145 years ago today, members of the Salvation Army landed in the United States to begin their charitable operations, fifteen years after the group was founded in England. With a worldwide membership of over 1.7 million today, the Protestant Christian church sect runs the well-known international charity in 131 countries with a mission to run charity shops, operate shelters for the homeless, and provide disaster relief and humanitarian aid. READ stories GNN has written on the organization… (1880)

Going all the way back to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake when the group’s nationwide appeals for donations yielded tremendous support, the Salvation Army has been among the first to arrive when natural or man-made disasters strike anywhere in the world. Since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, they’ve allocated donations of more than $365 million to serve more than 1.7 million people. The Army’s immediate response to Katrina included the mobilization of more than 178 feeding units and 11 field kitchens which served more than 5.7 million hot meals and 8.3 million sandwiches. After the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, they arrived immediately at some of the worst disaster sites to help retrieve and bury the dead, and have since rebuilt homes and constructed new boats to recover livelihoods.

The Salvation Army may be best recognized for their Christmas season bell-ringers—volunteers and employees who stand outside of businesses with red kettles, ringing bells to inspire spontaneous donations. A tradition in the US has developed in the last decades whereby people drop valuable gold coins, rings, or bundles of large bills anonymously into the kettles.

MORE Good News on this Date:

• Thomas Jefferson was named minister to France replacing Benjamin Franklin (1785)
• Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call saying, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you” (1876)
• Viking Press produced the first Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman (1926)
• Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple opened on Broadway (1965) 
• Nearly one-half million people in Turkmenistan took shovels in hand and spent the day planting 755,000 trees—an ongoing Green Belt project that aimed to combat the country’s creeping desertification by planting three million saplings that year (2013)

827 years ago today, the Giralda Minaret was designed for the Almohad Mosque in what was Islamic Seville, Andalusia. This UNESCO World Heritage Site is perhaps the second most famous example of Moorish architecture behind the Al-Hambra, and today serves as the bell tower of the Seville cathedral. One look at the belfry is enough to know that its Renaissance style was added later.

A large mosque was built to replace the smaller, older Mosque of Ibn ‘Addabas, built in the 9th century under Umayyad rule. From the beginning, craftsmen from all over Al-Andalus and the Maghreb were enlisted in the mosque’s planning, construction, and decoration, and the caliph himself was highly invested in the process and was said to have visited the site daily.

Ahmad Ibn Baso had begun the base of the tower in cut stone and his work was continued by a Maghrebi Berber architect named ‘Ali al-Ghumari, who was responsible for building the main body of the minaret in brick, and completed by Sicilian architect Abu Layth Al-Siqilli.

The minaret was built using both local bricks and recycled marble from old Umayyad monuments. On 10 March 1198, the tower was completed with the addition of the finial (jāmūr) of four precious metal spheres (either gold or bronze) at the tower’s peak to commemorate al-Mansur’s victory over Alfonso VIII of Castile, which had taken place four years prior. (1198)

Happy 62nd Birthday to the legendary record producer and all-around guru Rick Rubin. Co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, founder of American Recordings, and former co-president of Columbia Records, Rubin began his career helping to popularize hip hop by producing acts such as the Beastie Boys, Run DMC, LL Cool J, and the Geto Boys. Rubin is also an enthusiastic modern spiritualist and attempts to live every moment in the present because that’s all that there is.

Dan Charnas, a music journalist who worked as vice president of A&R and marketing at Rubin’s American Recordings label in the 1990s, said, “He’s fantastic with sound and arrangements, and he’s tremendous with artists. They love him. He shows them how to make it better, and he gets more honest and exciting performances out of people than anyone.”

Rubin’s biggest trademark as a producer has been a “stripped-down” sound, which involves eliminating production elements such as string sections, backup vocals, and reverb, and instead having naked vocals and bare instrumentation. He’s applied this philosophy to Red Hot Chili Peppers, Audioslave, System of a Down, Linkin Park, Metallica, Aerosmith, Weezer, Rage Against the Machine, Johnny Cash, and Danzig.

Rubin just released his first book called The Creative Act: A Way of Being, about how to move through life as a creative force. (1963)

28 years ago today, Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on The WB television network. Created by cult fiction hero Joss Whedon, the show stars Buffy Summers, a young woman who hunts vampires, demons, and other supernatural creatures even as she occasionally struggles with high schooler problems. Running through 7 seasons from 1997 to 2003, the show was a major success, with 4-6 million regular viewers on new episodes. Furthermore, like all great fiction TV shows, it spawned hundreds of fan-fictions, spin-offs, extended universe content, literature, and comic books collectively known as the “Buffyverse” which provided fans of the show an almost endless source of entertainment.

Buffy is considered to be part of a wave of television series from the late 1990s and early 2000s that feature strong female characters, alongside Xena: Warrior Princess, La Femme Nikita, Dark Angel, and Alias. It won 3 Emmys in its time and was ranked 38th on Rolling Stone’s 100 Best TV Shows of All Time.

But outright inspiration is not the only thing that followed in the wake of Buffy. The show wormed its way into a section of the sociological study of popular culture, so much so that a 2012 study by Slate found that Buffy was named the most studied pop culture work by academics, with more than 200 papers, essays, and books devoted to the series. (1997)

And, on this day in 1804, France transferred ownership of the Louisiana Territory to the US in a ceremony in St. Louis. The US bought 828,000 square miles (2,140,000 km2), and paid France $15 million (68 million francs) in a deal known as The Louisiana Purchase. Napoleon needed the money to bolster his military for a looming conflict with the U.K.

Also, Happy Birthday to actress Sharon Stone, who turns 67 today. Years after starring in Basic Instinct and the Scorsese film, Casino, for which she earned an Oscar nomination, she suffered a brain embolism and spent time recovering with her three adopted sons. (1958)

Happy Birthday to Hollywood star Jon Hamm who turns 54 today. He rocketed to fame playing the 60s advertising executive Don Draper in the TV hit Mad Men, for which he won two Golden Globes and an Emmy, after 15 nominations. He also had a recurring role on NBC’s 30 Rock and is reportedly reuniting with his co-star Tina Fey in a new film directed by Mad Men co-star John Slattery called Maggie Moore, a dark comedy about a sheriff in a small town.

Hamm is also getting ready to shoot Corner Office, a film adaptation of The Room, playing a compulsive bureaucrat who discovers a secret room that his co-workers deny exists—a dark satire being shot in Vancouver through mid-March. In 2020 he starred with Emily Blunt in Wild Mountain Thyme, a romantic drama set in Ireland. WATCH some of his funny moments on talk shows….(1971)

He portrayed the angel Gabriel opposite David Tennant in the Amazon Prime miniseries, adapted from Neil Gaiman’s book, Good Omens and also had a role in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.