732 – Battle of Tours: Near Poitiers, France, the leader of the Franks, Charles Martel, and his men, defeat a large army of Moors, stopping the Muslims from spreading into Western Europe.
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1580 – After a three-day siege, the English Army beheads over 600 Irish and Papal soldiers and civilians at Dún an Óir, Ireland.
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1911 – The Wuchang Uprising leads to the demise of Qing Dynasty, the last Imperial court in China, and the founding of the Republic of China.
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1917 – Thelonious Monk born. American jazz pianist and composer considered one of the giants of American music. Monk had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including “Epistrophy”, “‘Round Midnight”, “Blue Monk”, “Straight, No Chaser” and “Well, You Needn’t”.
Monk is the second-most recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed over 1,000 songs while Monk wrote about 70.
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1924 – Edward D. Wood, Jr. born. American screenwriter, director, producer, actor, author, and film editor, in the 1950s, Wood made a number of low-budget genre movies, in the 1960s and 1970s, made pornographic movies and wrote over 80 pulp crime, horror, and sex novels.
Films included Glen or Glenda, Jail Bait, Bride of the Monster, The Violent Years, Night of the Ghouls, The Sinister Urge, Orgy of the Dead, and of course that low-budget zombie/UFO classic Plan 9 from Outer Space.
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1957 – A fire at the Windscale nuclear plant, Cumbria, U.K. was the world’s first major nuclear accident , ranked in severity at level 5 on the 7-point International Nuclear Event Scale. The name Windscale developed such a poor reputation generally that the authoroities changed it to Sellafield.
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1985 – Orson Welles died. American actor, director, writer and producer who worked extensively in theater, radio and film. He is best remembered for his innovative work in all three media, most notably Caesar (1937), a groundbreaking Broadway adaption of Julius Caesar and the debut of the Mercury Theatre; The War of the Worlds (1938), possibly the most famous broadcast in the history of radio; and Citizen Kane (1941), which is consistently ranked as one of the all-time greatest films.
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2010 – Solomon Burke died, American singer-songwriter, entrepreneur, mortician, and an archbishop of the United House of Prayer For All People, known as “King Solomon,” the “King of Rock ‘n’ Soul,” and as the “Bishop of Soul,” and described as “the Muhammad Ali of soul,” and as “the most unfairly overlooked singer of soul’s golden age.”
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Alchemy & Accident 