August 30th is

Frankenstein Day *

Grief Awareness Day *

Slinky Day *

Toasted Marshmallow Day

International Whale Shark Day *

U.N. International Day of the Disappeared *

________________________________________________________________

MORE! Mary Shelley, John Gunther and Sylvia Earle, click

________________________________________________________________

WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

East Timor – Consultation Day

India – Punjab: Baba Sri Chand Ji
(birthday of the Udasi yogi)

Kazakhstan – Constitution Day

North Cyprus and Turkey – Victory Day
(War of Independence – Battle of Dumlupinar)

Peru – Santa Rosa de Lima
(Peru’s patron saint)

Spain – Buñol, Valencia: La Tomatina
(tomato throwing festival)

________________________________________________________________

On This Day in HISTORY

526 – Theoderic the Great, King of the Ostrogoths and ruler of Italy, dies; his daughter Amalasuntha takes power as regent for her 10-year-old son Athalaric. When her son dies in 534, she briefly becomes Queen, choosing her cousin Theidaha as co-ruler, but is assassinated with at the least his permission, giving Byzantine Emperor Justinian I an excuse to send his general Belisarius on an invasion of  Italy

1096 – Pope Urban II bans use of the crossbow, on pain of excommunication, against fellow Christians; still allowed for use against non-believers, heretics and heathens

1681 – English King Charles II grants William Penn a royal charter for a large tract of land in America to satisfy a debt owed to Penn’s father

1748 – Jacques-Louis David born, French Neoclassicist painter

1767 – Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwencke born, German composer, pianist and music publisher

1780 – Benedict Arnold secretly promises to surrender West Point fort to the British

1787 – Mary Thomas born, poet and early South Australian settler whose diaries and letters, first published in 1915, are a detailed account of early colonial life

1797 – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is born, author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein Day * honors her best-known work

1821 – Anita Garibaldi born, Brazilian comrade-in-arms and wife of Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi after his arrival is Brazil. A skilled horsewoman – while pregnant, she escapes after being captured by enemies during the Battle of Curitibanos by stealing a horse; when it is shot out from under her, she wades into the river Canoas. Her pursuers assume she will drown, and leave her for dead. She survives for four days without food or water before finding help, and reunites with Garibaldi; a few months later she gives birth their son

1835 – Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, is founded, named after then-British Prime Minister, William Lamb, 2^nd Viscount Melbourne

1836 – Houston, Texas, is founded, named after Sam Houston, hero of San Jacinto

1852 – Jacobus Hoff born in Holland, German chemist, first winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry (1901)

1862 – Confederate victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run in Manassas VA

1871 – Ernest Rutherford born in New Zealand, English Nobel Prize-winning physicist (1908)

1893 – Huey P. Long born, “The Kingfish” of Louisiana politics; after serving as Chair of the Railroad and Public Service Commissions, he was Louisiana’s governor (1928-1932), and senator (1932-1935); assassinated in 1935 at the Louisiana State Capitol

1901 – John Gunther born, American journalist; author of Inside Europe, Inside U.S.A., and Death Be Not Proud

1909 – Virginia Lee Burton born, American children’s author and illustrator; her book The Little House won a Caldecott Award; she founded textile collective Folly Cove Designers

1909 – Charles Doolittle Walcott discovers fossils near Burgess Pass, naming the site as the Burgess Shale

Charles, Sidney and Stuart Walcott working at the Burgess Shale

1912 – Nancy Wake born in New Zealand, British agent during WWII, a Special Operations Executive member who became a leading figure in the French Resistance; one of the Allies most decorated servicewomen of the war, by 1943 she was the Gestapo’s most wanted person with a 5 million franc price on her head

1912 – E. M. Purcell born, American Nobel Prize-winning physicist (1952)

1913 – Sir Richard Stone born, English Nobel Prize-winning economist (1984)

1918 – Fanni Kaplan shoots and seriously injures Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin; she refuses to implicate anyone else, insisting she acted alone

1919 – Kitty Wells born, American singer-songwriter and guitarist, first woman to top the U.S. country charts, Country Music Hall of Fame inductee; Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1991)

1922 – New Orleans Rhythm Kings record “Tiger Rag”

1922 – Regina Resnik, American mezzo-soprano; her international career spanned 50 years, but the NY Met was her artistic home

1923 – Barbara Ansell born, British physician; founder of pediatric rheumatology, developing a system of classifying childhood arthritis, and specialized in research and treatment of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis

1928 – Independence of India League is established

1935 – Sylvia Earle born, oceanographer, pioneer in use of SCUBA gear, first woman to serve as chief scientist at NOAA, co-designer and builder of a submersible craft, the first to reach 3,000 foot depths, author Atlas of the Ocean: The Deep Frontier

1941 – The WWII Nazi Siege of Leningrad begins, which will last nearly 2 ½ years

1945 – WWII; Hong Kong is liberated from the Japanese by British Armed Forces

1945 – In Vietnam, the August Revolution ends as Emperor Bảo Đại abdicates, ending the Nguyễn dynasty

1956 – In Louisiana, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway opens

1960 – Kevin Oldham born, American pianist and composer; died at age 33 of AIDS

1963 – The “Hotline” between Moscow and Washington goes into operation

1965 – Bob Dylan releases his “Highway 61 Revisited” album

1967 – Thurgood Marshall confirmed by U.S. Senate as the first black Supreme Court justice

1974 – The first cooperative U.S. and Netherlands scientific satellite is launched from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California

1983 – Guion S. Bluford Jr. is the first African-American astronaut in space aboard the Challlenger space shuttle

1984 – Space shuttle Discovery lifts off for first voyage, deploys three communications satellites, with Judith A. Resnik aboard, who becomes the second U.S. woman in space

1989 – Leona Helmsley, “Queen of Mean” hotelier, found guilty of income tax evasion

1990 – George H.W. Bush tells reporters a “new world order” could emerge from the Persian Gulf crisis

1999 – East Timor votes for independence from Indonesia in UN-sponsored referendum

2005 – Hurricane Katrina strikes the Gulf Coast with devastating force, killing more than 1,700 people and flooding New Orleans after the city’s levees fail

2010 – U.N. resolution establishes August 30 as International Day of the Disappeared *

2011 – The first National Grief Awareness Day * is started by Angie Cartwright on her mother’s birthday

2012 – First International Whale Shark Day – Whale Sharks added to International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species

2015 – Slinky Day * is launched to celebrate the 70^th Anniversary of the Slinky

________________________________________________________________