April 19 - The Simpsons

Bart Simpson and his dysfunctional family made their debut as an animated short on Fox TV’s “The Tracey Ullman Show” on April 19, 1987. The Simpsons – Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie – were the brainchild of animator and voice actor Matt Groening, who named the characters after members of his own family, substituting Bart for his own name. Groening submitted only basic sketches for the short video, assuming they would be enhanced in production. But the animators simply re-traced his drawings, which resulted in the characters’ initially crude appearance. After three seasons, the sketch was developed into a half-hour prime-time “adult animated sitcom,” a sometimes-subtle, sometimes-brutal send-up of middle-class American society that debuted in December 1989. “The Simpsons” is now the longest-running U.S. TV sitcom and the longest-running U.S. animated program. In 2009 it surpassed “Gunsmoke” as the longest-running U.S. primetime, scripted TV series. Pictured: now, and then.

April 18 - Lucrezia Borgia

Lucrezia Borgia was born on April 18, 1480, near Rome. She was the daughter of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia of Aragon (Spain), who would later become the politically adept Pope Alexander VI, and one of his mistresses, Vannozza Cattanei, who was also the mother of Lucrezia's two older brothers, the immoral and likely murderous Cesare and the ill-fated Giovanni. Her three marriages into influential families – the powerful and princely Giovanni Sforza, then Alfonso d'Aragon of Naples, and finally Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara – served to increase the political power of her family, in its violent quest to control large parts of Italy. Lucrezia’s reputation is dogged by rumors: incest with her brother Cesare, her skill with poisons, the birth of a mysterious baby, and her role in a massive orgy (the Banquet of Chestnuts) hosted by Cesare that involved countless clergy. Historians debate whether Lucrezia actively participated in the Borgias’ notorious crimes or was a helpless pawn in their schemes.

April 17 - William Holden

Actor William Holden was born on April 17, 1918, in O'Fallon, Illinois. His real name was William Franklin Beedle, Jr. At age 3 his family moved to Southern California, where he was spotted by a Paramount talent scout in 1937. He played roles in minor films until 1950, when director Billy Wilder cast him as Joe Gillis, the young screenwriter who became the paramour of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a has-been silent-screen star, in “Sunset Boulevard.” A major star of the 1950s, he had memorable roles in “Born Yesterday” (1950) and “Stalag 17” (1953), for which he won a Best Actor Oscar, followed by “The Country Girl” (1954), “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” (1954), “Sabrina”(1954), “Picnic” (1955), “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing”(1955), “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957), and “The Horse Soldiers” (1959). He made a comeback in Sam Peckinpah's “The Wild Bunch” (1969), which led to roles in “The Towering Inferno” (1974) and the bitingly satirical “Network” (1976). Alcoholism contributed to his death in 1981.

April 16 - Dusty Springfield

The singer known as Dusty Springfield was born on April 16, 1939, in North London, England. Born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien into a music-loving Catholic family, she was a tomboy who loved to sing and acquired the nickname "Dusty" by playing football (soccer) with boys in the street. In 1960 she formed a pop-folk vocal trio, The Springfields, with her brother. Then in 1963 her solo recording "I Only Want to Be with You" landed her on the music charts in the UK and the United States, where she was the second artist of the “British Invasion,” after the Beatles, to have a major hit. More followed with "Wishin' and Hopin'" (1964), "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" (1964), "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" (1966) and her quintessential song, "Son of a Preacher Man" (1968). Her album “Dusty in Memphis” (1969) shimmers with lyrical nuance in songs like “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore” (written by Randy Newman) and “No Easy Way Down” (Carole King), two of the saddest songs she committed to vinyl.

April 15 - Henry James

170 years ago: Author Henry James was born on April 15, 1843, in New York City. Tutored as a child, Henry toured parts of Europe with his moneyed and leisured family beginning at age 12. For the next two decades he alternated between America and Europe, then settled in England and became a British subject in 1915, a year before his death. His greatest novels and short stories portray Americans encountering Europeans and vice-versa, told from the viewpoint of a character within a tale, allowing him to explore ideas of consciousness and perception. His short novel Washington Square (1880) was followed by The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Turn of the Screw (1898) and others. His greatest, late novels were written in Rye, outside London, including The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902) and his final masterpiece, The Golden Bowl (1904), in which the shape and form of the novel itself is reflected in the golden bowl represented in it. “It is art that makes life,” James said, “makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of its process.” Pictured: John Singer Sargent portrait, 1913.

