June 28^th is:

Paul Bunyan Day

Tapioca Day

Parchment Cooking Day

International Body Piercing Day

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MORE! Adolphe Sax, Gilda Radner and Nelson Mandela, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Bosnia and Herzegovina – St. Vitus Day

Indonesia – Cuti Bersama
(bonus holiday)

Serbia – St. Vitus Day

Ukraine – Constitution Day

United Kingdom – in Somerset:
Glastonbury Festival (ongoing)

United States: South Carolina:
Palmetto Day *

Vietnam – Vietnamese Family Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

572 – Alboin, King of the Lombards, last of the line of hero-kings who led his people in their migration to Italy, is assassinated in a coup d’état instigated by the Byzantines, his foster brother, and his wife. The coup fails because of opposition by the majority of Lombards, who elect Cleph as Alboin’s successor

1360 – Muhammed VI, ‘El Bemejo’ (Red One, for his red hair) becomes the tenth Nasrid king of Granada after killing his brother-in-law Ismail II

1461 – The coronation of Edward IV, first Yorkist King of England

1491 – King Henry VIII is born, second Tudor monarch (1509-1547)

1519 – Charles V is elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire; also head of the Romans, of Italy and of the Spanish Empire, a domain spanning nearly four million square kilometers – the first described as ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’

1577 – Peter Paul Rubens born, Flemish Baroque painter

Venus at the Mirror – Self-Portrait, by Peter Paul Rubens

1709 – Peter the Great defeats Charles XII of Sweden at the Battle of Poltava, the beginning of Sweden’s decline as a great power

1712 – Jean-Jacques Rousseau born, French philosopher; (The Social Contract)

1776 – A small band of South Carolina patriots defeated the British Royal Navy in the Battle of Sullivan’s Island; commemorated in South Carolina as Palmetto Day

1778 – Mary “Molly Pitcher” Hays McCauley, wife of an American artilleryman, carries water to soldiers during the Battle of Monmouth. Legend says she took her husband’s place at his gun after he is overcome with heat.

1838 – Coronation of Queen Victoria in Westminster Abbey

1841 – The Paris Opera Ballet premieres the classic ballet Giselle in the Salle Le Peletier

1846 – Adolphe Sax patents the saxophone

1852 – Hans Huber born, Swiss composer

1859 – First dog show held in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England

1865 – The Union’s Army of the Potomac is disbanded

1867 – Luigi Pirandello born, Italian playwright and author; 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature; Così è (se vi pare) (Right Your Are – If You Think So), Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters In Search of an Author)

1876 – Clara Maass born, American nurse, contract nurse for the U. S. Army during the Spanish-American War and in the Philippines; went to Cuba to assist in the research into yellow fever, where she volunteered to be infected and subsequently died

1887 – Floyd Dell born, American novelist, playwright, poet and journalist; radical liberal and feminist editor of The Masses (1914-1917)

1891 – Esther Forbes, American author and historian; Pulitzer Prize for Paul Revere and the World He Lived In and the Newbery Award for Johnny Tremain

1892 – E. H. Carr born, English political scientist and historian

1894 – The U.S. Congress makes Labor Day an American national holiday

1894 – Dame Anne Loughlin born, British labor activist, organizer and journalist, member and organizer for the National Union of Tailor and Garment Workers

1895 – The U.S. Court of Private Land Claims rules James Reavis’ claim to Barony of Arizona is “wholly fictitious and fraudulent”

1902 – U.S. Congress passes the Spooner Act, authorizing President Theodore Roosevelt to acquire rights from Colombia for the Panama Canal

1902 – Richard Rodgers born, American composer, a major force in musical comedy

1905 – Ashley Montagu born in the U.K., American anthropologist; studies of relationship between race and gender to politics and development

1906 – Maria Goeppert-Mayer born in Germany, American physicist; 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics; second woman to win the prize in physics after Marie Curie

1909 – Eric Ambler born, English author and screenwriter

1914 – Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife are assassinated in Sarajevo

1917 – Katherine Rawls born, American athlete and Olympian, national champion in swimming and diving, Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron pilot during WWII

Katherine Rawls in pike dive at 1936 Berlin Olympics

1919 – Treaty of Versailles signed ending World War I exactly five years after it began

1926 – Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz merge their companies into Mercedes-Benz

1934 – Bette Greene, American author; Newbery Award for Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon Maybe

1946 – Gilda Radner born, comedian, original cast member of Saturday Night Live, the Gilda Radner Hereditary Cancer Program at Cedars-Sinai is named in her memory

1950 – North Korean forces capture Seoul, and they launch the Seoul National University Hospital Massacre, killing over 900 medical personnel, civilian patients and wounded soldiers, after wiping out a platoon guarding the South Korean hospital. This is in retaliation for the Bodo League massacres of over 150,000 Communists and suspected Communist sympathizers. The league’s founders are Korean jurists who collaborated with the Japanese during WWII

1952 – Nelson Mandela and other anti-Apartheid leaders jailed in South Africa

1967 – Israel declares Jerusalem reunified under its sovereignty after capturing the Arab sector in the Six-Day War

1969 – At 3 AM, yet another police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in Greenwich Village, erupts into an uprising of patrons with a crowd of locals gathered on the street, fed up with police targeting gay establishments, many of which had already been closed. Days of protests follow – sparking the LGBTQ civil rights movement

1975 – David Bowie releases “Fame”

1976 – The first women enter the U.S. Air Force Academy

1978 – U.S. Supreme Court, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, bars quota systems in college admissions

1987 – Iraqi warplanes target civilians in a chemical bombing attack on  the town of  Sardasht, in northwestern Iran

1989 – On the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Slobodan Milošević gives the Gazimestan speech at the site of the historic battle

1991 – Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio debuts at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral

1997 – Mike Tyson is disqualified in the third round for biting a piece off Evander Holyfield’s ear

2000 – U.S. Supreme Court rules Boy Scouts of America v Dale that the BSA can bar homosexuals from serving as troop leaders

2000 – U.S. Supreme Court declares a Nebraska law outlawing “partial birth abortions” is unconstitutional; 30 other states have similar laws

2001 – Serbia delivers former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milošević to the UN War Crimes Tribunal

2004 – In Boumediene v. Bush, U.S. Supreme Court rules 5-4 that enemy combatants can challenge their detention in U.S. courts; Lakhdar Boumediene, a naturalized citizen  Bosnia and Herzegovina, was being held in military detention at Guantanamo Bay

2007 – The American bald eagle is removed from the U.S. endangered species list

2010 – The U.S Supreme Court rules 5-4 in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment provides Americans a fundamental right to bear arms that cannot be violated by state and local governments, the first time the court said there is an individual right to gun ownership rather than one related to military service

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