August 6th is

Fresh Breath Day

Hiroshima Day *

Root Beer Float Day

Wiggle Your Toes Day

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MORE! Alexander Fleming, Lucille Ball and Takako Doi, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Christianity – Feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus

Andorra – Andorra La Vella Festival

Bolivia – National Day

El Salvador – San Salvador: Celebración del Divino Salvador del Mundo (Celebration of Christ )

France – Lorient: Festival Interceltique
(Celtic cultural festival)

Jamaica – Independence Day

Japan – Hiroshima: Peace Ceremony &
Peace Message Lantern Floating *  

Netherlands – Amsterdam:
Dekmantel Festival

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On This Day in HISTORY

1181 – Chinese and Japanese astronomers record observations of a supernova, now known as SN1181 in the constellation Cassiopeia

Remnant of SN1181, 3C58 (x-ray)

1538 – Bogotá, Columbia, is founded by Gonzalo Jiméniez de Quesada

1619 – Barbara Strozzi born, Italian Baroque singer and composer

1664 – Johann Christoph Schmidt born, German composer and organist

1697 – Nicola Salvi born, Italian sculptor-architect; Rome’s Trevi Fountain designer

1774 – Shaker Founder ‘Mother’ Ann Lee and a small group of her followers arrive in NYC from Great Britain, where she had been arrested and jailed multiple times

1787 – Sixty proof sheets of the U.S. Constitution are delivered to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia PA

1809 – Alfred Tennyson born, future British Poet Laureate and Lord

1817 – Zerelda Wallace born, American lecturer, temperance advocate and suffragist, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary on women’s suffrage

1819 – Norwich University is founded in Northfield, Vermont as the first private military school in the U.S.

1825 – Bolivia splits off from Peru, gains independence from Spain

1828 – Andrew Taylor Still is born, American founder of osteopathy

1848 – Susie King Taylor born, first African-American Civil war nurse, author and educator; nursed the First South Carolina Volunteers, a black unit, during the Civil War; notable for her memoir Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers; first African-American to teach openly in a Georgia school for former slaves, teaching both adults and children

1861 – The United Kingdom annexes Lagos, Nigeria

1862 – Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas is scuttled on the Mississippi River after suffering catastrophic engine failure near Baton Rouge, LA

1869 – Frank Cobb born, American newspaper editor of the New York World

1881 – Sir Alexander Fleming born, Scottish bacteriologist; discovers penicillin (1928)

1886 – Inez Milholland born, labor lawyer, suffragist, WWI correspondent and orator; led the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 on a white horse

1890 – Murderer William Kemmler is first person executed by electric chair, at Auburn Prison NY

1901 – Kiowa land in Oklahoma is opened for white settlement, effectively dissolving the contiguous reservation

1911 – Lucille Ball born, star of I Love Lucy and first woman to head a major television studio, Desilu

1912 – The Progressive ‘Bull Moose’ Party holds their convention at the Chicago Coliseum; Jane Addams gives the seconding speech nominating Teddy Roosevelt as their presidential candidate, a first for a woman. Unlike Republicans and Democrats, the Progressive Party fully endorses women’s suffrage, in additions to advocating for child labor laws, and an 8-hour workday. Roosevelt thanked her in a telegram: “I prized your action not only because of what you are and stand for, but because of what it symbolizes for the new movement.” 

1914 – Austria-Hungary declares war against Russia; Serbia declares war on Germany

1916 – Richard Hofstadter born, American “post-WWII liberal consensus” historian;  Social Darwinism in American Thought and Anti-intellectualism in American Life 

1928 – Jackie Presser born, American Teamsters Union leader (1983-88)

1917 – Barbara Cooney born, American children’s author and illustrator, honored with two Caldecott Medals and a National Book Award

1926 – Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel

1926 – Don Juan, starring John Barrymore opens, the first feature-length film using Vitaphone sound-on-disc system (synchronized musical score and sound effects)

1928 – Andy Warhol born, the original American Pop Art artist

1930 – New York County Judge Joseph Force Crater steps into a taxi and disappears; a missing person case that has never been solved; he is declared legally dead in 1939

1930 – Abbey Lincoln, born as Anna Marie Woolridge, American singer-songwriter and civil rights activist

1940 – The Soviet Union illegally annexes Estonia

1942 – Netherlands Queen Wilhelmina is first reigning queen to address U.S. Congressional joint session

1945 – The U.S. B-29 Enola Gay drops “Little Boy” atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. 70,000 people are killed instantly, thousands die over years from burns and radiation –
Commemorated at Hiroshima Peace Ceremony & Peace Message Lantern Floating * in Japan and as Hiroshima Day * in the U.S. and UK

1956 – Final broadcast of the DuMont Television Network, a boxing match

1960 – Cuba nationalizes all foreign-owned property

1962 – Jamaica becomes independent from Great Britain

1965 – President Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act into law

1979 – Marcus Hooper, aged 12, is the youngest person to swim the English Channel

1982 – American premiere of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” in NYC

1987 – The movie Who’s That Girl, starring Madonna, premieres in NYC

1988 – NYC Tompkins Square Park Riot – police charged protestors of new park curfew, causing a riot, leading to over 100 complaints of police brutality

1990 – The UN Security Council votes 13-0, with Cuba and Yemen abstaining, for economic sanctions against Iraq

1991 – Tim Berners-Lee releases description of his idea for a World Wide Web

1991 – Takako Doi becomes first female speaker of Japan’s House of Representatives

Takako Doi in 1986

1993 – Pope John Paul II issues his Veritatis splendor(‘splendor of truth’) encyclical, asserting that absolute truths and moral laws exist and are accessible to all persons; affirms the Catholic Church’s magisterium (moral authority); and self-determination is not an absolute, but must be bound by an understanding of Divine Law (as expressed by the Roman Catholic Church)

1996 – NASA says ALH 84001 meteorite contains evidence of primitive life-forms

2009 – U.S. senate confirms Sonia Sotomayor 68-31 as first Hispanic, and third female, Supreme Court Justice

2012 – NASA’s Curiosity rover lands on surface of Mars

2015 – The expansion of the Suez Canal is inaugurated at a ceremony in Ismaïlia

2015 – Comedian Jon Stewart hosts The Daily Show for the last time

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