weightlifter (b. 1893)
1963 – Pope John XXIII (b. 1881)
1963 – Nâzım Hikmet Ran, Turkish poet, author, and playwright (b. 1902)
1964 – Kâzım Orbay, Turkish general and politician, 9th Turkish Speaker of the Parliament (b. 1887)
1964 – Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Finnish author and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1888)
1969 – George Edwin Cooke, American soccer player (b. 1883)
1970 – Hjalmar Schacht, Danish-German economist, banker, and politician (b. 1877)
1971 – Heinz Hopf, German-Swiss mathematician and academic (b. 1894)
1973 – Jean Batmale, French footballer and manager (b. 1895)
1974 – Michael Gaughan (Irish republican), Irish Republican hunger striker (b. 1949)
1975 – Ozzie Nelson, American actor and bandleader (b. 1906)
1975 – Eisaku Satō, Japanese lawyer and politician, 39th Prime Minister of Japan (b. 1901)
1977 – Archibald Hill, English physiologist and politician, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1886)
1977 – Roberto Rossellini, Italian director and screenwriter (b. 1906)
1981 – Carleton S. Coon, American anthropologist and academic (b. 1904)
1986 – Anna Neagle, English actress and singer (b. 1904)
1987 – Will Sampson, American actor and painter (b. 1933)
1989 – Ruhollah Khomeini, Iranian religious leader and politician, 1st Supreme Leader of Iran (b. 1902)
1990 – Robert Noyce, American physicist and businessman, co-founded the Intel Corporation (b. 1927)
1991 – Brian Bevan, Australian rugby league player (b. 1924)
1991 – Katia Krafft, French volcanologist and geologist (b. 1942)
1991 – Maurice Krafft, French volcanologist and geologist (b. 1946)
1991 – Lê Văn Thiêm, Vietnamese mathematician and academic (b. 1918)
1992 – Robert Morley, English actor and screenwriter (b. 1908)
1993 – Yeoh Ghim Seng, Singaporean politician, acting President of Singapore (b. 1918)
1994 – Puig Aubert, German-French rugby player and coach (b. 1925)
1997 – Dennis James, American actor and game show host (b. 1917)
2001 – Anthony Quinn, Mexican-American actor and producer (b. 1915)
2002 – Lew Wasserman, American talent agent and manager (b. 1913)
2003 – Felix de Weldon, Austrian-American sculptor, designed the Marine Corps War Memorial (b. 1907)
2005 – Harold Cardinal, Canadian lawyer and politician (b. 1945)
2009 – David Carradine, American actor (b. 1936)
2009 – Koko Taylor, American singer (b. 1928)
2010 – Rue McClanahan, American actress (b. 1934)
2011 – James Arness, American actor and producer (b. 1923)
2011 – Andrew Gold, American singer, songwriter, musician and arranger (b. 1951)
2011 – Bhajan Lal, Indian politician, 6th Chief Minister of Haryana (b. 1930)
2011 – Jack Kevorkian, American pathologist, author, and activist (b. 1928)
2011 – Jan van Roessel, Dutch footballer (b. 1925)
2012 – Carol Ann Abrams, American producer, author, and academic (b. 1942)
2012 – Roy Salvadori, English racing driver and manager (b. 1922)
2012 – Brian Talboys, New Zealand journalist and politician, 7th Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand (b. 1921)
2013 – Atul Chitnis, German-Indian technologist and journalist (b. 1962)
2013 – Józef Czyrek, Polish economist and politician, Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1928)
2013 – Frank Lautenberg, American soldier and politician (b. 1924)
2014 – Svyatoslav Belza, Russian journalist, author, and critic (b. 1942)
2014 – Gopinath Munde, Indian politician, 3rd Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra (b. 1949)
2015 – Avi Beker, Israeli political scientist and academic (b. 1951)
2016 – Muhammad Ali, American boxer (b. 1942)
2021 – F. Lee Bailey, American attorney (b. 1933)
Holidays and observances
Roman Empire: Festival for the goddess Bellona.
Christian feast day:
Charles Lwanga and Companions (Roman Catholic Church), and its related observances:
Martyrs' Day (Uganda)
Clotilde
Kevin of Glendalough
Ovidius
Vladimirskaya (Russian Orthodox)
June 3 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Confederate Memorial Day (Kentucky, Louisiana, and Tennessee, United States)
Economist day (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Mabo Day (Australia)
Opium Suppression Movement Day (Taiwan)
World Bicycle Day
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15855 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%202 | June 2 |
Events
Pre-1600
455 – Sack of Rome: Vandals enter Rome, and plunder the city for two weeks.
1098 – First Crusade: The first Siege of Antioch ends as Crusader forces take the city; the second siege began five days later.
1601–1900
1608 – London: Virginia gets new charter, extending borders from "sea to sea".
1615 – The first Récollet missionaries arrive at Quebec City, from Rouen, France.
1676 – Franco-Dutch War: France ensured the supremacy of its naval fleet for the remainder of the war with its victory in the Battle of Palermo.
1692 – Bridget Bishop is the first person to be tried for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts; she was found guilty and later hanged.
1763 – Pontiac's Rebellion: At what is now Mackinaw City, Michigan, Chippewas capture Fort Michilimackinac by diverting the garrison's attention with a game of lacrosse, then chasing a ball into the fort.
1774 – Intolerable Acts: The Quartering Act is enacted, allowing a governor in colonial America to house British soldiers in uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings if suitable quarters are not provided.
1780 – Gordon Riots anti Catholic riots in London resulting in an estimated 300-700 deaths.
1793 – French Revolution: François Hanriot, leader of the Parisian National Guard, arrests 22 Girondists selected by Jean-Paul Marat, setting the stage for the Reign of Terror.
1805 – Napoleonic Wars: A Franco-Spanish fleet recaptures Diamond Rock, an uninhabited island at the entrance to the bay leading to Fort-de-France, from the British.
1835 – P. T. Barnum and his circus start their first tour of the United States.
1848 – The Slavic congress in Prague begins.
1866 – The Fenians defeat Canadian forces at Ridgeway and Fort Erie, but the raids end soon after.
1896 – Guglielmo Marconi applies for a patent for his wireless telegraph.
1901–present
1909 – Alfred Deakin becomes Prime Minister of Australia for the third time.
1910 – Charles Rolls, a co-founder of Rolls-Royce Limited, becomes the first man to make a non-stop double crossing of the English Channel by plane.
1919 – Anarchists simultaneously set off bombs in eight separate U.S. cities.
1924 – U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signs the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.
1941 – World War II: German paratroopers murder Greek civilians in the villages of Kondomari and Alikianos.
1946 – Birth of the Italian Republic: In a referendum, Italians vote to turn Italy from a monarchy into a Republic. After the referendum, King Umberto II of Italy is exiled.
1953 – The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey becomes the first British coronation and one of the first major international events to be televised.
1955 – The USSR and Yugoslavia sign the Belgrade declaration and thus normalize relations between the two countries, discontinued since 1948.
1962 – During the FIFA World Cup, police had to intervene multiple times in fights between Chilean and Italian players in one of the most violent games in football history.
1964 – The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is formed.
1966 – Surveyor program: Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, becoming the first U.S. spacecraft to soft-land on another world.
1967 – Luis Monge is executed in Colorado's gas chamber, in the last pre-Furman execution in the United States.
1967 – Protests in West Berlin against the arrival of the Shah of Iran are brutally suppressed, during which Benno Ohnesorg is killed by a police officer. His death results in the founding of the terrorist group Movement 2 June.
1979 – Pope John Paul II starts his first official visit to his native Poland, becoming the first Pope to visit a Communist country.
1983 – After an emergency landing because of an in-flight fire, twenty-three passengers aboard Air Canada Flight 797 are killed when a flashover occurs as the plane's doors open. Because of this incident, numerous new safety regulations are put in place.
1990 – The Lower Ohio Valley tornado outbreak spawns 66 confirmed tornadoes in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio, killing 12.
1997 – In Denver, Timothy McVeigh is convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in which 168 people died. He was executed four years later.
2003 – Europe launches its first voyage to another planet, Mars. The European Space Agency's Mars Express probe launches from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan.
2012 – Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the killing of demonstrators during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
2014 – Telangana officially becomes the 29th state of India, formed from ten districts of northwestern Andhra Pradesh.
Births
Pre-1600
1305 – Abu Sa'id Bahadur Khan, ruler of Ilkhanate (d. 1335)
1423 – Ferdinand I of Naples (d. 1494)
1489 – Charles, Duke of Vendôme (d. 1537)
1535 – Pope Leo XI (d. 1605)
1601–1900
1602 – Rudolf Christian, Count of East Frisia, Ruler of East Frisia (d. 1628)
1621 – Rutger von Ascheberg, Courland-born soldier in Swedish service (d. 1693)
1621 – (baptized) Isaac van Ostade, Dutch painter (d. 1649)
1638 – Henry Hyde, 2nd Earl of Clarendon (d. 1709)
1644 – William Salmon, English medical writer (d. 1713)
1731 – Martha Washington, First Lady of the United States (d. 1802)
1739 – Jabez Bowen, American colonel and politician, 45th Deputy Governor of Rhode Island (d. 1815)
1740 – Marquis de Sade, French philosopher and politician (d. 1814)
1743 – Alessandro Cagliostro, Italian occultist and explorer (d. 1795)
1773 – John Randolph of Roanoke, American planter and politician, 8th United States Ambassador to Russia (d. 1833)
1774 – William Lawson, English-Australian explorer and politician (d. 1850)
1813 – Daniel Pollen, Irish-New Zealand politician, 9th Prime Minister of New Zealand (d. 1896)
1823 – Gédéon Ouimet, Canadian lawyer and politician, 2nd Premier of Quebec (d. 1905)
1835 – Pope Pius X (d. 1914)
1838 – Duchess Alexandra Petrovna of Oldenburg (d. 1900)
1840 – Thomas Hardy, English novelist and poet (d. 1928)
1840 – Émile Munier, French artist (d. 1895)
1857 – Edward Elgar, English composer and educator (d. 1934)
1857 – Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Danish author and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1919)
1861 – Concordia Selander, Swedish actress and manager (d. 1935)
1863 – Felix Weingartner, Croatian-Austrian pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1942)
1865 – George Lohmann, English cricketer (d. 1901)
1865 – Adelaide Casely-Hayford, Sierra Leone Creole advocate and activist for cultural nationalism (d. 1960)
1866 – Jack O'Connor, American baseball player and manager (d. 1937)
1875 – Charles Stewart Mott, American businessman and politician, 50th Mayor of Flint, Michigan (d. 1973)
1878 – Wallace Hartley, English violinist and bandleader (d. 1912)
1881 – Walter Egan, American golfer (d. 1971)
1891 – Thurman Arnold, American lawyer and judge (d. 1969)
1891 – Takijirō Ōnishi, Japanese admiral and pilot (d. 1945)
1899 – Lotte Reiniger, German animator and director (d. 1981)
1899 – Edwin Way Teale, American environmentalist and photographer (d. 1980)
1901–present
1904 – Frank Runacres, English painter and educator (d. 1974)
1904 – Johnny Weissmuller, Hungarian-American swimmer and actor (d. 1984)
1907 – Dorothy West, American journalist and author (d. 1998)
1907 – John Lehmann, English poet and publisher (d. 1987)
1910 – Hector Dyer, American sprinter (d. 1990)
1911 – Joe McCluskey, American runner (d. 2002)
1913 – Barbara Pym, English author (d. 1980)
1913 – Elsie Tu, English-Hong Kong educator and politician (d. 2015)
1915 – Alexandru Nicolschi, Romanian spy (d. 1992)
1917 – Heinz Sielmann, German photographer and director (d. 2006)
1918 – Ruth Atkinson, Canadian-American illustrator (d. 1997)
1918 – Kathryn Tucker Windham, American journalist and author (d. 2011)
1920 – Frank G. Clement, American lawyer and politician, 41st Governor of Tennessee (d. 1969)
1920 – Yolande Donlan, American-English actress (d. 2014)
1920 – Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Polish-German author and critic (d. 2013)
1920 – Tex Schramm, American businessman (d. 2003)
1920 – Johnny Speight, English screenwriter and producer (d. 1998)
1921 – Betty Freeman, American photographer and philanthropist (d. 2009)
1921 – Ernie Royal, American trumpet player (d. 1983)
1921 – Sigmund Sternberg, Hungarian-English businessman and philanthropist (d. 2016)
1921 – András Szennay, Hungarian priest (d. 2012)
1922 – Juan Antonio Bardem, Spanish director and screenwriter (d. 2002)
1922 – Carmen Silvera, Canadian-English actress (d. 2002)
1923 – Lloyd Shapley, American mathematician and economist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2016)
1924 – June Callwood, Canadian journalist, author, and activist (d. 2007)
1926 – Chiyonoyama Masanobu, Japanese sumo wrestler, the 41st Yokozuna (d. 1977)
1926 – Milo O'Shea, Irish-American actor (d. 2013)
1927 – W. Watts Biggers, American author, screenwriter, and animator (d. 2013)
1927 – Colin Brittan, English footballer (d. 2013)
1928 – Erzsi Kovács, Hungarian singer (d. 2014)
1928 – Rafael A. Lecuona, Cuban-American gymnast and academic (d. 2014)
1928 – Ron Reynolds, English footballer (d. 1999)
1929 – Norton Juster, American architect, author, and academic (d. 2021)
1929 – Ken McGregor, Australian tennis player (d. 2007)
1930 – Pete Conrad, American captain, pilot, and astronaut (d. 1999)
1933 – Jerry Lumpe, American baseball player and coach (d. 2014)
1933 – Lew "Sneaky Pete" Robinson, drag racer (d. 1971)
1934 – Johnny Carter, American singer (d. 2009)
1935 – Carol Shields, American-Canadian novelist and short story writer (d. 2003)
1935 – Dimitri Kitsikis, Greek poet and educator (d. 2021)
1936 – Volodymyr Holubnychy, Ukrainian race walker (d. 2021)
1937 – Rosalyn Higgins, English lawyer and judge
1937 – Sally Kellerman, American actress (d. 2022)
1937 – Jimmy Jones, American singer-songwriter (d. 2012)
1937 – Robert Paul, Canadian figure skater and choreographer
1937 – Deric Washburn, American screenwriter and playwright
1938 – Kevin Brownlow, English historian and author
1938 – George William Penrose, Lord Penrose, Scottish lawyer and judge
1939 – Charles Miller, American musician (d. 1980)
1939 – John Schlee, American golfer (d. 2000)
1940 – Constantine II of Greece
1941 – Ünal Aysal, Turkish businessman
1941 – Stacy Keach, American actor
1941 – Lou Nanne, Canadian-American ice hockey player and manager
1941 – Charlie Watts, English drummer, songwriter, and producer (d. 2021)
1942 – Mike Ahern, Australian politician, 32nd Premier of Queensland
1943 – Charles Haid, American actor and director
1943 – Crescenzio Sepe, Italian cardinal
1944 – Robert Elliott, American actor (d. 2004)
1944 – Marvin Hamlisch, American composer and conductor (d. 2012)
1945 – Richard Long, English painter, sculptor, and photographer
1945 – Bonnie Newman, American businesswoman and politician
1946 – Lasse Hallström, Swedish director, producer, and screenwriter
1946 – Peter Sutcliffe, English serial killer (d. 2020)
1948 – Jerry Mathers, American actor
1949 – Heather Couper, English astronomer and physicist (d. 2020)
1949 – Frank Rich, American journalist and critic
1950 – Joanna Gleason, Canadian actress and singer
1950 – Momčilo Vukotić, Serbian footballer and manager (d. 2021)
1951 – Gilbert Baker, American artist, gay rights activist, and designer of the rainbow flag (d. 2017)
1951 – Arnold Mühren, Dutch footballer and manager
1951 – Larry Robinson, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
1951 – Alexander Wylie, Lord Kinclaven, Scottish lawyer, judge, and educator
1952 – Gary Bettman, American commissioner of the National Hockey League
1953 – Vidar Johansen, Norwegian saxophonist
1953 – Craig Stadler, American golfer
1953 – Cornel West, American philosopher, author, and academic
1954 – Dennis Haysbert, American actor and producer
1955 – Dana Carvey, American comedian and actor
1955 – Nandan Nilekani, Indian businessman, co-founded Infosys
1955 – Mani Ratnam, Indian director, producer, and screenwriter
1955 – Michael Steele, American singer-songwriter and bass player
1956 – Jan Lammers, Dutch race car driver
1957 – Mark Lawrenson, English footballer and manager
1958 – Lex Luger, American wrestler and football player
1959 – Rineke Dijkstra, Dutch photographer
1959 – Lydia Lunch, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actress
1959 – Erwin Olaf, Dutch photographer
1960 – Olga Bondarenko, Russian runner
1960 – Tony Hadley, English singer-songwriter and actor
1960 – Kyle Petty, American race car driver and sportscaster
1961 – Dez Cadena, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1962 – Mark Plaatjes, South African-American runner and coach
1963 – Anand Abhyankar, Indian actor (d. 2012)
1964 – Caroline Link, German director and screenwriter
1965 – Russ Courtnall, Canadian ice hockey player
1965 – Mark Waugh, Australian cricketer and journalist
1965 – Steve Waugh, Australian cricketer
1966 – Dayana Cadeau, Haitian born Canadian-American professional bodybuilder
1966 – Candace Gingrich, American activist
1966 – Pedro Guerra, Spanish singer-songwriter
1966 – Petra van Staveren, Dutch swimmer
1967 – Remigija Nazarovienė, Lithuanian heptathlete and coach
1967 – Mike Stanton, American baseball player
1968 – Merril Bainbridge, Australian singer-songwriter
1968 – Andy Cohen, American television host
1968 – Lester Green, American comedian, and actor
1969 – Kurt Abbott, American baseball player
1969 – Paulo Sérgio, Brazilian footballer
1969 – David Wheaton, American tennis player, radio host, and author
1970 – B Real, American rapper and actor
1971 – Kateřina Jacques, Czech translator and politician
1972 – Wayne Brady, American actor, comedian, game show host, and singer
1972 – Raúl Ibañez, American baseball player
