October 9^th is

Curious Events Day

Fire Prevention Day *

Leif Erikson Day *

National Chess Day *

Native American Day

Nautilus Night *

Pizza and Beer Day

World Post Day *

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MORE! Giuseppe Verdi, Jill Ker Conway and John Lennon, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Columbus Day in American Samoa, Puerto Rico, U.S. and U.S. Virgin Islands

Bahamas – National Heroes Day

Belize – Pan America Day

Canada – Thanksgiving Day and
Calgary AB: WordFest (literary festival)

Chile: Encuentro de Dos Mundos

Ecuador – Guayaquil Independence Day

Japan – Fitness Day

Norfolk Island – Agricultural Show Day

Northern Mariana Islands – Cultural Day

Saint Barthélemy – Abolition Day *

Sint Maarten – Constitution Day

Turks and Caicos Islands – Heritage Day

Uganda – Independence Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

1238 – James I of Aragon conquers Valencia and founds the Kingdom of Valencia

1410 – Clockmaker Mikulášof Kadaň and astronomer Jan Šindel install the Prague Orloj, the oldest astronomical clock still in working order in the world

1604 – Kepler’s Supernova was seen in the Milky Way, in the constellation Ophiuchus

1635 – Roger Williams, tried and convicted of sedition and heresy, is banished from Massachusetts, after speaking against civil magistrates ordering punishments for religious offences, in favor of a person’s right to follow their own religious convictions, and questioning the King’s right to grant charters to lands already inhabited by indigenous peoples. He would shelter for the winter with the Wampanoags’ chief Massasoit

1701 – The Collegiate School of Connecticut is chartered in Old Saybrook CT, later moved to New Haven and re-named Yale University

1776 – Spanish missionaries settle in what will be San Francisco CA

1804 – Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, founded

Hobart Town by Alan Carswell, 1821

1813 – Giuseppe Verdi is born, Italian opera composer

1824 – Slavery is abolished in Costa Rica

1834 – Ireland’s first public railway, the Dublin and Kingstown line, opens

1835 – Camille Saint-Saens is born, French composer

1847 – Slavery is abolished in Saint Bathélemy,* and all slaves are freed

1855 – Isaac Singer patents the sewing machine motor, and Joshua C. Stoddard patents his calliope

1858 – Mail service via stagecoach between San Francisco CA and St. Louis MO begins

1860 – Leonard Wood born, Army officer and doctor, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army (1910-1914); one of the ‘Rough Riders’ in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, Military Governor of Cuba (1899-1902)

1872 – Aaron Montgomery sends out the first mail order catalogue – later, the firm becomes Montgomery Ward

1874 –  Union postale universelle, the Universal Postal Union (UPU), is created by the Treaty of Bern to: establish uniform postal rates for international mail; set guidelines for equal treatment of foreign and domestic mail; eliminate the need for extra postage as international mail passes through other countries in transit to its destination; and set standards for size and design of international postage stamps for maximum efficiency, such as showing the value of stamps in numerals instead of spelled out in letters. The UPU became a specialized agency of the United Nations in 1948 (see 1969 entry below)

1888 – The Washington Monument opens to the public in Washington DC

1890 – Aimee Semple McPherson born in Canada, Pentecostal evangelist and media celebrity who skillfully used radio to build up her image; there are still unresolved questions about whether or not she engineered her own kidnapping in 1926 when she disappeared for five weeks, causing an all-out media frenzy

1898 – Tawfīq el-Hakīm born, Egyptian author and dramatist

1899 – Bruce Catton born, American Civil War historian and author; 1954 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for A Stillness at Appomattox, final volume of The Army of the Potomac trilogy

1901 – Alice Mae Lee Jemison is born, member of the Seneca tribe, Indian nations rights activist, journalist, critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs

1907 – Las Cruces, NM is incorporated

1911 – The Fire Marshall’s Association of North America holds the first Fire Prevention Day * on the anniversary of the last day of the Great Chicago Fire. President Woodrow Wilson proclaims Fire Prevention Week in 1920

1915 – Belva Plain born, best-selling American novelist of popular and historical fiction

1918 – Bebo Valdés born, Cuban pianist, bandleader and composer-arranger

1920 – Yusef Lateef, born William Huddleston, American Jazz instrumentalist and composer; noted for using Asian instruments and creating Jazz-Asian fusion music

1930 – Aviator Laura Ingalls (not the author) becomes the first woman to fly across the U.S., completing a nine-stop journey from New York’s Roosevelt Field to Glendale CA

1933 – Peter Mansfield born, British physicist, 2003 Nobel Laureate for work on Magnetic Resonance Imagining (MRI) with Paul Lauterbur

1934 – Jill Ker Conway born in Australia, academic and author; first woman president of Smith College (1975-1985), where she engaged in creative circumvention of  Massachusetts welfare laws so single-parent scholarship students would not have to choose between welfare benefits to support their families or scholarships to continue their education, leading to a change in Massachusetts welfare laws to enable students to keep their benefits and their scholarships

1934 – Abdullah Ibrahim, born as Adolph Brand, South African pianist and composer

1936 – Generators at Boulder Dam (now Hoover Dam) begin producing electricity

1940 – John Lennon born, English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer; The Beatles

1944 – Rita Donaghy born, British academic administrator, trade unionist, Labour life peer of the House of Lords; President of the trade union NALGO (National and Local Government Officers’ Association – 1989-1990)

1944 – Nona Hendryx born, American vocalist, songwriter and record producer; member of Labelle and Talking Heads, as well as a solo career

1946 – The Eugene O’Neill drama The Iceman Cometh opens on Broadway

1948 – Jackson Browne born, American singer-songwriter and guitarist

1950 – Jody Williams born, American political activist for human rights; 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts toward banning anti-personnel mines

1962 – Uganda becomes an independent British Commonwealth realm

1964 – U.S. Congress passes a joint resolution declaring October 9 Leif Erikson Day *

1967 – Guerrilla leader Che Guevara is executed in Bolivia

1969 – World Post Day * officially recognized at the Universal Postal Union Congress, to celebrate its founding

1970 – The Khmer Republic is proclaimed in Cambodia

1975 – Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

1976 – National Chess Day * is proclaimed by President Ford as part of the U.S bicentennial celebration – Benjamin Franklin was a skilled player and wrote one of the earliest books on chess

1981 – Capital punishment is abolished in France

1986 – Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera debuts in London

1992 – A 28 p0und (13 kilogram) meteorite lands in the driveway of Knapp residence, in Peekskill, New York, destroying family’s 1980 Chevrolet Malibu

2003 – Queen Elizabeth II makes Sting a Commander of the British Empire (CBE)

2006 – North Korea announces that it had conducted its nuclear weapons test

2007 – As part of International Cephalopod Awareness Days, Nautilus Night celebrates the lesser-known extant cephalopods, some of the 800 cephalopods known to science

2009 – President Barack Obama is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

2010 – Chile’s 33 trapped miners cheer and embrace each other as a drill punched into their underground chamber where they had been stuck for an agonizing 66 days

2012 – The Pakistani Taliban make a failed attempt to assassinate 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai for speaking out for the rights of girls to an education, sparking international support for her and her cause

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