Confederate General John Bell Hood's incursion into Tennessee suffered a massive blow with a disastrous encounter outside Franklin, Tennessee with Union troops under General John M. Schofield.  Hood sent six divisions, numbering around 20,000 men, across open ground against entrenched Federal positions. Even though Schofield retreated during the night to Nashville, all Confederate assaults were beaten back, with Hood losing 1,750, including six generals, killed.  The Union lost around 200 men.  (By John Osborne)   

George Boole was born to a Lincolnshire tradesman in 1815 and grew up in the city of Lincoln.  He had only an early elementary education but he educated himself, with the help of the local Mechanics Institute, to a remarkable degree.  He became a school teacher and embarked on research in mathematics. After his papers were published he became professor of mathematics at Queen's College in Cork.  He remained there for the rest of his life, laying out "Boolean algebra" and other foundations of modern computer science.  (By John Osborne) 

At the invitation of the Swiss, representatives of sixteen countries met in Geneva on August 8, 1864, to discuss the treatment of wounded and prisoners in modern warfare. Two weeks later the "Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field" was signed. Just ten articles long, it nevertheless laid out the beginnings of the humane treatment of casualties of warfare.  (By John Osborne)

A group of four prospectors, John Cowan, D. J. Miller, John Crab, and Reginald Stanley, discovered gold deposits in Montana, filing their claim under the name "Last Chance Gulch." The area soon teemed with miners and the fields there yielded around nineteen million dollars in gold in their first four years.  The town of Helena was also soon founded and became the capital of the Montana Territory in 1875.  (By John Osborne)

Alois Alzheimer was born in Bavaria and took his medical degree at the University of Wurtzburg and soon after began working at the City Asylum in Frankfurt Am Main. There, in 1901, he began the study a 51-year patient named Auguste Deter with mystifying symptoms. After Deter's death, Alzheimer's autopsy of his brain identified the characteristic tangles and plaque of the disease that was later named "Alzheimer's Disease." Alzheimer died in 1915 of heart disease.  He was 51. (By John Osborne)  

Richard Georg Strauss was born in Munich, Germany, the son of the well-known composer and musician Franz Strauss.  He began his involvement with music, therefore, from an earlier age and became one of the leading composers of the early modern era.  His most popular works included the opera Der Rosenkavalier and the tone poems Death and Transfiguration and, Also sprach Zarathustra. He had married into a Jewish family and his fame enabled him to protect, to a point, his relatives during the Nazi period.  He died in 1949.  (By John Osborne)