June 25 Dateline

Birthdays

1860 - Gustave Charpentier, French opera composer, best known for his opera Louise.  (Renee Fleming sings Charpentier'sLouise, "Depuis le jour". Uploaded by Thewisemonkey9. Accessed Jun 25, 2014.)

1900 - Louis Mountbatten, Viceroy of India, Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, was a British Royal Navy officer and statesman, an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and second cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II.

1903 - George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), English author, creator of 1984 and Animal Farm. He is  novelist and essayist, journalist and critic, whose work is characterised by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.  (Literature - George Orwell. Uploaded by The School of Life. Accessed June 25, 2018.

1945 - Carly Simon, American singer-songwriter, musician, and children's author. She first rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records; her 13 Top 40 U.S. hits include "Anticipation" (No. 13), "You Belong To Me" (No. 6), "Coming Around Again" (No. 18), and her four Gold certified singles "Jesse" (No. 11), "Mockingbird" (No. 5, a duet with James Taylor), "You're So Vain" (No. 1), and "Nobody Does It Better" (No. 2) from the 1977 James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me. (Carly Simon - Anticipation. Accessed June 25, 2011)

1963 - George Michael (born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou), English singer, songwriter, record producer, and philanthropist. Michael sold over 80 million records worldwide making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. He achieved seven number one songs on the UK Singles Chart and eight number one songs on the US Billboard Hot 100. He was widely known for his success in the 1980s and 1990s, including Wham! singles such as "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" and "Last Christmas" and solo singles such as "Careless Whisper" and "Faith".

1963 - Yann Martel, Spanish-born French Canadian author best known for the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi, published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, among many other best-selling lists. It was adapted for a film, garnering four Oscars including Best Director and winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score. Martel is also author of other bestselling novels, stories (The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios), and a collection of letters to Canada's Prime Minister 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. He has won a number of literary prizes. 

Lefties:
George Michael, Singer
Carly Simon, Singer

More birthdays and historical events today, 25 June - On This Day.

Historical Events

1840 - Felix Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 52, "Lobgesang" (or Hymn of Praise), a symphony-cantata, is first performed, in St. Thomas Church, Leipzig.  (Note: "Lobgesang" or "Hymn of Praise" was  composed by Felix Mendelssohn, written in 1840 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the invention of printing, along with the less-known Festgesang "Gutenberg Cantata". The composer's description of the work was 'A Symphony-Cantata on Words of the Holy Bible, for Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra'. Structurally, it consists of three purely orchestral movements followed by 11 movements for chorus and/or soloists and orchestra, and lasts approximately 65--70 minutes. Resource: Wikipedia.org.)  

1857 - Gustave Flaubert goes on trial for public immorality. His tragic novel, Madame Bovary, is described as obscene at the time, depicting a woman who embarks on a series of affairs in a search for meaning.

June 24 Dateline

Birthdays

1842 - Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce, American short-story writer, journalist and poet. His book The Devil's Dictionary was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has been described as "one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature". Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction.

1901 - Harry Partch, American composer and music theorist. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales. He built custom-made instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described his theory and practice in his book Genesis of a Music.

1915 - Sir Fred Hoyle, FRS, English mathematician and astronomer, who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. He also held controversial stances on other scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory, a term coined by him on BBC radio, and his promotion of panspermia as the origin of life on Earth. He wrote science fiction novels, short stories and radio plays, and co-authored twelve books with his son, Geoffrey Hoyle.

1930 - Claude Henri Jean Chabrol, French film director and a member of the French New Wave (nouvelle vague) group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s. Like his colleagues Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, Chabrol was a critic for the influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma before becoming a film maker.

1952 -  Dave Willetts, English singer and actor known for his lead roles in West End musicals. (Dave Willetts - Music of the Night, from 'The Phantom Of The Opera', uploaded by davewillettsofficial. Accessed June 24, 2015. Dave Willetts - Make Them Hear You, from "Ragtime", uploaded by davewillettsofficial. Accessed June 24, 2016.)

Lefties:
None known

 

 

More birthdays and historical events today, 24 June - On This Day. 

Historical Events

1314 - The Bannockburn Day, where the battle in 1314 ends. Robert I of Scotland known as Robert the Bruce, defeats the English forces under Edward II.    

1340 - The Battle of Sluys, with thee fleet personally led by Edward III, takes place at sea, the first battle of the Hundred Years' War against the French. He also goes on to win the Battle of Crecy six years later, supporting his claim to France and establishing sovereignty over the English channel. 

