May 17 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on May 17

• Dennis Hopper (1936)

  American actor and director known for Easy Rider and Blue Velvet.

• Enya (1961)

  Irish singer and composer known for atmospheric, layered vocal recordings including "Orinoco Flow."

• Craig Ferguson (1962)

  Scottish-American comedian and television host, longtime host of The Late Late Show.

• Trent Reznor (1965)

  American musician and composer, founder of Nine Inch Nails and an Academy Award-winning film composer.

This Day in History

• 1673 — Explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette departed from present-day St. Ignace, Michigan, to begin mapping the Mississippi River.

• 1875 — The first Kentucky Derby was run at Churchill Downs in Louisville.

• 1954 — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

• 1990 — The World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its International Classification of Diseases, no longer classifying it as a mental disorder.

• 1792 — Twenty-four New York stockbrokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement, an accord that laid the foundation for what eventually became the New York Stock Exchange.

What May 17 Says About You

Some dates carry one landmark ruling. May 17 carries two of genuine consequence, thirty-six years apart: the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which dismantled the legal basis for segregated public schools, and the World Health Organization's 1990 declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness, a global shift in medical consensus that took decades of advocacy to achieve. Both were, in their own ways, corrections to institutions that had spent far too long treating a wrong as settled fact — a very Taurus preoccupation with getting the foundation right, even if it takes generations. Dennis Hopper, born May 17, 1936, spent his career pushing against Hollywood's comfortable conventions from the inside, first as the co-creator of Easy Rider's counterculture road movie and later as one of film's most reliably unsettling character actors. Trent Reznor, born on the same date in 1965, built an entire musical career out of taking abrasive, uncompromising material and, eventually, an Academy Award-winning turn toward film scoring — a Taurus-style expansion of range built on top of, rather than instead of, the original identity. Marquette and Jolliet's 1673 expedition, launched on this date from present-day Michigan, opened European mapping of the Mississippi River basin, a slow and genuinely hazardous undertaking that took months rather than a single dramatic voyage. The numerology day number for the 17th reduces to 8, associated with ambition and material accomplishment, which fits neatly with the first Kentucky Derby, run on this date in 1875 and now the longest continuously held sporting event in the United States — itself a monument to the accumulation of tradition and stakes over more than a century. Enya, born May 17, 1961, built a distinctive sound almost entirely in the recording studio through painstaking, layered vocal overdubbing rather than live performance, an unusually literal example of patient, methodical construction. Craig Ferguson's decade-long run hosting a late-night show, also tied to this date, rewarded the same kind of sustained, night-after-night consistency. Beyond any fixed monthly symbolism, what defines May 17 is institutions finally, belatedly, getting something right — a pattern repeated across law, medicine, and sport on this date more than most. Even the date's oldest entry fits the same slow-institution-building pattern rather than any single dramatic turn: the Buttonwood Agreement, signed by two dozen New York stockbrokers under a buttonwood tree on this date in 1792, was a modest, informal accord about trading commissions that nonetheless became the direct ancestor of the New York Stock Exchange, an institution that would go on to define global finance for the next two centuries and counting. Craig Ferguson, also born May 17, became a naturalized U.S. citizen as an adult before his late-night hosting career took off, itself a formal institutional step that mirrors the date's pattern of belated, deliberate corrections and confirmations. Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, and Jolliet, a fur trader, made an unlikely expedition partnership across professional lines that nonetheless produced some of the most detailed early European maps of the Mississippi's upper reaches.