May 16th is

Biographer’s Day *

Coquilles Saint Jacques Day

Mimosa Day

Honor Our LGBT Elders’ Day *

National Love a Tree Day
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MORE! James Boswell, Margret Rey and  Bob Dylan, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Austria – Vienna:
Vienna Theatre Festival (ongoing)

Ireland – Kilkenny:
Film Festival at Kilkenny

Morocco – El-Kelaâ M’Gouna:
Vallée des Roses Festival

South Sudan – SPLA Day
(Sudan People’s Liberation Army)

United Kingdom – Brighton:
The Brighton Arts Festival
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On This Day in HISTORY

1527 – Florence becomes a Republic

1532 – Sir Thomas More resigns as Lord Chancellor of England, refusing to support the supremacy of the King above the Papacy

1718 – Maria Gaetana Agnesi born, Italian mathematician, philosopher, and child prodigy; writings on calculus, the works of Euler, and the curve known as the “Witch of Agnesi”; devotes last decades of her life to working with the poor.

1763 – James Boswell and Samuel Johnson meet in the London bookshop of Johnson’s friend, Tom Davies, a Scot who wrote a biography of the actor-manager David Garrick; commemorated now as Biographer’s Day *

1792 – Denmark abolishes the slave trade

1804 – Elizabeth Palmer Peabody born, American educator, business woman and translator, founded the first English-language kindergarten in the United States, business manager for the Transcendentalist publication The Dial

1817 – Mississippi steamboat service begins

1843 – The first major wagon train heading for the Pacific Northwest sets out on the Oregon Trail with one thousand pioneers from Elm Grove, Missouri

1861 – The Republican Convention in Chicago chooses Abraham Lincoln as their Presidential candidate

1861 – Kentucky proclaims its neutrality in the U.S. Civil War, which lasted only four months, until Confederate General Gideon Pillow violated Kentucky’s declared neutrality, provoking Kentuckians to adhere to the Union

1866 – The U.S. Congress eliminates the half dime coin and replaces it with the five cent piece – the ‘nickel’

1868 – U.S. President Andrew Johnson is acquitted in his impeachment trial by one vote in the U. S. Senate

1879 – Antonin Dvorák’s “Slavic Dancing” premieres

1880 – Anne O’Hare McCormick born in England, American journalist and columnist, 1936 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism, first woman member of NY Times editorial board

1894 – Walter Yust born, U.S. editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica

1905 – H.E. Bates born, English author; Love for Lydia, The Darling Buds of May

1906 – Margret Rey born, German author and illustrator, with her husband, H.A. Rey known for the Curious George series of children’s books

1910 – Olga Bergholz born, Russian poet, gave speeches and read poems on the radio during the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944)

1912 – Studs Terkel born, American author, historian and broadcaster; 1985 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction; Hard Times, Working

1913 – Woody Herman born, American jazz musician and bandleader

1918 – The Sedition Act of 1918 is passed by the U.S. Congress, making criticism of the government during wartime an imprisonable offense. Repealed less than two years later

1919 – Liberace, born as Wladziu Valentino Liberace, American pianist and TV personality, one of the highest paid entertainers in the world in his heyday

1920 – Pope Benedict XV canonizes Joan d’Arc

1925 – Nancy Roman born, American astronomer, advocate for women in the sciences, first Chief of Astronomy in the Office of Space Science at NASA; the ‘Mother of Hubble’ 

1927 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules bootleggers must pay income tax

1929 – Adrienne Rich born, American poet and author, declined the National Medal of Arts in protest of a vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts

1929 –The first Academy Awards ceremony takes place during a private dinner for less than 300 people at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel; Wings wins best picture

1939 – The first Food Stamps are issued; the program operated by permitting people on relief to buy orange stamps equal to their normal food expenditures; for every US dollar’s worth of orange stamps purchased, fifty cents’ worth of blue stamps were received. Orange stamps could be used to buy any food; blue stamps could only be used to buy food determined by the Department of Agriculture to be surplus

1946 – The musical Annie Get Your Gun, starring Ethel Merman, opens on Broadway

1966 – Bob Dylan releases his album Blonde on Blonde

1966 – After he has replaced several ‘revisionists’ (moderates), Mao Zedong announces the Cultural Revolution in the ‘May 16 Notification,’ bringing on ten years of sociopolitical upheaval which will paralyze China politically and greatly damage its society and economy. Chinese cultural and historical treasures are ransacked and destroyed; temples and burial sites are desecrated; Buddhism is denounced as superstition; libraries and books burned; a central directive is issued to stop police intervention in the rampages of the Red Guard, unleashing greater violence on educators; many of them are killed, commit suicide or are sent to labor camps

1966 – The Beach Boys release their Pet Sounds album

1970 – MASH wins the Grand Prix award at the Cannes Film Festival

1981 – Kim Carne’s single “Bette Davis Eyes” is #1 on the charts

1986 – The Seville Statement on Violence is adopted by a UNESCO-sponsored international meeting of scientists

1988 – U.S. Surgeon Gen C Everett Koop reports nicotine as addictive as heroin

1991 – Queen Elizabeth II is the first British Monarch to address the U.S Congress

2005 –Women’s suffrage and the right to hold office passes in a 35-23 National Assembly vote in Kuwait

2011 – NASA Space Shuttle Endeavor launches for its final mission in space

2013 – Human stem cells are successfully cloned

2015 – The first Honor Our LGBT Elders’ Day * is launched by Nate Sweeney, executive director of the LGBT Resource Center of Chase Brexton Healthcare

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