Year 1863 (MDCCCLXIII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Tuesday of the 12-day slower Julian calendar.
Pierina Legnani (1863–1930) was an Italian ballerina considered one of the greatest ballerinas of all time.
Legnani was born on September 30, 1863 in Milan. From 1893 until 1901 she was Prima Ballerina Assoluta with the Tsar's Imperial Ballet at the Maryinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg. Legnani trained at La Scala where she developed her technical expertise. She was the first ballerina to introduce the 32 fouettés en tournant into the coda of the Grand Pas d'action of the ballet Cinderella. The 32 turns on pointe is a bravura procedure emphasising the strength and technique of the dancer.
Legnani danced the rôles of Odette and Odile in the 1895 Riccardo Drigo revised version of the ballet Swan Lake .
Her last performance was in the Minkus/Petipa ballet La Camargo on January 28, 1901 after which she retired to live in her villa at Lake Como.
The ballets of Marius Petipa that she danced were as follows—
After retiring from the stage she lived in Italy and served on the examining board of La Scala Ballet School until four months before she died. She died on November 15, 1930.
Abraham Lincoln i/ˈeɪbrəhæm ˈlɪŋkən/ (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through its greatest constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union while ending slavery, and promoting economic and financial modernization. Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated. He became a country lawyer, a Whig Party leader, Illinois state legislator in the 1830s, and a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives in the 1840s. After a series of debates in 1858 that gave national visibility to his opposition to the expansion of slavery, Lincoln lost a Senate race to his arch-rival Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln, a moderate from a swing state, secured the Republican Party nomination. With almost no support in the South he swept the North and was elected president in 1860. His election was the signal for seven southern slave states to declare their secession from the Union and form the Confederate States of America. The departure of the Southerners gave Lincoln's party firm control of Congress, but no formula for compromise or reconciliation was found. And the war came.