April 29th is

• Go Birding Day
• Dance Day *
• Eeyore’s Birthday
• National Herb Day
• Sense of Smell Day
• ‘Peace’ Rose Day *
• Spring Astronomy Day
• Tai Chi Day
• Veterinary Day
• World Wish Day
• Zipper Day *
• Save the Frogs Day *
• Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare

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MORE! C.P. Cavafy, Marietta Blau and Duke Ellington, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

India – Karnataka: Basava Jayanti
(birth of founder/leader of the Lingayats)

Japan – Shōwa Day
(birth of Hirohito, Emperor Showa)

Spain – Trujillo: Cheese Festival

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On This Day in HISTORY

1289 – Al Mansur Qala’un, Sultan of Egypt, captures ancient Tripoli, (site now in modern-day Lebanon) from the Crusader States after a siege beginning in early March, then burns it to the ground, killing all but 1200 women and children, sent to Alexandria as slaves

1429 – French soldiers led by Joan d’Arc relieve the Siege of Orléans, surrounded by the British since the previous October

1483 – Gran Canaria, largest of the Canary Islands, is conquered by the Kingdom of Castile

1521 – Swedish troops under Gustav Vasa defeat Danish forces under Didrik Slagheck  in the Battle of Västerås and capture the city of Västerås The Danes holding the castle, however, refuse to surrender to the Swedes, until after enduring a nine-month siege

1745 – Oliver Ellsworth born, American jurist and politician; chief author of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which establishes the federal judiciary of the United States

1770 – James Cook and his crew make their first landfall on the mainland of the Australian continent; Cook originally christens the area “Stingray Bay” but later crossed that out and names it “Botany Bay”

Botany Bay by Charles Gore, 1789

1813 – Rubber is patented by J.F. Hummel

1854 – Henri Poincare born, French mathematician, astronomer, and scientific philosopher

1861 – The state of Maryland’s House of Delegates votes not to secede from the Union

1863 – C.P. (Constantine) Cavafy born in Egypt, of Greek parents, one of the most important figures in Greek poetry, and most widely translated into other languages

1879 – Sir Thomas Beecham born, English conductor and impresario

1880 –  Lillian Bertha Jones Horace born, pioneering educator and writer; the earliest known African American woman novelist in Texas; the only other well-known black southern women novelist besides Zora Neale Hurston in early-to-mid twentieth century; one of only two black women nationally to own a publishing company before 1920; Five Generations Hence

1893 – Harold Urey born, American Nobel-Prize winning chemist (1934); helped develop the atom bomb

1894 – Marietta Blau born, Austrian physicist; developed photographic nuclear emulsions that were usefully able to image and accurately measure high energy nuclear particles and events, leading to her establishing a method to accurately study reactions caused by cosmic ray events. Her nuclear emulsions significantly advanced the field of particle physics. For her work, much of which was unpaid because of her gender, she was nominated for the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics by Erwin Schrödinger, but was passed over, and the prize given instead to Cecil Powell for development of the photographic method for particle detection and discovery of the pion (a meson consisting of a quark and antiquark) using this method

1899 – Duke Ellington born as Edward Kennedy Ellington, American Jazz musician, composer and bandleader

1910 –The People’s Budget, passed by the House of Commons and reluctantly by the House of Lords, is the first budget in British history with the intent of redistributing wealth among the British people, implementing unprecedented taxes on the lands and high incomes of Britain’s rich to fund new social welfare programmes

1911 – Tsinghua University, a major mainland China university, is founded in Beijing

1913 – Margaret Owings born, California artist, writer, environmental activist; founder Friends of the Sea Otter (1968); assisted Environmental Defense Fund

1913 – Zipper Day * – Gideon Sundback patents a “hookless fastener,” the first widely marketed zipper

1916 – After six days of fighting, Irish rebel leaders surrender to British forces in Dublin, bringing the Easter Rising to an end

1920 – Harold Shapero born, American composer

1927 – Construction of Spirit of St Louis (the monoplane which Charles Lindburgh will fly across the Atlantic) is completed

1933 – Willie Nelson born, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer

1936 – Zubin Mehta born, Indian bassist and conductor

1944 – British WWII agent Nancy Wake, a leading figure in the French Resistance and the Gestapo’s most wanted person, parachutes back into France to be a liaison between London and the local maquis group

1945 – Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler marries his longtime partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker and designates Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor; Allied Forces enter Berlin

1945 – Dachau concentration camp is liberated by United States troops

1945 – The Italian commune of Fornovo di Taro is liberated from German forces by Brazilian forces

1945 – ‘Peace’ Rose Day * – Famed French rose breeder Francis Meiland develops a beautiful hybrid tea rose in the 1930s, then sends cuttings to friends in Italy, the U.S., Germany, and Turkey to insure its survival during WWII. In 1945, he contacts Field Marshall Alan Brooke, offering to name the rose after him, but Brooke suggests it be called the ‘Peace’ Rose, and the name is formally announced on this day, as the Allied Forces move into Berlin, and WWII is officially ending. Peace roses are also presented to the first delegation of the United Nations in San Francisco, with a note: “We hope the ‘Peace’ Rose will influence men’s thoughts for everlasting world peace.”

1946 – International Military Tribunal for the Far East convenes, indicts former Prime Minister of Japan Hideki Tojo and 28 former Japanese leaders for war crimes

1951 – Tibetan delegates to the Central People’s Government arrive in Beijing and draft a Seventeen Point Agreement for Chinese sovereignty and Tibetan autonomy

1965 – Pakistan’s Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) successfully launches its seventh rocket in its Rehber series

1968 – The controversial musical Hair, a product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, opens on Broadway; some of its songs become anthems of the anti-Vietnam War movement

1975 – U.S. evacuates its citizens from Saigon in Operation Frequent Wind in response to advancing North Vietnamese forces, ending U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War

1979 – Van Halen’s “Dance The Night Away” single is released

1982 – International Dance Day * is launched by the Dance Committee of the International Theatre Institute (ITI)

1990 – Wrecking cranes began tearing down the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate

1992 – Deadly rioting that claimed 54 lives and caused $1 billion in damage erupted in Los Angeles after a jury in Simi Valley acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of almost all state charges in the videotaped beating of Rodney King

1996 – The musical Rent opens on Broadway

1997 – The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 comes into force, outlaws production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons among its signatories

2008 – Save the Frogs is founded, now an organization of scientists and volunteers working in 60 countries to educate and lobby for the preservation of the number of frog species threatened or endangered by loss of habitat and water pollution

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