May 23rd is

National Taffy Day *

Lucky Penny Day *

World Turtle Day *

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MORE! Carolus Linnaeus , Margaret Fuller and Robert Moog, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Bahá’í– Declaration of the Bab that he is a Prophet

Abkhazia – Flag Day

Jamaica – Labour Day

Montenegro – Independence Holiday
(second day of celebration)

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On This Day in HISTORY

1430 – Joan d’Arc is captured by the Burgundians while leading an army to raise the Siege of Compiègne; they sell her to the English

1498 – Girolamo Savonarola is burned at the stake in Florence, Italy

1533 – King Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon is declared null and void.

1696 –  Johann Caspar Vogler born, German composer and organist

1701 – Captain Kidd, convicted of murder and piracy, is hanged

1707 – Carolus Linnaeus born, Swedish biological classifier

1753 – Giovanni Battista Viotti born, Italian composer and violinist

1785 – Benjamin Franklin writes in a letter that he has invented bifocals

1793 – The first pennies in the United States are made of copper – Lucky Penny Day *

1810 – Margaret Fuller born, journalist, editor, author, women’s rights advocate, wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the first major U.S. feminist work. She was the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial  (1840). By her 30s, Fuller was considered the best-read person in New England, male or female, and was the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College. She joined the New York Tribune staff under Horace Greeley (1844), became one of the first American literary critics, then both the first American female foreign correspondent and first American woman war correspondent while traveling in England, France. and Italy, reporting on the Italian States Revolution of 1848, sending back eye-witness accounts of the uprising in Rome. She met Giovanni Angelo, the Marchese d’Ossoli, a liberal revolutionary who was ten years younger. They became lovers, had a son (1848), and married the next year. After the Roman uprising was put down, they fled to Florence (1849).  When the family sailed for the U.S., their ship ran aground in a storm off Fire Island, NY, in July 1850. Their bodies are never found

1827 – The first U.S. nursery school is established in New York by Joanna Bethune and Hannah L. Murray, “to relieve parents of the laboring classes from the care of their children while engaged in the vocations by which they lived, and provide for the children, a protection from the weather, from idleness and the contamination of evil example besides affording them the means of early and efficient education.” Almost 500 children of mothers who had to work in order support their families were cared for in the first two years

1842 – Maria Konopnicka born, Polish poet, novelist, translator, journalist and women’s rights activist

1846 – Arabella Mansfield, née Belle Aurelia Babb, born, the first U.S. woman to pass the bar exam, though she never used her law degree, but taught English and History at Simpson College and Iowa Wesleyan, and layer served as a dean in both the music and art schools at DePauw University; helped organize of the Iowa Suffrage Society

1855 – Isabella Ford born, English author, lecturer, suffragist and social reformer, worked with female mill workers and trade unionists

1873 – Canada’s North West Mounted Police force established; they are renamed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1920

1879 – Elizabeth Gunn born, New Zealand pediatrician and children’s health pioneer ; served in WWI as a captain in the New Zealand Medical Corps; after the war, she employed by the school medical service, and set up “health camps” for malnourished children to spend 3 weeks eating nourishing food, and getting fresh air and sunshine, eventually organized as the national Federation of Health Camps

1883 – The year Salt Water Taffy * is invented in Atlantic City, New Jersey

1895 – The New York Public Library is created, by combining the Astor and Lennox libraries

1908 – Max Abramovitz born, U.S. architect, Lincoln Center, United Nations Building

1910 – Artie Shaw born, composer, Swing era bandleader and clarinetist

1910 – Margaret Wise Brown born, children’s book author, Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny

1912 – Jean Françaix born, French Neoclassical composer and pianist

1914 – Barbara Ward born, English economist, journalist, lecturer, advocate of sustainable development

1922 – The play Abie’s Irish Rose opens on Broadway

1923 – Alicia de Larrocha born, called “greatest Spanish pianist in history”

1926 – Aileen Clarke Hernandez born, union organizer, civil rights activist, 2nd NOW national president, co-founder Black Women Organized for Action, San Francisco

1934 – Robert Moog born, American engineer, inventor of the Moog Synthesizer

1940 – Frank Sinatra records “I’ll Never Smile Again” with Tommy Dorsey and the Pied Pipers

1949 – The Republic of West Germany is established

1966 – The Beatles release “Paperback Writer”

1977 – The U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear the appeals of Watergate wrong-doers H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell

1984 – U.S. premiere of the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

1990 – American Tortoise Rescue is founded, sponsor of World Turtle Day *

2015 – Myanmar President Thein Sein implements controversial population control law requiring women to wait 3 years between births

2016 – Chinese archaeologists announce evidence found of earliest use of barley in China to make beer, in Shaanxi province 3400-2900 BC
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