Today's Famous Birthdays

[IceWizard]

Frederick Douglass
(born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c.
February 1817 or 1818 – February 20, 1895)

was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping
from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in
Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery
writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample
to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent
American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator
had once been a slave. It was in response to this disbelief that Douglass wrote his first autobiography.








Christopher Latham Sholes
(February 14, 1819 – February 17, 1890)

was an American inventor who invented the QWERTY keyboard,[2] and, along with Samuel W. Soule,
Carlos Glidden and John Pratt, has been contended to be one of the inventors of the first typewriter
in the United States. He was also a newspaper publisher and Wisconsin politician. In his time,
Sholes went by the names C. Latham Sholes, Latham Sholes, or C. L. Sholes, but never
"Christopher Sholes" or "Christopher L. Sholes".








James Riddle Hoffa
(February 14, 1913 – disappeared July 30, 1975;
declared dead July 30, 1982)

was an American labor union leader who served as the president of the International Brotherhood
of Teamsters (IBT) from 1957 until 1971.

From an early age, Hoffa was a union activist, and he became an important regional figure with the
IBT by his mid-twenties. By 1952, he was the national vice-president of the IBT and between 1957
and 1971 he was its general president. He secured the first national agreement for teamsters' rates
in 1964 with the National Master Freight Agreement. He played a major role in the growth and the
development of the union, which eventually became the largest by membership in the United States,
with over 2.3 million members at its peak, during his terms as its leader.

Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975. It is generally accepted that he was murdered by the Mafia,
and in 1982 was declared legally dead. Hoffa's legacy and the circumstances of his disappearance
continue to stir debate.








Michael Rubens Bloomberg
(born February 14, 1942)

is an American businessman, politician, philanthropist, and author. He is the majority owner,
co-founder and CEO of Bloomberg L.P. He was Mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, and
was a candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President of the United States. He
has served as chair of the Defense Innovation Board, an independent advisory board that
provides recommendations on artificial intelligence, software, data and digital modernization
to the United States Department of Defense, since June 2022.









Carl Milton Bernstein
(born February 14, 1944)

is an American investigative journalist and author. While a young reporter for The Washington Post
in 1972, Bernstein was teamed up with Bob Woodward, and the two did much of the original news
reporting on the Watergate scandal. These scandals led to numerous government investigations and
the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called
"maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene Roberts.