1972 – Wentworth Miller, American actor and screenwriter
1973 – Marko Kristal, Estonian footballer and manager
1973 – Neifi Pérez, Dominican-American baseball player
1974 – Gata Kamsky, Russian-American chess player
1974 – Matt Serra, American mixed martial artist
1975 – Salvatore Scibona, American author
1976 – Earl Boykins, American basketball player
1976 – Martin Čech, Czech ice hockey player (d. 2007)
1976 – Antônio Rodrigo Nogueira, Brazilian mixed martial artist and boxer
1976 – Tim Rice-Oxley, English singer-songwriter and keyboard player
1977 – Teet Allas, Estonian footballer
1977 – A.J. Styles, American wrestler
1977 – Zachary Quinto, American actor and producer
1978 – Dominic Cooper, English actor
1978 – Nikki Cox, American actress
1978 – Yi So-yeon, biotechnologist and astronaut, the first Korean in space
1978 – Justin Long, American actor
1979 – Morena Baccarin, Brazilian-American actress
1979 – Butterfly Boucher, Australian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1980 – Fabrizio Moretti, Brazilian-American drummer
1980 – Bobby Simmons, American basketball player
1980 – Richard Skuse, English rugby player
1980 – Abby Wambach, American soccer player and coach
1980 – Tomasz Wróblewski, Polish bass player and songwriter
1981 – Nikolay Davydenko, Russian tennis player
1981 – Chin-hui Tsao, Taiwanese baseball player
1982 – Jewel Staite, Canadian actress
1983 – Chris Higgins, American ice hockey player
1983 – Toni Livers, Swiss skier
1983 – Brooke White, American singer-songwriter and actress
1984 – Jack Afamasaga, New Zealand rugby league player
1984 – Max Boyer, Canadian wrestler
1984 – Feleti Mateo, Australian-Tongan rugby league player
1985 – Miyuki Sawashiro, Japanese voice actress and singer
1986 – Todd Carney, Australian rugby league player
1987 – Maryka Holtzhausen, South African netball player
1987 – Yoann Huget, French rugby player
1987 – Matthew Koma, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1987 – Angelo Mathews, Sri Lankan cricketer
1987 – Sonakshi Sinha, Indian actress
1988 – Staniliya Stamenova, Bulgarian canoeist
1989 – Steve Smith, Australian cricketer
1992 – Pajtim Kasami, Swiss footballer
1993 – Adam Taggart, Australian footballer
1999 – Campbell Graham, Australian rugby league player
2002 – Madison Hu, American actress
Deaths
Pre-1600
657 – Pope Eugene I
891 – Al-Muwaffaq, Abbasid general (b. 842)
910 – Richilde of Provence (b. 845)
1200 – Bishop John of Oxford
1258 – Peter I, Count of Urgell
1292 – Rhys ap Maredudd, Welsh nobleman and rebel leader
1418 – Katherine of Lancaster, queen of Henry III of Castile
1453 – Álvaro de Luna, Duke of Trujillo, Constable of Castile
1567 – Shane O'Neill, head of the O'Neill dynasty in Ireland (b. 1530)
1572 – Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk (b. 1536)
1581 – James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, Scottish soldier and politician, Lord Chancellor of Scotland (b. 1525)
1601–1900
1603 – Bernard of Wąbrzeźno, Roman Catholic priest (b. 1575)
1693 – John Wildman, English soldier and politician, Postmaster General of the United Kingdom (b. 1621)
1701 – Madeleine de Scudéry, French author (b. 1607)
1716 – Ogata Kōrin, Japanese painter and educator (b. 1658)
1754 – Ebenezer Erskine, Scottish minister and theologian (b. 1680)
1761 – Jonas Alströmer, Swedish businessman (b. 1685)
1785 – Jean Paul de Gua de Malves, French mathematician and academic (b. 1713)
1806 – William Tate, English painter (b. 1747)
1853 – Henry Trevor, 21st Baron Dacre, English general (b. 1777)
1865 – Ner Middleswarth, American judge and politician (b. 1783)
1875 – Józef Kremer, Polish psychologist, historian, and philosopher (b. 1806)
1881 – Émile Littré, French lexicographer and philosopher (b. 1801)
1882 – Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italian general and politician (b. 1807)
1901–present
1901 – George Leslie Mackay, Canadian missionary and author (b. 1844)
1927 – Hüseyin Avni Lifij, Turkish painter (b. 1886)
1929 – Enrique Gorostieta, Mexican general (b. 1889)
1933 – Frank Jarvis, American runner and triple jumper (b. 1878)
1937 – Louis Vierne, French organist and composer (b. 1870)
1941 – Lou Gehrig, American baseball player (b. 1903)
1942 – Bunny Berigan, American singer and trumpet player (b. 1908)
1947 – John Gretton, 1st Baron Gretton, English sailor and politician (b. 1867)
1948 – Viktor Brack, German physician (b. 1904)
1948 – Karl Brandt, German SS officer (b. 1904)
1948 – Karl Gebhardt, German physician (b. 1897)
1948 – Waldemar Hoven, German physician (b. 1903)
1948 – Wolfram Sievers, German SS officer (b. 1905)
1952 – Naum Torbov, Bulgarian architect, designed the Central Sofia Market Hall (b. 1880)
1956 – Jean Hersholt, Danish-American actor and director (b. 1886)
1959 – Lyda Borelli, Italian actress (b. 1884)
1961 – George S. Kaufman, American director, producer, and playwright (b. 1889)
1962 – Vita Sackville-West, English author and poet (b. 1892)
1967 – Benno Ohnesorg, German student and activist (b. 1940)
1968 – André Mathieu, Canadian pianist and composer (b. 1929)
1969 – Leo Gorcey, American actor (b. 1917)
1970 – Orhan Kemal, Turkish author (b. 1914)
1970 – Albert Lamorisse, French director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1922)
1970 – Bruce McLaren, New Zealand race car driver and engineer, founded the McLaren racing team (b. 1937)
1970 – Giuseppe Ungaretti, Italian soldier, journalist, and academic (b. 1888)
1974 – Hiroshi Kazato, Japanese race car driver (b. 1949)
1976 – Kenneth Mason, English soldier and geographer (b. 1887)
1976 – Juan José Torres, Bolivian general and politician, 61st President of Bolivia (b. 1920)
1977 – Albert Bittlmayer, German footballer (b. 1952)
1977 – Stephen Boyd, Northern Irish-born American actor (b. 1931)
1978 – Santiago Bernabéu Yeste, Spanish footballer and coach (b. 1895)
1979 – Jim Hutton, American actor (b. 1934)
1982 – Fazal Ilahi Chaudhry, Pakistani lawyer and politician, 5th President of Pakistan (b. 1904)
1983 – Stan Rogers, Canadian singer-songwriter (b. 1949)
1983 – Ray Stehr, Australian rugby league player and coach (b. 1913)
1986 – Aurèle Joliat, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1901)
1987 – Anthony de Mello, Indian-American priest and psychotherapist (b. 1931)
1987 – Sammy Kaye, American bandleader and songwriter (b. 1910)
1987 – Andrés Segovia, Spanish guitarist (b. 1893)
1988 – Raj Kapoor, Indian actor, director, and producer (b. 1924)
1989 – Ted a'Beckett, Australian cricketer and footballer (b. 1907)
1990 – Rex Harrison, English actor (b. 1908)
1991 – Ahmed Arif, Turkish poet and author (b. 1927)
1992 – Philip Dunne, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1908)
1993 – Johnny Mize, American baseball player, coach, and sportscaster (b. 1913)
1993 – Tahar Djaout, Algerian journalist, writer and poet (b. 1954)
1994 – David Stove, Australian philosopher, author, and academic (b. 1927)
1996 – John Alton, Hungarian-American cinematographer and director (b. 1901)
1996 – Leon Garfield, English author (b. 1921)
1996 – Ray Combs, American game show host (b. 1956)
1997 – Doc Cheatham, American trumpet player, singer, and bandleader (b. 1905)
1997 – Helen Jacobs, American tennis champion (b. 1908)
1999 – Junior Braithwaite, Jamaican singer (b. 1949)
2000 – Svyatoslav Fyodorov, Russian ophthalmologist, academic, and politician (b. 1927)
2000 – John Schlee, American golfer (b. 1939)
2000 – Gerald James Whitrow, English mathematician, cosmologist, and historian (b. 1912)
2001 – Imogene Coca, American actress and comedian (b. 1908)
2001 – Joey Maxim, American boxer (b. 1922)
2002 – Hugo van Lawick, Dutch director and photographer (b. 1937)
2003 – Freddie Blassie, American wrestler and manager (b. 1918)
2003 – Alma Ricard, Canadian broadcaster and philanthropist (b. 1906)
2005 – Lucien Cliche, Canadian lawyer and politician (b. 1916)
2005 – Gunder Gundersen, Norwegian skier (b. 1930)
2005 – Samir Kassir, Lebanese journalist and educator (b. 1950)
2005 – Melita Norwood, English civil servant and spy (b. 1912)
2006 – Keith Smith, English rugby player and coach (b. 1952)
2007 – Kentarō Haneda, Japanese pianist and composer (b. 1949)
2007 – Huang Ju, Chinese engineer and politician, 1st Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China (b. 1938)
2008 – Bo Diddley, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1928)
2008 – Mel Ferrer, American actor (b. 1917)
2008 – Cevher Özden, Turkish banker and businessman (b. 1933)
2009 – David Eddings, American author (b. 1931)
2012 – Avraham Botzer, Polish-Israeli commander (b. 1929)
2012 – Adolfo Calero, Nicaraguan businessman and political activist (b. 1931)
2012 – Richard Dawson, English-American soldier, actor, television personality, and game show host (b. 1932)
2012 – LeRoy Ellis, American basketball player (b. 1940)
2012 – Kathryn Joosten, American actress (b. 1939)
2012 – Jan Gmelich Meijling, Dutch commander and politician (b. 1943)
2013 – Mario Bernardi, Canadian pianist and conductor (b. 1930)
2013 – Chen Xitong, Chinese politician, 8th Mayor of Beijing (b. 1930)
2013 – Mandawuy Yunupingu, Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1956)
2014 – Ivica Brzić, Serbian footballer and manager (b. 1941)
2014 – Anjan Das, Indian director and producer (b. 1951)
2014 – Gennadi Gusarov, Russian footballer and manager (b. 1937)
2014 – Nikolay Khrenkov, Russian bobsledder (b. 1984)
2014 – Duraisamy Simon Lourdusamy, Indian cardinal (b. 1924)
2014 – Kuaima Riruako, Namibian politician (b. 1935)
2014 – Alexander Shulgin, American pharmacologist and chemist (b. 1925)
2015 – Fernando de Araújo, East Timorese politician, President of East Timor (b. 1963)
2015 – Irwin Rose, American biologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1926)
2017 – Peter Sallis, English actor (b. 1921)
Holidays and observances
Children's Day (North Korea)
Christian feast day:
Ahudemmeh (Syriac Orthodox Church).
Alexander (martyr)
Elmo
Felix of Nicosia
Marcellinus and Peter
Martyrs of Lyon, including Blandina
Pope Eugene I
Pothinus
June 2 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Civil Aviation Day (Azerbaijan)
Coronation of King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, also Social Forestry Day (Bhutan)
Day of Hristo Botev (Bulgaria)
Decoration Day (Canada)
Festa della Repubblica (Italy)
International Sex Workers Day
Telangana Day (Telangana, India)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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Events
Pre-1600
1215 – Zhongdu (now Beijing), then under the control of the Jurchen ruler Emperor Xuanzong of Jin, is captured by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, ending the Battle of Zhongdu.
1252 – Alfonso X is proclaimed king of Castile and León.
1298 – Residents of Riga and Grand Duchy of Lithuania defeated the Livonian Order in the Battle of Turaida.
1495 – A monk, John Cor, records the first known batch of Scotch whisky.
1533 – Anne Boleyn is crowned Queen of England.
1535 – Combined forces loyal to Charles V attack and expel the Ottomans from Tunis during the Conquest of Tunis.
1601–1900
1648 – The Roundheads defeat the Cavaliers at the Battle of Maidstone in the Second English Civil War.
1649 – Start of the Sumuroy Revolt: Filipinos in Northern Samar led by Agustin Sumuroy revolt against Spanish colonial authorities.
1670 – In Dover, England, Charles II of England and Louis XIV of France sign the Secret Treaty of Dover, which will force England into the Third Anglo-Dutch War.
1676 – Battle of Öland: allied Danish-Dutch forces defeat the Swedish navy in the Baltic Sea, during the Scanian War (1675–79).
1679 – The Scottish Covenanters defeat John Graham of Claverhouse at the Battle of Drumclog.
1773 – Wolraad Woltemade rescues 14 sailors at the Cape of Good Hope from the sinking ship De Jonge Thomas by riding his horse into the sea seven times. Both he and his horse, Vonk, drowned on his eighth attempt.
1779 – The court-martial for malfeasance of Benedict Arnold, a general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, begins.
1792 – Kentucky is admitted as the 15th state of the United States.
1794 – The battle of the Glorious First of June is fought, the first naval engagement between Britain and France during the French Revolutionary Wars.
1796 – Tennessee is admitted as the 16th state of the United States.
1812 – War of 1812: U.S. President James Madison asks the Congress to declare war on the United Kingdom.
1813 – Capture of USS Chesapeake.
1815 – Napoleon promulgates a revised Constitution after it passes a plebiscite.
1831 – James Clark Ross becomes the first European at the North Magnetic Pole.
1849 – Territorial Governor Alexander Ramsey declared the Territory of Minnesota officially established.
1855 – The American adventurer William Walker conquers Nicaragua.
1857 – Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal is published.
1861 – American Civil War: The Battle of Fairfax Court House is fought.
1862 – American Civil War: Peninsula Campaign: The Battle of Seven Pines (or the Battle of Fair Oaks) ends inconclusively, with both sides claiming victory.
1868 – The Treaty of Bosque Redondo is signed, allowing the Navajo to return to their lands in Arizona and New Mexico.
1879 – Napoléon Eugène, the last dynastic Bonaparte, is killed in the Anglo-Zulu War.
1890 – The United States Census Bureau begins using Herman Hollerith's tabulating machine to count census returns.
1901–present
1913 – The Greek–Serbian Treaty of Alliance is signed, paving the way for the Second Balkan War.
1916 – Louis Brandeis becomes the first Jew appointed to the United States Supreme Court.
1918 – World War I: Western Front: Battle of Belleau Wood: Allied Forces under John J. Pershing and James Harbord engage Imperial German Forces under Wilhelm, German Crown Prince.
1919 – Prohibition comes into force in Finland.
1922 – The Royal Ulster Constabulary is founded.
1929 – The 1st Conference of the Communist Parties of Latin America is held in Buenos Aires.
1930 – The Deccan Queen is introduced as first intercity train between Bombay VT (Now Mumbai CST) and Poona (Pune) to run on electric locomotives.
1939 – First flight of the German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter aircraft.
1941 – World War II: The Battle of Crete ends as Crete capitulates to Germany.
1941 – The Farhud, a massive pogrom in Iraq, starts and as a result, many Iraqi Jews are forced to leave their homes.
1943 – BOAC Flight 777 is shot down over the Bay of Biscay by German Junkers Ju 88s, killing British actor Leslie Howard and leading to speculation that it was actually an attempt to kill British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
1946 – Ion Antonescu, "Conducator" ("Leader") of Romania during World War II, is executed.
1950 – The Declaration of Conscience speech, by U.S. Senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith: "The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny - Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear." A response to Joseph R. McCarthy's speech at Wheeling, West Virginia.
1950 – The Chinchaga fire ignites. By September, it would become the largest single fire on record in North America.
1958 – Charles de Gaulle comes out of retirement to lead France by decree for six months.
1961 – The Canadian Bank of Commerce and Imperial Bank of Canada merge to form the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the largest bank merger in Canadian history.
1962 – Adolf Eichmann is hanged in Israel.
1964 – Kenya becomes a republic with Jomo Kenyatta (1897 – 22 August 1978) as its first President (1964 to 1978).
1974 – The Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choking victims is published in the journal Emergency Medicine.
1975 – The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan was founded by Jalal Talabani, Nawshirwan Mustafa, Fuad Masum and others.
1978 – The first international applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty are filed.
1979 – The first black-led government of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 90 years takes power.
1980 – Cable News Network (CNN) begins broadcasting.
1988 – European Central Bank is founded in Brussels.
1988 – The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty comes into effect.
1990 – Cold War: George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev sign a treaty to end chemical weapon production.
1993 – Dobrinja mortar attack: Thirteen are killed and 133 wounded when Serb mortar shells are fired at a soccer game in Dobrinja, west of Sarajevo.
1994 – Republic of South Africa becomes a republic in the Commonwealth of Nations.
1999 – American Airlines Flight 1420 slides and crashes while landing at Little Rock National Airport, killing 11 people on a flight from Dallas to Little Rock.
2001 – Nepalese royal massacre: Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal shoots and kills several members of his family including his father and mother.
2001 – Dolphinarium discotheque massacre: A Hamas suicide bomber kills 21 at a disco in Tel Aviv.
2004 – Oklahoma City bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols is sentenced to 161 consecutive life terms without the possibility of a parole, breaking a Guinness World Record.
2008 – A fire on the back lot of Universal Studios breaks out, destroying the attraction King Kong Encounter and a large archive of master tapes for music and film, the full extent of which was not revealed until 2019.
2009 – Air France Flight 447 crashes into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brazil on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. All 228 passengers and crew are killed.
2009 – General Motors files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It is the fourth largest United States bankruptcy in history.
2011 – A rare tornado outbreak occurs in New England; a strong EF3 tornado strikes Springfield, Massachusetts, during the event, killing four people.
2011 – Space Shuttle Endeavour makes its final landing after 25 flights.
2015 – A ship carrying 458 people capsizes on Yangtze river in China's Hubei province, killing 400 people.
