May 31 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on May 31

• Walt Whitman (1819)

  American poet known for Leaves of Grass, a landmark collection that helped define a distinctly American poetic voice.

• Clint Eastwood (1930)

  American actor and director known for Westerns and later a two-time Academy Award winner for Best Director.

• Brooke Shields (1965)

  American actress and model who began her career as a child star before building a lasting career on stage and screen.

• Colin Farrell (1976)

  Irish actor known for a range of film roles spanning blockbusters and independent drama.

This Day in History

• 1859 — The clock at the Palace of Westminster in London, popularly known as Big Ben, began keeping time for the first time.

• 1889 — The Johnstown Flood killed more than 2,200 people in Pennsylvania after a poorly maintained dam collapsed following heavy rain.

• 1962 — Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, sentenced to death by an Israeli court, was executed shortly after midnight, following the rejection of his final appeal for clemency on May 31.

• 1970 — A massive earthquake struck off the coast of Peru, triggering a landslide that killed tens of thousands of people, one of the deadliest natural disasters in the Western Hemisphere's recorded history.

What May 31 Says About You

May 31 closes out the month with a date whose history swings between careful, deliberate mechanisms and sudden, uncontrollable failure. Big Ben's clock began keeping time on this date in 1859, a piece of Victorian engineering built to a standard of precision so exacting that it's remained one of the most reliable public timepieces in the world for over a century and a half. The Johnstown Flood, just thirty years later on the same date in 1889, showed what happens when engineering maintenance fails instead: a private dam upstream from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, poorly maintained by the wealthy sporting club that owned it, collapsed after heavy rain and sent a wall of water through the town, killing more than 2,200 people in a disaster still studied as a case of corporate negligence. Walt Whitman, born May 31, 1819, spent decades meticulously revising and expanding Leaves of Grass across multiple editions, a lifelong project built with exactly the kind of patient precision Big Ben's engineers would have recognized, even if the results looked nothing alike. Adolf Eichmann's final appeal for clemency was rejected by Israel's president on this date in 1962, with his execution following in the earliest hours of the next day — a legal process carried out with deliberate, careful procedure specifically because the case demanded it be beyond reproach, given Eichmann's role organizing the logistics of the Holocaust. The 1970 Ancash earthquake off the coast of Peru, striking on this date, triggered a catastrophic landslide that buried entire towns within minutes, among the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere — a stark reminder that some failures have no engineering fix to prevent them. The numerology day number for the 31st reduces to 4, associated with structure and discipline, a fitting closing note for the month given how much of May 31's history turns on structures either holding or giving way. Clint Eastwood, born on this date in 1930, built a decades-long directing career on tightly disciplined, economical filmmaking, while Colin Farrell and Brooke Shields, also born on this date, have each built careers defined by sustained reinvention across very different eras of film and television. May's emerald, worn historically as a symbol of protection, and its lily of the valley, a flower said in some traditions to symbolize the return of happiness, close out a month whose final day carries an unusually direct reminder of both what careful structure protects against and what happens when it fails. Whitman spent much of the Civil War volunteering as a nurse in Washington hospitals, tending wounded soldiers from both sides, an experience that reshaped the more sober, direct poems he added to later editions of Leaves of Grass. Technically, "Big Ben" refers only to the tower's great bell, not the clock or tower itself, though the name has long since become popular shorthand for all three.