November 2nd

… is Daniel Boone’s birthday. He was born in 1734 in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and died in 1820 in Missouri.

Presidents James Knox Polk (1795 North Carolina) and Warren G. Harding (1865 Ohio) were born on November 2nd.

Just over a year ago, the Library of Congress released a trove of steamy love letters that Harding wrote to his mistress, Carrie Fulton Phillips, in the decade before he became the nation’s 29th president. (How steamy? Let’s just say they feature a character named Jerry, and it’s a body part, not a person.) And on Thursday, The New York Times broke the news that DNA testing had confirmed that Harding, who was married for 33 years until his death in 1923, had fathered a child with a second paramour, Nan Britton, during the same period in which he was penning love notes to Phillips.

The Atlantic