November 12th is

Fancy Rat & Mouse Day *

World Pneumonia Day *

World Quality Day *

Pizza With The Works Except Anchovies Day

Super Moon Night *

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MORE! Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Auguste Rodin and Sun Yat-sen, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Baha’i – Birth of Baha’u’llah

East Timor – National Youth Day

Liberia – National Memorial Day

Taiwan – Sun Yat-sen’s Birthday

United Kingdom: Penrith, Cumbria:
The Winter Droving/Drover’s Cup

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On This Day in HISTORY

1439 – Plymouth, England is the first town incorporated by the English Parliament

1793 – Jean Sylvain Bailly, French astronomer, mathematician and political leader early in the French Revolution, who presided over the Tennis Court Oath (Serment du Jeu de Paume,  a vow “not to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the kingdom is established.”) Served as the first Mayor of Paris (1789-1791), but resigned on November 12, 1791, after his order to the National Guard in July to disperse the riotous crowd demanding the King step down made him extremely unpopular. Arrested in July, 1793, and brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris in November after he refused to testify against Marie Antoinette. On November 12, he was guillotined at the Champ de Mars, the site selected because it was where he “betrayed” the democratic movement. Forced to endure the freezing rain and the insults of a howling mob, when a scoffer shouted, “Tu trembles, Bailly?” (“Do you tremble, Bailly?”), he stoically responded, “Oui, mais c’est seulement de froid.” (“Yes, but it is only the cold.”)

1799 – Andrew Ellicott Douglass witnesses the Leonid meteor shower from a ship off the Florida Keys

1815 – American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton is born in Johnstown NY

1833 – Alexander Borodin, Russian composer, is born

1840 – Sculptor Auguste Rodin is born in Paris, especially remembered for his works “The Kiss” and “The Thinker”

1859 – The first flying trapeze act is performed by Jules Leotard at Cirque Napoleon in Paris, France. Leotard also designed of the garment named for him

1866 – Sun Yat-sen is born, Chinese revolutionary, physician, first president and founding father of the Republic of China

1893 – The treaty of the Durand Line delineating the border between present day Pakistan and Afghanistan is signed by Sir Mortimer Durand, British India diplomat, and Afghan Amir Abdur Rahman Khan; the Durand Line is recognized as an international border between the two nations.

1905 – Norway’s referendum on the Storting (‘great thing’ the supreme Norwegian legislature) decision to offer the throne of the newly independent country to Prince Carl of Denmark is approved by 78.9% of voters. Prince Carl and his wife, Princess Maud of Wales, are crowned King and Queen on June 22, 1906

1912 – The frozen bodies of British explorer Robert Scott and his men are found on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, and King George I of Greece makes a triumphal entry into Thessaloniki after its liberation from 482 years of Ottoman rule

1915 – Theodore W. Richards, of Harvard University, becomes the first American  awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry

1918 – Austria and Czechoslovakia become independent republics

1921 – Representatives of nine nations gather for the Washington Conference for Limitation of Armaments

1927 – Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union

1936 – In California, the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge opens to traffic

1940 – Walt Disney releases Fantasia

1945 – Neil Young born, Canadian singer-songwriter, producer-director-screenwriter, band member of Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills Nash & Young and Crazy Horse

1946 – Exchange National Bank in Chicago IL opens the first drive-up banking facility

1948 – In Tokyo, an international war crimes tribunal sentences seven Japanese military and government officials, including General Hideki Tojo, to death for their roles in World War II

1954 – The Ellis Island immigration station in New York Harbor closes after processing more than 20 million immigrants since 1892

1956 – Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia join the United Nations, and during the Suez Crisis, Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian refugees in Rafah after the invasion of the Gaza strip

1958 – A team of rock climbers led by climber Warren Harding completes the first ascent of The Nose on El Capitan in Yosemite Valley

1964 – Paula Murphy sets the female land speed record 226.37 MPH

1968 – Equatorial Guinea joins the United Nations

1969 – Independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh breaks the story of the My Lai Massacre

1975 – The Union of the Comoros, an archipelago island nation in the Indian Ocean, joins the United Nations

1979 – In response to the Iran Hostage Crisis, US President Jimmy Carter orders a halt to all petroleum imports into the United States from Iran

1980 – NASA space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn and takes the first images of its rings

1982 – Yuri Andropov succeeds Leonid Brezhnev as the USSR General Secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee

1983 – The American Fancy Rat & Mouse Association (AFRMA) is founded, to sponsor competition shows, and information booths at Pet Expos to educate the public on breeding, proper care and exhibition, and promote Fancy Rat & Mouse Day *

1984 – Space shuttle astronauts Dale Gardner and Joe Allen snare the Palapa B-2 satellite in history’s first space salvage, and Madonna’s Like a Virgin album is released

1987 – The American Medical Association issues a policy statement that it is unethical for a doctor to refuse to treat a patient because they had AIDS or were HIV-positive

1990 – Tim Berners-Lee publishes a formal proposal for the World Wide Web

1991 – Robert Gates is sworn in as director of the U.S. CIA

1995 – The Erdut Agreement is a peaceful resolution of Croatia’s War of Independence

1996 – Eminem’s first studio album, Infinite, is released

1997 – The UN Security Council imposed new sanctions on Iraq for constraints being placed on UN arms inspectors

2003 – Shanghai Transrapid sets a new world speed record (501 kilometres per hour (311 mph)) for commercial railway systems

2004 – Comparative Toxicogenomics Database, a public website curating scientific data describing relationships between chemicals/drugs, genes/proteins, diseases, taxa, phenotypes, GO annotations, pathways, and interaction modules, is launched by the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University

2008 – World Quality Day * is established at the Imarsat Conference Centre

2009 – First World Pneumonia Day, * a program of the World Health Organization (WHO) to promote prevention and treatment of pneumonia, the greatest cause of child deaths worldwide

2012 – One Direction’s second album Take Me Home is released in the U.K.

2014 – The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe deploys the Philae lander, which reaches the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko

2016 – Super Moon Night* – the full moon will be closer to Earth than it has been since January 26, 1948, and won’t be this close again until November 25, 2034

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Visuals

• Pizza with the works, except anchovies
• International flags
• Jean Sylvain Bailly, center, at the Tennis Court Oaths
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• August Rodin
• Sun Yat-sen
• King George I of Greece enters Thessaloniki – Photo12/UIG/Getty Images)
• First ascent of The Nose on El Capitan,Yosemite – UPI/San Francisco Chronicle File

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