On This Day = January 7
Bithdays + Events + Holidays + Observances
BIRTHDAYS
1830 = Albert Bierstadt = American painter
1873 = Adolph Zukor = Hungarian-American producer and Paramount co-founder
1890 = Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson = American soldier and comic pioneer
1891 = Zora Neale Hurston = American writer and folklorist
1895 = Hudson Fysh = Australian pilot and Qantas co-founder
1899 = F. Orlin Tremaine = American executive, writer, and editor
1912 = Charles Addams = American cartoonist and The Addams Family creator
1921 = Chester Kallman = American poet, librettist, and translator 🌈
1928 = William Peter Blatty = American author and screenwriter (The Exorcist)
1946 = Jann Wenner = American Rolling Stone co-founder 🌈
1948 = Kenny Loggins = American singer-songwriter
1950 = Erin Gray = American actress and model
1953 = Robert Longo = American painter and sculptor
1957 = Katie Couric = American television journalist and host
1963 = Christian Louboutin = French footwear designer 🌈
1964 = Nicolas Cage = American actor
1965 = Five for Fighting = American singer-songwriter
1971 = Jeremy Renner, American actor
1977 = Dustin Diamond = American actor and comedian
1988 = Robert Sheehan = Irish actor
1990 = Michael Sam = American football player 🌈
1991 = Caster Semenya = South African runner and activist 🌈
1991 = Michaela Jaé Rodriguez = American actor 🌈
EVENTS
1610 = Galileo Galilei makes his first observation of the four Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa, although he is not able to distinguish the last two until the following night.
1782 = The first American commercial bank, the Bank of North America, opens.
1894 = Thomas Edison makes a kinetoscopic film of someone sneezing. On the same day, his employee, William Kennedy Dickson, receives a patent for motion picture film.
1927 = The first transatlantic commercial telephone service is established from New York City to London.
1954 = Georgetown–IBM experiment: The first public demonstration of a machine translation system is held in New York at the head office of IBM.
1957 = The board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) approves a national policy statement asserting that laws against sodomy and federal restrictions on employment of lesbians and gay men are constitutional.
1973 = Jack Baker adopts his partner Mike McConnell in Minnesota for tax benefits. Baker was the president of the University of Minnesota student body. They had applied for a marriage license in 1970 but were denied.
1982 = Fame, based on the 1980 Alan Parker film, premieres on NBC.
1985 = Blaine Elswood writes about experimental AIDS drugs. Elswood founded the Guerilla Clinic in San Francisco, an underground group for AIDS activists who sold experimental AIDS drugs to those who wanted them.
1994 = The first-ever televised lesbian kiss in the UK airs on Brookside is a soap opera set in Liverpool, England. The series began on the launch night of Channel 4 on November 2, 1982, and ran for 21 years until November 4, 2003. The kiss was between Beth Jordache and Margaret Clemence.
2004 = Six ex-students from Morgan Hill Unified School District settle a lawsuit against the district for $1.1 million. “[The settlement also] requires the school district to implement mandatory annual training regarding harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity for administrators, teachers, middle school and high school students, and staff. The settlement ends five years of wrangling during which a state law was passed—with the Morgan Hill students’ input—prohibiting anti-gay harassment of students. The case also prompted a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in April that stated public school administrators who fail to take effective steps to counter anti-gay harassment could be violating the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection—even if they have an anti-discrimination policy in place. That ruling covered districts in California and eight other Western states and, according to plaintiffs’ attorneys, finally brought district officials to the negotiating table, according to the L.A. Times.