Month: June 2013

June 21: Lewis Tappan, abolitionist who was intimately involved in the Amistad defense in 1841, and arranged for the African defendants to be represented by former President John Quincy Adams, died on this date in 1873.

June 20: On this date in 1840, Samuel Finley Breese Morse was issued patent 1647 for his telegraph invention that changed the world.

June 19: Lispenard Stewart, scion of a wealthy Old New York family, who never married, and benefactor of the zoo, Grace Church, and the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, was born on this date in 1865.

June 18: On this date in 1897, Juliet Corson, who pioneered cook books (including Fifteen Cent Dinners for Families of Six) and founded the New York School of Cookery in 1876, the first successful cooking school there, died.

June 17: James Weldon Johnson, who wrote the “Negro National Anthem” (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”) with his brother J. Rosamund, and who led the fight for the Anti-Lynching Law of 1921, was born on this date in 1871.

June 16: On this date in 1930, inventor Elmer Sperry, who created the gyrocompass, a high density arc lamp, and the Iron Mike, and held 400 other patents, twice as many as Thomas Edison, died.

June 15: At the 1852 Democratic National Convention, on this date, Brooklyn’s Henry Cruse Murphy came within a vote of winning his party’s nomination for president of the United States.

June 13: On this date in 1906, Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s uncle who had secretly lived simultaneously with two wives and two families within blocks of each other, died.

June 12: On this date in 1822, Edgar Addison Kimball was born. He would serve with distinction during the Mexican-American and Civil Wars, only to be murdered during that latter war by a rival officer.