Celebrity photographer Carl Van Vechten

It is the birthday of 1920s celeb photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880), who made portraits of actors, singers, artists, and writers in the 1920s and 1930s, including some of the most prominent personalities in the Harlem Renaissance. Van Vechten was assistant music critic for The New York Times, and later served as its first modern dance critic. He also wrote seven novels, including Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works (1922), The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), The Tattooed Countess (1924), Red (1925), Firecrakers: A Realistic Novel (1925), Nigger Heaven (1926), and Parties (1930). He was a lifelong friend of Gertrude Stein and served as the literary executor of her estate.

Happy birthday, financier J.P. Morgan

It is the birthday of financier J.P. Morgan (1837), who was one of the richest and powerful men in America in the era of the Robber Barons. He supplied gold to the U.S. Treasury to end the Panic of 1896. He personally averted the banking Panic of 1907 by locking financial leaders in his New York mansion until they agreed to solutions to the problem. He merged companies to form General Electric and U.S. Steel. He underwrote the rescue of The New York Times from financial disaster. Morgan was an avid collector of art, books and gemstones. He contributed to the American Museum of Natural History and helped start the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His private collection formed the foundation of the Pierpont Morgan Library.

Virginia Pope made high fashion news

It is the birthday of fashion writer Virginia Pope (1886), who was fashion editor of The New York Times from 1933 to 1955. She is credited with turning fashion writing into news.  She was the first to send photos of the 1930s Paris shows for publication the next day in New York. When World War II separated American designers from the fashion centers of Europe, Pope produced home-grown Fashions of the Times revues, featuring the work of American designers, and in the process, making them widely known. In addition to two decades of writing about fashion for the Times, her work appears in American Fashion (2007),  an illustrated history of apparel in the United States.

Carl Van Vechten photographed celebs

It is the birthday of writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880), who is best remembered for his photographs of celebrity writers, artists, singers and actors in the 1920s and 1930s. He was particularly fascinated with the leading figures in the Harlem Renaissance. Van Vechten worked as assistant music critic for The New York Times and later as its first modern dance critic. He wrote seven novels, including Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works (1922), The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), The Tattooed Countess (1924), Red (1925), Firecrakers: A Realistic Novel (1925), Nigger Heaven (1926), and Parties (1930). He met Gertrude Stein in Paris in 1913 and remained a lifelong friend. He became the literary executor of her estate and published some of her unpublished writings. Collections of his photographs are at Yale University, Fisk University, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Museum of the City of New York.

Hal Borland wrote When the Legends Die

It is the birthday of outdoor writer Hal Borland (1900), who is best remembered for his novel When the Legends Die (1963), which became a young adult classic and was adapted for a 1972 film starring Richard Widmark and Frederic Forrest. The book tells the story of a Ute indian youth who leaves the reservation and enters the rodeo circuit and is befriended by a drunken old former rodeo star. It examines the clash between the traditional tribal ways and the 20th century. Borland was born in Nebraska and grew up in Colorado. His father was a rural newspaper editor. Borland graduated from Columbia University and later wrote for the Denver Post, Audubon Magazine, and The New York Times, where he produced a popular Sunday outdoor column for 37 years. Borland wrote numerous nature books and novels.

Happy birthday, Richard Harding Davis

Davis (standing second from left) with fellow war correspondents in Tampa during the Spanish-American War.

It is the birthday of war corespondent Richard Harding Davis (1864), the most famous celebrity reporter of his era, who built his reputation on his coverage of the Spanish-American War, The Second Boer War, and World War I. At various times, he worked for the New York Evening Sun, the New York Herald, and The New York Times. Later, he was managing editor of Harper's Weekly and wrote for Scribner's Magazine. He became a good friend of Teddy Roosevelt when he was embedded with the Rough Riders in Cuba. Roosevelt loved his short story, Gallagher, about a streetwise copyboy who hunts down the murderer in a sensational case. A ruggedly handsome fellow, Davis was the prototype for Charles Dana Gibson's Gibson Man, the epitome of masculinity in 19th century America. Davis wrote more than 35 novels, short story collections and travel books.

Salisbury wrote of Russia, Vietnam, China

Harrison Salisbury

It is the birthday of journalist Harrison Salisbury (1908), who won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1955 for a series of stories he wrote after serving as the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times. Salisbury was one of the Times' top editors. He also reported from Vietnam and China. He was a prolific writer, the author of 29 books.

Salisbury began working for United Press after being suspended from the University of Minnesota in 1930. He never graduated. He served as UP's foreign editor during the last two years of World War II, and traveled with the Red Army as it pursued the retreating Germans. In 1945, he wrote a series for Collier's Weekly about Russia that became a book Russia on the Way (1946). He served as the Times' Moscow bureau chief for five years beginning in 1949. In Russia, he constantly sparred with Soviet officials over censorship, though he was criticized by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and by writer Gay Talese (The Kingdom and the Power) for being too sympathetic to the Soviets.

Salisbury served as the Times' chief of domestic correspondents during the 1960s and covered the Civil Rights struggle in the South. He directed the coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He visited North Vietnam in 1966 and became convinced that the United States policy of pursuing the air war was a bad policy as it was killing thousands of civilians. He was the first American journalist to report on the war from North Vietnam and among the first to oppose the war.

Salisbury also traveled extensively in China. He witnessed the student uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989 that led to a bloody massacre at the hands of the Chinese military.

Salisbury's books include American in Russia (1955), The Shook-Up Generation (1968), Behind the Lines: Hanoi (1967), Orbit of China (1967), War Between Russia and China (1969), The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (1969), The Gates of Hell (1975), Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions 1905-1917 (1978), Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times (1980), Journey For Our Times (autobiography) (1983), China: 100 Years of Revolution (1983), The Long March: The Untold Story (1985), Tiananmen Diary: Thirteen Days in June (1989), The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng (1992), Heroes of My Time (1993).

Salisbury died from a sudden heart attack in Connecticut in 1993 at the age of 84.

Hal Borland, outdoor writer

Hal Borland

It is the birthday of writer Hal Borland (1900), whose Sunday "outdoor editorials" in The New York Times captured the imagination of nature lovers for nearly 40 years. He wrote more than 25 books, including four novels. Pulitzer Prize-winning naturalist Edwin Way Teale called Borland's outdoor books "a breath of fresh country air." He was born in a tiny town southwest of Omaha and raised in a tiny town in eastern Colorado, where his father owned a newspaper. His book County Editor's Boy, recalls his days growing up in Flagler, Colorado. He attended the University of Colorado for a time but dropped out to work on his father's paper. Later he went to Columbia University and graduated with a degree in journalism in  1923. Eventually, he worked at the Denver Post, and wrote for Audubon Magazine. In 1945, he and his wife, Barbara Borland, moved to a 100-acre farm in Connecticut, where he wrote books and magazine articles, and his column for The New York Times. His wisdom was that of rural America, born of his childhood and his love of nature. “Knowing trees," he once wrote, "I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.”