Feast day of St Adrian, bishop of St Andrew's, and his Companions
According to Saint Bede, Adrian was born in Africa and was made Abbot of Nerida near Naples. He travelled to England with Saint Theodore of Tarsus when the latter was made Archbishop of Canterbury. He became abbot of St Peter and Paul monastery in Canterbury in Kent, and remained there until his death.

Feast day of St Basil and Companions
Basil (c. 330 - January 1, 379), also called Basil the Great, was bishop of Caesarea, a leading churchman in the 4^th century. The Eastern Orthodox Church considers him a saint and one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, together with Gregory Nazianzus and John Chrysostom. Basil, Gregory Nazianzus, and Basil's brother Gregory of Nyssa are called the Cappadocian Fathers. The Roman Catholic Church considers him a saint and a Doctor of the Church. In Greek tradition, his name was given to Father Christmas and is supposed to visit children and give presents every January 1 (when Basil's memory is celebrated; read more), unlike other traditions where this person is Saint Nicolas and comes every Christmas.

He should not be confused with Saint Basil the Confessor, who lived about 400 years later. He also should not be confused with Basil Fool for Christ, a Russian Orthodox saint, after whom St Basil's Cathedral on Red Square in Moscow is named. Nor should he be confused with St Basil of Ostrog, who is a Serbian Orthodox saint, who built the Ostrog Monastery which is caved in and stands on a very high hill between Danilovgrad and Niksic.

Feast day of St Basinus

Feast day of St Giovanni Antonio Farina

Feast day of St Humbert III

Feast day of St Lucius I, pope and martyr

Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days    Shop saints

Maha Shivaratree, Mauritius

Charter Day (1681), Pennsylvania

Constitution Day, US (1789)

Admission Day (1791), Vermont, USA

Admission Day (1803), Ohio, USA

1188 Blanche of Castile (d. November 26, 1252), wife of Louis VIII of France, mother of Louis IX

1678 Antonio Vivaldi (d. 1741), Italian composer (The Four Seasons)

1702 Jack Sheppard (d. November 16, 1724), notorious English criminal and serial escapee, executed with an audience of 200,000 people at Tyburn, the principal location in London for public executions by hanging. He was born in 1702, becoming a workhouse child who abandoned his apprenticeship and took up robbery, running with numerous accomplices including bad girls –  a woman named Maggot (or Poll Maggot) and another named Bess Edgworth, or Edgeworth (an alias of Elizabeth Lyon), his lover. He escaped from prison many times, most notably escaping from the condemned cell in Newgate in 1724.

Highwaymen, outlaws, bushrangers, pirates, gangsters, etc in the Book of Days    More

1756 Sir Henry Raeburn, Scottish portrait painter

1778 Robert Emmet (Gaelic – Roibéard Eimeíd; d. September 20, 1803), Irish nationalist rebel leader

1793 Karl Lachmann (d. 1851), philologist

1856 John Dwyer (d. February 1, 1934), English-born Australian labor activist, who immigrated to Australia in 1888. From the early 1890s, he was a leader of Sydney's Active Service Brigade (with JA Andrews, Arthur Desmond, et al). Dwyer was imprisoned after the Sydney Anarchy Trial of June, 1894.

"Leaving his London employment on his 'own accord', Dwyer embarked upon a quest for recognition – recognition of his rights as a worker and his identity as an individual. Dwyer and his family arrived in New South Wales to be greeted by the economic depression of the 1890s, and state and employer mobilisation against organised labour and working class radicals. Dwyer was soon reduced to scraping together a living as a boarding house manager in Sydney's poorest districts, as he helped organise the Active Service Brigade, which agitated on behalf of the unemployed … a working class political radical and autodidact who embraced temperance, and who was fascinated by new ideas in religion and science – Darwinism, Theosophy and occult spiritualism.