Births
Pre-1600
1134 – Geoffrey, Count of Nantes (d. 1158)
1300 – Thomas of Brotherton, 1st Earl of Norfolk, English politician, Lord Marshal of England (d. 1338)
1451 – Giles Daubeney, 1st Baron Daubeney (d. 1508)
1460 – Enno I, Count of East Frisia, German noble (d. 1491)
1480 – Tiedemann Giese, Polish bishop (d. 1550)
1498 – Maarten van Heemskerck, Dutch painter (d. 1574)
1522 – Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, Dutch writer and scholar (d. 1590)
1563 – Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, English politician, Secretary of State for England (d. 1612)
1601–1900
1612 – Frans Post, Dutch painter (d. 1680)
1633 – Geminiano Montanari, Italian astronomer and academic (d. 1687)
1637 – Jacques Marquette, French missionary and explorer (d. 1675)
1653 – Georg Muffat, French organist and composer (d. 1704)
1675 – Francesco Scipione, marchese di Maffei, Italian archaeologist and playwright (d. 1755)
1762 – Edmund Ignatius Rice, Irish priest and missionary, founded the Irish Christian Brothers (d. 1844)
1765 – Christiane Vulpius, mistress and wife of Johann Wolfgang Goethe (d. 1816)
1770 – Friedrich Laun, German author (d. 1849)
1790 – Ferdinand Raimund, Austrian actor and playwright (d. 1836)
1796 – Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, French physicist and engineer (d. 1832)
1800 – Edward Deas Thomson, Australian educator and politician, Chief Secretary of New South Wales (d. 1879)
1801 – Brigham Young, American religious leader, 2nd President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (d. 1877)
1804 – Mikhail Glinka, Russian composer (d. 1857)
1808 – Henry Parker, English-Australian politician, 3rd Premier of New South Wales (d. 1881)
1815 – Otto of Greece (d. 1862)
1819 – Francis V, Duke of Modena (d. 1875)
1822 – Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden, English portrait photographer (d. 1865)
1825 – John Hunt Morgan, American general (d. 1864)
1831 – John Bell Hood, American general (d. 1879)
1833 – John Marshall Harlan, American lawyer, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and politician; Attorney General of Kentucky (d. 1911)
1843 – Henry Faulds, Scottish physician and missionary, developed fingerprinting (d. 1930)
1844 – John J. Toffey, American lieutenant, Medal of Honor recipient (d. 1911)
1869 – Richard Wünsch, German philologist (d. 1915)
1873 – Elena Alistar, Bessarabian politician (d. 1955)
1874 – Yury Nikolaevich Voronov, Russian botanist (d. 1931)
1878 – John Masefield, English author and poet (d. 1967)
1879 – Max Emmerich, American triathlete and gymnast (d. 1956)
1887 – Clive Brook, English actor (d. 1974)
1889 – James Daugherty, American author, illustrator, and painter (d. 1974)
1889 – Charles Kay Ogden, English linguist and philosopher (d. 1957)
1890 – Frank Morgan, American actor (d. 1949)
1892 – Amanullah Khan, sovereign of the Kingdom of Afghanistan, (d. 1960)
1899 – Edward Charles Titchmarsh, English mathematician and academic (d. 1963)
1901–present
1901 – Hap Day, Canadian ice hockey player, referee, and manager (d. 1990)
1901 – Tom Gorman, Australian rugby league player (d. 1978)
1901 – John Van Druten, English-American playwright and director (d. 1957)
1903 – Vasyl Velychkovsky, Ukrainian-Canadian bishop and martyr (d. 1973)
1903 – Hans Vogt, Norwegian linguist and academic (d. 1986)
1905 – Robert Newton, English-American actor (d. 1956)
1907 – Jan Patočka, Czech philosopher (d. 1977)
1907 – Frank Whittle, English airman and engineer, developed the jet engine (d. 1996)
1908 – Julie Campbell Tatham, American author (d. 1999)
1909 – Yechezkel Kutscher, Slovakian-Israeli philologist and linguist (d. 1971)
1910 – Gyula Kállai, Hungarian communist leader, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People's Republic of Hungary (d. 1996)
1912 – Herbert Tichy, Austrian geologist, author, and mountaineer (d. 1987)
1913 – Bill Deedes, English journalist and politician (d. 2007)
1915 – John Randolph, American actor (d. 2004)
1916 – Jean Jérôme Hamer, Belgian Cardinal (d. 1996)
1917 – William Standish Knowles, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2012)
1920 – Robert Clarke, American actor and producer (d. 2005)
1921 – Nelson Riddle, American composer and bandleader (d. 1985)
1922 – Joan Caulfield, American model and actress (d. 1991)
1922 – Povel Ramel, Swedish singer-songwriter and pianist (d. 2007)
1924 – William Sloane Coffin, American minister and activist (d. 2006)
1925 – Dilia Díaz Cisneros, Venezuelan teacher (d. 2017)
1926 – Johnny Berry, English footballer (d. 1994)
1926 – Andy Griffith, American actor, singer, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2012)
1926 – Marilyn Monroe, American model and actress (d. 1962)
1926 – George Robb, English international footballer and teacher (d. 2011)
1926 – Richard Schweiker, American soldier and politician, 14th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (d. 2015)
1928 – Georgy Dobrovolsky, Ukrainian pilot and astronaut (d. 1971)
1928 – Steve Dodd, Australian actor and composer (d. 2014)
1928 – Bob Monkhouse, English actor and screenwriter (d. 2003)
1929 – Nargis, Indian actress (d. 1981)
1929 – James H. Billington, American academic and Thirteenth Librarian of Congress (d. 2018)
1930 – Matt Poore, New Zealand cricketer (d. 2020)
1930 – Edward Woodward, English actor (d. 2009)
1931 – Walter Horak, Austrian footballer (d. 2019)
1932 – Frank Cameron, New Zealand cricketer
1932 – Christopher Lasch, American historian and critic (d. 1994)
1933 – Haruo Remeliik, Palauan politician, 1st President of Palau (d. 1985)
1933 – Charles Wilson, American lieutenant and politician (d. 2010)
1934 – Pat Boone, American singer-songwriter and actor
1934 – Peter Masterson, American actor, director, producer and screenwriter (d. 2018)
1934 – Doris Buchanan Smith, American author (d. 2002)
1935 – Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, English architect, founded Foster and Partners
1935 – Reverend Ike, American minister and television host (d. 2009)
1935 – Jack Kralick, American baseball player (d. 2012)
1935 – Percy Adlon, German director, screenwriter and producer
1935 – John C. Reynolds, American computer scientist and academic (d. 2013)
1936 – Anatoly Albul, Soviet and Russian wrestler (d. 2013)
1936 – André Bourbeau, Canadian politician (d. 2018)
1936 – Bekim Fehmiu, Bosnian actor (d. 2010)
1936 – Gerald Scarfe, English illustrator and animator
1937 – Morgan Freeman, American actor and producer
1937 – Rosaleen Linehan, Irish actress
1937 – Colleen McCullough, Australian neuroscientist and author (d. 2015)
1939 – Cleavon Little, American actor and comedian (d. 1992)
1940 – René Auberjonois, American actor (d. 2019)
1940 – Katerina Gogou, Greek writer and actress (d. 1993)
1940 – Kip Thorne, American physicist, astronomer, and academic
1941 – Dean Chance, American baseball player and manager (d. 2015)
1941 – Toyo Ito, Japanese architect, designed the Torre Realia BCN and Hotel Porta Fira
1941 – Alexander V. Zakharov, Russian physicist and astronomer
1942 – Parveen Kumar, Pakistani-English physician and academic
1943 – Orietta Berti, Italian singer and actress
1943 – Richard Goode, American pianist
1943 – Lorrie Wilmot, South African cricketer (d. 2004)
1944 – Colin Blakemore, British neurobiologist
1944 – Robert Powell, English actor
1945 – Jim McCarty, American blues rock guitarist
1945 – Linda Scott, American singer
1945 – Lydia Shum, Chinese-Hong Kong actress (d. 2008)
1945 – Frederica von Stade, American soprano and actress
1946 – Brian Cox, Scottish actor
1947 – Ron Dennis, English businessman, founded the McLaren Group
1947 – Jonathan Pryce, Welsh actor and singer
1947 – Ronnie Wood, English guitarist, songwriter, and producer
1948 – Powers Boothe, American actor (d. 2017)
1948 – Tomáš Halík, Czech Roman Catholic priest, philosopher, theologian and scholar
1948 – Michel Plasse, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 2006)
1948 – Juhan Viiding, Estonian poet and actor (d. 1995)
1950 – Perrin Beatty, Canadian businessman and politician
1950 – Charlene, American singer-songwriter
1950 – Jean Lambert, English educator and politician
1950 – Michael McDowell, American author and screenwriter (d. 1999)
1952 – Şenol Güneş, Turkish footballer and manager
1952 – David Lan, South African-English director and playwright
1952 – Mihaela Loghin, Romanian shot putter
1953 – Ronnie Dunn, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1953 – Ted Field, American entrepreneur and race car driver
1954 – Jill Black, English lawyer and judge
1955 – Chiyonofuji Mitsugu, Japanese sumo wrestler (d. 2016)
1955 – Lorraine Moller, New Zealand runner
1955 – Tony Snow, American journalist, 26th White House Press Secretary (d. 2008)
1956 – Patrick Besson, French writer and journalist
1956 – Petra Morsbach, German author
1958 – Nambaryn Enkhbayar, Mongolian lawyer and politician, 3rd President of Mongolia
1958 – Gennadiy Valyukevich, Belarusian triple jumper (d. 2019)
1959 – Martin Brundle, English racing driver and sportscaster
1959 – Alan Wilder, English singer-songwriter, keyboard player, and producer
1960 – Simon Gallup, English musician
1960 – Vladimir Krutov, Russian ice hockey player and coach (d. 2012)
1960 – Sergey Kuznetsov, Russian footballer and manager
1960 – Giorgos Lillikas, Cypriot politician, 8th Cypriot Minister of Foreign Affairs
1960 – Lucy McBath, American politician
1960 – Elena Mukhina, Russian gymnast (d. 2006)
1961 – Paul Coffey, Canadian ice hockey player
1961 – Mark Curry, American actor
1961 – Werner Günthör, Swiss shot putter and bobsledder
1961 – John Huston, American golfer
1961 – Peter Machajdík, Slovakian-German pianist and composer
1963 – Vital Borkelmans, Belgian footballer
1963 – Miles J. Padgett, Scottish physicist and academic
1963 – David Westhead, English actor and producer
1965 – Larisa Lazutina, Russian skier
1965 – Olga Nazarova, Russian sprinter
1966 – Greg Schiano, American football player and coach
1968 – Jason Donovan, Australian actor and singer
1968 – Mathias Rust, German aviator
1969 – Luis García Postigo, former Mexican footballer
1969 – Teri Polo, American actress
1970 – Alexi Lalas, American soccer player, manager, and sportscaster
1971 – Mario Cimarro, Cuban-American actor and singer
1973 – Frédérik Deburghgraeve, Belgian swimmer
1973 – Adam Garcia, Australian actor
1973 – Heidi Klum, German-American model, fashion designer, and producer
1974 – Alanis Morissette, Canadian-American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actress
1974 – Michael Rasmussen, Danish cyclist
1974 – Sarah Teather, English politician
1975 – Michal Grošek, Czech-Swiss ice hockey player and coach
1975 – Frauke Petry, German politician
1976 – Marlon Devonish, English sprinter and coach
1977 – Arsen Gitinov, Russian and Kyrgyzstani freestyle wrestler
1977 – Danielle Harris, American actress
1977 – Brad Wilkerson, American baseball player and coach
1977 – Sarah Wayne Callies, American actress
1978 – Antonietta Di Martino, Italian high jumper
1979 – Santana Moss, American football player
1979 – Markus Persson, Swedish game designer, founded Mojang
1981 – Brandi Carlile, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1981 – Amy Schumer, American actress
1981 – Carlos Zambrano, Venezuelan-American baseball player
1981 – Aleksei Mikhailovich Uvarov, Russian footballer
1982 – Justine Henin, Belgian tennis player
1984 – Jean Beausejour, Chilean footballer
1984 – Olivier Tielemans, Dutch racing driver
1985 – Tirunesh Dibaba, Ethiopian runner
1985 – Mário Hipólito, Angolan footballer
1985 – Dinesh Karthik, Indian cricketer
1985 – Nick Young, American basketball player
1985 – Sam Young, American basketball player
1986 – Moses Ndiema Masai, Kenyan runner
1986 – Chinedu Obasi, Nigerian footballer
1986 – Ben Smith, New Zealand rugby player
1987 – Zoltán Harsányi, Slovakian footballer
1987 – Yarisley Silva, Cuban pole vaulter
1988 – Javier Hernández, Mexican footballer
1989 – Nataliya Goncharova, Ukrainian/Russian volleyball player
1989 – Sammy Alex Mutahi, Kenyan runner
1990 – Miller Bolaños, Ecuadoran footballer
1990 – Carlota Ciganda, Spanish golfer
1991 – Tyrone Roberts, Australian rugby league player
1994 – Kagayaki Taishi, Japanese sumo wrestler
1996 – Edvinas Gertmonas, Lithuanian footballer
1996 – Tom Holland, English actor
Deaths
Pre-1600
195 BC – Emperor Gaozu of Han (b. 256 BC)
193 – The emperor Marcus Didius Julianus is murdered in his palace.
352 – Ran Min, "Heavenly Prince" (Tian Wang) during the Sixteen Kingdoms
654 – Pyrrhus, patriarch of Constantinople
829 – Li Tongjie, general of the Tang Dynasty
847 – Xiao, empress of the Tang Dynasty
896 – Theodosius Romanus, Syriac Orthodox patriarch of Antioch
932 – Thietmar, duke of Saxony
1146 – Ermengarde of Anjou, Duchess regent of Brittany (b. 1068)
1186 – Minamoto no Yukiie, Japanese warlord
1220 – Henry de Bohun, 1st Earl of Hereford (b. 1176)
1310 – Marguerite Porete, French mystic
1354 – Kitabatake Chikafusa (b. 1293)
1434 – King Wladislaus II of Poland
1571 – John Story, English martyr (b. 1504)
1601–1900
1616 – Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japanese shogun (b. 1543)
1625 – Honoré d'Urfé, French author and poet (b. 1568)
1639 – Melchior Franck, German composer (b. 1579)
1660 – Mary Dyer, English-American martyr (b. 1611)
1662 – Zhu Youlang, Chinese emperor (b. 1623)
1681 – Cornelis Saftleven, Dutch genre painter (b. 1607)
1710 – David Mitchell, Scottish admiral and politician (b. 1642)
1740 – Samuel Werenfels, Swiss theologian (b. 1657)
1769 – Edward Holyoke, American pastor and academic (b. 1689)
1773 – Wolraad Woltemade, South African folk hero (b. 1708)
1795 – Pierre-Joseph Desault, French anatomist and surgeon (b. 1744)
1815 – Louis-Alexandre Berthier, French general and politician, French Minister of War (b. 1753)
1823 – Louis-Nicolas Davout, French general and politician, French Minister of War (b. 1770)
1826 – J. F. Oberlin, French pastor and philanthropist (b. 1740)
1830 – Swaminarayan, Indian religious leader (b. 1781)
1833 – Oliver Wolcott Jr., American lawyer and politician, 2nd United States Secretary of the Treasury, 24th Governor of Connecticut (b. 1760)
1841 – David Wilkie, Scottish painter and academic (b. 1785)
1846 – Pope Gregory XVI (b. 1765)
1861 – John Quincy Marr, American captain (b. 1825)
1864 – Hong Xiuquan, Chinese rebel, led the Taiping Rebellion (b. 1812)
1868 – James Buchanan, American lawyer and politician, 15th President of the United States (b. 1791)
1872 – James Gordon Bennett, Sr., American publisher, founded the New York Herald (b. 1795)
1873 – Joseph Howe, Canadian journalist and politician, 5th Premier of Nova Scotia (b. 1804)
1876 – Hristo Botev, Bulgarian poet and journalist (b. 1848)
1879 – Napoléon, Prince Imperial of France (b. 1856)
1901–present
1908 – Allen Butler Talcott, American painter (b. 1867)
1925 – Thomas R. Marshall, American politician, 28th Vice President of the United States (b. 1854)
1927 – Lizzie Borden, American accused murderer (b. 1860)
1927 – J. B. Bury, Irish historian, philologist, and scholar (b. 1861)
1934 – Sir Alfred Rawlinson, 3rd Baronet, English colonel and polo player (b. 1867)
1935 – Arthur Arz von Straußenburg, Romanian-Hungarian general (d. 1857)
1938 – Ödön von Horváth, Croatian-French author and playwright (b. 1901)
1941 – Hans Berger, German neurologist and academic (b. 1873)
1941 – Hugh Walpole, New Zealand-English author (b. 1884)
1943 – Leslie Howard, English actor, director, and producer (b. 1893)
1943 – Wilfrid Israel, English-German businessman and philanthropist (b. 1899)
1946 – Ion Antonescu, Romanian marshal and politician, 43rd Prime Minister of Romania (b. 1882)
1948 – Alex Gard, Russian-American cartoonist (b. 1900)
1952 – John Dewey, American psychologist and philosopher (b. 1859)
1953 – Emanuel Vidović, Croatian painter and illustrator (b. 1870)
1954 – Martin Andersen Nexø, Danish-German journalist and author (b. 1869)
1960 – Lester Patrick, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (b. 1883)
1960 – Paula Hitler, German-Austrian sister of Adolf Hitler (b. 1896)
1962 – Adolf Eichmann, a German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (b. 1906)
1963 – Walter Lee, Australian politician, 24th Premier of Tasmania (b. 1874)
1965 – Curly Lambeau, American football player and coach, founded the Green Bay Packers (b. 1898)
1966 – Papa Jack Laine, American drummer and bandleader (b. 1873)
1968 – Helen Keller, American author and activist (b. 1880)
1968 – André Laurendeau, Canadian playwright, journalist, and politician (b. 1912)
1969 – Ivar Ballangrud, Norwegian speed skater (b. 1904)
1971 – Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian and academic (b. 1892)
1979 – Werner Forssmann, German physician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1904)
1980 – Arthur Nielsen, American businessman, founded the ACNielsen company (b. 1897)
1981 – Carl Vinson, American lawyer and politician (b. 1883)
1983 – Prince Charles, Count of Flanders (b. 1903)
1983 – Anna Seghers, German writer (b. 1900)
1985 – Richard Greene, English actor and soldier (b. 1918)
1986 – Jo Gartner, Austrian racing driver (b. 1958)
1987 – Rashid Karami, Lebanese lawyer and politician, 32nd Prime Minister of Lebanon (b. 1921)
1988 – Herbert Feigl, Austrian philosopher from the Vienna Circle (b. 1902)
1989 – Aurelio Lampredi, Italian engineer, designed the Ferrari Lampredi engine (b. 1917)
1991 – David Ruffin, American singer-songwriter (b. 1941)
1996 – Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, Indian politician, 6th President of India (b. 1913)
1999 – Christopher Cockerell, English engineer, invented the hovercraft (b. 1910)
2000 – Tito Puente, American drummer, composer, and producer (b. 1923)
2001 – Hank Ketcham, American cartoonist, created Dennis the Menace (b. 1920)
2001 – notable victims of the Nepalese royal massacre
Aishwarya of Nepal (b. 1949)
Birendra of Nepal (b. 1945)
Dhirendra of Nepal (b. 1950)
Prince Nirajan of Nepal (b. 1978)
Princess Shruti of Nepal (b. 1976)
2002 – Hansie Cronje, South African cricketer (b. 1969)
2004 – William Manchester, American historian and author (b. 1922)
2005 – Hilda Crosby Standish, American physician (b. 1902)
2005 – George Mikan, American basketball player and coach (b. 1924)*2006 – Rocío Jurado, Spanish singer and actress (b. 1944)
2007 – Tony Thompson, American singer and songwriter (b. 1975)
2008 – Tommy Lapid, Israeli journalist and politician, 17th Justice Minister of Israel (b. 1931)
2008 – Yves Saint Laurent, French fashion designer, founded Saint Laurent Paris (b. 1936)
2009 – Vincent O'Brien, Irish horse trainer (b. 1917)
2010 – Kazuo Ohno, Japanese dancer (b. 1906)
2010 – Andrei Voznesensky, Russian poet (b. 1933)
2011 – Haleh Sahabi, Iranian humanitarian and activist (b. 1957)
2012 – Faruq Z. Bey, American saxophonist and composer (b. 1942)
2012 – Pádraig Faulkner, Irish educator and politician, 19th Irish Minister of Defence (b. 1918)
2012 – Milan Gaľa, Slovak politician (b. 1953)
2013 – James Kelleher, Canadian lawyer and politician, 33rd Solicitor General of Canada (b. 1930)
2014 – Ann B. Davis, American actress (b. 1926)
2014 – Valentin Mankin, Ukrainian sailor (b. 1938)
2015 – Charles Kennedy, Scottish journalist and politician (b. 1959)
2015 – Joan Kirner, Australian educator and politician, 42nd Premier of Victoria (b. 1938)
2015 – Nicholas Liverpool, Dominican lawyer and politician, 6th President of Dominica (b. 1934)
2015 – Jacques Parizeau, Canadian economist and politician, 26th Premier of Quebec (b. 1930)
2015 – Jean Ritchie, American singer-songwriter (b. 1922)
2018 – Sinan Sakić, Serbian pop-folk singer (b. 1956)
2019 – Ani Yudhoyono, Indonesian politician, 6th First Lady of Indonesia. (b. 1952)
Holidays and observances
Children's Day (International), and its related observances:
The Day of Protection of Children Rights (Armenia)
Mothers' and Children's Day (Mongolia)
Christian feast day:
Annibale Maria di Francia
Crescentinus
Fortunatus of Spoleto
Herculanus of Piegaro
Íñigo of Oña
Justin Martyr (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran)
Ronan of Locronan
June 1 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Earliest day on which June Holiday can fall, while June 7 is the latest; celebrated on the first Monday in June. (Ireland)
Earliest day on which Labour Day can fall, while June 7 is the latest; celebrated on the first Friday in June. (The Bahamas)
Earliest day on which Teacher's Day can fall, while June 7 is the latest; celebrated on the first Sunday in June. (Hungary)
Earliest day on which the Queen's Birthday can fall, while June 7 is the latest; celebrated on the first Monday in June. (New Zealand, Cook Islands, Fiji)
Earliest day on which Seamen's Day can fall, while June 7 is the latest; celebrated on the first Sunday in June. (Iceland)
Earliest day on which Western Australia Day can fall, while June 7 is the latest; celebrated on the first Sunday in June. (Western Australia)
Global Day of Parents (International)
Independence Day, celebrates the independence of Samoa from New Zealand in 1962.
