November 16th is

National Button Day *

National Fast Food Day

Have a Party with Your Bear Day

International Day for Tolerance *

UNESCO Day *

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MORE! Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Joan Lindsay and W.C. Handy, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Canada – Montréal QB:
M pour Montréal Festival

Germany – Repentance Day

North Korea – Mother’s Day

Peru – Huaripampa Anniversary

Sint Maarten & Sint Eustatius –
Sint Esutatius

Tajikistan – Day of the Nation’s Leader

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On This Day in HISTORY

1491 – In La Guardia, Spain, a medieval blood libel (false accusation of ritual murder made against Jews) results in an auto-da-fé execution of several Jews and conversos forced to confess under torture to the murder of a child, even though no corpse had ever been found, and their “testimony” was so conflicting the court had trouble depicting the events that were supposed to have taken place. This child was quickly made into a saint, El Santo Niño de La Guardia, and was used as propaganda by the Spanish Inquisitor General Tomás de Torquemada in the campaign against heresy and crypto-Judaism (secret adherence to Judaism while public professing another faith)

1793 – During the French Revolution, 90 anti-republican Catholic priests are executed by drowning at Nantes

1822 – Missouri trader William Becknell arrives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over a route that becomes known as the Santa Fe Trail

1838 – The London Protocol  is an agreement reached between the three Great Powers (Britain, France and Russia), which establishes creation of an internally autonomous, but tributary Greek state under Ottoman suzerainty

1849 – A Russian court sentences writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky to death for anti-government activities, but his sentence is later commuted to hard labor

1852 – The English astronomer John Russell Hind discovers the asteroid 22 Kalliope

1855 – David Livingstone becomes the first European to see Victoria Falls in what is now present-day Zambia-Zimbabwe

1873 –W.C. Handy is born, American composer called “father of the blues”

1889 – George S. Kaufman is born, American playwright, whose collaborations include You Can’t Take It With You, Dinner at Eight and The Man Who Came to Dinner

1895 – German composer-conductor Paul Hindemith is born

1896 – Australian Joan Lindsay is born, author of Picnic at Hanging Rock

1904 – English engineer John A. Fleming patents a thermionic valve (vacuum tube)

1907 – Oklahoma is admitted as the 46th state

1914 – The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States officially opens

1915 – Coca-Cola patents its prototype for a contoured bottle

1920 – Qantas, Australia’s national airline, is founded as Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited

1933 – The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. establish diplomatic relations for the first time

1938 – The National Button Society starts National Button Day *

1945 – UNESCO is founded, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization –
UNESCO Day *

1952 – In the Peanuts comic strip, Lucy first holds a football for Charlie Brown

1959 – The Sound of Music opens on Broadway

1969 – The U.S. Army announces that several soldiers are charged with the killing and subsequent cover-up of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam on March 16, 1968

1973 – NASA launches Skylab 3 carrying a crew of three astronauts from Cape Canaveral FL on an 84-day mission

1973 – U.S. President Nixon signs the Alaska Pipeline measure into law

1974 – Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie On Reggae Woman” is released

1981 – A vaccine for hepatitis B is approved

1985 – Colonel Oliver North was put in charge of the shipment of HAWK anti-aircraft missiles to Iran

1988 – In the first open election in more than a decade, voters in Pakistan elect populist candidate Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister of Pakistan

1992 – The Hoxne Hoard is discovered by Eric Lawes in Hoxne, Suffolk

1995 – UNESCO adopts a Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, now celebrated as International Day for Tolerance *

1998 – The U.S. Supreme Court said that union members could file discrimination lawsuits against employers even when labor contracts require arbitration

2000 – Bill Clinton is the first serving U.S. president to visit Communist Vietnam

2001 – The movie Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone opens in U.S. and U.K.

2004 – NASA’s unmanned “scramjet” X-43A reaches nearly 10 times the speed of sound above the Pacific Ocean

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Visuals

• 8 to 10 year old racially diverse children
• International flags
• Map of the Santa Fe Trail
• Victoria Falls
• One of the first single-engine planes flown by Quantas
• 1952 Peanuts strip showing the first time Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown
• Part of the Hoxne Hoard treasure

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