June 4th is

Cancer Survivors Day *

Cognac Day

National SAFE Day *

Old Maid’s Day *

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MORE! Élisabeth Thible, Henry Ford and Ishmael Jaffree, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Christianity – Whit Sunday (Pentecost) commemorates the descent of the Holy Ghost upon Christ’s disciples

Germany – Dortmund:
PollerWiesen Music Festival

Ghana – Revolution Day

Iran – Imam Khomeini Day

Lithuania – Father’s Day

Netherlands – Erp:
7^th Sunday Festival

Tonga – Emancipation Day
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On This Day in HISTORY

1411 – French King Charles VI grants a monopoly for the ripening of Roquefort cheese to the people of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, as they had been doing for centuries

1561 – The steeple of St Paul’s, the medieval cathedral of London, is destroyed in a fire caused by lightning and is never rebuilt

1647 – The English army seizes King Charles I

1784 – Eight months after the first manned balloon flight, Élisabeth Thible becomes the first woman to fly in an untethered hot air balloon. Her flight with M. Fleurant covers four kilometers in 45 minutes, and reaches an estimated altitude of 1,500 meters. She is dressed as the goddess Minerva, and fed the firebox to keep them aloft

1792 – Captain George Vancouver claims Puget Sound for the Kingdom of Great Britain

1812 – Following Louisiana’s admittance as a U.S. state, the Louisiana Territory is renamed the Missouri Territory

1825 – General Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolutionary War, speaks at what would become Lafayette Square, in Buffalo NY during his visit to the U.S.

1855 – Major Henry C. Wayne departs New York aboard the USS Supply to procure camels to establish the U.S. Camel Corps

The short-lived U.S. Camel Corps in action

1876 – The Transcontinental Express train arrives in San Francisco a record 83 hours and 39 minutes after leaving New York City

1878 – The Cyprus Convention, a secret agreement between the Ottoman Empire and the United Kingdom, grants the UK control over Cypress in exchange for British support of the Ottomans during the Congress of Berlin, and British use of the island as a base against possible Russian aggression

1881 – Natalya Goncharova born, Russian modernist painter-sculptor-stage designer

Linen by Natalya Goncharova (Tate)

1896 – Henry Ford completes the Ford Quadricycle, his first gasoline-powered automobile, and gives it a successful test run on the streets of Detroit

1912 – Massachusetts becomes the first state of the United States to enact a minimum wage law, which only applies to women and children under 18 years of age and doesn’t set a standard wage, just a panel to study complaints about low wages; employers who are found to pay wages inadequate to cover the cost of living and maintain a worker’s health, are reprimanded by having their names printed in local newspapers

1913 – Bruno Bettinelli born, Italian composer

1913 – Emily Davison, a suffragette, runs out in front of King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby. She is trampled, never regains consciousness, and dies four days later

1917 – The first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded

1919 – The U.S. Congress finally approves the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees suffrage to women, and sends it to the U.S. states for ratification

1920 – Hungary loses 71% of its land and 63% of its population in the post-WWI Treaty of Trianon, breaking up the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

1929 – George Eastman demonstrates the first Technicolor movie in Rochester NY

1939 – The MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 963 Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, in the U.S., after already being turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, more than 200 of its passengers later die in Nazi concentration camps

1942 – WWII, Battle of Midway: a Japanese attack is ordered by Admiral Nagumo on U.S. forces at Midway Island

1944 – WWII, Italy: Rome falls to the Allies as the U.S. Fifth Army begins its liberation

1948 – The first Old Maid’s Day * is held by Marion Richards of Jeffersonville PA to honor contributions Old Maids make to their communities and their families. During the last 70 years, women have fought hard to gain greater independence, so maybe this should be a day to find a new name and deck of cards for the Old Maid game

1954 – France grants Vietnam self-governance within the French Union

1961 – At the Summit in Vienna, Austria, U.S. President Kennedy meets Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev

1973 – Don Wetzel, Tom Barnes and George Chastain patent the ATM machine

1975 – California Governor Jerry Brown signs the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act into law, the first law in the U.S. giving farmworkers collective bargaining rights

1984 – Bruce Springsteen’s album Born in the U.S.A. is released

1985 – In Wallace v. Jaffree, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds by 6-3 a lower court ruling striking down an Alabama law providing for a daily minute “meditation or voluntary prayer” in public schools. Ishmael Jaffree, parent of three students in the Mobile County Public School System, complains his kindergarten-aged son is being made fun of by other students for refusing to say the prayers, and that two of his children are subjected to religious indoctrination, including their teachers leading the students in reciting certain prayers in unison; when his children will not say the prayers, they are ostracized by classmates – the school district did nothing to alleviate the situation, so he filed suit

1986 – Jonathan Jay Pollard, a former Navy intelligence analyst, pleads guilty in Washington to spying for Israel

1987 – The founding of Cancer Survivors Day is announced at a meeting of the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship, to be an annual event on the first Saturday in June

1989 – The People’s Liberation Army ends the pro-democracy demonstrations in
Tiananmen Square violently; at least 250 people are killed, but some reports indicate many more casualties

Bodies of Demonstrators, moved from nearby Tiananmen Square, June 4, 1989

1991 – Pope John Paul II inflames the abortion debate by comparing abortion to the mass murders by the Nazis in the Holocaust; his comments are angrily denounced by Jewish leaders and feminists

1992 – The U.S. Postal Service announces that more people voted for the “younger Elvis” stamp design

2009 – President Barak Obama addresses the Muslims of the world in a speech in Cairo, saying America has a common cause with Islam

2016 – National SAFE Day * is started by the Brooklyn Mae Mohler Foundation to prevent senseless child shooting deaths by making sure every gun in American households is stored securely

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