Madaraka Day (Kenya)
National Maritime Day (Mexico)
National Tree Planting Day (Cambodia)
Pancasila Day (Indonesia)
President's Day (Palau)
The beginning of Crop over, celebrated until the first Monday of August. (Barbados)
Victory Day (Tunisia)
World Milk Day (International)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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0.23427319526672363,
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15857 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June%2022 | June 22 | On this day the Summer solstice may occur in the Northern Hemisphere, and the Winter solstice may occur in the Southern Hemisphere.
Events
Pre-1600
217 BC – Battle of Raphia: Ptolemy IV Philopator of Egypt defeats Antiochus III the Great of the Seleucid kingdom.
168 BC – Battle of Pydna: Romans under Lucius Aemilius Paullus defeat Macedonian King Perseus who surrenders after the battle, ending the Third Macedonian War.
813 – Battle of Versinikia: The Bulgars led by Krum defeat the Byzantine army near Edirne. Emperor Michael I is forced to abdicate in favor of Leo V the Armenian.
910 – The Hungarians defeat the East Frankish army near the Rednitz River, killing its leader Gebhard, Duke of Lotharingia (Lorraine).
1527 – Fatahillah expels Portuguese forces from Sunda Kelapa, now regarded as the foundation of Jakarta.
1593 – Battle of Sisak: Allied Christian troops defeat the Ottomans.
1601–1900
1633 – The Holy Office in Rome forces Galileo Galilei to recant his view that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Universe in the form he presented it in, after heated controversy.
1774 – The British pass the Quebec Act, setting out rules of governance for the colony of Quebec in British North America.
1783 – A poisonous cloud caused by the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland reaches Le Havre in France.
1807 – In the Chesapeake–Leopard affair, the British warship attacks and boards the American frigate .
1813 – War of 1812: After learning of American plans for a surprise attack on Beaver Dams in Ontario, Laura Secord sets out on a 30 kilometer journey on foot to warn Lieutenant James FitzGibbon.
1839 – Cherokee leaders Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot are assassinated for signing the Treaty of New Echota, which had resulted in the Trail of Tears.
1870 – The United States Department of Justice is created by the U.S. Congress.
1893 – The Royal Navy battleship accidentally rams the British Mediterranean Fleet flagship which sinks taking 358 crew with her, including the fleet's commander, Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon.
1897 – British colonial officers Charles Walter Rand and Lt. Charles Egerton Ayerst are assassinated in Pune, Maharashtra, India by the Chapekar brothers and Mahadeo Vinayak Ranade, who are later caught and hanged.
1898 – Spanish–American War: In a chaotic operation, 6,000 men of the U.S. Fifth Army Corps begins landing at Daiquirí, Cuba, about east of Santiago de Cuba. Lt. Gen. Arsenio Linares y Pombo of the Spanish Army outnumbers them two-to-one, but does not oppose the landings.
1901–present
1907 – The London Underground's Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway opens.
1911 – George V and Mary of Teck are crowned King and Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
1911 – Mexican Revolution: Government forces bring an end to the Magonista rebellion of 1911 in the Second Battle of Tijuana.
1918 – The Hammond Circus Train Wreck kills 86 and injures 127 near Hammond, Indiana.
1940 – World War II: France is forced to sign the Second Compiègne armistice with Germany, in the same railroad car in which the Germans signed the Armistice in 1918.
1941 – World War II: Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.
1942 – World War II: Erwin Rommel is promoted to Field Marshal after the Axis capture of Tobruk.
1942 – The Pledge of Allegiance is formally adopted by US Congress.
1944 – World War II: Opening day of the Soviet Union's Operation Bagration against the Army Group Centre.
1944 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs into law the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill.
1945 – World War II: The Battle of Okinawa comes to an end.
1948 – The ship brought the first group of 802 West Indian immigrants to Tilbury, marking the start of modern immigration to the United Kingdom.
1948 – King George VI formally gives up the title "Emperor of India", half a year after Britain actually gave up its rule of India.
1962 – Air France Flight 117 crashes on approach to Pointe-à-Pitre International Airport in Guadeloupe, killing 112 people.
1965 – The Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea is signed.
1966 – Vietnamese Buddhist activist leader Thích Trí Quang was arrested as the military junta of Nguyen Cao Ky crushed the Buddhist Uprising.
1969 – The Cuyahoga River catches fire in Cleveland, Ohio, drawing national attention to water pollution, and spurring the passing of the Clean Water Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
1978 – Charon, the first of Pluto's satellites to be discovered, was first seen at the United States Naval Observatory by James W. Christy.
1984 – Virgin Atlantic launches with its first flight from London to Newark.
1986 – The famous Hand of God goal, scored by Diego Maradona in the quarter-finals of the 1986 FIFA World Cup match between Argentina and England, ignites controversy. This was later followed by the Goal of the Century. Argentina wins 2–1 and later goes on to win the World Cup.
1990 – Cold War: Checkpoint Charlie is dismantled in Berlin.
2000 – Wuhan Airlines Flight 343 is struck by lightning and crashes into Wuhan's Hanyang District, killing 49 people.
2002 – An earthquake measuring 6.5 Mw strikes a region of northwestern Iran killing at least 261 people and injuring 1,300 others and eventually causing widespread public anger due to the slow official response.
2009 – A Washington D.C Metro train traveling southbound near Fort Totten station collides into another train waiting to enter the station. Nine people are killed in the collision (eight passengers and the train operator) and at least 80 others are injured.
2012 – Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo is removed from office by impeachment and succeeded by Federico Franco.
2012 – A Turkish Air Force McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II fighter plane is shot down by the Syrian Armed Forces, killing both of the plane's pilots and worsening already-strained relations between Turkey and Syria.
2015 – The Afghan National Assembly building is attacked by gunmen after a suicide bombing. All six of the gunmen are killed and 18 people are injured.
Births
Pre-1600
662 – Rui Zong, emperor of the Tang Dynasty (d. 716)
916 – Sayf al-Dawla, founder of the Emirate of Aleppo (d. 967)
1000 – Robert I, duke of Normandy (d. 1035)
1373 – Elizabeth Bonifacia, heiress of Poland (d. 1399)
1427 – Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Italian writer and wife of Piero di Cosimo de' Medici (d. 1482)
1450 – Eleanor of Naples, duchess of Ferrara (d. 1493)
1477 – Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset, English nobleman (d. 1530)
1593 – Sir John Gell, 1st Baronet, English politician and militarian (d. 1671)
1601–1900
1680 – Ebenezer Erskine, Scottish minister and theologian (d. 1754)
1684 – Francesco Manfredini, Italian violinist and composer (d. 1762)
1704 – John Taylor, English author and scholar (d. 1766)
1713 – John Sackville, English cricketer and politician (d. 1765)
1738 – Jacques Delille, French poet and translator (d. 1813)
1757 – George Vancouver, English lieutenant and explorer (d. 1798)
1763 – Étienne Méhul, French pianist and composer (d. 1817)
1767 – Wilhelm von Humboldt, German philosopher, academic, and politician, Interior Minister of Prussia (d. 1835)
1792 – James Beaumont Neilson, Scottish engineer and businessman (d. 1865)
1805 – Giuseppe Mazzini, Italian journalist and politician (d. 1872)
1820 – James Hutchison Stirling, Scottish physician and philosopher (d. 1909)
1834 – William Chester Minor, American surgeon and linguist (d. 1920)
1837 – Paul Morphy, American chess player (d. 1884)
1837 – Ernst Ziller, German-Greek architect, designed the Presidential Mansion (d. 1923)
1844 – Oscar von Gebhardt, German theologian and academic (d. 1906)
1845 – Tom Dula, American soldier (d. 1868)
1845 – Richard Seddon, English-New Zealand politician, 15th Prime Minister of New Zealand (d. 1906)
1855 – Samuel Morris, Australian cricketer (d. 1931)
1856 – Henry Rider Haggard, English novelist (d. 1925)
1861 – Maximilian von Spee, Danish-German admiral (d. 1914)
1864 – Hermann Minkowski, German mathematician and academic (d. 1909)
1871 – William McDougall, English psychologist and polymath (d. 1938)
1873 – Filippo Silvestri, Italian entomologist and academic (d. 1949)
1874 – Walter Friedrich Otto, German philologist and scholar (d. 1958)
1876 – Pascual Díaz y Barreto, Mexican archbishop (d. 1936)
1879 – Thibaudeau Rinfret, Canadian lawyer and jurist, 9th Chief Justice of Canada (d. 1962)
1880 – Johannes Drost, Dutch swimmer (d. 1954)
1884 – James Rector, American sprinter and lawyer (d. 1949)
1885 – Milan Vidmar, Slovenian engineer and chess player (d. 1962)
1887 – Julian Huxley, English biologist and academic (d. 1975)
1888 – Harold Hitz Burton, American lawyer and politician, 45th Mayor of Cleveland (d. 1964)
1890 – Aleksander Warma, Estonian commander and politician, 4th Prime Minister of Estonia in exile (d. 1970)
1891 – Franz Alexander, Hungarian psychoanalyst and physician (d. 1964)
1892 – Robert Ritter von Greim, German general and pilot (d. 1945)
1894 – Bernard Ashmole, English archaeologist and art historian (d. 1988)
1896 – Leonard W. Murray, Canadian admiral (d. 1971)
1897 – Edmund A. Chester, American journalist and broadcaster (d. 1973)
1897 – Norbert Elias, German-Dutch sociologist and philosopher (d. 1990)
1898 – Erich Maria Remarque, German-Swiss soldier and author (d. 1970)
1899 – Richard Gurley Drew, American engineer, invented Masking tape (d. 1980)
1899 – Michał Kalecki, Polish economist and academic (d. 1970)
1900 – Oskar Fischinger, German-American abstract artist, filmmaker, and painter (d. 1967)
1901–present
1901 – Elias Katz, Finnish runner and coach (d. 1947)
1902 – Marguerite De La Motte, American actress (d. 1950)
1903 – John Dillinger, American criminal (d. 1934)
1903 – Carl Hubbell, American baseball player (d. 1988)
1906 – William Kneale, English logician and philosopher (d. 1990)
1906 – Anne Morrow Lindbergh, American pilot and author (d. 2001)
1906 – Billy Wilder, Austrian-born American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2002)
1907 – Eriks Ādamsons, Latvian writer, poet, and novelist (d. 1946)
1909 – Katherine Dunham, American dancer and choreographer (d. 2006)
1909 – Infanta Beatriz of Spain, Spanish aristocratic (d. 2002)
1909 – Mike Todd, American producer and manager (d. 1958)
1910 – John Hunt, Baron Hunt, Indian-English lieutenant and mountaineer (d. 1998)
1910 – Anne Ziegler, English singer (d. 2003)
1910 – Konrad Zuse, German computer scientist and engineer, invented the Z3 computer (d. 1995)
1911 – Vernon Kirby, South African tennis player (d. 1994)
1912 – Princess Caroline Mathilde of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (d. 1983)
1912 – Raymonde Allain, French model and actress (d. 2008)
1913 – Sándor Weöres, Hungarian poet and author (d. 1989)
1914 – Mei Zhi, Chinese author and essayist (d. 2004)
1915 – Dolf van der Linden, Dutch conductor and composer (d. 1999)
1915 – Cornelius Warmerdam, American pole vaulter and coach (d. 2001)
1915 – Randolph Hokanson, American pianist (d. 2018)
1915 – Thomas Quinn Curtiss, American writer, and film and theatre critic (d. 2000)
1916 – Johnny Jacobs, American television announcer (d. 1982)
1916 – Richard Eastham, American actor (d. 2005)
1916 – Emil Fackenheim, German Jewish philosopher and Reform rabbi (d. 2003)
1918 – Cicely Saunders, English nurse, social worker, physician and writer (d. 2005)
1918 – Yeoh Ghim Seng, Singaporean politician, acting President of Singapore (d. 1993)
1919 – Gower Champion, American dancer and choreographer (d. 1980)
1919 – Henri Tajfel, Polish social psychologist (d. 1982)
1919 – Clifton McNeely, American basketball player and coach (d. 2003)
1920 – James H. Pomerene, American computer scientist and engineer (d. 2008)
1920 – Jovito Salonga, Filipino lawyer and politician, 14th President of the Senate of the Philippines (d. 2016)
1921 – Joseph Papp, American director and producer (d. 1991)
1921 – Barbara Vucanovich, American lawyer and politician (d. 2013)
1921 – Radovan Ivšić, Croatian writer (d. 2009)
1921 – Barbara Perry, American actress (d. 2019)
1922 – Bill Blass, American fashion designer, founded Bill Blass Group (d. 2002)
1922 – Clair Cameron Patterson, American scientist (d. 1995)
1923 – José Giovanni, French-Swiss director and screenwriter (d. 2004)
1924 – Christopher Booth, English clinician and historian (d. 2012)
1924 – Larkin Kerwin, Canadian physicist and academic (d. 2004)
1926 – George Englund, American film editor, director, producer and actor (d. 2017)
1926 – Rachid Solh, Lebanese politician, 48th Prime Minister of Lebanon (d. 2014)
1927 – Anthony Low, Indian-English historian and academic (d. 2015)
1928 – Ralph Waite, American actor and director (d. 2014)
1929 – Bruce Kent, English activist and laicised Roman Catholic priest
1930 – Yuri Artyukhin, Russian colonel, engineer, and astronaut (d. 1998)
1930 – Walter Bonatti, Italian journalist and mountaineer (d. 2011)
1931 – Ruby Garrard Woodson, American educator and cultural historian (d. 2008)
1932 – Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari, Princess of Iran (d. 2001)
1932 – Yevgeny Kychanov, Russian orientalist, historian, and academic (d. 2013)
1932 – Amrish Puri, Indian actor (d. 2005)
1932 – June Salter, Australian actress (d. 2001)
1932 – Prunella Scales, English actress
1932 – John Wakeham, Baron Wakeham, English businessman and politician, Leader of the House of Lords
1933 – Dianne Feinstein, American politician
1934 – James Bjorken, American physicist, author, and academic
1936 – Kris Kristofferson, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor
1936 – Ferran Olivella, Spanish footballer
1936 – Hermeto Pascoal, Brazilian accordion player and composer
1937 – Chris Blackwell, English record producer, co-founded Island Records
1937 – Bernie McGann, Australian saxophonist and composer (d. 2013)
1939 – Don Matthews, American-Canadian football player and coach (d. 2017)
1939 – Ed Paschke, Polish-American painter and academic (d. 2004)
1940 – Joan Busfield, English sociologist, psychologist, and academic
1940 – Hubert Chesshyre, English historian and author (d. 2020)
1940 – Abbas Kiarostami, Iranian director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2016)
1940 – Esther Rantzen, English journalist
1941 – Ed Bradley, American journalist (d. 2006)
1941 – Terttu Savola, Finnish journalist and politician
1943 – Klaus Maria Brandauer, Austrian actor and director
1943 – Brit Hume, American journalist and author
1943 – J. Michael Kosterlitz, British-American physicist
1944 – Peter Asher, English singer, guitarist, and producer
1944 – Helmut Dietl, German director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2015)
1945 – Rainer Brüderle, German economist and politician, German Minister of Economics and Technology
1946 – Linda Bond, Canadian 19th General of The Salvation Army
1946 – Sheila Hollins, Baroness Hollins, English psychiatrist and academic
1946 – Eliades Ochoa, Cuban singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1946 – Józef Oleksy, Polish economist and politician, 7th Prime Minister of Poland (d. 2015)
1946 – Stephen Waley-Cohen, English journalist and businessman
1947 – Octavia E. Butler, American author (d. 2006)
1947 – Howard Kaylan, American pop-rock singer-songwriter and musician
1947 – Bruno Latour, French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist
1947 – Pete Maravich, American basketball player (d. 1988)
1947 – Jerry Rawlings, Ghanaian lieutenant and politician, President of Ghana (d. 2020)
1948 – James Charteris, 13th Earl of Wemyss, Scottish businessman
1948 – Todd Rundgren, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1949 – Larry Junstrom, American bass player (d. 2019)
1949 – Brian Leveson, English lawyer and judge
1949 – Alan Osmond, American singer and producer
1949 – Meryl Streep, American actress
1949 – Luís Filipe Vieira, Portuguese businessman
1949 – Lindsay Wagner, American actress
1949 – Elizabeth Warren, American academic and politician
1950 – Sharon Maughan, English actress
1950 – Adrian Năstase, Romanian lawyer and politician, 59th Prime Minister of Romania
1950 – Greg Oliphant, Australian rugby league player
1950 – Zenonas Petrauskas, Lithuanian lawyer and politician (d. 2009)
1950 – Tom Alter, Indian actor (d. 2017)
1951 – Brian Cookson, British cyclist and sports administrator
1951 – Craig Gruber, American bass player (d. 2015)
1951 – Humphrey Ocean, English painter and academic
1952 – Graham Greene, Canadian actor
1952 – Santokh Singh, Malaysian football player
1953 – Wim Eijk, Dutch cardinal
1953 – Mauro Francaviglia, Italian mathematician and academic (d. 2013)
1953 – Cyndi Lauper, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actress
1953 – Bruce McAvaney, Australian journalist and sportscaster
1954 – Freddie Prinze, American comedian and actor (d. 1977)
1955 – Green Gartside, Welsh singer-songwriter and guitarist
1955 – Christine Orengo, British academic and educator
1956 – Darryl Brohman, Australian rugby league player and sportscaster
1956 – Alfons De Wolf, Belgian cyclist
1956 – Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistani agriculturist and politician, 25th Pakistani Minister of Foreign Affairs
1956 – Tim Russ, American actor, director, and screenwriter
1956 – Markus Schatte, German footballer, manager, and coach
1956 – Derek Forbes, Scottish bass player and guitarist
1957 – Danny Baker, English journalist and screenwriter
1957 – Garry Gary Beers, Australian bass player, songwriter, and producer
1957 – Kevin Bond, English footballer and manager
1957 – Michael Stratton, English geneticist and academic
1958 – Rocío Banquells, Mexican pop singer and actress
1958 – Bruce Campbell, American actor, director, producer and writer
1959 – Michael Kinane, Irish jockey
1959 – Nicola Sirkis, French singer-songwriter and guitarist
1959 – Daniel Xuereb, French footballer
1960 – Erin Brockovich, American lawyer and environmentalist
1960 – Margrit Klinger, German runner
1960 – Tracy Pollan, American actress
1961 – Jimmy Somerville, Scottish singer-songwriter
1962 – Stephen Chow, Hong Kong actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
1962 – Bobby Gillespie, Scottish musician and singer-songwriter
1962 – Clyde Drexler, American basketball player and coach
1962 – Gerald Hillringhaus, German footballer
1963 – Hokutoumi Nobuyoshi, Japanese sumo wrestler, the 61st Yokozuna
1963 – John Tenta, Canadian-American wrestler (d. 2006)
1964 – Cadillac Anderson, American basketball player
1964 – Amy Brenneman, American actress
