October 5th is
Apple Betty Day
Do Something Nice Day
World Teacher’s Day *
International Day of No Prostitution *
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MORE! Cyrus the Great, Louise Fitzhugh and Václav Havel, click
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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS
Brunei – Golden Jubilee Celebration
India – Maharishi Valmiki Ji Birthday
Israel – Sukkot Holiday
Kiribati – Education Day
Macau – Chong Chao (Mid-Autumn Festival)
Myanmar – Thadingyut Full Moon (Buddhist)
Nepal –Kojagrat Purnima
(last day of Dashain)
Portugal – Republic Day
Sri Lanka – Vap Full Moon Poya
Vanuatu – Constitution Day
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On This Day in HISTORY
539 BC – (traditional date) The army of Cyrus the Great of Persia takes Babylon
610 – Coronation of Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, who made Greek the Eastern Empire’s official language
1274 – Al-Dhahabi born, Syrian Shafi’i scholar and historian; one of his teachers was Zainab Bint ‘Umar Bin Kindi, a woman, who taught him the beginnings of the Sahih Al-Bukhari, a major Sunni text, and the book of Al-Nikaah
1450 – Louis IX, Duke of Bavaria, orders expulsion of Jews from Lower Bavaria
1665 – The Academia Holsatorum Chiloniensis is founded in Kiel, the northernmost university in the Holy Roman Empire, now called the University of Kiel
1713 – Denis Diderot born, French philosopher and critic
1743 – Giuseppe Gazzaniga born, Italian opera composer
1789 – The Women’s March on Versailles: Parisian women march to Versailles to demand bread from Louis XVI, to insist the King and his court move to Paris, and to protest his refusal to issue decrees to abolish feudalism
1789 – William Scoresby born, British Arctic explorer and scientist; his observations in snow and crystals in the polar regions and temperature variations in the polar oceans are among the first published
1850 – Fanny Jane Butler born, pioneering English medical missionary to India, worked in Kashmir, also founded medical facilities in Srinagar and Bhagalpur
1857 – Anaheim, California, is founded
1858 – Helen Churchill Candee born, American author, journalist, interior decorator and feminist; survivor of the sinking of the Titanic; How Women May Earn a Living (1900) was a best-seller, and Decorative Styles and Periods establishes her design credentials; board member of the National Woman Suffrage Association
Helen Candee, son Harry, their guide, and “Effie” the elephant at Angkor Wat (1922)
1864 – Louis Lumière born, French chemist, director and producer, a filmmaking pioneer
1877 – Chief Joseph surrenders his Nez Perce band to General Nelson Miles: “I will fight no more forever”
1882 – Robert H. Goddard born, American physicist, engineer and inventor; built the first liquid-fueled rocket
1889 – Teresa de la Parra born, Venezuelan author; Iphigenia: Diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored
1892 – Remington Kellogg born, American naturalist, zoologist and paleontologist; a director of the U.S. National Museum; studied fossil pinnipeds and marine mammals, feeding habits of hawks and owls, and the predatory risk to humans of alligators
Remington Kellogg holding Amazon River dolphin skull
1905 – Wilbur Wright in Wright Flyer III flies 24 miles in 39 minutes, a world record
1908 – Joshua Logan born, American stage and film director, producer and writer; revealed in his biography, Josh, My Up and Down, In and Out Life, that he suffered from Bipolar disorder, and had been treated with lithium
1911 – The Kowloon-Canton Railway begins service
1916 – Stetson Kennedy born, American author, folklorist, and human rights activist who infiltrated the Georgia Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s to expose their secrets to authorities and then testified against Klan leaders, who were found guilty; the state of Georgia revoked the Klan’s corporate charter after his revelations; wrote monographs against poll taxes and other restrictions that disenfranchised the poor and minorities
1917 – Magda Szabó born, most translated Hungarian author and poet; censured by the Hungarian communist regime for not conforming to socialist realism; The Door, Für Elise, An Old-Fashioned Story
1928 – Louise Fitzhugh born, American author-illustrator; Harriet the Spy series
1931 – Rosalie Cheeseman Gower born, Canadian nurse and political activist; appointed as a commissioner of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC – 1980-1992), where she was an effective advocate for public interest over industry profits, and improved media portrayals of women
1932 – Václav Havel, Czech poet, playwright, dissident and politician, first President of the Czech Republic
1932 – Yvonne Braithwaite Burke born, African-American politician, U.S. Congresswoman (D-CA)
1936 – Two hundred men, with Jarrow’s female MP Ellen Wilkinson, begin marching from the town of Jarrow to London, carrying a petition for re-establishment of industry in their town, which had ended when Jarrow’s main employer, Palmer’s shipyard, closed in 1934, after building more than a 1000 ships since 1851. While they were warmly welcomed by the London public, and Parliament received the petition, it was not debated, so the marchers believed they had failed. But the Jarrow March helped foster changes which did lead to major social reforms following WWII
1938 – Nazi Germany invalidates Jewish passports, issuing passports marked with a J for ‘Jude’ for those desiring to emigrate
1944 – French women get the right to vote
1945 – ‘Hollywood Black Friday’ – after six months on strike, 3oo set decorators represented by the Conference of Studio Unions picket at the Warner Brothers main gate in very hot weather – as scabs try to get past them, tempers flare and cars are stopped and overturned; reinforcements arrive from both the strikers and the studio and a riot breaks out, with studio strikebreakers using chains, hammers, pipes, night sticks, tears gas, and fire hoses in the battle; 300 police and deputy sheriffs are called to stop the violence; over 40 injuries are reported
1947 – President Harry S. Truman makes the first televised White House address, asking Americans to give up eating meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursdays to help stockpile grain for starving people in Europe
1955 – Disneyland Hotel opens in Anaheim, California
1959 – Maya Lin born, artist-architect of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. (1980-82) and other public sculptures, author of Boundaries
1962 – The first Albert Broccoli production of the James Bond series, Dr. No, premieres, and the first Beatles single “Love Me Do” is released
1969 – First episode Monty Python’s Flying Circus airs on BBC One
1970 – Public Television: PBS is founded
1983 – Solidarity founder Lech Walesa is named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
1988 – Chilean coalition Concertación ends Augusto Pinochet’s re-election bid
1988 – Democrat Lloyd Bentsen lambastes Republican Dan Quayle during their vice-presidential debate, telling Quayle, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy”
1989 – A North Carolina jury finds PTL evangelist Jim Bakker guilty of using his TV show to defraud followers
1990 – After one hundred and fifty years The Herald broadsheet newspaper of Melbourne, Australia, is published for the last time as a separate newspaper
1994 – World Teachers Day * is founded by a coalition of teachers organizations
2000 – Mass demonstrations in Belgrade lead to resignation of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević, often called the ‘Bulldozer Revolution’
2002 – The first International Day of No Prostitution, * supported by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
2005 – Defying the White House, the Senate votes 90-9 to approve an amendment that would prohibit the use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” against anyone in U.S. government custody
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