MILESTONES: February 23, birthdays for Aziz Ansari, D’Angelo Russell, Daymond John

Brooklyn Today

February 23, 2018 Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Aziz Ansari. Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

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Greetings, Brooklyn. Today is the 54th day of the year.

On this day in 1861, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle front page reported that an assassination attempt against President-elect Abraham Lincoln had been averted. This was one of allegedly five attempts on Lincoln’s life before John Wilkes Booth shot him in a theater on April 14, 1865. The Eagle report stated that rumors of assassination plots were not widely believed. However, several history websites report that it took a team of prominent people, including railroad magnate Samuel Morse Felton; Pinkerton Detective Henry Davies, a governor; and the hiring of a private train to circumvent Baltimore, where it was believed the railway would be sabotaged. When the president-elect’s scheduled train arrived in Washington, he and Mrs. Lincoln were not aboard.

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On this day in 1848, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle front page reported that former U.S. President John Quincy Adams fell ill and was not expected to survive. The Eagle printed details of his collapsing at his desk in the House of Representatives’ chamber, just moments after voting against referring a resolution to a military affairs committee. Some cite the cause of his collapse and death as an intracerebral hemorrhage, others called it a stroke. The Eagle identified it as apoplexy. Adams, son of Founding Father John Adams, had served one term as the sixth U.S. president (1824-28) before Andrew Jackson defeated him. A skilled diplomat, he had helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812. John Quincy Adams also became the first and only former president to serve in Congress, for 18 years until his death, on this day in history.

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On this day in 1889, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle front page featured a report on the Omnibus Enabling Act that gave statehood to the Dakota Territory. The act, which lame duck President Grover Cleveland signed just two weeks before Benjamin Harrison succeeded him, authorized the Dakotas to split into two states — north and south — as well as Washington. Nine months later, on Nov. 2, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison signed the statehood proclamations into law.

That front page also featured a story about an Author’s Festival at the Packer Collegiate Institute. The Eagle story waxed poetic, calling the students the “chaste Dianas” (a term derived from Roman mythology). Although bemused in tone, the story commended the Packer Alumnae Association for producing the Author’s Carnival as a fundraiser, for having donated the school’s gymnasium (later a larger one was built), and its plans to establish a women’s college. The women’s junior college did open some 30 years later, and lasted until 1972.

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On this day in 1949, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle front page reported that Israel and Egypt were set to sign a truce the next day. U.N. Mediator Ralph Bunche was one of the architects of this truce, which, at press time for the Feb. 23, 1949 edition, would include an exchange of prisoners and demilitarization of several zones. It also established the Green line and kept in place the 1922 international border between Egypt and Mandatory Palestine (from the British Mandate). The truce also let Egypt maintain control over the Gaza Strip — a portion of land near the Mediterranean Sea. This truce was part of a set of armistice agreements between Israel and Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

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NOTABLE PEOPLE born on this day include comedian and actor AZIZ ANSARI, who was born in 1983; actress EMILY BLUNT, who was born in 1983; former baseball player BOBBY BONILLA, who was born in 1963; broadcast journalist SYLVIA CHASE, who was born in 1938; actor PETER FONDA, who was born in 1939; “Shark Tank” judge DAYMOND JOHN, who was born in Brooklyn in 1969; former football player and boxer ED “TOO TALL” JONES, who was born in 1951; singer HOWARD JONES, who was born in 1955; actress KELLY MACDONALD, who was born in 1976; Hall of Fame soccer player JOE-MAX MOORE, who was born in 1971; comedian and actress NIECY NASH, who was born in 1970; actress PATRICIA RICHARDSON, who was born in 1951; and Brooklyn Nets guard D’ANGELO RUSSELL, who was born in 1996.

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THE FIRST ADULT ANIMAL WAS CLONED ON THIS DAY IN 1997. Researchers in Scotland announced the first cloning of an adult animal, a lamb they named Dolly with a genetic makeup identical to that of her mother. This led to worldwide speculation about the possibility of human cloning. On Mar 4, 1997, President Bill Clinton imposed a ban on the federal funding of human cloning research.

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EMMA HART WILLARD WAS BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1787. Intent on improving educational opportunities for women, she sent her Plan for Improving Female Education to the governor of New York. In it she described her ideal for a girls’ school, including the instruction usually offered the girls of her day (music, drawing, penmanship, dancing), as well as adding religious and moral instruction, natural philosophy and domestic science. The New York Legislature granted her a charter for the Waterford Academy for Young Ladies. The school later moved to Troy, New York, where it was first named the Troy Female Seminary and later the Emma Willard School. She began the Willard Association for the Mutual Improvement of Female Teachers in 1837, and she authored several textbooks on geography, history and astronomy. Willard died in New York in 1870.

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W.E.B. Du BOIS WAS BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1868. The American educator was a seminal leader of the movement for black equality. “The cost of liberty,” he wrote in 1909, “is less than the price of repression.” Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963.

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WILLIAM L. SHIRER WAS BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1904. The American journalist and author served as the European correspondent from 1927 to 1934 for the Chicago Tribune. While working for the paper, he became a friend of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the leader of India’s independence movement. As a result of this he published “Gandhi: A Memoir” in 1980. His best-known book is “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” in which he used his experiences in Europe with the New York Herald Tribune, the Universal News Service and CBS Radio. Shirer died in 1993 in Massachusetts.

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VICTOR LONZO FLEMING WAS BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1889. The film director’s talents are manifest in two of Hollywood’s most popular and enduring movies: “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone with the Wind,” for which he won an Academy Award. Fleming died in Arizona in 1949.

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Special thanks to “Chase’s Calendar of Events” and Brooklyn Public Library.

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“Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader and fuller life.” — historian and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, who was born on this day in 1868