August 24th is

Pluto Demoted Day *

Strange Music Day *

Vesuvius Day *

William Willberforce Day *

Waffle Iron Day *

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

France – Saint-Jean-de-Luz:
◊ Baleapop Music & Art

Hungary – Siófok:
◊ B.my.Lake Fest

Liberia – Flag Day

Saint Barts – St. Bartholomew Festival

Spain – Sant Rafel de sa Creu:
◊ Hyte Concert Festival

Switzerland – Zürich:
◊ Zürich Openair

Ukraine – Independence Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

79 – (Traditional date) After centuries of dormancy, Mount Vesuvius erupts, buries Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae, commemorated on Vesuvius Day *

MORE! Slave trade, U.S. Capitol burns, and Pluto’s demoted

1349 – 6,000 Jews, blamed for the bubonic plague, killed in Mainz Germany

1456 – Printing of the Guttenberg Bible was completed

1572 – St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: French King Charles IX, swayed by his mother Catherine de Medici, orders the assassination of leaders of the French Protestants, called Huguenots, in Paris, which becoms a bloodbath, killing 70,000 protestants, and the resumption of the French religious civil war

1662 – Act of Uniformity requires all English to accept Book of Common Prayer

1759 – William Wilberforce is born, head of English parliamentary campaign to abolish the slave trade. Small in stature, but with a fine speaking voice and a sharp wit, he tirelessly advocated for ending the slave trade, in spite of numerous health problems, from 1789 until the passage of Abolition of the Slave Trade bill in 1807.  William Wilberforce Day * honors his persistence

1814 –  British forces capture Washington DC, set fire to the Capitol and the President’s Mansion (now called the White House), the only time the city has been occupied by a foreign force. Dolley Madison organized the household staff and slaves of the presidential residence to save valuables as the British were entering the city.

1857 – The Panic of 1857 becomes first world-wide economic crisis, caused by an international economic downturn and over-expansion of U.S. economy, compounded by sinking of SS Central America carrying a large shipment of gold to NY banks, and the failure of Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company causing other businesses to fail

1869 – Cornelius Swarthout patents the waffle iron *

1891 – Thomas Edison patents the motion picture camera

1909 – Workers begin pouring concrete for the Panama Canal

1950 – Edith Sampson becomes the first black U.S. delegate to the U.N.

1954 – Congress passes the Communist Control Act, declaring the Communist Party to be an “agency of a hostile foreign power”

1981 – Mark David Chapman sentenced to 20 years-to-life for killing John Lennon

1991 – Ukraine declares its independence from the Soviet Union

1998 – Musician Patrick Grant starts Strange Music Day * – “listen to a CD you never heard before, just for the hell of it”

2006 – Pluto Demoted * – 424 astronomers still present on final day of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague, less than 5% of the world’s astronomers, voted to demote Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet

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Visuals

• William Wilberforce, 1828 painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence
• International flags
• The Eruption of Vesuvius, 1825 painting by Abraham Pether
• Design for Medallion of British Anti-Slavery Society, 1787, by Josiah Wedgwood
• Burning of Washington, artist not credited
• Cornelius Swarthout waffe iron drawing for patent application
• Pluto – planet or dwarf?

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