Today in History

From wikipedia.org:

Events
536 - St. Silverius becomes Pope (probable date)
793 - The first Viking raid on British soil at Lindisfarne where a set date for the raid is known
1624 - Earthquake strikes Peru
1776 - American Revolutionary War: Battle of Trois-Rivières - American invaders are driven back at Trois-Rivières, Quebec
1783 - The volcano Laki, in Iceland, begins an eight-month eruption which kills over 9,000 people and starts a seven-year famine
1887 - Herman Hollerith receives a patent for his punch card calculator
1949 - Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is published
1949 - Red Scare: Such celebrities as Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson are named in an FBI report as Communist Party members
1953 - Flint-Worcester Tornadoes: A tornado hits in Flint, Michigan and kills 115. This is the last tornado to claim more than 100 lives
1953 - The United States Supreme Court rules that Washington, D.C. restaurants could not refuse to serve black patrons
1968 - James Earl Ray is arrested for the murder of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr
1968 - The body of assassinated U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy is laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery
1995 - Downed U.S. Air Force pilot Captain Scott O’Grady is rescued by U.S. Marines in Bosnia
1998 - Charlton Heston assumes the presidency of the National Rifle Association
2004 - First Transit of Venus in this millennium

Births
1625 - Giovanni Domenico Cassini, scientist (d. 1712)
1724 - John Smeaton, civil engineer (d. 1794)
1810 - Robert Schumann, composer (d. 1856)
1847 - Ida McKinley, former First Lady of the United States (d. 1907)
1867 - Frank Lloyd Wright, architect (d. 1959)
1910 - John W. Campbell Jr., science fiction writer, publisher, editor (d. 1971)
1916 - Francis Crick, scientist, Nobel laureate, helped discover the molecular structure of DNA (d. 2004)
1925 - Barbara Bush, former First Lady of the United States (to 41st President, George Bush, mother to 43rd President George W. Bush)
1927 - LeRoy Neiman, painter
1929 - Jerry Stiller, comedian, actor
1933 - Joan Rivers, comedienne, author
1944 - Boz Scaggs, singer, songwriter
1955 - Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web
1957 - Scott Adams, cartoonist (“Dilbert”)

Deaths
1809 - Thomas Paine, American revolutionary and writer: Common Sense (b. 1737)
1845 - Andrew Jackson, 7th President of the United States (b. 1767)
1874 - Cochise, Apache leader (b. c. 1812)
1982 - Satchel Paige, baseball player (b. 1906)