December 28 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on December 28

• Woodrow Wilson (1856)

  28th President of the United States who led the country through World War I and championed the founding of the League of Nations.

• Denzel Washington (1954)

  American actor and two-time Academy Award winner known for Training Day and Glory.

This Day in History

• 1895 — The Lumière brothers held the first commercial public screening of projected motion pictures in Paris, an event widely regarded as marking the birth of cinema as a public medium.

• 1973 — President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law, establishing one of the strongest environmental protection frameworks in the world.

What December 28 Says About You

December 28's history is a story of things that started small and quiet before becoming permanent fixtures of modern life. In 1895, the Lumière brothers held the first commercial public screening of projected motion pictures at a Paris café, a program of ten short films including Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and the famous train-arrival film whose supposed audience panic has since been challenged by film historians as likely exaggerated in later retelling — a modest technical demonstration that is now widely regarded as the actual birth of cinema as a public medium, rather than merely a scientific curiosity confined to labs. Seventy-eight years later, in 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law on this date, legislation that had passed the Senate that December by a vote of 92 to 0, a level of bipartisan agreement almost unimaginable for major environmental law in the decades since, and one credited with helping pull species including the bald eagle, the American alligator, and the gray wolf back from the edge of extinction. Capricorn is closely tied to patient, long-term structure-building as its stretch of the calendar continues. Woodrow Wilson, born on this date in 1856, spent his presidency pursuing a vision of durable international structure through the League of Nations, an ambition that ultimately failed to win the two-thirds Senate ratification it needed — meaning the United States itself never joined the organization Wilson had championed, a bitter irony that shadowed the final years of his presidency — though the idea outlived him and, in modified form, eventually became the United Nations. Denzel Washington, born in 1954, built a screen career on the same medium the Lumière brothers unknowingly invented on this date, becoming one of the most consistently respected actors of his generation across nearly five decades of work, winning Academy Awards for both Glory (1989) and Training Day (2001) and directing several of his own later films as well. Numerology reduces the 28th to day number 1, tied to new beginnings, matching a date whose two headline achievements — a new artistic medium, a new legal framework for conservation — were both genuine firsts in their fields. Growth and renewal are old associations tied to blue topaz, zircon, tanzanite, and turquoise, December's stones, alongside narcissus and holly, its two flowers. The Lumière screening took place in the basement Salon Indien of the Grand Café on Paris's Boulevard des Capucines, drawing an audience of only about thirty-three paying visitors that first night before word of mouth swelled crowds within days. The Endangered Species Act passed the Senate that December by an overwhelming 92 to 0 vote and has since been credited with helping recover species including the bald eagle, delisted from federal protection in 2007 after decades of dramatic population growth. Wilson's League of Nations proposal ultimately failed in the U.S. Senate largely over Article X, a collective-security provision that opponents feared could commit American forces to conflicts without direct congressional approval.