December 1st is

Antarctica Day *

Civil Air Patrol Day *

Day With(out) Art *

Eat a Red Apple Day

National Fried Pie Day

World AIDS Awareness Day *

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MORE! Madame Tussaud, Hans Christian Andersen and Bette Midler, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Central African Republic – Republic Proclamation

Chad – Freedom and Democracy Day

Kazakhstan – Day of the First President

Portugal – Independence Restoration Day

Romania – Ziua unirii (national day)

United Arab Emirates – Martyrs’ Commemoration Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

1577 – Francis Walsingham is knighted, Queen Elizabeth I of England’s principal secretary, dubbed her “spymaster”

1761 – Marie Tussaud, French sculptor, founded Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, is hired to make death masks of victims of the guillotine during the French Revolution, barely escaping the guillotine herself

1834 – Slavery is abolished in the Cape Colony by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833

1835 – Hans Christian Andersen publishes his first book of fairy tales

1862 – In his State of the Union Address President Lincoln reaffirms the necessity of ending slavery as ordered ten weeks earlier in the Emancipation Proclamation

1865 – Shaw University, first historically black university in southern U.S., founded in Raleigh, North Carolina

1878 – During President Hayes tenure, the first telephone is installed in the White House in Washington, D.C. by Alexander Graham Bell personally

1885 – Dr. Pepper is sold for the first time

1886 – Rex Stout born, American mystery writer of more than 70 novels and stories featuring the gourmand detective, Nero Wolfe

1913 – The Buenos Aires Metro, first underground railway system in the Southern Hemisphere and Latin America, begins operation

1913 – Ford Motor Company introduces the first moving assembly line

1913 – Crete, self-ruling since the First Balkan War, is annexed by Greece

1918 – Kingdom of Iceland becomes a sovereign state, yet remains a part of  Denmark

1925 – The Locarno Pact finalizes the treaties between World War I protagonists

1936 – The first patent is issued for a commercial scale hydroponic system for plant culture (a ‘hydroponicum’) to Ernest Walfrid Brundin and Frank F. Lyon

1941 – Founding of the Civil Air Patrol * an auxiliary unit of the U.S. Air Force, under Administration Order 9 signed by Fiorello La Guardia, Mayor of New York City and Director of the Office of Civilian Defense

1942 – In the U.S., nationwide gasoline rationing goes into effect.

1944 – Eric Bloom of the music group ‘Blue Oyster Cult’ is born

1945 – Bette Midler, the ‘Divine Miss M’ born, American singer-songwriter, actress and producer

1952 – The New York Daily News reports the news of Christine Jorgensen, the first notable case of sex reassignment surgery.

1955 – In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to the Montgomery Bus Boycott

1956 – Leonard Bernstein musical Candide opens on Broadway, based on the book by Voltaire

1958 – The Central African Republic attains self-rule within the French Union

1959 – 12 nations sign the Antarctic Treaty, setting it aside “forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes in the interest of mankind” –  Antarctica Day *

1964 – LBJ and top advisers meet to discuss bombing North Vietnam

1965 – An airlift of refugees from Cuba to the United States begins

1967 – U.K. release of the Jimi Hendrix Experience album Axis: Bold as Love

1969 –First draft lottery in the United States held since World War II

1973 – Papua New Guinea gains self-governance from Australia

1975 – The Styx album Equinox is released

1984 – NASA conducts Controlled Impact Demonstration, deliberately crashing a remote-controlled airliner in order to test a promising fuel additive for retarding or suppressing fire in a crash-landing scenario

1988 – First World AIDS Day, now called World AIDS Awareness Day *

1989 – Right-wing ‘Reform the Armed Forces’ Movement officers attempt to oust Philippine President Corazon Aquino in a failed bloody coup d’état, and East Germany’s parliament abolishes the constitutional provision granting the Communist Party the leading role in the state

1989 – First Day With(out) Art * – museums offer programs to draw attention to AIDS

1990 – British and French workers digging the Channel Tunnel from their respective countries drill through a final piece of rock and shake hands,  22.3 km from the UK, 15.6 km from France, 40 metres beneath the seabed

1991 – Ukrainian voters overwhelmingly approve a referendum for independence from the Soviet Union

1999 – Russian Duma passes animal rights bill prohibiting people from eating their pets

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Visuals

• Day With(out) Art promo
• International flags
• Francis Walsingham
• Waxwork of Madame Marie Tussaud
• ‘Hans Andersen’ fairy tales, cover of early printing
• Shaw University, 1874 brochure cover
• Rex Stout mystery Fer-de-Lance, 1934 cover
• 1940s Civil Air Patrol poster
• World AIDS Day poster
• Celebrating Chunnel French and English workers meeting

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