June 8th is

Best Friend’s Day

Jelly-Filled Doughnut Day

Name Your Poison Day

Upsy Daisy Day *

World Oceans Day *

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MORE! George Orwell, Helen Keller and Louisa Tetrazzini, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Canada – Lower West Pubnico NS:
Nova Scotia Museum Rhubarb Festival

France – Paris:
Brooklyn Brewery Mash

Norfolk Island –
Pitcairn Islanders Arrival Day *

Solomon Islands – Temotu Province:
Temotu Province Day

Sri Lanka – Poson Full Moon Poya Day
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On This Day in HISTORY

632 – Muhammad ibn Abullāh, prophet and founder of Islam, dies in Medina in Arabia

793 – Viking Northmen raid the abbey on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, a major center of Christian learning on the Northumbrian coast, considered, the beginning of the Viking Age. A life of St. Cuthbert, who was a Bishop of Lindisfarne, written at the abbey, is the oldest extant piece of English historical writing, and the Lindisfarne Gospels are among the most beautifully illuminated manuscripts to survive to the present day

1042 – Edward the Confessor becomes King of England, one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings of England.

1191 – Richard I (‘the Lionheart’) arrives in Acre, beginning his crusade.

1625 – Gian Domenico Cassini born in Italy, French astronomer; discoverer of four satellites of Saturn and the division of the planet’s rings, now called the Cassini Division

1671 – Tomaso Albinoni born, Italian Baroque composer

1784 – Antoine Carême born, French founder of haute cuisine; “the cook of kings and the king of cooks”

1786 – In New York City, the first commercially made ice cream is offered for sale

1789 – James Madison introduces twelve proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution in Congress

1794 – Robespierre inaugurates the French Revolution’s new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, with large organized festivals all across France

1810 – Robert Schumann born, German Romantic composer

1829 – Sir John Millais born, English painter and illustrator

Rosalind in the Forest, by John Millais

1848 – Franklin Hiram King born, American agricultural scientist; inventor of the cylindrical tower silo

1856 – A group of 194 Pitcairn Islanders, descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty, arrives at Norfolk Island, the ‘Third Settlement of the Island’

1858 – Charlotte Angas Scott born, mathematician; competed in “Tripos” final examinations (1880) offered at Cambridge. Mastery of Tripos exams qualified her to receive a bachelor’s degree with honors, previously only awarded to male Cambridge students. Ranked 8th in test scores, but not allowed at awards ceremony, solely because she was female; one of first English women to obtain a doctorate in mathematics; published An Introductory Account of Certain Modern Ideas and Methods in Plane Analytical Geometry (1894), still widely used

1860 – Alicia Stott born, Irish-English mathematician known for her models of three-dimensional geometric figures, coined “polytope” for a convex solid in four (or more) dimensions

 Cell representations by Alicia Stott

1861 – Tennessee secedes from the Union

1867 – After Ausgleich, the Austro-Hungarian compromise that establishes the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph I is crowned Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary

1869 – Frank Lloyd Wright born, leading American modern architect

1871 – Louisa Tetrazzini born, Italian operatic soprano; Chicken Tetrazzini is named for her, possibly by Ernest Arbogast, chef at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel

1887 – Herman Hollerith patents a punched card calculator for ‘Compiling Statistics’

1900 – Estelle Griswold born, birth control advocate and pioneer, defendant in the Supreme Court case “Griswold v. Connecticut” which legalized contraception for married couples in 1965

1903 – Jessie Bernard born, sociologist, feminist critic and author of The Paradox of the Happy Marriage (1971), and The Female World (1981)

1903 – Marguerite Yourcenar born in Belgium, French novelist and essayist; Memoirs of Hadrian; winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980. The Yourcenar Prize is named in her honor

1906 – Theodore Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act into law, authorizing the President to restrict the use of certain parcels of public land with historical or conservation value

1910 – John W. Campbell born, American science fiction writer; influential editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact

1927 – Paul Whiteman and his orchestra record “When Day is Done”

1929 – Margaret Bondfield becomes Minister of Labour, the first woman appointed to the Cabinet of the UK

1949 – George Orwell’s enduring and influential dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is published; it introduces Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, the Thought Police, Newspeak, the Ministry of Truth and other phrases to the English language, often called “Orwellian”

1949 – Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson are all named in an FBI report as members of the Communist Party

1953 – U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously in District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. Inc., a lawsuit spearheaded by Mary Church Terrell against a segregated restaurant in Washington DC, that its policy of segregation is illegal, upholding laws passed in the District of Columbia in 1872 and 1873 prohibiting segregation in public places, which, although never enforced for decades, are still on the books in 1953

1959 – Shortly before noon off the coast of Florida, Balao-class submarine USS Barbero fires a cruise missile toward the Navy Auxiliary Air Station at Mayport, its training-type warhead containing two official USPS mail containers holding 3,000 commemorative postcards, the first known use of missiles by any postal department. It is also the only attempt – although successful, it is prohibitively expensive

1968 – Authorities announce the capture in London of James Earl Ray, the suspected assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr

1972 – During the Vietnam War, 9-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc is burned by napalm, an event captured by AP photographer Nick Ut moments later while the young girl is running down a road, in an iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning photo

1979 – The Who releases the soundtrack album The Kids Are Alright

1984 – Homosexuality is declared legal in the Australian state of New South Wales

1987 – New Zealand’s Labour government declares a national nuclear-free zone under the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987

1987 – Fawn Hall, national security aide Oliver L. North’s secretary, testified at the Iran-Contra hearings that she had helped to shred some documents

1992 – The first World Oceans Day is celebrated, coinciding with the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, proclaimed by the UN Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea

2003 – The first Upsy Daisy Day * is launched by Stephanie West Allen to encourage the habit of starting each day with humor and a positive attitude

2004 – The first Venus Transit in well over a century takes place, the previous one being in 1882

2009 – Two American journalists are found guilty of illegally entering North Korea and sentenced to 12 years of penal labor

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