1964 – Dan Brown, American author and academic
1964 – Miroslav Kadlec, Czech footballer
1965 – Uwe Boll, German director, producer, and screenwriter
1965 – Ľubomír Moravčík, Czech footballer and manager
1966 – Michael Park, English racing driver (d. 2005)
1966 – Emmanuelle Seigner, French actress
1966 – Dean Woods, Australian cyclist
1968 – Darrell Armstrong, American basketball player and coach
1968 – Miri Yu, Zainichi, Korean novelist
1971 – Gary Connolly, English rugby player
1971 – Mary Lynn Rajskub, American actress and comedian
1971 – Kurt Warner, American football player and sportscaster
1972 – Damien Oliver, Australian jockey
1973 – Carson Daly, American radio and television host
1974 – Jo Cox, British MP (d. 2016)
1974 – Vijay, Indian actor
1975 – Urmas Reinsalu, Estonian academic and politician, 28th Estonian Minister of Defence
1978 – Champ Bailey, American football player
1978 – Dan Wheldon, English racing driver (d. 2011)
1979 – Joey Cheek, American speed skater
1979 – Thomas Voeckler, French cyclist
1980 – Ilya Bryzgalov, Russian ice hockey player
1980 – Stephanie Jacobsen, Hong Kong-Australian actress
1981 – Sione Lauaki, New Zealand rugby player (d. 2017)
1981 – Aquivaldo Mosquera, Colombian footballer
1982 – Andoni Iraola, Spanish footballer
1982 – Ian Kinsler, American baseball player
1982 – Soraia Chaves, Portuguese actress and model
1983 – Allar Raja, Estonian rower
1984 – Dustin Johnson, American golfer
1984 – Rubén Iván Martínez, Spanish footballer
1984 – Jerome Taylor, Jamaican cricketer
1984 – Janko Tipsarević, Serbian tennis player
1985 – Thomas Leuluai, New Zealand rugby league player
1987 – Danny Green, American basketball player
1987 – Nikita Rukavytsya, Ukrainian-Australian footballer
1988 – Omri Casspi, Israeli basketball player
1989 – Cédric Mongongu, Congolese footballer
1989 – Jung Yong-hwa, South Korean singer-songwriter and actor
1990 – Sebastian Jung, German footballer
1991 – Hugo Mallo, Spanish footballer
1992 – Ura Kazuki, Japanese sumo wrestler
1992 – Harry Reid, British actor
1993 – Loris Karius, German footballer
1994 – Sebastien Haller, French footballer
1994 – Carlos Vinícius Santos de Jesus, Brazilian footballer
1996 – Mikel Merino, Spanish footballer
1999 – Sam Retford, Australian-English actor
Deaths
Pre-1600
431 – Paulinus of Nola, Christian bishop and poet (b. 354)
910 – Gebhard, Frankish nobleman
910 – Gerhard I, Frankish nobleman
947 – Qian Hongzuo, king of Wuyue (b. 928)
1017 – Leo Passianos, Byzantine general
1101 – Roger I of Sicily, Norman nobleman (b. 1031)
1276 – Innocent V, pope of the Catholic Church (b. 1225)
1343 – Aimone, Count of Savoy (b. 1291)
1429 – Jamshīd al-Kāshī, Persian astronomer and mathematician (b. 1380)
1521 – Leonardo Loredan, Italian politician, 76th Doge of Venice (b. 1436)
1535 – John Fisher, English bishop and saint (b. 1469)
1601–1900
1632 – James Whitelocke, English judge and politician, Chief Justice of Chester (b. 1570)
1634 – Johann von Aldringen, Austrian field marshal (b. 1588)
1664 – Katherine Philips, Anglo-Welsh poet (b. 1631)
1699 – Josiah Child, English merchant, economist, and politician (b. 1630)
1714 – Matthew Henry, Welsh minister and author (b. 1662)
1766 – Carlo Zimech, Maltese priest and painter (b. 1696)
1868 – Heber C. Kimball, American religious leader (b. 1801)
1872 – Rudecindo Alvarado, Argentinian general (b. 1792)
1874 – Howard Staunton, English chess player (b. 1810)
1892 – Pierre Ossian Bonnet, French mathematician and academic (b. 1819)
1894 – Alexandre-Antonin Taché, Canadian archbishop and missionary (b. 1823)
1901–present
1905 – Francis Lubbock, American colonel and politician, 9th Governor of Texas (b. 1815)
1913 – Ștefan Octavian Iosif, Romanian poet and translator (b. 1875)
1925 – Felix Klein, German mathematician and academic (b. 1849)
1928 – A. B. Frost, American illustrator and painter (b. 1851)
1931 – Armand Fallières, French politician, 9th President of France (b. 1841)
1933 – Tim Birkin, English racing driver and lieutenant (b. 1896)
1935 – Szymon Askenazy, Polish historian and diplomat (b. 1866)
1936 – Moritz Schlick, German-Austrian physicist and philosopher (b. 1882)
1938 – C. J. Dennis, Australian poet and author (b. 1876)
1940 – Monty Noble, Australian cricketer and sportscaster (b. 1873)
1942 – August Froehlich, German priest and activist (b. 1891)
1945 – Isamu Chō, Japanese general (b. 1895)
1945 – Mitsuru Ushijima, Japanese general (b. 1887)
1956 – Walter de la Mare, English poet, short story writer and novelist (b. 1873)
1959 – Hermann Brill, German educator and politician, 8th Minister-President of Thuringia (b. 1895)
1964 – Havank, Dutch journalist and author (b. 1904)
1965 – David O. Selznick, American screenwriter and producer (b. 1902)
1966 – Thaddeus Shideler, American hurdler (b. 1883)
1969 – Judy Garland, American actress and singer (b. 1922)
1970 – Đặng Thùy Trâm, Vietnamese surgeon and author (b. 1942)
1974 – Darius Milhaud, French composer and educator (b. 1892)
1977 – Jacqueline Audry, French director and screenwriter (b. 1908)
1977 – Peter Laughner, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1952)
1979 – Louis Chiron, Monégasque race car driver (b. 1899)
1984 – Joseph Losey, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1909)
1987 – Fred Astaire, American actor and dancer (b. 1899)
1988 – Dennis Day, American singer and actor (b. 1916)
1990 – Ilya Frank, Russian physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1908)
1993 – Pat Nixon, American educator, 37th First Lady of the United States (b. 1912)
1995 – Leonid Derbenyov, Russian poet and songwriter (b. 1931)
1995 – Al Hansen, American sculptor and author (b. 1927)
1997 – Ted Gärdestad, Swedish singer-songwriter (b. 1956)
1997 – Gérard Pelletier, Canadian journalist and politician (b. 1919)
2003 – Vasil Bykaŭ, Belarusian war novelist (b. 1924)
2004 – Bob Bemer, American computer scientist and engineer (b. 1920)
2004 – Mattie Stepanek, American poet and author (b. 1990)
2007 – Erik Parlevliet, Dutch field hockey player (b. 1964)
2008 – Natalia Bekhtereva, Russian neuroscientist and psychologist (b. 1924)
2008 – George Carlin, American comedian, actor, and author (b. 1937)
2008 – Dody Goodman, American actress and dancer (b. 1914)
2011 – Coşkun Özarı, Turkish footballer and coach (b. 1931)
2012 – Juan Luis Galiardo, Spanish actor and producer (b. 1922)
2013 – Henning Larsen, Danish architect, designed the Copenhagen Opera House (b. 1925)
2013 – Allan Simonsen, Danish race car driver (b. 1978)
2014 – Fouad Ajami, Lebanese-American author and academic (b. 1945)
2014 – Rama Narayanan, Indian director and producer (b. 1949)
2015 – James Horner, American composer and conductor (b. 1953)
2017 – Mao Kobayashi, Japanese newscaster and actress (b. 1982)
2017 – Quett Masire, Botswanan politician (b. 1926)
2018 – Vinnie Paul, American musician (b. 1964)
Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Aaron of Aleth
Alban, first recorded Martyr in Britain (commemoration, Anglicanism)
Blessed Pope Innocent V
Eusebius of Samosata (Eastern Orthodox Church)
John Fisher (Catholic Church)
Nicetas of Remesiana
Paulinus of Nola
Thomas More (Catholic Church)
June 22 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Anti-Fascist Struggle Day (Croatia)
Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Great Patriotic War (Belarus)
Father's Day (Guernsey, Isle of Man, and Jersey)
Teachers' Day (El Salvador)
References
External links
Days of the year
June | [
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15858 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20Cleese | John Cleese | John Marwood Cleese ( ; born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report. In the late 1960s, he co-founded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus. Along with his Python co-stars Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman, Cleese starred in Monty Python films, which include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979) and The Meaning of Life (1983).
In the mid-1970s, Cleese and first wife Connie Booth co-wrote the sitcom Fawlty Towers, and he starred in it as Basil Fawlty. The series resulted in Cleese's receiving the 1980 BAFTA for Best Entertainment Performance, and in 2000 the show topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. In a 2001 Channel 4 poll, Basil was ranked second on its list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters. Cleese co-starred with Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and former Python colleague Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and Fierce Creatures (1997), both of which he also wrote. For A Fish Called Wanda he was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has also starred in Time Bandits (1981) and Rat Race (2001) and has appeared in many other films, including Silverado (1985), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), two James Bond films (as R and Q), two Harry Potter films (as Nearly Headless Nick) and the last three Shrek films.
Cleese has specialised in satire, black comedy, sketch comedy, and surreal humour. With Yes Minister writer Antony Jay, he co-founded Video Arts, a production company making entertaining training films. In 1976, Cleese co-founded The Secret Policeman's Ball benefit shows to raise funds for the human rights organisation Amnesty International. Although a staunch supporter of the Liberal Democrats, in 1999 he turned down an offer from the party to nominate him for a life peerage.
Early life
Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, the only child of Reginald Francis Cleese (1893–1972), an insurance salesman, and his wife Muriel Evelyn (née Cross, 1899–2000), the daughter of an auctioneer. His family's surname was originally Cheese, but his father had thought it was embarrassing and used the name Cleese when he enlisted in the Army during the First World War; he changed it officially by deed poll in 1923. As a child, Cleese supported Bristol City FC and Somerset County Cricket Club. Cleese was educated at St Peter's Preparatory School (paid for by money his mother inherited), where he received a prize for English and did well at cricket and boxing. When he was 13, he was awarded an exhibition at Clifton College, an English public school in Bristol. He was already more than 6 feet (1.83 m) tall by then.
Cleese allegedly defaced the school grounds, as a prank, by painting footprints to suggest that the statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had got down from his plinth and gone to the toilet. Cleese played cricket in the First XI and did well academically, passing eight O-Levels and three A-Levels in mathematics, physics and chemistry. In his autobiography So, Anyway, he says that discovering, aged 17, he had not been made a house prefect by his housemaster affected his outlook: "It was not fair and therefore it was unworthy of my respect... I believe that this moment changed my perspective on the world."
Cleese could not go straight to Cambridge, as the ending of National Service meant there were twice the usual number of applicants for places, so he returned to his prep school for two years to teach science, English, geography, history, and Latin (he drew on his Latin teaching experience later for a scene in Life of Brian, in which he corrects Brian's badly written Latin graffiti). He then took up a place he had won at Downing College, Cambridge, to read law. He also joined the Cambridge Footlights. He recalled that he went to the Cambridge Guildhall, where each university society had a stall, and went up to the Footlights stall, where he was asked if he could sing or dance. He replied "no" as he was not allowed to sing at his school because he was so bad, and if there was anything worse than his singing, it was his dancing. He was then asked "Well, what do you do?" to which he replied, "I make people laugh."
At the Footlights theatrical club, Cleese spent a lot of time with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie and met his future writing partner Graham Chapman. Cleese wrote extra material for the 1961 Footlights Revue I Thought I Saw It Move, and was registrar for the Footlights Club during 1962. He was also in the cast of the 1962 Footlights Revue Double Take! Cleese graduated from Cambridge in 1963 with an upper second. Despite his successes on The Frost Report, his father sent him cuttings from The Daily Telegraph offering management jobs in places like Marks & Spencer.
Career
Pre-Python
Cleese was a scriptwriter, as well as a cast member, for the 1963 Footlights Revue A Clump of Plinths. The revue was so successful at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that it was renamed Cambridge Circus and taken to the West End in London and then on a tour of New Zealand and Broadway, with the cast also appearing in some of the revue's sketches on The Ed Sullivan Show in October 1964.
After Cambridge Circus, Cleese briefly stayed in America, performing on and off-Broadway. While performing in the musical Half a Sixpence, Cleese met future Python Terry Gilliam as well as American actress Connie Booth, whom he married on 20 February 1968. At their wedding at a Unitarian Church in Manhattan, the couple attempted to ensure an absence of any theistic language. "The only moment of disappointment," Cleese recalled, "came at the very end of the service when I discovered that I'd failed to excise one particular mention of the word 'God.'" Later, Booth became a writing partner.
He was soon offered work as a writer with BBC Radio, where he worked on several programmes, most notably as a sketch writer for The Dick Emery Show. The success of the Footlights Revue led to the recording of a short series of half-hour radio programmes, called I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, which were so popular that the BBC commissioned a regular series with the same title that ran from 1965 to 1974. Cleese returned to Britain and joined the cast. In many episodes, he is credited as "John Otto Cleese" (according to Jem Roberts, this may have been due to the embarrassment of his actual middle name Marwood).
Also in 1965, Cleese and Chapman began writing on The Frost Report. The writing staff chosen for The Frost Report consisted of a number of writers and performers who went on to make names for themselves in comedy. They included co-performers from I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again and future Goodies Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor, and also Frank Muir, Barry Cryer, Marty Feldman, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Dick Vosburgh and future Python members Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. While working on The Frost Report, the future Pythons developed the writing styles that would make their collaboration significant. Cleese's and Chapman's sketches often involved authority figures, some of whom were performed by Cleese, while Jones and Palin were both infatuated with filmed scenes that opened with idyllic countryside panoramas. Idle was one of those charged with writing David Frost's monologue. During this period Cleese met and befriended influential British comedian Peter Cook, eventually collaborating with Cook on several projects and forming a close friendship that lasted until Cook's death in 1995.
It was as a performer on The Frost Report that Cleese achieved his breakthrough on British television as a comedy actor, appearing as the tall, upper class patrician figure in the classic "Class" sketch (screened on 7 April 1966), contrasting comically in a line-up with the shorter, middle class Ronnie Barker and the even shorter, working class Ronnie Corbett. The British Film Institute commented, "Its twinning of height and social position, combined with a minimal script, created a classic TV moment." This series was so popular that in 1966 Cleese and Chapman were invited to work as writers and performers with Brooke-Taylor and Feldman on At Last the 1948 Show, during which time the Four Yorkshiremen sketch was written by all four writers/performers (the Four Yorkshiremen sketch is now better known as a Monty Python sketch).
Cleese and Chapman also wrote episodes for the first series of Doctor in the House (and later Cleese wrote six episodes of Doctor at Large on his own in 1971). These series were successful, and in 1969 Cleese and Chapman were offered their very own series. However, owing to Chapman's alcoholism, Cleese found himself bearing an increasing workload in the partnership and was, therefore, unenthusiastic about doing a series with just the two of them. He had found working with Palin on The Frost Report an enjoyable experience and invited him to join the series. Palin had previously been working on Do Not Adjust Your Set with Idle and Jones, with Terry Gilliam creating the animations. The four of them had, on the back of the success of Do Not Adjust Your Set, been offered a series for Thames Television, which they were waiting to begin when Cleese's offer arrived. Palin agreed to work with Cleese and Chapman in the meantime, bringing with him Gilliam, Jones, and Idle.
Monty Python
Monty Python's Flying Circus ran for four series from October 1969 to December 1974 on BBC Television, though Cleese quit the show after the third. Cleese's two primary characterisations were as a sophisticate and a loony. He portrayed the former as a series of announcers, TV show hosts, and government officials (for example, "The Ministry of Silly Walks"). The latter is perhaps best represented in the "Cheese Shop" and by Cleese's Mr Praline character, the man with a dead Norwegian Blue parrot and a menagerie of other animals all named "Eric". He was also known for his working class "Sergeant Major" character, who worked as a Police Sergeant, Roman Centurion, etc. Cleese also appeared during some abrupt scene changes as a radio commentator (usually outfitted in a dinner suit) where, in a rather pompous manner, he would make the formal and determined announcement "And now for something completely different", which later became the title of the first Monty Python film.
Partnership with Graham Chapman
Along with Gilliam's animations, Cleese's work with Graham Chapman provided Python with its darkest and angriest moments, and many of his characters display the seething suppressed rage that later characterised his portrayal of Basil Fawlty.
Unlike Palin and Jones, Cleese and Chapman wrote together in the same room; Cleese claims that their writing partnership involved him doing most of the work, while Chapman sat back, not speaking for long periods before suddenly coming out with an idea that often elevated the sketch to a new level. A classic example of this is the "Dead Parrot sketch", envisaged by Cleese as a satire on poor customer service, which was originally to have involved a broken toaster and later a broken car (this version was actually performed and broadcast on the pre-Python special How to Irritate People). It was Chapman's suggestion to change the faulty item into a dead parrot, and he also suggested that the parrot be specifically a "Norwegian Blue", giving the sketch a surreal air which made it far more memorable.
