July 7^th is:

World Chocolate Day *

Strawberry Sundae Day

Tell the Truth Day

Father-Daughter Take a Walk Day

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MORE! Gustav Mahler, Charlotte Whitney and Ringo Starr, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Belarus – 2^nd day of Kupalle

Cook Islands – Ra o te Ui Ariki
(high chief council day)

Japan – Tanabata
(Star Festival)

Malaysia –
Georgetown World Heritage Day

Marshall Islands – Fishermen’s Day

Solomon Islands – Independence Day

Tanzania – Mainyesho ya Saba Saba
(Dar es Salaam trade fair)

Ukraine – Kupala Night
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On This Day in HISTORY

1124 – During the First Crusade, the city of Tyre is captured by the crusaders

1456 – Joan d’Arc is retried, acquitted of heresy – 25 years after her death

1550 – World Chocolate Day * – traditional date for Chocolate’s arrival in Europe

Poseidon Taking Chocolate to Europe – frontispiece to Chocolata Inda by Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma – 1644

1752 – Joseph-Marie Jacquard born, French inventor of the Jacquard loom

1753 – Act of Parliament to establish the British Museum

1801 – Toussaint L’Ouverture declares Haitian independence

1802 – “The Wasp” is published, a sheet attacking U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, under the pseudonym “Robert Rusticoat” but written by Harry Croswell, a supporter of John Adams and the Federalists, to counter Jefferson supporter Charles Holt’s paper, The Bee.  In 1804, a criminal case, The People of the State of New York v. Harry Croswell, accuses Croswell of slandering public officials. His attorney, Anthony Hamilton, argues successfully that truthful statements should never be considered defamatory, even if aimed at the President of the United States. In 1805, the New York legislature writes Hamilton’s argument into law

1846 – U.S. annexation of California is proclaimed at Monterey after the Mexican garrison surrenders

1851 – Lillien Jane Martin born, American psychologist, author of Salvaging Old Age, and Sweeping the Cobwebs

1852 – Vera Nikolayevna Figner born, Russian revolutionary, doctor’s assistant; participant in the assassination plot against Alexander II, tried and sentenced to death, but sentence commuted to Siberian penal servitude; wrote Memories of a Revolutionist

1860 – Gustav Mahler born, Austrian composer and conductor

1861 – Nettie Stevens born, American geneticist, described the XY chromosome system with Edmund Beecher Wilson

1863 – First U.S. military draft – exemptions can be bought for $300

1865 – Mary Surratt, conspirator in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is hanged with three co-conspirators, the first woman to be executed in the U.S.

1867 – Charlotte Anita Whitney, American social worker, Communist Labor Party organizer, pacifist and suffragist; defendant in the 1920 ‘Criminal Syndicalism’ trial, Whitney v. California, charged with being a member of an organization that was illegal under California law because of its association with the international Communist movement – noted for a landmark U.S. Supreme Court concurring opinion by Justice Louis Brandeis that only a “clear and present danger” would be sufficient for the legislative restriction of the right of free speech: “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.” Whitney’s conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court, but she was later pardoned by the Governor of California, and the Court explicitly overruled Whitney v. California in the Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling in 1969

1887 – Marc Chagall born in Belarus, French painter, printmaker and designer

Marc Chagall, self-portrait -1914

1905 –  Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin born, French mathematician; the first woman to become a full professor of mathematics in France; expert in fluid dynamics and abstract algebra; author of textbooks on lattice theory and abstract algebra, and a history, Portraits  of women mathematicians

1906 – Satchel Paige born, American baseball player, Negro League pitching star and rookie major-league baseball pitcher at age 42

1907 – The first Ziegfeld Follies opens

1907 – Robert Heinlein born, American science-fiction writer; Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love

1910 – Doris McCarthy born, Canadian painter of landscapes and Arctic icebergs

Antarctica from the Heights by Doris McCarthy, 1991

1911 – US-Great Britain-Japan-Russia North Pacific Fur Seal Convention bans open-water seal hunting, first international treaty for wildlife preservation

1915 – Margaret Walker born, African American novelist and poet, noted for poem For My People and novel Jubilee

1923 – Eduardo Falú born, Argentinean guitarist and composer

1924 – Natalia Bekhtereva born, Russian neuroscientist and psychologist; founding director of the Institute for Human Brain, a branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, did studies measuring the impulse activity of human neurons

1924 – Mary Ford born, American singer-guitarist, performed with husband, Les Paul

1928 – The first sliced bread is sold by Chillicothe Baking Company of Missouri

1930 – Construction begins on Boulder Dam on the Colorado River – name will be changed to Hoover Dam in 1947

1940 – Richard Starkey, future Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, is born

1954 – WHBQ Memphis is first radio station to play Elvis Presley – ‘That’s All Right’

1965 – Otis Redding records “Respect”

1967 – The Beatles release “All You Need is Love”

1972 – Susan Lynn Roley and Joanne E. Pierce, the first two women FBI special agents, are sworn in (The first woman agent was Emma Hotchkiss Jentzer, who was hired by the FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, in 1911. J. Edgar Hoover, first and longest-serving director of the FBI, initiated the policy of not hiring women, which his successor, L. Patrick Gray, rescinds)

1977 – Styx releases their album The Grand Illusion

1981 – Sandra Day O’Connor nominated to be first woman on U.S. Supreme Court

1983 – Samantha Smith, a 12-year-old American schoolgirl, flies to the Soviet Union at the invitation of Secretary General Yuri Andropov after she writes a letter to him. She travels as a Goodwill Ambassador making a plea for peace. In 1985, she is killed in a plane crash

1987 – Lt. Col. Oliver North begins his testimony at the Iran-Contra hearing, telling Congress that he had “never carried out a single act, not one” without authorization

1992 – New York Court of Appeals overturns a conviction of two women for exposing their breasts in public; rules women have the same right as men to go topless in public

2011 – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the final movie based on the wizard fantasy books, debuts in London

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