April 15 - Leonardo da Vinci

Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, in the hill town of Vinci in the Republic of Florence. He was the illegitimate son of a wealthy legal notary. His manifold interests in the laws of science and nature are reflected in his works as a painter, sculptor, inventor and draftsman. Da Vinci's name is now virtually synonymous with the "Mona Lisa," a painting he began between 1505 and 1507. The sitter is almost certainly Lisa del Giocondo, wife of a wealthy Florentine silk merchant, who probably commissioned the work to celebrate the birth of their second son. The Italian name for the painting, “La Gioconda,” means “happy" or "jovial" (literally "the jocund one"), a pun on the feminine form of the sitter's married name. Da Vinci never delivered the painting. Near the end of his life, in 1516, he was invited by King François I of France to work near his chateau in the Loire Valley, where he apparently continued to rework the portrait that is now considered beautifully odd and mysterious.

April 14 - Black Sunday

A terrifying “Black Sunday” occurred on April 14, 1935. After weeks of suffocating dust storms on America’s Great Plains, the clear, sunny day tempted people to go outside. But that afternoon, temperatures dropped, winds exceeded 60 mph and visibility fell to zero. A massive, rolling wave of black dirt plunged a vast area of Oklahoma and Texas, centered on the states’ panhandles, into lethal blackness. Tons of topsoil had been blown off barren fields and carried in a “Black Blizzard” for hundreds of miles. People took shelter wherever possible. Severe drought and decades of intensive, environmentally destructive farming had eroded an estimated 100 million acres of land. The skewed ecosystem brought on plagues of rabbits, spiders, centipedes, grasshoppers and crickets. On April 15, an Associated Press reporter who had been caught in the storm coined the term “dust bowl” in an article for the Lubbock (TX) Evening Journal, describing both the phenomenon and the affected region.

April 13 - Thomas Jefferson

April 13, 1743, is the birthdate of Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States (1801–1809). He was born in Shadwell, Virginia, near the center of the state. He entered the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg at age 16 and became a lawyer in 1767. He spoke five languages fluently and, as a farmer (largely tobacco), he was interested in new mechanical inventions and labor-saving devices. He improved the moldboard part of a plow so that it would lift and turn sod more efficiently. He designed a revolving bookstand that allowed five books to be viewed in one place. In Monticello’s entrance hall, he devised a Great Clock powered by gravity using cannonballs, with wall markings showing the time and the day of the week (its face can be seen from both inside and outside). He also devised a cylindrical wheel cipher for encoding and decoding messages, and he repeatedly improved a letter-copying device called a polygraph constructed of two connected pens.

April 12 - The First Human in Outer Space (Yuri Gagarin)

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first human being to enter outer space on April 12, 1961, when his spacecraft Vostok I completed an orbit of the Earth, the first ever by a manned vehicle. The flight took 108 minutes from launch to landing (the shortest manned orbital flight). The spacecraft was a small round capsule launched from Baikonur cosmodrome, in the desert steppe of Kazakhstan east of the Aral Sea; it was designed to maintain life for 10 days if re-entry failed. Medical staff and engineers were uncertain how a human would react to weightlessness, so the spacecraft was locked on automatic controls, though Gagarin had an override code. On re-entry, he was ejected from the capsule 7 kilometers above the Earth. He landed with a parachute 280 miles west of the planned site near Baikonur. A farmer and her daughter, seeing a figure in a bright orange suit with a large helmet, backed away in fear. Gagarin said to them, “Don’t be afraid! I must find a telephone to call Moscow!"

Aoril 11 - Oleg Cassini

Fashion designer Oleg Cassini was born on April 11, 1913, in Paris, to Russian aristocrats, the Count and Countess Loiewski. He grew up in Florence, studied under French couturier Jean Patou, and opened his own boutique in Rome. In 1936 he emigrated to America and, by 1941, he was a designer for Paramount Pictures, where he dressed many stars, including Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford and Marilyn Monroe. With a reputation for original, spontaneous design, he met Jacqueline Bouvier shortly before her marriage in 1953, and in 1961 he became the exclusive couturier to the woman who had become First Lady of the United States. (Mrs. Kennedy called him her "Secretary of Style.") Cassini shaped the entire “Jackie Look,” which had a profound and lasting impact on fashion for its sophisticated elegance, luxurious fabrics, clean lines and timeless simplicity. Pictured: the First Lady in Cassini designs, which he said focused on her “beauty, naturalness, understatement … and symbolism.”