February 14th is

Valentine’s Day

National Donor Day *

Extraterrestrial Day

Ferris Wheel Day

Pet Theft Awareness Day *

California Oranges Day *

Cream-Filled Chocolates Day

International Book Giving Day *
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MORE! Oscar Wilde, Anna Howard Shaw and Salman Rushdie, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Afghanistan – Liberation Day

Bulgaria – Trifon Zarezan
(wine-growers’ day)

Lebanon – Rafic Hariri Memorial Day
(assassinated Prime Minister)

Qatar – National Sports Day

Saint Vincent & Grenadines –
Opening of Argyle Airport
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On This Day in HISTORY

842 – Charles the Bald and Louis the German swear the Oaths of Strasbourg, mutual pledges of allegiance, in the French and German languages

1349 – Several hundred Jews are burned to death by mobs while the remaining Jews are forcibly removed from Strasbourg

1400 – Richard II of England dies, most probably from starvation, in Pontefract Castle, on the orders of Henry Bolingbroke

1502 – The Catholic Monarchs, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, issue a decree that Muslims in Granada refusing to convert to Catholicism must leave Spain

1530 – Spanish conquistadores, led by Nuño de Guzmán, overthrow and execute Tangaxuan II, last independent Tarascan monarch in what is now central Mexico

1556 – During the reign of Roman Catholic Queen Mary I of England, who succeeded her Protestant brother Edward VI, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer is declared a heretic and degraded from holy orders; he is later burned at the stake

1602 – Francesco Cavalli born, Italian operatic composer

1655 – The Mapuche under their elected military leader, Clentaru, rise up against the Spanish in an insurrection in present-day central Chile

1778 – American sloop-of-war Ranger, commanded by John Paul Jones, receives the first official salute to the “Stars and Stripes,” the new American flag, from the French fleet at Quiberon Bay under Admiral  Toussaint-Guillaume Picquet de la Motte

1803 – Moses Coates received a patent for the apple parer

1804 – Karađorđe leads the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottoman Empire

1813 – Alexander Dargomyzhsky born Russian composer

1819 – Christopher Sholes born, American inventor who developed the typewriter

1838 – Margaret E. Knight, American inventor, including a machine to fold and glue paper bags with flat bottoms

1847 – Anna Howard Shaw born, America minister and physician, one of the most influential leaders of the women’s suffrage movement

1849 – The first photograph of a serving U.S. President is taken by Matthew Brady of President James Polk

1859 – Oregon became the 33rd member of the Union

1870 – Esther Hobart Morris begins her tenure as the first female Justice of the Peace in the U. S., appointed to replace the judge who resigned in protest over Wyoming’s passage of the women’s suffrage amendment to the state constitution in December 1869.

1871 – Marion Mahoney Griffin, American architect/delineator, community planner, second woman graduate from in architecture from MIT, chief renderer of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs from 1895 to 1909

1876 – Alexander Graham Bell files an application for a patent for the telephone

1882 – George Jean Nathan born, American author, editor, and drama critic

1889 – California Oranges Day * In Los Angeles, the first shipment of California oranges are put in special cooled railroad cars for transport to the Eastern U.S.

1895 – Oscar Wilde’s final play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opens in London at the St. James Theatre

1899 – The U.S. Congress approved voting machines for use in federal elections

1900 – Russia imposed tighter imperial control over Finland in response to an international petition for Finland’s freedom

1903 – The U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor was established

1912 – The first diesel engine submarine was commissioned in Groton, CT

1912 – Arizona is admitted as the 48th U.S. state

1920 – The League of Women Voters is founded in Chicago, and Maude Wood Park becomes its first president

1929 – Seven gangsters who were rivals of Al Capone are killed in the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” Chicago IL

1940 – The first porpoise born in captivity arrived at Marineland in Florida

1941 – Donna Shalala, University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor (1988-1993), U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (1993-2001), president of the University of Miami (2001- 2015), awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008

1945 – Peru, Paraguay, Chile and Ecuador joined the United Nations

1946 – ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) is unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania, the world’s first general purpose electronic computer

1957 – Lionel Hampton’s only major musical work, King David, made its debut at New York’s Town Hall

1961 – Lawrencium, element 103, is first produced in Berkeley CA

1962 – U.S. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy gives a television tour of the White House

1967 – Aretha Franklin records her song “Respect”

1968 – The fourth Madison Square Gardens opens

1977 – Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” is released

1980 – Walter Cronkite announces his retirement from the CBS Evening News

1983 – A 6-year-old boy becomes the first person to receive a heart and liver transplants in the same operation

1988 – Pet Theft Awareness Day * is launched by Last Chance for Animals; almost 2 million pets are stolen every year in the U.S. alone, so this program promotes  having pets micro-chipped or tattooed

1989 – Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini calls on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie because of his novel The Satanic Verses

1989 – The first satellite of the Global Positioning System (GPS) is placed in orbit

1989 – Union Carbide agrees to pay $470 million to the government of India in a court-ordered settlement of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak disaster

1997 – Astronauts on the space shuttle Discovery perform a series of spacewalks to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope

1998 – U.S. authorities officially announce that Eric Rudolph is a suspect in an abortion clinic bombing in Alabama

2003 – National Donor Day * is an educational initiative of  the U.S. Health and Human Services Division of Transplantation for blood donation and organ donation registration

2011 – The TV game show “Jeopardy!” begins airing the first of three episodes pitting human Jeopardy champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings against an IBM computer named “Watson”

2012 – International Book Giving Day * is conceived by Amy Broadmoore and her son, and launched with the help of Zoe Toft, collecting an distributing books to disadvantaged children around the world

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Visuals

• National Donor Day poster
• International flags
• Charles the Bald and Louis the German swear the Oaths of Strasbourg
• Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán painted in the Codex Telleriano Remensis
• Matthew Brady’s portrait of President James Polk
• The Importance of Being Earnest, at the St. James Theatre
• ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)
• Salman Rushdie. religion quote
• International Book Giving Day banner

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