"... Driven to the metropolis, Dwyer joined a group called the Active Service Brigade, which agitated for the rights of the unemployed during the 1890s. The Brigade also ran a doss house, or what its leaders called a 'barracks', for unemployed men. Dwyer became the manager of these barracks, where the unemployed could be educated and drilled into a disciplined force of political agitation. In 1894 the Brigade split as a result of a criminal libel charge brought against its leaders by NSW Justice Minister Thomas Slattery; they were convicted and Dwyer served a six month term in Maitland Gaol. In 1895 Dwyer revived the Brigade under his own control, as an expression of his iconoclastic politics. By the turn of the century, the barracks idea had been reduced to simple boarding houses, a pragmatic residue of the Brigade's theatrical radicalism. The boarding houses providing Dwyer with a threadbare income for the next twenty years, as his family shifted about inner-Sydney's poorest districts, renting cheap premises. In the late 1890s Dwyer's interest in social change also manifested in membership of the Independent Order of Good Templars and the Theosophical Society. The IOGT explicitly sought working class support by linking drink to class issues; theosophy allowed him to express the personal and spiritual dimensions of his ideology. Like his political radicalism, these interests had their roots in his London life, and were fitfully pursued as he strove to improve the family income. Dwyer variously tried his hand at business schemes – sometimes to make money for himself, sometimes co-operative ventures for the unemployed; these schemes invariably failed. He repeatedly tried to find a way out of his circumstances, but success eluded him throughout his Australian experience. From 1921 he lived in working class obscurity in the western Sydney home of one of his children."
MG Hearn, doctoral thesis

Sydney Anarchy Trial of February, 1894

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson

1864 Daniel Mannix (d. November 2, 1963), Irish-born Australian Catholic clergyman, Archbishop of Melbourne for 46 years, one of the most influential public figures in 20^th-Century Australia, and certainly the most powerful cleric in Australian history. 

In 1914, Australia entered World War I on the side of Britain, and when Mannix denounced the war as "just a sordid trade war", he was widely denounced as a traitor. When the Australian Labor Party government of Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription for the war, Mannix campaigned against it. Although he only spoke out against conscription twice in the period leading up to the 1916 referendum, he was scapegoated by Hughes, and blamed for its defeat in its aftermath. His input was almost certainly too small to have made any real difference. He spoke out more frequently about the 1917 referendum, and might have contributed to its defeat; the extent to which Mannix was influential in the debates surrounding the conscription referenda has been the subject of debate among historians.

Source: Wikipedia

1877 Garrett Morgan (d. 1963), inventor

1878 PD Ouspensky (Peter D Ouspensky; Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky; d. October 2, 1947), Russian philosopher who invoked geometry in his discussions of psychology and higher dimensions of existence; best known for his expositions of the early work of the Greek-Armenian mystic and spiritual teacher, GI Gurdjieff

1879 Josip Murn Aleksandrov (d. 1901), Slovene poet

1901 Charles Goren, contract bridge expert

1903 Luis Carrero Blanco (d. 1973), Spanish statesman

1909 Harry Helmsley (d. 1997), real estate entrepreneur

1913 John Garfield (d. 1952), actor

1916 Hans Eysenck (d. 1997), psychologist

1925 Paul Mauriat, musician

1926 Iñigo Sanz, professor of law

1928 Alan Sillitoe, British author and playwright (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner)

1932 Miriam Makeba ('Mama Afrika'), Grammy Award-winning South African singer

1934 Dame Jane Goodall, conservationist and author. She was named a Dame of the British Empire (DBE) in a ceremony held in Buckingham Palace in 2004.

"Jane Goodall is the world's foremost authority on chimpanzees, having closely observed their behavior for the past quarter century in the jungles of the Gombe Game Reserve in Africa, living in the chimps' environment and gaining their confidence … Dr Goodall has expanded her global outreach with the founding of the Jane Goodall Institute based in Ridgefield, CT. She now teaches and encourages young people to appreciate the conversation of chimpanzees and all creatures great and small. She lectures, writes, teaches and continues her mission in many inventive ways, including the Chimpanzee Guardian Project."  Source

1934 Janez Strnad, Slovene physicist

1942 Charles C Krulak, 31^st Commandant of the US Marine Corps

1947 Jan Garbarek, Norwegian musician

1948 Lindy Chamberlain, New Zealand-born Australian woman who was mistakenly jailed for the August 17, 1980, so-called murder of her baby, Azaria, who was devoured at the mythic Uluru (Ayer's Rock) by a dingo, an Australian wild dog. The story involved some very poorly conducted forensic blood tests – on a substance that later proved to be not blood at all, but a spray-on material used in the normal manufacture of a car. 

