Today
Events: In 1766 James Christie held his first auction in London; in 1872 the Mary Celeste was found abandoned, drifting in the Atlantic with a cargo of alcohol; in 1933 Prohibition — the banning of the manufacture and sale of alcohol — was repealed in America.
Births: Martin van Buren, eighth American President 1837-41, 1782; Christina Rossetti, poet, 1830; George Custer, American general, 1839; John Rushworth Jellicoe, 1st Earl Jellicoe of Scapa, commander-in-chief of Britain’s Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland, 1916, 1859; Josef Pilsudski, Polish dictator 1926-35, 1867; Bill Pickett, cowboy rodeo legend, 1870; Constance Spry, flower-arranging and cookery writer, 1886; Fritz Lang, film director, 1890; Walt Disney, producer of animated cartoon films, 1901; Emeric Pressburger, screenwriter and film producer, 1902; Otto Preminger, film director, 1906.
Deaths: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composer, 1791; Alexandre Dumas père, novelist, 1870; Sir Henry Tate, sugar merchant and art patron, 1899; Claude Monet, Impressionist painter, 1926; Vachel Lindsay, poet, 1931; Joseph Erlanger, physiologist who shared a Nobel prize in 1944 for discoveries relating to the functions of single nerve fibres, 1965; Sir Robert Watson-Watt, physicist and radar pioneer, 1973.
Tomorrow
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Events: In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered the island of Hispaniola; in 1917, after the Bolshevik Revolution, Finland declared its independence from Russia; in 1922 the Irish Free State was proclaimed; in 1943 British forces captured Monte Camino in Italy.
Births: Henry VI, King of England 1422-61, 1470-71, 1421; Warren Hastings, first governor-general of India, 1732; Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, chemist who discovered the law that gases combine in a simple ratio by volume, 1778; Richard H. Barham, author of The Ingoldsby Legends, 1788; Ira Gershwin, lyricist, 1896.
Deaths: Jean-Baptiste-Sim?on Chardin, painter of still-lifes and domestic scenes, 1779; Anthony Trollope, novelist, 1882; Louis Blanc, French politician and historian, 1882; Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States during the American Civil War 1861-65, 1889; Roy Orbison, singer and songwriter, 1988; Tunku Abdul Rahman, Prime Minister of Malaya, 1957-63, and of Malaysia, 1963-70, 1990.