June 23 Dateline

Birthdays

1763 - Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais (born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie), the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the first Empress of the French after he proclaimed himself Emperor. Her first husband, Alexandre de Beauharnais, was guillotined during the Reign of Terror, and she was imprisoned in the Carmes Prison until five days after his execution. Her two children by Beauharnais became significant to royal lineage. Through her daughter, Hortense, she was the maternal grandmother of Napoleon III. Through her son, Eugène, she was the great-grandmother of later Swedish and Danish kings and queens. The reigning houses of Belgium, Norway and Luxembourg also descend from her. She did not bear Napoleon any children and as a result, he divorced her in 1810 to marry Marie Louise of Austria. Joséphine was the recipient of numerous love letters written by Napoleon, many of which still exist. Her Château de Malmaison was noted for its magnificent rose garden, which she supervised closely, owing to her passionate interest in roses, collected from all over the world.(Napoleon Bonaparte and Josephine de Beauharnais. Updated by KaiserineFrederick. Accessed June 23, 2019.)

1889 - Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, Leading Russian poet of 20th Century, better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received second-most nominations for the award the following year. Quoted from Anna Akhmatova: "Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free."  (Requiem by Anna Akhmatova. Uploaded by A Poetry Channel. Accessed June 23, 2016.)

1894 - Edward VIII, later Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor (Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David), King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Empire, and Emperor of India, from 20 January 1936 until his abdication on 11 December of that year. When it became apparent he could not marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson and remain on the throne, he abdicated. He was succeeded by his younger brother, George VI, father of then Princess Elizabeth. With a reign of 326 days, Edward is the shortest-reigning monarch of the United Kingdom. After his abdication, Edward was created Duke of Windsor. He married Wallis in France on 3 June 1937, after her second divorce became final. 

 
1894 - Alfred Charles Kinsey, American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist. In 1947 he founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, previously known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

1910 - Jean Anouilh, French dramatist. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1944 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's Vichy government. It is a tragedy inspired by Greek mythology and the play of the same name by Sophocles. In English, it is often distinguished from its antecedent through its pronunciation (French pronunciation: ​[ɑ̃tiɡɔn], approximately an-tee-gon). One of France's most prolific writers after World War II, much of Anouilh's work deals with themes of maintaining ntegrity in a world of moral compromise.

1912 - Alan Mathison Turing, OBE FRS, English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Despite these accomplishments, he was never fully recognised in his home country during his lifetime, due to his homosexuality, which was then a crime in the UK.  During the Second World War, Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, therefore, helped win the war.  (Alan Turing - Celebrating the Life of a Genius. Uploaded by Cambridge University. Accessed June 23, 2013.)

1927 - Robert "Bob" Louis Fosse, American actor, choreographer, dancer, and film and stage director. He directed and choreographed musical works on stage and screen, including the stage musicals The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Sweet Charity, Pippin, and Chicago. His films include Sweet Charity, Cabaret, Lenny, All That Jazz, and Star 80.  Fosse's distinctive style of choreography included turned-in knees and "jazz hands". He is the only person ever to have won Oscar, Emmy, and Tony awards in the same year. He was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning Best Director for Cabaret, and won the Palme D'Or in 1980 for All That Jazz. He won a record eight Tonys for his choreography, as well as one for direction for Pippin. (All That Jazz (Bob Fosse Tribute - w/ scenes from Chicago, Cabaret and Sweet Charity. YouTube, uploaded by Eduardo Barauna. Accessed June 23, 2018. Movie stars: Catherine Zeta-Jones (Chicago), Liza Minnelli (Cabaret), and Sweet Charity (Shirley Maclaine). 

 

1929 - Henri Pousseur, Belgian composer, teacher and music theorist. He is considered one of the experimenters of the new music techniques during his time. (Henri Pousseur, Rhymes for Different Sound Sources, 1958. (French title: "Rimes pour differentes sources sonores"), performed in 1967 by The Rome Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bruno Maderna. Updated by Michael Berridge. Accessed June 23, 2015.) 

1943 - James Lawrence Levine, American pianist and conductor, primarily known for his tenure as Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera, a position he held for 40 years.

Lefties:
None known

 

More birthdays and historical events today, 23 June - On This Day.

Historical Events

1757 - The Battle of Plassey takes place, part of the Seven Years' War. Robert Clive (known as "Clive of India") and his force is many times outnumbered, fighting the Nawab of Bengal and French artillerymen. Despite odds, Clive pulls off an amazing victory that helps to secure the British in India denying the French their claim.

1934 - Modern forensics is born. William Bayly is convicted of murder in New Zealand, based on traces of bone and ash. It is the first murder to be proved by modern forensics.