Remarkably, despite the fact that a lethal attack by a dingo on a baby in a desert camping ground is scarcely an unlikely event, Lindy Chamberlain and her husband Michael survived years of assault by media and the law, and more than a few Australians believed them both guilty. She was not pardoned until June 2, 1987. In 1988, Evil Angels (aka A Cry in the Dark), the movie of John Bryson's book on the extraordinary Chamberlain story, was released starring Meryl Streep.

"A search of the Chamberlain's car produced what appeared to be the blood of an infant on the seats and on a pair of scissors in the vehicle. After that, the Chamberlains were arrested and tried for the murder of their baby daughter.  They insisted they were innocent, but the evidence appeared to say otherwise.  Lindy was convicted of murder and Michael was declared an accessory to the crime. Lindy went to prison."   Source

"Wendy Carlisle, ABC Radio National presenter: After Lindy was released, there was the Royal Commission and the quashing of her conviction, and then something curious started to happen: people started to write to her and say sorry for all that had happened.

"Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton (reading from such a letter): 'Lindy, my name is … I want to apologise to you and ask for your forgiveness in my feelings against you in once and for a long time believing of your guilt of the death of your loved daughter, Azaria.

"'At the time I was a serving police officer in (a certain Australian state) and the feeling there was you were guilty as hell. I even got first-hand knowledge from a Northern Territory policeman that you were "shonky as shit". Please excuse the language. I even disliked you further when a serving policeman got into the court-house one day and said that Michael was looking embarrassed with his head down and you were there doing your fingernails and kept looking at the people in the gallery with a cold, hard face. That made you even more guilty as we dug into his every word.'

"[Lindy, to interviewer] I have to say I did do my fingernails, it gave me something to do when you felt like hitting people. My lawyers used to get upset with me for that, but it was better than jumping up and screaming at people.

"[Lindy reading from letter again] 'And so Lindy, I helped brand you as guilty. And I just knew that you were guilty. I was glad when they jailed you and had no compassion for you.

"'About 12 months ago, I wanted to write to you and ask for your forgiveness for judging you, for I did not have that right. Although I did not know what to believe, but I decided I would not judge you again and when my friends discussed you I would not be involved in the discussion.

"'On Saturday while walking through the ABC Shop, I saw a large stack of your books and I picked it up and decided to buy it. I went home and did not get much of a chance to read it until church on Sunday and from that time on, I have not been sleeping well or concentrating on anything except your book. I knew as I began reading about Azaria's birth that you loved her and that you did not have any thought even to 'do away' with her. From that moment I knew without a shadow of doubt that you were, and are innocent. My knowledge went beyond belief, but I know with every fibre of my being that you are innocent of that terrible frame-up. I was, and am still, terribly ashamed of my former feelings.

"'I wonder what it was at that time that Australians wanted "blood" from you. Hatred is a horrible thing, and I have never seen a nation with so much hatred. I am going to write to the Northern Territory government and suggest they pay you an adequate compensation for the unrighteous things done to you. I also intend to tell them they need to put on Azaria's birth certificate that she died from killing by a dingo.'

"[Lindy, to interviewer] That's an interesting about-face, although what interests me here, and I'm not supposed to say things like this because I'm supposed to say isn't support wonderful, which support is. But it's interesting here that this person who is a police officer went from believing I was guilty from gossip, to believe I was innocent because she read about Azaria's birth. Nowhere in there does she mention looking at any of the facts, so although she's come to the right conclusion in the end, she still did on feelings instead of facts, and this is one thing that Australia needs to learn, th