October 21^th is

Apple Day *

Babbling Day

Back to the Future Day *

Celebration of the Mind Day *

Count Your Buttons Day

Mammography Day *

Pumpkin Cheesecake Day

Reptile Awareness Day

____________________________________________________________

MORE! Tokugawa Ieyasu, Florence Nightingale, and Buddy Holly, click

____________________________________________________________

WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, and St. Eustatius – Antilles Day

British Virgin Islands –  St. Ursula Day

Burundi – President Ndadaye’s Death Anniversary

Egypt – Egyptian Naval Day

Honduras – Army Day

Macau – Chong Yeung
(ancestor festival)

New Zealand – Hawke’s Bay:
Provincial Anniversary Day

Serbia – WWII Victims Remembrance Day

Somalia – Revolution Day

Taiwan – Overseas Chinese Day

____________________________________________________________

On This Day in HISTORY

1520 – Ferdinand Magellan arrives at the straits now named for him, the Straits of Magellan, a route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, separating the southern tip of mainland South America from Terra del Fuego

1600 – Tokugawa Ieyasu defeats rivals at the Battle of Sekighara, beginning the Tokugawa shogunate, which will control Japan until 1867

1774 – First display of the word “Liberty” on a flag, raised by American colonists in Taunton MA in defiance of British rule

1797 – U.S. Navy frigate Constitution is launched in Boston Harbor

1805 – At the Battle of Trafalgar, the British fleet led by Vice Admiral Lord Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish fleet, ending French maritime power and making Britain the dominant naval power until the 20^th century, but Nelson is mortally wounded by a French sharpshooter

1816 – Rev. Robert Sparke Hutchings founds the Penang Free School, the first and now oldest English-language school in Southeast Asia

1824 – Joseph Aspdin patents Portland cement, “an improvement in the mode of producing an artificial stone” with his Majesty King George IV’s High Court of Chancery

1854 – Florence Nightingale and a staff of 38 nurses leave Britain for Scutari, in the Ottoman Empire, to tend sick or wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War

1867 – The Medicine Lodge Treaty is signed in Kansas by southern Great Plains Indian leaders, requiring them to relocate to a western Oklahoma reservation

1879 – Thomas Edison invents a workable electric light bulb, which is the first commercially practical light bulb, but not the first light bulb invented

1888 – The Swiss Social Democratic Party is founded, currently the only left-wing political party with representatives on the Swiss Federal Council

1907 – The Merry Widow opens in New York City

1910 – HMS Niobe arrives in Halifax Harbour, and becomes the first ship in the Royal Canadian Navy

1921 – President Warren G. Harding delivers the first speech by a sitting U.S. President against lynching in southern U.S. states

1931 – The Sakurakai, an ultranationalist secret society within the Imperial Japanese Army, launches an abortive coup d’état attempt

1940 – Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is published

1945 – Women are allowed to vote for the first time in France

1956 – The British Army captures Kenyan Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi; his execution signaled the end of the violent uprising against the British colonial government, disputing the right of white British colonialists to continually expropriate traditional tribal lands, which had been upheld by the British Kenya High Court in 1921

1958 – Buddy Holly’s last studio recording session, including “Raining in My Heart”

1959 – The Sololmon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opens to the public in New York City

1965 – Comet Ileya-Seki approaches perihelion, passing 279,617 miles (450,00 km) from the sun

1967 – More than 100,000 Vietnam War protesters hold a peaceful rally in Washington DC at the Lincoln Memorial, but their march to the Pentagon leads to clashes with soldiers and U.S. Marshals, described by Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night

1974 – Queen releases their single “Killer Queen”

1977 – The European Patent Institute is founded

1983 –The 17^th General Conference on Weights and Measures defines a meter as the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second

1990 – First Apple Day * held at Covent Garden in London

1993 – First National Mammography Day * proclaimed by President Clinton in the third Friday of October annually

2005 – Images are taken which document the existence of the dwarf planet Eris

2010 – First Celebration of the Mind Day, * honoring Martin Gardner, popular math/science writer and leading authority on Lewis Carroll, on his birthday anniversary

2015 – First Back to the Future Day * – In the movie Back the Future, Marty McFly and the modified Delorean arrive in the future on October 21, 2015, at 4:29 pm

____________________________________________________________

Visuals

• Apple with heart bite for Apple Day
• International flags
• 1762 map of the Terra del Fuego
• The Fall of Nelson, painting by Denis Dighton
• Florence Nightingale at Scutari Military Hospital
• The Merry Widow – poster
• Opening page of For Whom the Bell Tolls
• National Mammogram Day reminder
• The Delorean from Back to the Future

____________________________________________________________