Their humour often involved ordinary people in ordinary situations behaving absurdly for no obvious reason. Like Chapman, Cleese's poker face, clipped middle class accent, and intimidating height allowed him to appear convincingly as a variety of authority figures, such as policemen, detectives, Nazi officers or government officials, which he then proceeded to undermine. In the "Ministry of Silly Walks" sketch (written by Palin and Jones), for example, Cleese exploits his stature as the crane-legged civil servant performing a grotesquely elaborate walk to his office. On the Silly Walks sketch, Ben Beaumont-Thomas in The Guardian writes, "Cleese is utterly deadpan as he takes the stereotypical bowler-hatted political drone and ruthlessly skewers him. All the self-importance, bureaucratic inefficiency and laughable circuitousness of Whitehall is summed up in one balletic extension of his slender leg."
Chapman and Cleese also specialised in sketches wherein two characters conducted highly articulate arguments over completely arbitrary subjects, such as in the "cheese shop", the "dead parrot" sketch and "Argument Clinic", where Cleese plays a stone-faced bureaucrat employed to sit behind a desk and engage people in pointless, trivial bickering. All of these roles were opposite Palin (who Cleese often claims is his favourite Python to work with)—the comic contrast between the towering Cleese's crazed aggression and the shorter Palin's shuffling inoffensiveness is a common feature in the series. Occasionally, the typical Cleese–Palin dynamic is reversed, as in "Fish Licence", wherein Palin plays the bureaucrat with whom Cleese is trying to work.
Though Flying Circus lasted four series, by the start of series 3, Cleese was growing tired of dealing with Chapman's alcoholism. He felt, too, that the show's scripts had declined in quality. For these reasons, he became restless and decided to move on. Though he stayed for the third series, he officially left the group before the fourth season. Cleese received a credit on three episodes of the fourth series which used material from these sessions, though he was officially unconnected with the fourth series. He remained friendly with the group, and all six began writing Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Much of his work on Holy Grail remains widely quoted, including the Black Knight scene. Cleese returned to the troupe to co-write and co-star in two further Monty Python films, Monty Python's Life of Brian and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. His attack on Roman rule in Life of Brian–when he asks "What have the Romans ever done for us?", before being met with a string of benefits including sanitation, roads and public order–was ranked the seventh funniest line in film in a 2002 poll. Since the last Python film (Meaning of Life in 1983) Cleese has participated in various live performances with the group over the years.
1970s
From 1970 to 1973, Cleese served as rector of the University of St Andrews. His election proved a milestone for the university, revolutionising and modernising the post. For instance, the rector was traditionally entitled to appoint an "assessor", a deputy to sit in his place at important meetings in his absence. Cleese changed this into a position for a student, elected across campus by the student body, resulting in direct access and representation for the student body.
Around this time, Cleese worked with comedian Les Dawson on his sketch/stand-up show Sez Les. The differences between the two physically (the tall, lean Cleese and the short, stout Dawson) and socially (the public school and the Cambridge-educated Cleese vs. the working class, self-educated Mancunian Dawson) were marked, but both worked well together from series 8 onwards until the series ended in 1976.
He appeared on a single, "Superspike", with Bill Oddie and a group of UK athletes, billed the "Superspike Squad", to fund the latter's attendance at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal.
Cleese starred in the low-budget spoof of the Sherlock Holmes detective series The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It (1977) as the grandson of the world's greatest consulting detective. In December 1977, Cleese appeared as a guest star on The Muppet Show. Ranked one of the best guest stars to appear on the show, Cleese was a fan of The Muppet Show and co-wrote much of the episode. In it he is "kidnapped" before the show begins, complains about the number of pigs, and gets roped into doing a closing number with Kermit the Frog, Sweetums, pigs, chickens and monsters. Cleese also made a cameo appearance in their 1981 film The Great Muppet Caper and won the TV Times award for Funniest Man on TV – 1978–79. In 1979, he starred in a TV special, To Norway, Home of Giants, produced by Johnny Bergh.
Throughout the 1970s, Cleese also produced and acted in a number of successful business training films, including Meetings, Bloody Meetings, and More Bloody Meetings. These were produced by his company Video Arts.
Fawlty Towers
Cleese achieved greater prominence in the United Kingdom as the neurotic hotel manager Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers, which he co-wrote with his wife Connie Booth. The series won three BAFTA awards when produced, and in 2000 it topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. In a 2001 poll conducted by Channel 4 Basil Fawlty was ranked second (behind Homer Simpson) on their list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters. The series also featured Prunella Scales as Basil's acerbic wife Sybil, Andrew Sachs as the much abused Spanish waiter Manuel, and Booth as waitress Polly, the series' voice of sanity. Cleese based Basil Fawlty on a real person, Donald Sinclair, whom he had encountered in 1970 while the Monty Python team were staying at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay while filming inserts for their television series. Reportedly, Cleese was inspired by Sinclair's mantra, "I could run this hotel just fine if it weren't for the guests." He later described Sinclair as "the most wonderfully rude man I have ever met," although Sinclair's widow has said her husband was totally misrepresented in the series. During the Pythons' stay, Sinclair allegedly threw Idle's briefcase out of the hotel "in case it contained a bomb," complained about Gilliam's "American" table manners, and threw a bus timetable at another guest after he dared to ask the time of the next bus to town.
The first series was screened from 19 September 1975 on BBC 2, initially to poor reviews, but gained momentum when repeated on BBC 1 the following year. Despite this, a second series did not air until 1979, by which time Cleese's marriage to Booth had ended, but they revived their collaboration for the second series. Fawlty Towers consisted of two seasons, each of only six episodes; Cleese and Booth both maintain that this was to avoid compromising the quality of the series. The popularity of Fawlty Towers has endured, and in addition to featuring high in greatest-ever television show polls it is often rebroadcast. In a 2002 poll, Basil's "don't mention the war" comment (said to the waitress Polly about the German guests) was ranked the second funniest line in television.
1980s and 1990s
During the 1980s and 1990s, Cleese focused on film, though he did work with Peter Cook in his one-off TV special Peter Cook and Co. in 1980. In the same year, Cleese played Petruchio, in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew in the BBC Television Shakespeare series. In 1981 he appeared in the Terry Gilliam-directed Time Bandits as Robin Hood. He also participated in Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (filmed 1980, released 1982) and starred in The Secret Policeman's Ball for Amnesty International. In 1985, Cleese had a small dramatic role as a sheriff in the American Western Silverado, which had an all-star cast that included Kevin Kline, with whom he starred in A Fish Called Wanda three years later. In 1986, he starred in the British comedy film Clockwise as an uptight school headmaster obsessed with punctuality and constantly getting into trouble during a journey to speak at the Headmasters' Conference. Written by Michael Frayn, the film was successful in the UK but not in the United States. It earned Cleese the 1987 Peter Sellers Award For Comedy at the Evening Standard British Film Awards.
In 1988, Cleese wrote and starred in A Fish Called Wanda as the lead, Archie Leach, along with Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and Michael Palin. Wanda was a commercial and critical success, becoming one of the top ten films of the year at the US box office, and Cleese was nominated for an Academy Award for his script. Kline won the Oscar for his portrayal of bumbling, violent, narcissistic ex-CIA agent Otto West in the film.
In 1989, Graham Chapman was diagnosed with throat cancer; Cleese, Michael Palin, Peter Cook, and Chapman's partner David Sherlock witnessed Chapman's death. Chapman's death occurred a day before the 20th anniversary of the first broadcast of Flying Circus, with Jones commenting that it was "the worst case of party-pooping in all history." Cleese gave a eulogy at Chapman's memorial service.
Cleese later played a supporting role in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) alongside Branagh himself and Robert De Niro. With Robin Skynner, the English psychiatrist, Cleese wrote two books on relationships: Families and How to Survive Them and Life and How to Survive It. The books are presented as a dialogue between Skynner and Cleese.
The follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda, Fierce Creatures—which again starred Cleese alongside Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Palin—was released in 1997, but was greeted with mixed reception by critics and audiences. Cleese has since often stated that making the second film had been a mistake. When asked by his friend, director and restaurant critic Michael Winner, what he would do differently if he could live his life again, Cleese responded, "I wouldn't have married Alyce Faye Eichelberger and I wouldn't have made Fierce Creatures."
In 1999, Cleese appeared in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough as Q's assistant, referred to by Bond as "R". In 2002, when Cleese reprised his role in Die Another Day, the character was promoted, making Cleese the new quartermaster (Q) of MI6. In 2004, Cleese was featured as Q in the video game James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing, featuring his likeness and voice. Cleese did not appear in the subsequent Bond films, Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall; in the latter film, Ben Whishaw was cast in the role of Q.
21st century
Cleese is Provost's Visiting Professor at Cornell University, after having been Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large from 1999 to 2006. He makes occasional well-received appearances on the Cornell campus. In 2001, Cleese was cast in the comedy Rat Race as the eccentric hotel owner Donald P. Sinclair, the name of the Torquay hotel owner on whom he had based the character of Basil Fawlty. That year he appeared as Nearly Headless Nick in the first Harry Potter film: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001), a role he would reprise in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002). In 2002, Cleese made a cameo appearance in the film The Adventures of Pluto Nash, in which he played "James", a computerised chauffeur of a hover car stolen by the title character (played by Eddie Murphy). The vehicle is subsequently destroyed in a chase, leaving the chauffeur stranded in a remote place on the moon. In 2003, Cleese appeared as Lyle Finster on the US sitcom Will & Grace. His character's daughter, Lorraine, was played by Minnie Driver. In the series, Lyle Finster briefly marries Karen Walker (Megan Mullally). In 2004, Cleese was credited as co-writer of a DC Comics graphic novel titled Superman: True Brit. Part of DC's "Elseworlds" line of imaginary stories, True Brit, mostly written by Kim Howard Johnson, suggests what might have happened had Superman's rocket ship landed on a farm in Britain, not America.
From 10 November to 9 December 2005, Cleese toured New Zealand with his stage show John Cleese—His Life, Times and Current Medical Problems. Cleese described it as "a one-man show with several people in it, which pushes the envelope of acceptable behaviour in new and disgusting ways". The show was developed in New York City with William Goldman and includes Cleese's daughter Camilla as a writer and actor (the shows were directed by Australian Bille Brown). His assistant of many years, Garry Scott-Irvine, also appeared and was listed as a co-producer. The show then played in universities in California and Arizona from 10 January to 25 March 2006 under the title "Seven Ways to Skin an Ocelot". His voice can be downloaded for directional guidance purposes as a downloadable option on some personal GPS-navigation device models by company TomTom.
In a 2005 poll of comedians and comedy insiders, The Comedians' Comedian, Cleese was voted second to Peter Cook. In 2006, Cleese hosted a television special of football's greatest kicks, goals, saves, bloopers, plays, and penalties, as well as football's influence on culture (including the Monty Python sketch "Philosophy Football"), featuring interviews with pop culture icons Dave Stewart, Dennis Hopper, and Henry Kissinger, as well as eminent footballers, including Pelé, Mia Hamm, and Thierry Henry. The Art of Soccer with John Cleese was released in North America on DVD in January 2009 by BFS Entertainment & Multimedia. Also in 2006, Cleese released the song "Don't Mention the World Cup".
Cleese lent his voice to the BioWare video game Jade Empire. His role was that of an "outlander" named Sir Roderick Ponce von Fontlebottom the Magnificent Bastard, stranded in the Imperial City of the Jade Empire. His character is essentially a British colonialist stereotype who refers to the people of the Jade Empire as "savages in need of enlightenment". His armour has the design of a fork stuck in a piece of cheese. In 2007, Cleese appeared in ads for Titleist as a golf course designer named "Ian MacCallister", who represents "Golf Designers Against Distance". Also in 2007, he was involved in filming of the sequel to The Pink Panther, titled The Pink Panther 2, with Steve Martin and Aishwarya Rai.
Cleese collaborated with Los Angeles Guitar Quartet member William Kanengiser in 2008 on the text to the performance piece "The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha". Cleese, as narrator, and the LAGQ premiered the work in Santa Barbara. The year 2008 also saw reports of Cleese working on a musical version of A Fish Called Wanda with his daughter Camilla.
At the end of March 2009, Cleese published his first article as "Contributing Editor" to The Spectator: "The real reason I had to join The Spectator". Cleese has also hosted comedy galas at the Montreal Just for Laughs comedy festival in 2006, and again in 2009. Towards the end of 2009 and into 2010, Cleese appeared in a series of television adverts for the Norwegian electric goods shop chain Elkjøp. In March 2010 it was announced that Cleese would be playing Jasper in the video game Fable III.
In 2009 and 2010, Cleese toured Scandinavia and the US with his Alimony Tour Year One and Year Two. In May 2010, it was announced that this tour, set for May 2011, would extend to the UK (his first tour there). The show is dubbed the "Alimony Tour" in reference to the financial implications of Cleese's divorce. The UK tour started in Cambridge on 3 May, visiting Birmingham, Nottingham, Salford, York, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Oxford, Bristol and Bath (the Alimony Tour DVD was recorded on 2 July, the final Bath date). Later in 2011 John took his Alimony Tour to South Africa. He played Cape Town on the 21 & 22 October before moving over to Johannesburg, where he played from 25 to 30 October. In January 2012 he took his one-man show to Australia, starting in Perth on 22 January and throughout the next four months visited Adelaide, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Newcastle, New South Wales, Melbourne, Sydney, and finished up during April in Canberra.
In October 2010, Cleese was featured in the launch of an advertising campaign by The Automobile Association for a new home emergency response product. He appeared as a man who believed the AA could not help him during a series of disasters, including water pouring through his ceiling, with the line "The AA? For faulty showers?" During 2010, Cleese appeared in a series of radio advertisements for the Canadian insurance company Pacific Blue Cross, in which he plays a character called "Dr. Nigel Bilkington, Chief of Medicine for American General Hospital".
In 2012, Cleese was cast in Hunting Elephants, a heist comedy by Israeli filmmaker Reshef Levi. Cleese had to quit just prior to filming due to heart trouble and was replaced by Patrick Stewart. Between September and October 2013, Cleese embarked on his first-ever cross-Canada comedy tour. Entitled "John Cleese: Last Time to See Me Before I Die tour", he visited Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Victoria and finished in Vancouver, performing to mostly sold-out venues. Cleese returned to the stage in Dubai in November 2013, where he performed to a sold-out theatre.
Cleese was interviewed and appears as himself in filmmaker Gracie Otto's 2013 documentary film The Last Impresario, about Cleese's longtime friend and colleague Michael White. White produced Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Cleese's pre-Python comedy production Cambridge Circus. At a comic press conference in November 2013, Cleese and other surviving members of the Monty Python comedy group announced a reuniting performance to be held in July 2014.
Cleese joined with Eric Idle in 2015 and 2016 for a tour of North America, Canada and the ANZUS nations, "John Cleese & Eric Idle: Together Again At Last . . . For The Very First Time," playing small theatres and including interaction with audiences as well as sketches and reminisces. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything interview, Cleese expressed regret that he had turned down the role played by Robin Williams in The Birdcage, the butler played by Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day, and the clergyman played by Peter Cook in The Princess Bride.
In 2017, he wrote Bang Bang! a new adaptation of Georges Feydeau's French play Monsieur Chasse! for the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, before making its American premiere at the Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, New York in 2018 followed by touring the UK in spring 2020.
In 2021, Cleese cancelled an appearance at Cambridge University after learning that art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon had been blacklisted by the student union for impersonating Adolf Hitler. His visit to the university was intended to be part of a documentary on wokeism. Cleese said he was "blacklisting myself before someone else does".
Style of humour
In his Alimony Tour Cleese explained the origin of his fondness for black humour, the only thing that he inherited from his mother. Examples of it are the Dead Parrot sketch, "The Kipper and the Corpse" episode of Fawlty Towers, his clip for the 1992 BBC2 mockumentary "A Question of Taste", the Undertakers sketch, and his eulogy at Graham Chapman's memorial service which included the line, "Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard! I hope he fries." On his attitude to life he states, "I can take almost nothing seriously". Cleese has criticised political correctness, saying it has become "a sort of indulgence of the most over-sensitive people in your culture, the people who are most easily upset [...] if you have to keep thinking which words you can use and which you can't, then that will stifle creativity." According to Cleese, "The main thing is to realise that words depend on their context [...] PC people simply don't understand this business about context because they tend to be very literal-minded."
In 2020, following a controversy over the content of the Fawlty Towers episode "The Germans", Cleese criticised the BBC, saying "The BBC is now run by a mixture of marketing people and petty bureaucrats. It used to have a large sprinkling of people who'd actually made programmes. Not any more. So BBC decisions are made by persons whose main concern is not losing their jobs... That's why they're so cowardly and gutless and contemptible." He likened the style of humour in Fawlty Towers to the representation of Alf Garnett from another BBC sitcom, Till Death Us Do Part, saying "We laughed at Alf's reactionary views. Thus we discredited them, by laughing at him. Of course, there were people—very stupid people—who said 'Thank God someone is saying these things at last'. We laughed at these people too. Now they're taking decisions about BBC comedy."
Activism and politics
Cleese (and the other members of Python) have contributed their services to charitable endeavours and causes—sometimes as an ensemble, at other times as individuals. The cause that has been the most frequent and consistent beneficiary has been the human rights work of Amnesty International via the Secret Policeman's Ball benefit shows. The idea of the Ball was conceived by Cleese, with Huffington Post stating "in 1976 he "friended" the then-struggling Amnesty International (according to Martin Lewis, the very notion of Human Rights was then not the domain of hipsters and students, but just of foreign-policy wonks) first with a cheque signed "J. Cleese" — and then by rounding up "a few friends" to put on a show." Many musicians have publicly attributed their activism—and the organisation of their own benefit events—to the inspiration of the work in this field of Cleese and the rest of Python, such as Bob Geldof (organiser of Live Aid), U2, Pete Townshend, and Sting. On the impact of the Ball on Geldof, Sting states, "he took the 'Ball' and ran with it."
Cleese is a long-standing supporter of the Liberal Democrats. Prior to that, he was a supporter of the SDP after their formation in 1981, and during the 1987 general election he recorded a party political broadcast for the SDP–Liberal Alliance, in which he advocated for the introduction of proportional representation. Cleese subsequently appeared in broadcasts for the Liberal Democrats in the 1997 general election and narrated a radio election broadcast for the party during the 2001 general election.
In 2008, Cleese expressed support for Barack Obama and his presidential candidacy, offering his services as a speech writer. He was an outspoken critic of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, saying that "Michael Palin is no longer the funniest Palin". The same year, he wrote a satirical poem about Fox News commentator Sean Hannity for Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
In 2011, Cleese declared his appreciation for Britain's coalition government between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, saying: "I think what's happening at the moment is rather interesting. The Coalition has made everything a little more courteous and a little more flexible. I think it was quite good that the Liberal Democrats had to compromise a bit with the Tories." He also criticised the previous Labour government, commenting: "Although my inclinations are slightly left-of-centre, I was terribly disappointed with the last Labour government. Gordon Brown lacked emotional intelligence and was never a leader." Cleese also reiterated his support for proportional representation.
