Aug 30

The Second Battle of Bull Run was fought between August 28 and 30, 1862 as part of the American Civil War. It was the culmination of an offensive campaign waged by Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia against Union Major General John Pope’s Army of Virginia. It was a battle of much larger scale and numbers than the First Battle of Bull Run fought in 1861 on the same ground.

Confederate Major General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson captured the Union supply depot at Manassas Junction following a wide-ranging flanking march and threatening Pope’s line of communications with Washington, D.C. Jackson took up defensive positions of Stony Ridge. On August 28, 1862, Jackson attacked a Union column at Brawner’s Farm resulting in a stalemate. The wing of Lee’s army commanded by Major General James Longstreet broke through light Union resistance in the Battle of Thoroughfare Gap and approached the battlefield.

Pope became convinced that he had trapped Jackson and concentrated the bulk of his army against him. On August 29, Pope launched a series of assaults against Jackson’s position and they were repulsed with heavy casualties on both sides. On August 30, Pope renewed his attacks and massed Confederate artillery devastated a Union assault.

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Aug 29

William Friedkin is an Academy Award-winning American movie and television director, producer, and screenwriter born in Chicago, Illinois. He is best known for directed The Exorcist and The French Connection in the early 1970s.

After seeing Citizen Kane as a boy, Friedkin became fascinated with movies and began working for WGN-TV right after high school. He started his directorial career doing live TV shows and documentaries. In 1965, he moved to Hollywood and two years later released his first feature film, Good Times starring Sonny and Cher. In 1971, he released The French Connection, a gritty cop film starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider and shot in a visceral, documentary style. It won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Friedkin followed up with 1973’s The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel about a little girl possessed by the Devil. It revolutionized the horror genre and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. A now overly confident Friedkin directed Sorcerer, a remake of the movie Wages of Fear, that came out around the same time as Star Wars. It was received negatively by critics and performed poorly at the box office. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, his films received lackluster reviews and modest box office returns, although, his crime film, To Live and Die in L.A., starring William Petersen and Willem Dafoe, has become a critical favorite.

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Aug 28

Scientific American is a popular science magazine published first weekly and later monthly since August 28, 1845, making it one of the oldest continuously published periodicals in the United States. It brings articles about new and innovative research to the amateur and lay audience.

It had a monthly circulation of roughly 555,000 US and 90,000 international as of December 2005. It is a forum where scientific theories and discoveries are explained to a broader audience. In the past, scientists interested in fields outside their own areas of expertise made up the magazine’s target audience. Now, the publication is aimed at educational general readers who are interested in scientific issues. The magazine was founded by Rufus M. Porter as a single-page newsletter and throughout its early years Scientific American put much emphasis on reports of what was going on at the US patent office.

The publication reported on a broad range of inventions that includes perpetual motion machines, an 1849 device for buoying vessels by Abraham Lincoln, and the universal joint which now finds a place in nearly every automobile manufactured. The magazine evolved into something of a “workbench” publication, similar to the 20th century incarnation of Popular Science.

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Aug 27

Ira Levin was born in New York City and grew up in the Bronx and Manhattan. He attended Drake University in Iowa for two years before transferring to New York University, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1950. While in college, he entered a television screenwriting contest sponsored by CBS. He was a runner-up and sold his script to NBC where it became an episode on an anthology suspense series in 1951.

While still in his twenties and writing for TV, Levin published his first novel, A Kiss Before Dying about a cold-blooded ambitious young man who murders his wealthy girlfriend, gets away with it, and gets involved with her sister. The novel won the 1954 Edgar Award for the best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America and it was adapted into a film twice – in 1956 with Robert Wagner and in 1991 with Matt Dillon.

Rosemary’s Baby was published in 1967 and told the story of a young New York bride who may have been impregnated by the Devil. It was made into a critically and commercially successful film in 1968, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. The Stepford Wives was published in 1972 and featured women in an idyllic suburb who appear to have been replaced by subservient androids. It too was adapted into a film twice – in 1975 with Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss and in 2004 with Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick. Levin died in November 2007 from natural causes.