753 Pirmin, “Apostle of Alemanni,” died (b. ca. 670). He was the first abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Reichenau.

1534 The British Parliament passed the Supremacy Act, whereby Henry VIII and his successors to the English throne were declared “the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England.”

1584 Saint Charles Borromeo, archbishop of Milan and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, died at Milan, Italy (b. 2 October 1538).

1600 Richard Hooker, an Anglican priest and influential theologian whose emphases on reason, tolerance and inclusiveness considerably influenced the development of Anglicanism and who was the co-founder (with Thomas Cranmer and Matthew Parker) of Anglican theological thought, died at Bishopsbourne, Kent (b. March 1554).

1631 John Eliot (ca. 1604–1690), missionary to American Indians, landed at Boston, Massachusetts.

1643 In Boston, Samuel Gorton (1592–1677) and six others who had been extradited from Warwick, Rhode Island, were sentenced by the General Court of Massachusetts to confinement at hard labor for blasphemy.

1723 Samuel Davies, American Presbyterian leader and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), was born near Summit Ridge, New Jersey (d. 1761).

1784 Thomas Coke (1747–1814) arrived in America from England at New York City. He was the first Methodist bishop to come to the New World.

1794 Adolph Nussmann (b. August 1739, Münster, Westphalia), who laid foundations for the Lutheran church in North Carolina, died.

1794 William Cullen Bryant, poet and hymnist, was born at Cummington, Massachusetts (d. 12 June 1878).

1816 Calvin Fairbank, an abolitionist minister who spent more than seventeen years in prison for his anti-slavery activities, was born in Pike, New York (d. 12 October 1898).

1820 Claus Lauritz Clausen, teacher and lay preacher, was born in Denmark (d. 20 February 1892).

1838 The first groups of Saxons under Martin Stephan (1777–1846) left Bremerhaven on the Copernicus and the Johann Georg, the latter with C. F. W. Walther aboard.

1839 Peter Brand, president of the Concordia Synod and of the Eastern District (Missouri Synod), vice-president of Missouri Synod and member of its Board for Foreign Missions, was born in Ansbach, Hessen-Nassau, Germany (d. 11 January 1918).

1840 John Henry Herzer was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He graduated from Concordia Seminary, Saint Louis, in 1865 and served as a pastor in Steele County and Minneapolis, Minnesota; Plymouth, Wisconsin; and Athens, Illinois. He was a professor at Concordia Theological Seminary (Springfield, Illinois) from 1892 to 1914, when he retired from his professorship. Earlier in his ministry he had served as secretary of the Synodical Conference (1875–1876), vice-president of the Wisconsin District (1875–1891) and president of that district (1891–1892). He died on 2 May 1930 and is buried in Concordia Cemetery, Saint Louis.1875 Otto Carl August Boecler,  a professor at Concordia Theological Seminary (Springfield, Illinois) and Concordia Seminary (Saint Louis), was born in Memphis, Tennessee (d. 13 September 1942).

1905 Henry Wittrock (1879–1967) was installed as the Missouri Synod’s first resident pastor in Argentina.

1929 25,000 people filled the Arena in Saint Louis in celebration of the quadricentennial of Luther’s Small Catechism of 1529. There was a mass children’s choir of 3,500 voices, and Walter A. Maier (1893–1950) was the preacher.

1930 D. James Kennedy, an American televangelist and founder of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was born in Augusta, Georgia (d. 5 September 2007).

1931 Johann Leonhard Georg Mezger (b. 18 December 1857), a professor at Concordia Seminary (Saint Louis) and at the seminary in Zehlendorf, Berlin, Germany, died.

1946 Laurentius G. Abrahamson died at his home in Rock Island, Illinois (b. 2 March 1856).