In April 2011, Cleese said that he had declined a life peerage for political services in 1999. Outgoing leader of the Liberal Democrats Paddy Ashdown had put forward the suggestion shortly before stepping down, with the idea that Cleese would take the party whip and sit as a working peer, but the actor quipped that he "realised this involved being in England in the winter and I thought that was too much of a price to pay." Cleese also declined a CBE title in 1996 as he thought, "they were silly."
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2014, Cleese expressed political interest about the UK Independence Party, saying that although he was in doubt as to whether he was prepared to vote for it, he was attracted to its challenge to the established political order and the radicalism of its policies on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union. He expressed support for immigration, but also concern about the integration of immigrants into British culture.
Talking to Der Spiegel in 2015, Cleese expressed a critical view on what he saw as a plutocracy that was unhealthily developing control of the governance of the First World's societies, stating that he had reached a point when he "saw that our existence here is absolutely hopeless. I see the rich have got a stranglehold on us. If somebody had said that to me when I was 20, I would have regarded him as a left-wing loony."
In 2016, Cleese publicly supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union. He tweeted: "If I thought there was any chance of major reform in the EU, I'd vote to stay in. But there isn't. Sad." Cleese said that "EU bureaucrats" had taken away "any trace of democratic accountability" and suggested they should "give up the euro, introduce accountability."
During then-Republican nominee Donald Trump's run for the US Presidency in 2016, Cleese described Trump as "a narcissist, with no attention span, who doesn't have clear ideas about anything and makes it all up as he goes along". He had previously described the leadership of the Republican Party as "the most cynical, most disgracefully immoral people I've ever come across in a Western civilisation".
In 2017, Cleese stated that he wouldn't vote in that year's general election because "I live in Chelsea and Kensington, so under our present system my vote is utterly worthless." In July 2018, Cleese said that he was leaving the UK to relocate to the Caribbean island of Nevis, partly over frustration around the standard of the Brexit debate, including "dreadful lies" by "the right" and a lack of reform regarding the press and the voting system. He relocated to Nevis on 1 November 2018.
In May 2019, Cleese repeated his previous statement that London was no longer an English city, saying "virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation. So there must be some truth in it... I note also that London was the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU." London Mayor Sadiq Khan responded, "These comments make John Cleese sound like he's in character as Basil Fawlty. Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength. We are proudly the English capital, a European city and a global hub." Cleese added, "I suspect I should apologise for my affection for the Englishness of my upbringing, but in some ways I found it calmer, more polite, more humorous, less tabloid, and less money-oriented than the one that is replacing it."
In 2020, Cleese opposed the BBC's removal of the Fawlty Towers episode "The Germans" from the UKTV streaming service after protests following the murder of George Floyd, stating that the program was mocking prejudice with its use of a character who uttered racial slurs. "If they can't see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say," said Cleese. UKTV later restored the episode with a disclaimer about its content.
In November 2021, Cleese protested cancel culture by blacklisting himself over a Hitler impersonation controversy at the Cambridge Union.
Anti-smoking campaign
In 1992, the UK Health Education Authority (subsequently the Health Development Agency, now merged into the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) recruited Cleese—an ex-smoker—to star in a series of anti-smoking public service announcements (PSAs) on British television, which took the form of sketches rife with morbid humor about smoking and were designed to encourage adult smokers to quit. In a controlled study of regions of central and northern England (one region received no intervention) the PSAs were broadcast in two regions, and one region received both the PSAs, plus locally organised anti-tobacco campaigning. The study found that smokers in regions where the PSAs were broadcast were about half again as likely to have quit at the 18-month follow-up point as those who did not see them, irrespective of the local anti-tobacco campaign.
Personal life
Cleese met Connie Booth in the US and they married in 1968. In 1971, Booth gave birth to their only child, Cynthia Cleese, who went on to appear with her father in his films A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures. With Booth, Cleese wrote the scripts for and co-starred in both series of Fawlty Towers, although the two were actually divorced before the second series was finished and aired. Cleese and Booth are said to have remained close friends since. Cleese has two grandchildren, Evan and Olivia, through Cynthia's marriage to writer/director Ed Solomon. Cleese married American actress Barbara Trentham in 1981. Their daughter Camilla, Cleese's second child, was born in 1984. He and Trentham divorced in 1990. During this time, Cleese emigrated to Los Angeles.
In 1992, he married American psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger. They divorced in 2008; the divorce settlement left Eichelberger with £12 million in finance and assets, including £600,000 a year for seven years. Cleese said, "What I find so unfair is that if we both died today, her children would get much more than mine ... I got off lightly. Think what I'd have had to pay Alyce if she had contributed anything to the relationship—such as children, or a conversation".
Less than a year later, he returned to the UK, where he has property in London and a home on the Royal Crescent in Bath, Somerset. In August 2012, Cleese married English jewellery designer and former model Jennifer Wade in a ceremony on the Caribbean island of Mustique.
In an interview in 2014, Cleese blamed his mother, who lived to the age of 101, for his problems in relationships with women, saying: "My ingrained habit of walking on eggshells when dealing with my mother dominated my romantic liaisons for many years." Cleese said that he had spent "a large part of my life in some form of therapy" over his relationships with women.
In March 2015, in an interview with Der Spiegel, he was asked if he was religious. Cleese stated that he did not think much of organised religion and said he was not committed to "anything except the vague feeling that there is something more going on than the materialist reductionist people think".
Cleese has a passion for lemurs. Following the 1997 comedy film Fierce Creatures, in which the ring-tailed lemur played a key role, he hosted the 1998 BBC documentary In the Wild: Operation Lemur with John Cleese, which tracked the progress of a reintroduction of black-and-white ruffed lemurs back into the Betampona Reserve in Madagascar. The project had been partly funded by Cleese's donation of the proceeds from the London premier of Fierce Creatures. Cleese said "I adore lemurs. They're extremely gentle, well-mannered, pretty and yet great fun ... I should have married one".
The Bemaraha woolly lemur (Avahi cleesei), also known as Cleese's woolly lemur, is native to western Madagascar. The scientist who discovered the species named it after Cleese, mainly because of Cleese's fondness for lemurs and his efforts at protecting and preserving them. The species was first discovered in 1990 by a team of scientists from Zurich University led by Urs Thalmann but was not formally described as a species until 11 November 2005.
Filmography
Honours and tributes
A species of lemur, the Bemaraha woolly lemur (Avahi cleesei), has been named in his honour. John Cleese has mentioned this in television interviews. Also there is mention of this honour in "New Scientist"—and John Cleese's response to the honour.
An asteroid, 9618 Johncleese, is named in his honour.
Cleese declined a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1996.
There is a municipal rubbish heap of in altitude that has been named Mt Cleese at the Awapuni landfill just outside Palmerston North after he dubbed the city "suicide capital of New Zealand" after a stay there in 2005.
"The Universal Language" skit from All in the Timing, a collection of short plays by David Ives, centres around a fictional language (Unamunda) in which the word for the English language is "johncleese".
The post-hardcore rock band I Set My Friends on Fire has a song on their You Can't Spell Slaughter Without Laughter album titled "Reese's Pieces, I Don't Know Who John Cleese Is?".
Scholastic
University Degrees
Chancellor, visitor, governor, rector, and fellowships
Honorary Degrees
Bibliography
The Rectorial Address of John Cleese, Epam, 1971, 8 pages
Cleese Encounters: The Unauthorized Biography of Monty Python Veteran John Cleese, Jonathan Margolis, St. Martin's Press, 1992,
The Human Face (with Brian Bates) (DK Publishing Inc., 2001, )
Foreword for Time and the Soul, Jacob Needleman, 2003, (paperback)
Superman: True Brit, DC Comics, 2004,
So, Anyway..., 2014, Crown Archetype,
Professor at Large: The Cornell Years, 2018, Cornell University Press,
Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide, 2020, Crown,
Dialogues
Families and How to Survive Them, w/Robin Skynner, 1983 (hardc.), (p/back)
Life and How to Survive It, w/Robin Skynner 1993 (hardcover), (paperback)
See also
List of people who have declined a British honour
Notes
References
Published works
External links
John Cleese at the Museum of Broadcast Communications
John Cleese at the BBC Guide to Comedy
Podcast to celebrate The Life of Brian (March 2008)
Daily Llama: John Cleese Visits Lemurs at San Francisco Zoo
John Cleese Speaking at the American School in London
A Conversation with John Cleese at Cornell University (September 2017)
Living people
1939 births
20th-century English comedians
21st-century English comedians
20th-century English male actors
21st-century English male actors
21st-century English writers
Alumni of Downing College, Cambridge
Best Actor BAFTA Award winners
Best Entertainment Performance BAFTA Award (television) winners
British expatriate academics in the United States
British expatriates in Saint Kitts and Nevis
British male comedy actors
British male television writers
British surrealist artists
Cornell University faculty
English comedy writers
English expatriates in the United States
English male comedians
English male film actors
English male musical theatre actors
English male non-fiction writers
English male radio actors
English male stage actors
English male television actors
English male voice actors
English memoirists
English radio writers
English television personalities
English television writers
Liberal Democrats (UK) people
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from Somerset
Monty Python members
People educated at Clifton College
People from Weston-super-Mare
Primetime Emmy Award winners
Rectors of the University of St Andrews | [
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15861 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July%205 | July 5 |
Events
Pre-1600
328 – The official opening of Constantine's Bridge built over the Danube between Sucidava (Corabia, Romania) and Oescus (Gigen, Bulgaria) by the Roman architect Theophilus Patricius.
1316 – The Burgundian and Majorcan claimants of the Principality of Achaea meet in the Battle of Manolada.
1594 – Portuguese forces under the command of Pedro Lopes de Sousa begin an unsuccessful invasion of the Kingdom of Kandy during the Campaign of Danture in Sri Lanka.
1601–1900
1610 – John Guy sets sail from Bristol with 39 other colonists for Newfoundland.
1687 – Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
1770 – The Battle of Chesma between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire begins.
1775 – The Second Continental Congress adopts the Olive Branch Petition.
1803 – The Convention of Artlenburg is signed, leading to the French occupation of the Electorate of Hanover (which had been ruled by the British king).
1807 – In Buenos Aires the local militias repel the British soldiers within the Second English Invasion.
1809 – The Battle of Wagram between the French and Austrian Empires begins.
1811 – The Venezuelan Declaration of Independence is adopted by a congress of the provinces.
1813 – War of 1812: Three weeks of British raids on Fort Schlosser, Black Rock and Plattsburgh, New York commence.
1814 – War of 1812: Battle of Chippawa: American Major General Jacob Brown defeats British General Phineas Riall at Chippawa, Ontario.
1833 – Lê Văn Khôi along with 27 soldiers stage a mutiny taking over the Phiên An citadel, developing into the Lê Văn Khôi revolt against Emperor Minh Mạng.
1833 – Admiral Charles Napier vanquishes the navy of the Portuguese usurper Dom Miguel at the third Battle of Cape St. Vincent.
1841 – Thomas Cook organises the first package excursion, from Leicester to Loughborough.
1852 – Frederick Douglass delivers his "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech in Rochester, New York.
1859 – The United States discovers and claims Midway Atoll.
1865 – The United States Secret Service begins operation.
1884 – Germany takes possession of Cameroon.
1901–present
1915 – The Liberty Bell leaves Philadelphia by special train on its way to the Panama–Pacific International Exposition. This is the last trip outside Philadelphia that the custodians of the bell intend to permit.
1934 – "Bloody Thursday": the police open fire on striking longshoremen in San Francisco.
1935 – The National Labor Relations Act, which governs labor relations in the United States, is signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
1937 – Spam, the luncheon meat, is introduced into the market by the Hormel Foods Corporation.
1940 – World War II: Foreign relations of Vichy France are severed with the United Kingdom.
1941 – World War II: Operation Barbarossa: German troops reach the Dnieper river.
1943 – World War II: An Allied invasion fleet sails for Sicily (Operation Husky, July 10, 1943).
1943 – World War II: German forces begin a massive offensive against the Soviet Union at the Battle of Kursk, also known as Operation Citadel.
1945 – The United Kingdom holds its first general election in 10 years, which would be won by Clement Attlee's Labour Party.
1946 – Micheline Bernardini models the first modern bikini at a swimming pool in Paris.
1948 – National Health Service Acts create the national public health system in the United Kingdom.
1950 – Korean War: Task Force Smith: American and North Korean forces first clash, in the Battle of Osan.
1950 – Zionism: The Knesset passes the Law of Return which grants all Jews the right to immigrate to Israel.
1954 – The BBC broadcasts its first daily television news bulletin.
1954 – Elvis Presley records his first single, "That's All Right", at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee.
1962 – The official independence of Algeria is proclaimed after an eight-year-long war with France.
1970 – Air Canada Flight 621 crashes in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, killing all 109 people on board.
1971 – The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 years, is formally certified by President Richard Nixon.
1973 – A boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion (BLEVE) in Kingman, Arizona, following a fire that broke out as propane was being transferred from a railroad car to a storage tank, kills eleven firefighters.
1973 – Juvénal Habyarimana seizes power over Rwanda in a coup d'état.
1975 – Arthur Ashe becomes the first black man to win the Wimbledon singles title.
1975 – Cape Verde gains its independence from Portugal.
1977 – The Pakistan Armed Forces under Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq seize power in Operation Fair Play and begin 11 years of martial law. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, is overthrown.
1980 – Swedish tennis player Björn Borg wins his fifth Wimbledon final and becomes the first male tennis player to win the championships five times in a row (1976–1980).
1984 – The United States Supreme Court gives its United States v. Leon decision providing a good-faith exception from the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule against use of evidence obtained through defective warrants in criminal trials.
1987 – Sri Lankan Civil War: The LTTE uses suicide attacks on the Sri Lankan Army for the first time. The Black Tigers are born and, in the following years, will continue to kill with the tactic.
1989 – Iran–Contra affair: Oliver North is sentenced by U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell to a three-year suspended prison term, two years probation, $150,000 in fines and 1,200 hours community service. His convictions are later overturned.
1994 – Jeff Bezos founds Amazon.
1995 – Armenia adopts its constitution, four years after its independence from the Soviet Union.
1996 – Dolly the sheep becomes the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.
1997 – Sri Lankan Civil War: Sri Lankan Tamil MP A. Thangathurai is shot dead at Sri Shanmuga Hindu Ladies College in Trincomalee.
1999 – U.S. President Bill Clinton imposes trade and economic sanctions against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
2003 – The World Health Organization announces that the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak has been contained.
2004 – The first direct Indonesian presidential election is held.
2006 – North Korea tests four short-range missiles, one medium-range missile and a long-range Taepodong-2. The long-range Taepodong-2 reportedly fails in mid-air over the Sea of Japan.
2009 – A series of violent riots break out in Ürümqi, the capital city of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China.
2009 – The largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever discovered in Britain, consisting of more than 1,500 items, is found near the village of Hammerwich, near Lichfield, Staffordshire.
2012 – The Shard in London is inaugurated as the tallest building in Europe, with a height of 310 metres (1,020 ft).
2016 – The Juno space probe arrives at Jupiter and begins a 20-month survey of the planet.
