Today in History

In 1863, the first formal African American military unit, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, unsuccessfully attacked the Confederate-held Fort Wagner. The regiment was commanded by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw in order to help prove that Blacks could fight as well as Whites. More than half of the regiment, including Shaw, were killed in the attack on Fort Wagner. The regiment was disbanded after the war, but in 1989, the story of its formation was made into the film “Glory,” starring Matthew Broderick as Shaw and Denzel Washington as Private Trip, a role for which he won an Oscar.

When Elaine and I saw “Glory” at the Indiana Theater in Bloomington, IN, the theatre was mostly empty. However, there was a woman in the same row as us who appeared to be rather insane. She kept shouting advice to the characters on the screen. When someone else in the audience asked her to be quiet, she turned and yelled at him to shut up because she had every right to give advice to the soldiers.



390 BC: Battle of the Allia
64: The burning of Rome
1195: Almohad ruler Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur defeated Castilian King Alfonso VIII at the Battle of Alarcos
1898: Marie and Pierre Curie announced the discovery of a new element and proposed to call it polonium
1925: Adolf Hitler published his personal manifesto Mein Kampf
1969: Ted Kennedy drove his car off a wooden bridge into a tide-swept pond and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, died
1969: Apollo 11 prepared for landing on the Moon
1976: Gymnast Nadia Comaneci scored the first ever perfect 10 at the Olympics
1994: An explosion destroyed several Jewish organizations in Buenos Aires

Births
1552: Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor
1811: William Makepeace Thackeray, English author
1887: Vidkun Quisling, Norwegian politician and traitor
1906: Clifford Odets, writer
1906: S. I. Hayakawa, American semanticist and politician
1909: Andrei Gromyko, Soviet diplomat and President
1911: Hume Cronyn, American actor
1913: Red Skelton, American actor and comedian
1918: Nelson Mandela, South African revolutionary and president
1921: John Glenn, American astronaut and politician
1929: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, American singer
1933: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian poet
1937: Hunter S. Thompson, journalist and author
1940: James Brolin, actor
1940: Joe Torre, baseball player and manager
1941: Martha Reeves, singer
1947: Steve Forbes, entrepreneur, politician
1950: Sir Richard Branson, entrepreneur
1967: Vin Diesel, American actor


Deaths
1610: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Italian artist
1623: Pope Gregory XV
1698: Johann Heinrich Heidegger, Swiss theologian
1792: John Paul Jones, American naval commander
1817: Jane Austen, English novelist
1872: Benito Juárez, President of Mexico