In 1613 Mikhail I was unanimously elected by the national assembly to be Tsar, beginning the Romanov dynasty which would rule Imperial Russia until the Russian Revolution in 1917. In 1848 Karl Marx and Freidrich Engles published The Communist Manifesto, which would lay the groundwork for the Revolution that would bring down the Romanovs. And in 1937 the League of Nations would ban foreign “volunteers” in the Spanish Civil War. Much like most of what the League tried to do, it failed. Both the Nazis and the Soviets still aided opposing sides in the Civil War, as they would do again in WWII.

There was publishing news on this date in history. The Oakland Tribune (1874) and the New Yorker (1925) published their first editions. The first telephone directory was published in New Haven, Connecticut. And the first edition of the Cherokee Phoenix was released, becoming the first periodical to use the Cherokee syllabary, developed by Sequoyah. It was composed of characters used to represent syllables instead of single letters. It happened in Georgia before the Cherokee tribe was “relocated” to Oklahoma -in the Trail of Tears.

There were other firsts on this date; Lucy Hobbs Taylor became the first American woman to graduate from dental school. The first self-propelled steam locomotive ran in Wales in 1804. In 1842 John Greenough was granted the first patent for a sewing machine. And Edwin Land demonstrated his “instant camera” (The Polaroid Land Camera) to a meeting of the Optical Society of America in 1947

Spanish guitarist extraordinaire Andres Segovia began tuning his guitar in 1893. Erma Bombeck began uttering her witty humor in 1927. And both Alan Rickman (Snape and so many others) and Anthony Daniels (CP30) crawled onto the world stage in 1946.

This date is also shared by Civil Rights icons Barbara Jordan (1936) and John Lewis (1940), as well as film director Sam Peckinpah (1925) and singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter (1958) who reminded us that in life “sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug”

In 1677 we bade farewell to Baruch Spinoza the Dutch Jewish philosopher and scholar. Tim Horton, noted Canadian hockey player and businessman, left us the legacy of Tim Horton’s coffee places in 1974. Billy Graham walked off the big stage in 2018. And Peter Tork of the Monkees took the “Last Train to Clarksville” in 2019.