Births
Pre-1600
465 – Ahkal Mo' Naab' I, Mayan ruler (d. 524)
980 – Mokjong of Goryeo, Korean king (d. 1009)
1029 – Al-Mustansir Billah, Fatimid caliph (d. 1094)
1321 – Joan of the Tower, English consort of David II of Scotland (d. 1362)
1466 – Giovanni Sforza, Italian nobleman (d. 1510)
1547 – Garzia de' Medici, Tuscan son of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (d. 1562)
1549 – Francesco Maria del Monte, Italian cardinal and art collector (d. 1627)
1554 – Elisabeth of Austria, French queen (d. 1592)
1580 – Carlo Contarini, doge of Venice (d. 1656)
1586 – Thomas Hooker, English-born founder of the Colony of Connecticut (d. 1647)
1593 – Achille d'Étampes de Valençay, French military leader (d. 1646)
1601–1900
1653 – Thomas Pitt, English businessman and politician (d. 1726)
1670 – Dorothea Sophie of Neuburg, countess palatine (d. 1748)
1675 – Mary Walcott, American accuser and witness at the Salem witch trials (d. 1719)
1709 – Étienne de Silhouette, French translator and politician, Controller-General of Finances (d. 1767)
1717 – Peter III, Portuguese king (d. 1786)
1718 – Francis Seymour-Conway, 1st Marquess of Hertford, English politician, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (d. 1794)
1745 – Carl Arnold Kortum, German physician and poet (d. 1824)
1755 – Sarah Siddons, English actress (d. 1831)
1780 – François Carlo Antommarchi, French physician (d. 1838)
1781 – Stamford Raffles, English politician, founded Singapore (d. 1826)
1793 – Pavel Pestel, Russian officer (d. 1826)
1794 – Sylvester Graham, American minister and activist (d. 1851)
1801 – David Farragut, American admiral (d. 1870)
1802 – Pavel Nakhimov, Russian admiral (d. 1855)
1803 – George Borrow, British writer (d. 1881)
1805 – Robert FitzRoy, English captain, meteorologist, and politician, 2nd Governor of New Zealand (d. 1865)
1810 – P. T. Barnum, American businessman, co-founded Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus (d. 1891)
1820 – William John Macquorn Rankine, Scottish physicist, mathematician, and engineer (d. 1872)
1829 – Ignacio Mariscal, Mexican politician and diplomat, Secretary of Foreign Affairs for Mexico (d. 1910)
1832 – Pavel Chistyakov, Russian painter and educator (d. 1919)
1841 – William Collins Whitney, American financier and politician, 31st United States Secretary of the Navy (d. 1904)
1849 – William Thomas Stead, English journalist (d. 1912)
1853 – Cecil Rhodes, English-South African businessman and politician, 6th Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (d. 1902)
1857 – Clara Zetkin, German theorist and activist (d. 1933)
1857 – Julien Tiersot, French musicologist and composer (d. 1936)
1860 – Robert Bacon, American colonel and politician, 39th United States Secretary of State (d. 1919)
1860 – Mathieu Jaboulay, French surgeon (d. 1913)
1862 – George Nuttall, American-British bacteriologist (d. 1937)
1862 – Horatio Caro, English chess master (d. 1920)
1864 – Stephan Krehl, German composer (d. 1924)
1867 – A. E. Douglass, American astronomer (d. 1962)
1872 – Édouard Herriot, French lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of France (d. 1957)
1874 – Eugen Fischer, German physician and academic (d. 1967)
1879 – Dwight F. Davis, American tennis player and politician, 49th United States Secretary of War (d. 1945)
1879 – Wanda Landowska, Polish-French harpsichord player and educator (d. 1959)
1880 – Jan Kubelík, Czech violinist and composer (d. 1940)
1880 – Constantin Tănase, Romanian actor and playwright (d. 1945)
1882 – Inayat Khan, Indian mystic and educator (d. 1927)
1883 – Gustave Lanctot, Canadian historian, author, and academic (d. 1975)
1884 – Enrico Dante, Italian cardinal (d. 1967)
1885 – Blas Infante, Spanish historian and politician (d. 1936)
1885 – André Lhote, French sculptor and painter (d. 1962)
1886 – Willem Drees, Dutch politician and historian, Prime Minister of the Netherlands (1948–1958) (d. 1988)
1886 – Prince John Konstantinovich of Russia (d. 1918)
1888 – Herbert Spencer Gasser, American physiologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1963)
1888 – Louise Freeland Jenkins, American astronomer and academic (d. 1970)
1889 – Jean Cocteau, French novelist, poet, and playwright (d. 1963)
1890 – Frederick Lewis Allen, American historian and journalist (d. 1954)
1891 – John Howard Northrop, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1987)
1891 – Tin Ujević, Croatian poet and translator (d. 1955)
1893 – Anthony Berkeley Cox, English writer (d. 1971)
1893 – Giuseppe Caselli, Italian painter (d. 1976)
1894 – Ants Lauter, Estonian actor and director (d. 1973)
1896 – Thomas Playford IV, Australian politician, 33rd Premier of South Australia (d. 1981)
1898 – Georgios Grivas, Greek general (d. 1974)
1899 – Marcel Achard, French playwright, screenwriter, and author (d. 1974)
1900 – Yoshimaro Yamashina, Japanese ornithologist, founded the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology (d. 1989)
1900 – Bernardus Johannes Alfrink, Dutch cardinal (d. 1987)
1901–present
1901 – Julio Libonatti, Italian-Argentinian footballer (d. 1981)
1902 – Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., American colonel and politician, 3rd United States Ambassador to the United Nations (d. 1985)
1904 – Harold Acton, English scholar and author (d. 1994)
1904 – Ernst Mayr, German-American biologist and ornithologist (d. 2005)
1904 – Milburn Stone, American actor (d. 1980)
1905 – Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau, Haitian sociologist and educator (d. 1970)
1908 – Henri of Orléans, (d. 1999)
1908 – Lyman S. Ayres II, American businessman (d. 1996)
1910 – Georges Vedel, French lawyer and academic (d. 2002)
1911 – Endel Aruja, Estonian-Canadian physicist and academic (d. 2008)
1911 – Haydn Bunton, Sr., Australian footballer and coach (d. 1955)
1911 – Giorgio Borġ Olivier, Maltese lawyer and politician, 7th Prime Minister of Malta (d. 1980)
1911 – Georges Pompidou, French banker and politician, 19th President of France (d. 1974)
1913 – George Costakis, Russian art collector (d. 1990)
1913 – Smiley Lewis, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1966)
1914 – John Thomas Dunlop, American administrator and labor scholar (d. 2003)
1914 – Annie Fischer, Hungarian pianist and composer (d. 1995)
1915 – Babe Paley, American socialite (d. 1978)
1915 – John Woodruff, American runner and commander (d. 2007)
1915 – Al Timothy, Trinidadian musician and songwriter (d. 2000)
1916 – Lívia Rév, Hungarian classical pianist (d. 2018)
1916 – Ivor Powell, Welsh footballer (d. 2012)
1918 – K. Karunakaran, Indian lawyer and politician, 7th Chief Minister of Kerala (d. 2010)
1918 – Brian James, Australian actor (d. 2009)
1918 – Zakaria Mohieddin, Egyptian general and politician, 33rd Prime Minister of Egypt (d. 2012)
1918 – George Rochberg, American composer and educator (d. 2005)
1921 – Viktor Kulikov, Russian marshal (d. 2013)
1921 – Nanos Valaoritis, Greek author, poet, and playwright (d. 2019)
1923 – George Moore, Australian jockey (d. 2008)
1923 – Mitsuye Yamada, Japanese American activist
1924 – János Starker, Hungarian-American cellist and educator (d. 2013)
1924 – Edward Cassidy, Australian Roman Catholic cardinal priest (d. 2021)
1925 – Fernando de Szyszlo, Peruvian painter and sculptor (d. 2017)
1925 – Jean Raspail, French author and explorer (d. 2020)
1926 – Diana Lynn, American actress (d. 1971)
1928 – Pierre Mauroy, French educator and politician, Prime Minister of France (d. 2013)
1928 – Warren Oates, American actor (d. 1982)
1929 – Jimmy Carruthers, Australian boxer (d. 1990)
1929 – Katherine Helmond, American actress and director (d. 2019)
1929 – Tony Lock, English cricketer (d. 1995)
1929 – Jovan Rašković, Serbian psychiatrist, academic, and politician (d. 1992)
1929 – Jiří Reynek, Czech poet and graphic artist (d. 2014)
1931 – Ismail Mahomed, South African lawyer and politician, 17th Chief Justice of South Africa (d. 2000)
1932 – Gyula Horn, Hungarian politician, 37th Prime Minister of Hungary (d. 2013)
1933 – Paul-Gilbert Langevin, French musicologist, critic and physicist (d. 1986)
1936 – Shirley Knight, American actress (d. 2020)
1936 – James Mirrlees, Scottish economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2018)
1938 – Ronnie Self, American singer-songwriter (d. 1981)
1940 – Chuck Close, American painter and photographer (d. 2021)
1941 – Epeli Nailatikau, Fijian chief, President of Fiji
1942 – Matthias Bamert, Swiss composer and conductor
1942 – Hannes Löhr, German footballer, coach, and manager (d. 2016)
1943 – Curt Blefary, American baseball player and coach (d. 2001)
1943 – Mark Cox, English tennis player, coach and sportscaster
1943 – Robbie Robertson, Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor
1944 – Leni Björklund, Swedish politician, 28th Swedish Minister of Defence for Sweden
1945 – Michael Blake, American author and screenwriter (d. 2015)
1945 – Humberto Benítez Treviño, Mexican lawyer and politician, Attorney General of Mexico
1946 – Pierre-Marc Johnson, Canadian lawyer, physician, and politician, 24th Premier of Quebec
1946 – Paul Smith, English fashion designer
1946 – Gerard 't Hooft, Dutch physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1946 – Vladimir Mikhailovich Zakharov, Russian dancer and choreographer (d. 2013)
1949 – Ludwig G. Strauss, German physician and academic (d. 2013)
1950 – Carlos Caszely, Chilean footballer
1950 – Huey Lewis, American singer-songwriter and actor
1953 – Caryn Navy, American mathematician and computer scientist
1954 – Jimmy Crespo, American guitarist and songwriter
1954 – John Wright, New Zealand cricketer and coach
1955 – Tony Hadley, English footballer
1955 – Peter McNamara, Australian tennis player and coach (d. 2019)
1956 – Horacio Cartes, Paraguayan businessman and politician, President of Paraguay
1956 – James Lofton, American football player and coach
1957 – Carlo Thränhardt, German high jumper
1957 – Doug Wilson, Canadian-American ice hockey player and manager
1958 – Veronica Guerin, Irish journalist (d. 1996)
1958 – Bill Watterson, American author and illustrator
1959 – Marc Cohn, American singer-songwriter and keyboard player
1960 – Pruitt Taylor Vince, American actor and director
1962 – Sarina Hülsenbeck, German swimmer
1963 – Edie Falco, American actress
1964 – Ronald D. Moore, American screenwriter and producer
1965 – Kathryn Erbe, American actress
1965 – Eyran Katsenelenbogen, Israeli-American pianist and educator
1966 – Susannah Doyle, English actress, director, and playwright
1966 – Gianfranco Zola, Italian footballer and coach
1968 – Ken Akamatsu, Japanese illustrator
1968 – Kenji Ito, Japanese pianist and composer
1968 – Nardwuar the Human Serviette, Canadian singer-songwriter and keyboard player
1968 – Hedi Slimane, French fashion designer and photographer
1968 – Alex Zülle, Swiss cyclist
1968 – Susan Wojcicki, Polish-American technology executive, CEO of YouTube
1969 – Jenji Kohan, American screenwriter and producer
1969 – Armin Kõomägi, Estonian author and screenwriter
1969 – John LeClair, American ice hockey player
1969 – RZA, American rapper, producer, actor, and director
1970 – Mac Dre, American rapper and producer, founded Thizz Entertainment (d. 2004)
1970 – Valentí Massana, Spanish race walker
1971 – Derek McInnes, Scottish footballer and manager
1972 – Matthew Birir, Kenyan runner
1972 – Robert Esmie, Canadian sprinter
1972 – Gary Shteyngart, American writer
1973 – Marcus Allbäck, Swedish footballer and coach
1973 – Bengt Lagerberg, Swedish drummer
1973 – Róisín Murphy, Irish singer-songwriter and producer
1974 – Márcio Amoroso, Brazilian footballer
1974 – Sarah Taylor, Jersey squash player
1975 – Hernán Crespo, Argentinian footballer and coach
1975 – Ai Sugiyama, Japanese tennis player
1976 – Bizarre, American rapper
1976 – Nuno Gomes, Portuguese footballer
1977 – Nicolas Kiefer, German tennis player
1977 – Steven Sharp Nelson, American cellist
1978 – Britta Oppelt, German rower
1978 – Allan Simonsen, Danish race car driver (d. 2013)
1978 – İsmail YK, German-Turkish singer-songwriter
1979 – Shane Filan, Irish singer-songwriter
1979 – Amélie Mauresmo, French-Swiss tennis player
1979 – Stiliyan Petrov, Bulgarian footballer and manager
1980 – David Rozehnal, Czech footballer
1980 – Mads Tolling, Danish-American violinist and composer
1980 – Jason Wade, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1982 – Fabrício de Souza, Brazilian footballer
1982 – Alexander Dimitrenko, Ukrainian-German boxer
1982 – Alberto Gilardino, Italian footballer
1982 – Philippe Gilbert, Belgian cyclist
1982 – Kate Gynther, Australian water polo player
1982 – Dave Haywood, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1982 – Paíto, Mozambican footballer
1982 – Javier Paredes, Spanish footballer
1982 – Szabolcs Perenyi, Romanian-Hungarian footballer
1982 – Beno Udrih, Slovenian basketball player
1982 – Tuba Büyüküstün, Turkish actress
1982 – Junri Namigata, Japanese tennis player
1983 – Marco Estrada, Mexican baseball player
1983 – Jonás Gutiérrez, Argentinian footballer
1983 – Zheng Jie, Chinese tennis player
1983 – Taavi Peetre, Estonian shot putter (d. 2010)
1984 – Danay Garcia, Cuban actress
1984 – Zack Miller, American golfer
1985 – Alexandre R. Picard, Canadian ice hockey player
1985 – Megan Rapinoe, American soccer player
1986 – Iurii Cheban, Ukrainian canoe sprinter
1986 – Piermario Morosini, Italian footballer (d. 2012)
1986 – Alexander Radulov, Russian ice hockey player
1986 – Owl City, American singer, songwriter and composer
1987 – Ji Chang-wook, South Korean actor
1987 – Mohd Safiq Rahim, Malaysian footballer
1987 – Andrija Kaluđerović, Serbian footballer
1987 – Alexander Kristoff, Norwegian cyclist
1988 – Martin Liivamägi, Estonian swimmer
1988 – Samir Ujkani, Albanian footballer
1989 – Charlie Austin, English footballer
1989 – Georgios Efrem, Cypriot footballer
1989 – Dwight King, Canadian ice hockey player
1990 – Abeba Aregawi, Ethiopian-Swedish runner
1992 – Alberto Moreno, Spanish footballer
1992 – Chiara Scholl, American tennis player
1993 – Yaroslav Kosov, Russian ice hockey player
1994 – Diana Harkusha, Ukrainian lawyer, dancer, model and beauty queen
1994 – Shohei Ohtani, Japanese baseball player
1998 – Emily Fox, American soccer player and first pick of the 2021 NWSL Draft
Deaths
Pre-1600
905 – Cui Yuan, Chinese chancellor
905 – Dugu Sun, Chinese chancellor
905 – Lu Yi, Chinese chancellor (b. 847)
905 – Pei Shu, Chinese chancellor (b. 841)
905 – Wang Pu, Chinese chancellor
936 – Xu Ji, Chinese official and chancellor
967 – Murakami, Japanese emperor (b. 926)
1080 – Ísleifur Gissurarson, Icelandic bishop (b. 1006)
1091 – William of Hirsau, German abbot
1316 – Ferdinand, prince of Majorca (b. 1278)
1375 – Charles III, French nobleman (b. 1337)
1413 – Musa Çelebi, Ottoman prince and co-ruler
1507 – Crinitus, Italian scholar and academic (b. 1475)
1539 – Anthony Maria Zaccaria, Italian saint (b. 1502)
1601–1900
1661 – Sir Hugh Speke, 1st Baronet
1666 – Albert VI, German nobleman (b. 1584)
1676 – Carl Gustaf Wrangel, Swedish field marshal and politician (b. 1613)
1715 – Charles Ancillon, French jurist and diplomat (b. 1659)
1719 – Meinhardt Schomberg, 3rd Duke of Schomberg, German-English general (b. 1641)
1773 – Francisco José Freire, Portuguese historian and philologist (b. 1719)
1819 – William Cornwallis, English admiral and politician (b.1744)
1826 – Stamford Raffles, English politician, founded Singapore (b. 1782)
1833 – Nicéphore Niépce, French inventor, created the first known photograph (b. 1765)
1859 – Charles Cagniard de la Tour, French physicist and engineer (b. 1777)
1862 – Heinrich Georg Bronn, German geologist and paleontologist (b. 1800)
1863 – Lewis Armistead, Confederate general (b. 1817)
1884 – Victor Massé, French composer (b. 1822)
1901–present
1908 – Jonas Lie, Norwegian author, poet, and playwright (b. 1833)
1920 – Max Klinger, German painter and sculptor (b. 1857)
1927 – Albrecht Kossel, German physician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1853)
1929 – Henry Johnson, American sergeant (b. 1897)
1932 – Sasha Chorny, Russian poet and author (b. 1880)
1935 – Bernard de Pourtalès, Swiss captain and sailor (b. 1870)
1937 – Daniel Sawyer, American golfer (b. 1884)
1943 – Kazimierz Junosza-Stępowski, Polish actor (b. 1880)
1943 – Karin Swanström, Swedish actress, director, and producer (b. 1873)
1945 – John Curtin, Australian journalist and politician, 14th Prime Minister of Australia (b. 1885)
1948 – Georges Bernanos, French soldier and author (b. 1888)
1948 – Carole Landis, American actress (b. 1919)
1948 – Piet Aalberse, Dutch politician (b. 1871)
1957 – Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Indian lawyer and politician, 1st Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar (b. 1887)
1965 – Porfirio Rubirosa, Dominican race car driver, polo player, and diplomat (b. 1909)
1966 – George de Hevesy, Hungarian-German chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1885)
1969 – Wilhelm Backhaus, German pianist and educator (b. 1884)
1969 – Walter Gropius, German architect, designed the John F. Kennedy Federal Building and Werkbund Exhibition (b. 1883)
1969 – Tom Mboya, Kenyan politician, 1st Kenyan Minister of Justice (b. 1930)
1969 – Leo McCarey, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1898)
1975 – Gilda dalla Rizza, Italian soprano and actress (b. 1892)
1976 – Walter Giesler, American soccer player and referee (born 1910)
1983 – Harry James, American trumpet player and actor (b. 1916)
1984 – Chic Murray, Canadian politician, 2nd Mayor of Mississauga (b. 1914)
1991 – Howard Nemerov, American poet and essayist (b. 1920)
1995 – Jüri Järvet, Estonian actor and screenwriter (b. 1919)
1997 – A. Thangathurai, Sri Lankan Tamil lawyer and politician (b. 1936)
1998 – Sid Luckman, American football player (b. 1916)
2002 – Katy Jurado, Mexican actress (b. 1924)
2002 – Ted Williams, American baseball player and manager (b. 1918)
2004 – Hugh Shearer, Jamaican journalist and politician, 3rd Prime Minister of Jamaica (b. 1923)
2004 – Rodger Ward, American race car driver and sportscaster (b. 1921)
2005 – James Stockdale, American admiral (b. 1923)
2006 – Gert Fredriksson, Swedish canoe racer (b. 1919)
2006 – Thirunalloor Karunakaran, Indian poet and scholar (b. 1924)
2006 – Kenneth Lay, American businessman (b. 1942)
2006 – Amzie Strickland, American actress (b. 1919)
2007 – Régine Crespin, French soprano (b. 1927)
2007 – George Melly, English singer-songwriter and critic (b. 1926)
2008 – Hasan Doğan, Turkish businessman (b. 1956)
2010 – Bob Probert, Canadian ice hockey player and radio host (b. 1965)
2011 – Cy Twombly, American-Italian painter, sculptor, and photographer (b. 1928)
2012 – Rob Goris, Belgian cyclist (b. 1982)
2012 – Gerrit Komrij, Dutch author, poet, and playwright (b. 1944)
2012 – Colin Marshall, Baron Marshall of Knightsbridge, English businessman and politician (b. 1933)
2012 – Ruud van Hemert, Dutch actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1938)
2013 – Bud Asher, American lawyer and politician (b. 1925)
2013 – David Cargo, American politician, 22nd Governor of New Mexico (b. 1929)
2013 – Lambert Jackson Woodburne, South African admiral (b. 1939)
2014 – Rosemary Murphy, American actress (b. 1925)
2014 – Volodymyr Sabodan, Ukrainian metropolitan (b. 1935)
2014 – Hans-Ulrich Wehler, German historian and academic (b. 1931)
2014 – Brett Wiesner, American soccer player (b. 1983)
2015 – Uffe Haagerup, Danish mathematician and academic (b. 1949)
2015 – Yoichiro Nambu, Japanese-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1921)
2020 – Nick Cordero, Canadian actor and singer (b. 1978)
2021 – Raffaella Carrà, Italian singer, dancer, television presenter and actress (b. 1943)
2021 – Richard Donner, American film director (b. 1930)
Holidays and observances
Bloody Thursday (International Longshore and Warehouse Union)
Christian feast day:
Anthony Maria Zaccaria, priest (d. 1539)
Cyril and Methodius (a public holiday in Czech Republic and Slovakia)
Zoe of Rome (Roman Catholic Church)
July 5 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Constitution Day (Armenia)
Independence Day (Algeria), celebrating the independence of Algeria from France in 1962.
Independence Day (Cape Verde), celebrating the independence of Cape Verde from Portugal in 1975.
Independence Day (Venezuela), celebrating the independence of Venezuela from Spain in 1811; also National Armed Forces Day.
Tynwald Day, if July 5 is on a weekend, the holiday is the following Monday. (Isle of Man)
References
External links
Days of the year
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