Christopher Columbus lands in Japan - or so he thought, Ferdinand Magellan reaches the Pacific Ocean, the first and oldest university in the new world is established, Harvard was, too, nearly 100 years later, Jonathan Swift publishes "Gulliver's Travels" - and today's birthday club includes Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Held, and Susan Harris - with a reading from "The Picture of Dorian Gray," by Oscar Wilde.

"The Extermination Order" of Missouri, Vasily Arkhipov refuses to launch a nuclear torpedo, and Sylvia Plath's birthday - with a reading from "The Secret Garden," by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The most famous gunfight of the American West, Ida B. Wells publishes "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases," and happy birthday to Hillary Clinton and Marisha Pessl - with a reading from "Great Expectations," written by Charles Dickens.

The (actual) charge of the light brigade, the Zinoviev letter, and birthday cake for Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, Anne Tyler, and Zadie Smith - with a reading from "The Count of Monte Cristo," by Alexandre Dumas.

The first transcontinental telegraph line goes operational, Annie Taylor goes over Niagara Falls, and the women of Iceland go on strike, and happy birthday to Sarah Josepha Hale and Alexandra David-Neel - with a reading from "At the Back of the North Wind," by George MacDonald.

The first National Women's Rights Convention, and happy birthday to Ellie Greenwich and Michael Crichton - with a reading from Crichton's "The Lost World."

The Cuban Missile Crisis, Jean-Paul Sartre declines the Nobel Prize in Literature, red dyes get banned, and happy birthday to Doris Lessing, Timothy Leary, and Julie Dash - with a reading from "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Thomas Edison submits his patent application for the incandescent light bulb, Ernest Hemingway publishes "For Whom the Bell Tolls," 50,000 people march in Washington, D.C. to protest the U.S. war in Vietnam, and happy birthday to Ursula Le Guin and Carrie Fisher - with a reading from Fisher's "Postcards from the Edge."

Ratification of the Louisiana Purchase, setting the U.S.-Canada border, the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, and happy birthdays to Isabelle de Charrière and Nellie McClung - with a reading from "Sowing Seeds in Danny," by Nellie McClung.

The British surrender at Yorktown, "Black Monday," and birthdays of Miguel Angel Asturias, Walter Munk, John le Carre, Philip Pullman, and Tracy Chevalier - with a reading from "My Antonia," by Willa Cather.