There were three notable fine arts events on this date in history Handel’s oratorio Messiah premiered in Dublin Ireland in 1742. The New York City Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1870. And American pianist Van Cliburn won the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958.
In 1953 Allen Dulles of the CIA launched, secretly, the mind control program MKUltra, not to be exposed for decades afterward. Fortunately, there were other positive events on this date: the dedication of the Jefferson Memorial (1943) on the 200th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth: Sidney Poitier becoming the first African American male to win a Best Actor Oscar award (1964); and Tiger Woods becoming the youngest golfer to win the Masters Tournament (1977),
Along with Thomas Jefferson (1743), this was also the birthdate for the co-founder of the Jesuits- Peter Faber (1506); the notorious Guy Fawkes (1570) of the Gunpowder Plot, which attempted to blow up the English Parliament; Irish novelist, poet, and playwright Samuel Beckett (1906); and Russian chess grandmaster and author Garry Kasparov (1963).
Departing the world’s stage on this date was Russian Tsar Borus Gudinov (1605), inspiration for a play (1831, Puskin), an opera (1873, Modest Mussorgsky), and a cartoon character – Boris Badenov, on the Rocky and Bullwinkle, show that I grew up on. Sharing this date is Anne Jump Cannon (1941), an American suffragette, astronomer, and academic, who collaborated with Edward Pickering to develop the Harvard Classification System which categorized stars by their temperature.
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