July 19^th is

Daiquiri Day

National Hot Dog Day

Stick Out Your Tongue Day

Take Your Poet to Work Day *

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MORE!  Johannes Kepler, Lucretia Mott and Harry Belafonte, click

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World Festivals and National Holidays

 Ancient Rome celebrated the religious festival Lucaria, the “Festival of the Grove” but little is known about it now. Even the deity being honored is unknown. If the ritual for grove-clearing recorded by Cato the Elder is related to Lucaria, the invocation was deliberately anonymous 

Myanmar – Martyrs’ Day

Nicaragua – Sandinista Revolution Day

Spain – Sant Rafel de sa Creu:
Amnesia Ibiza (music)

United Kingdom – Great Dunmow:
Flitch Day (still-happy-in-marriage celebration)

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On This Day in HISTORY

64 – Circus Maximus in Rome burns

1545 – The Tudor warship Mary Rose sinks off Portsmouth

1553 – Protestant Lady Jane Grey, “Nine Day Queen” of England, is deposed by the Privy Council in favor of Henry VIII’s devoutly Catholic daughter Mary

1595 – Johannes Kepler has an epiphany, while demonstrating for students the periodic conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, about regular polygons and circles as the geometrical basis of the universe, but it doesn’t quite work, so he begins experimenting with 3-dimensional polygons; in 1596, he publishes Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Cosmographic Mystery), the first published defense of the Copernicus Theory

1674 – The Court of Holland bans the works of Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes and Lodewijk Meyer, which assert the right of individuals to think for themselves, and to question religious beliefs

1759 – Marianna Auenbrugger born, Austrian pianist and composer, a student of Joseph Haydn and Antonio Salieri; Salieri publishes her Keyboard Sonata in E-flat at his own expense

1799 – The Rosetta Stone is found in Rosetta, Egypt, by Pierre-François Bouchard

1814 – Samuel Colt born, American future gun manufacturer

1817 – Mary “Mother” Bickerdyke born, served in the Civil War as a Union hospital nurse and administrator, working during nineteen battles in field hospitals

1834 – Edgar Degas born, prominent French artist, famed for his paintings of dancers

Blue Dancers by Edgar Degas

1843 – Brunel launches SS Great Britain, first ocean-going craft with screw propeller

1846 – Edward Charles Pickering born, American physicist and astronomer

1848 – First day of the Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, NY, organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, both abolitionists, who met at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Women were barred from the convention floor, and their common indignation at this discrimination became the impetus for their founding of the women’s rights movement in the United States

1865 – Charles H. Mayo born, American surgeon; founder of the Mayo Clinic

1868 – Florence Foster Jenkins born, American amateur operatic soprano, known for her lack of singing ability, popular primarily for the amusement she provided

1875 – Alice Dunbar Nelson born, American novelist, poet and essayist

1896 – A. J. Cronin born, Scottish novelist and physician

1898 – Herbert Marcuse born in Germany, American political philosopher

1900 – The Paris Metro opens its first line for service

1905 – Edgar Snow born, American journalist and author

1916 – Eve Merriam born, American poet and playwright, noted for inspiring poetry for children, recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first book Family Circle

1919 – Peace Day celebration in Great Britain – WWI Cenotaph unveiled in London

1921 – Rosalyn Sussman Yalow born, American medical physicist, 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine (second American woman laureate in the category) for her part in development of the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique with co-laureates Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally. RIA is a radioisotope tracing technique which allows measurement of tiny quantities of biological substances in human blood and other aqueous fluids

1923 – Insulin is introduced in the U.S. as a treatment for Diabetes

1937 –Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst, the infamous “degenerate art exhibition” opens in Munich, Germany, presenting 650 works of art confiscated from German museums, denounced as works that “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill.” Works by Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Pablo Picasso, Piet Modrian, Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky are among those exhibited

1941 – Winston Churchill launches WWII British “V for Victory” campaign

1942 – The North American premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony #7 is broadcast from New York City by the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscannini; often called ‘the Leningrad Symphony’ because Shostakovich dedicated the work to his home town (called St. Petersburg at the time of his birth), which he wrote during the WWII 900-day Siege of Leningrad

1949 – Harry Belafonte begins recording his first sessions for Capitol Records

1956 – Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announces that the United States is withdrawing its offer of financial aid to Egypt for the construction of the Aswan Dam on the Nile River, officially because of “difficulties” in arranging the financial details with the Egyptian government, but motivated by antagonism toward Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and his outspoken attacks on Western colonialism. This also causes a rift in American-British relations, as the two allies were to partner in funding the project. The Soviet Union rushes to Egypt’s aid, and the dam is built without U.S. assistance, a major American diplomatic blunder

1969 – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, aboard NASA’s Apollo 11, go into orbit around the moon

1975 – The band Orleans releases “Dance With Me”

1976 – The Sagarmāthā National Park is established in the Himalayas of eastern Nepal and includes Mount Everest; it is classified as an Important Bird and Biodiversity Area (IBA) by Birdlife International; Sagarmāthā translates into English as “sky head”

1979 – The civil war in Nicaragua ends with the Sandinistas taking control of Managua as President Somoza flees the country

1980 – Billy Joel gets his first gold record for “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”

1984 – Geraldine Ferraro becomes the first woman nominated by a major party for U.S. Vice President at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco

1993 – President Clinton announces “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gays in the military

2005 – George W. Bush nominates John Roberts to replace Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor

2011 – The movie Captain America: The First Avenger premieres in Los Angeles

2011 – Summoned by British lawmakers for a three-hour grilling, Rupert Murdoch says he is humbled and ashamed, but takes no responsibility for wrongdoing in a phone hacking and bribery scandal at one of his tabloids, claiming only that he trusted the wrong people

2012 – Take Your Poet to Work Day * is launched – take a picture of your favorite poet and a favorite poem to work to share with co-workers

2014 – R.J. Reynolds to pay $23 billion in a lawsuit charging they hid tobacco risks

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