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Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, Brahmo philosopher, visual artist, playwright, composer, and novelist whose avant-garde works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A celebrated cultural icon of Bengal, he became Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. His home schooling, life in Shelidah, and extensive travels made Tagore an iconoclastic pragmatist; however, growing disillusionment with the British Raj caused the internationalist Tagore to back the Indian Independence Movement and befriend Mahatma Gandhi. Despite the loss of virtually his entire works included Gitanjali and Ghare-Baire, while his verse, short stories, and novels — many defined by rhythmic lyricism, colloquial language, meditative naturalism, and philosophical contemplation — received worldwide acclaim. (read more...)
Buzz Aldrin (born January 20, 1930 as Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr.) is an American pilot and astronaut. He was the Lunar Module Pilot for the Apollo 11 mission, the first lunar landing. He was the second person to set foot on the Moon and was the second human ever to step on an extraterrestrial world. Here, he walks on the surface of the Moon near the leg of the Lunar Module. (read more...)
Photograph taken by Neil A. Armstrong, mission commander, with a 70mm lunar surface camera. Source:NASA
- ... that former Regimental Sergeant Major Harry Lapwood was known as having the loudest voice in the New Zealand House of Representatives?
- ... that in 1951, Bulgarian politician and exile G. M. Dimitrov helped found the first Bulgarian NATO company?
- ... that Edith Killgore Kirkpatrick published a short book of favorite songs titled Louisiana Let's Sing in honor of her husband Claude's unsuccessful candidacy for Governor of Louisiana in 1963?
- ... that canal engineer Hugh Henshall was both pupil of and brother-in-law to James Brindley, the famous canal architect of the Industrial Revolution?
- ... that it took Peter Steinfeld six and a half weeks to write the opening eleven pages of his first screenplay, Drowning Mona?
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See also: Biographies of living persons • Manual of Style (biographies)
"History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth."
Interviewed by George Plimpton in The Paris Review, Winter 1986
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Births
- 1800 - Millard Fillmore, 13th President of the United States (d. 1874)
- 1891 - Zora Neale Hurston, American author (d. 1960) (pictured)
- 1939 - Maury Povich, American TV host
- 1939 - Prince Michael of Greece and Denmark
- 1957 - Katie Couric, American television host
- 1964 - Nicolas Cage, American actor
Deaths
- 1536 - Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII of England (b. 1485)
- 1619 - Nicholas Hilliard, English painter (bc. 1547)
- 1920 - Edmund Barton, first Prime Minister of Australia (b. 1849)
- 1943 - Nikola Tesla, Serbian-born inventor and electrical engineer (b. 1856)
- 1989 - Hirohito, Emperor of Japan (b. 1901)
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