In 632 AD Muhammed the Prophet delivered his final sermon. In 1836 the Alamo fell to Mexican troops commanded by Santa Anna. And in 1857 the US Supreme Court delivered its infamous verdict in the Dred Scott case.
In 1869 Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev presented the first periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society. Bayer registers the “Aspirin” trademark in 1899. And in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression President FDR declared a “bank holiday” closing all banks and freezing all financial transactions.
Today was a day of beauty, laughter, and poetry. Sculpture Michelangelo (1475), comedian Lou Costello (1906), and poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806) were all born on this date. American economist Alan Greenspan was born on this date in 1926 and the next year brought us the youngest Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, and Colombian journalist and author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
1937 brought us another astronaut – Valentina Tereshkova – the youngest female astronaut to go into space. Willie Stargill, the great Pittsburgh Pirate whose home runs only seemed to go into space, joined us in 1940.
The fabled trio of Davy Crockett, James Bowie, and William Travers departed earth from the Alamo in 1836. The american novelist Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) laid down her pen in 1888. And American band leader John Philip Souza ceased to blow his horn in 1932.
This date in history saw the departures of oft-quoted associate justice of the Supreme Court Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr (1935), the designer of Mt Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum (1941), Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning novelist Pearl S. Buck (1973), and Alice W McKane (1948) the first black woman doctor in Savannah GA.
We also bid farewell to two opposites – German pastor Martin Neimoller (1984)who uttered his famous “they came for …) regret for not doing more against the Nazis and Russian-born American novelist Ayn Rand (1982) who promoted the philosophy of Objectivism, which basically endorsed selfishness as a virtue.
This date is celebrated as European Day of the Righteous, commemorating all who stood up against crimes against humanity and totalitarianism with their own moral responsibility
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