June 13th is

International Albinism Awareness Day *

Cupcake Lover’s Day

Call Your Doctor Day *

Sewing Machine Day

Weed Your Garden Day

Random Acts of Light Day * . . . . . . .  Kitchen Klutzes of America Day
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MORE! Walter Hunt, Dorothy L. Sayers and Daniel Ellsberg, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Croatia – Tisno:
Beats, Beer & Boogaloo (opening day)

Portugal – Lisbon: Santo António
(patron saint) Sardine Festival

Spain – Ceuta:
Día de San Antonio Fiesta
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On This Day in HISTORY

1325 – Ibn Battuta sets off from his home in Tangiers on a hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, a journey that would ordinarily take sixteen months. He will not see Morocco again for twenty-four years

1381 – During the English Peasants’ Revolt, sparked by a poll tax of 12 pence from every adult and a growing demand for an end to serfdom, rebels led by Wat Tyler on a march from Canterbury arrive at London Bridge and pass over it into the capital. They begin attacking civil targets:  destroying legal records, opening prisons, sacking homes, and killing individuals they thought were associated with the royal government.

1514 – Henry Grace à Dieu, at over 1,000 tons the largest warship in the world at this time, built at the new Woolwich Dockyard in England, is dedicated

1525 – Martin Luther marries Katharina von Bora, against the celibacy rule decreed by the Roman Catholic Church for priests and nuns

1740 – The War of Jenkin’s Ear: forces led by Georgia provincial governor James Oglethorpe begin an unsuccessful siege of  St. Augustine

1752 – Fanny Burney born, became Madame d’Arblay, English author of journals, diaries, and novels; Evelina is a landmark in development of the novel of manners;  she wrote first person account of undergoing a mastectomy without anesthesia

1774 – Rhode Island becomes the first of Britain’s North American colonies to ban the importation of slaves

1777 – The Marquis de Lafayette, aged 19, lands near Charleston SC, to offer his services to the Americans in the Revolutionary War

1789 – Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, wife of Alexander Hamilton, serves ice cream at a dinner party to General George Washington

1790 – Thomas Saint, cabinet-maker and inventor, receives the first patent for the design of a sewing machine, but never produces one. In 1874, William Newton Wilson finds Saint’s drawings in the London Patent Office, and builds a model

1805 – During the Lewis and Clark Expedition, a scouting party led by Meriwether Lewis sights the Great Falls of the Missouri River

Lewis & Clark – Great Falls of the Missouri – DeVoto (1997)

1825 – Walter Hunt patents the safety pin, but sells the rights for $400

1859 – Christine Terhune Herrick born, American author and journalist, noted contributor to Harper’s Bazaar

1863 – Lucy Christiana born, Lady Duff-Gordon, British fashion designer, known professionally as Lucile and for training the first professional models

1865 – W. B. Yeats, Irish poet and playwright, major figure in the Irish Literary Revival and the founding of the Abbey Theatre, 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature

1866 – The U.S. House agrees to the changes the Senate has made in the proposed 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and a joint resolution on June 18th requests that the President transmit the proposal to the states for ratification. The amendment grants citizenship and protection of civil liberties to recently freed male slaves

1875 – Miriam “Ma” Ferguson born, American politician, first woman Governor of Texas serving from 1925-27 and 1933-35

1879 – Lois Weber born, American silent film director, actress, screenwriter, and producer; an important and prolific director of the silent film era; pioneer of the split screen technique in her 1913 film Suspense; early experimenter with sound; first woman to direct a full-length feature film, The Merchant of Venice (1914); in 1917, the first woman director to own a film studio, Lois Weber Productions (1917-1921), and the only woman member of the Motion Picture Directions Association

1881 – Mary Antin born, American author and immigration rights activist, known for her autobiography The Promised Land about her life in Czarist Russia, immigration and assimilation into American culture

1893 – Dorothy L. Sayers born, British author, poet and playwright; Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels

1898 – Canada organizes the Yukon Territory, with Dawson as its capital

1899 – Carlos Chávez born, Mexican composer, conductor, and journalist, founder of the Mexican Symphonic Orchestra

1902 – Carolyn Eisele born, American mathematician and historian of mathematics, professor of mathematics at Hunter College for almost 50 years

1905 – Xian Xinghai born, Chinese composer

1908 – Maria Elena Vieira da Silva born, Portuguese-French abstract artist

1914 – The U.S. Post Office Department’s new Parcel Post service begins without specifying exactly what could and could not be mailed via Parcel Post. After several children are “mailed” via Parcel Post (their parents paid for stamps, and in at least once case, postal insurance, and they were safely delivered by postal workers to visit their relatives), Postmaster General Burleson announces a new rule in 1914 that all human beings are barred from being mailed, but a few children are still sent, until postal inspectors begin investigating violations of the rule. Today, you can mail live chickens and other poultry, assorted reptiles and bees, but not children.

1928 – Renée Morisset born, Canadian pianist, piano duo with her husband Victor Bouchard, recipients of the Prix Calixa-Lavallée and Members of the Order of Canada

1931 – Nora Kovach born, Hungarian-American ballerina, defected from the Soviet bloc to the west

1937 – Eleanor Holmes Norton born, U.S . Congress Representative from the District of Columbia, formerly Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

1941 – Esther Ofarim born, Israeli musician, singer, and songwriter

1949 – Ann Druyan born, American documentary screenwriter and producer, co-author of the 1980 documentary series Cosmos;  Creative Director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project, the golden discs affixed to both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft

1966 – U.S. Supreme Court rules 5-4 in the landmark case  Miranda v. Arizona that Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination requires that police inform suspects of their rights before questioning them

1967 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson nominates Solicitor-General Thurgood Marshall to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court

1970 – The Beatles song, “The Long and Winding Road” is #1 on the U.S. charts

1971 – The New York Times begins publication of the Pentagon Papers, a study prepared by the Department of Defense of U.S political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967; Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst at the RAND Corporation, who worked on the top-secret study, releases a copy of the papers, which prove “that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance”

1983 – Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the central Solar System when it passes beyond the orbit of Neptune

1994 – A jury in Anchorage, Alaska, blames recklessness by Exxon and Captain Joseph Hazelwood for the Exxon Valdez disaster, allowing victims of the oil spill to seek $15 billion in damages

2000 – President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea meets Kim Jong-il, leader of North Korea, for the beginning of the first ever inter-Korea summit, in the northern capital of Pyongyang

2002 – The George W. Bush administration withdraws the U.S from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed with the USSR, ten years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and creates the U.S. Missile Defense Agency in 2002; the appropriation for the agency passed by Congress for 2017 is $8.2 billion

2010 – A capsule of the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa, containing particles of the asteroid 25143 Itokawa, returns to Earth

2015 – The UN General Assembly establishes International Albinism Awareness Day * in cooperation with the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation (NOAH) and Under the Same Sun, an Africa-based organization.

2016 – Call Your Doctor Day * is launched by Bright Pink, a women’s health non-profit, to encourage young women to schedule annual ‘Well-Woman Exam.’ However, it’s great advice for everybody, regardless of age or gender, and in the U.S., with the uncertainty about the future cost and availability of health insurance and Medicare, it’s critical to do it now

2017 – The first Random Acts of Light Day * is sponsored by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society® (LLS), the largest voluntary health agency dedicated to blood cancer research and patient support

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