October 18^th is

Alaska Day *

Chocolate Cupcake Day

No Beard Day

Hard-Boiled Detective Day *

Rocky Horror Picture Show Day *

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MORE! Nicholas Culpeper, Mary Wroth and  Dashiell Hammett, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Hinduism – Deepavali/Diwali (Festival of Lights) celebrates light’s victory over darkness – five- day festival, main night coincides with new moon

Azerbaijan – Independence Day

Canada – Persons Day *

Hungary – Budapest:
Contemporary Arts Festival (til 10-22)

Italy – Alba, Piedmont:
White Truffle Festival (til 11-26)

Netherlands – Amsterdam:
Amsterdam Dance Event (til 10-22)

South Korea – Busan: (til -10-21)
Busan International Film Festival

Zambia – National Day of Prayer

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On This Day in HISTORY

320 AD – Pappus of Alexandria observes a solar eclipse and writes about it in his commentary on the Almagest, a 2^nd century Greek mathematical and astronomical treatise on the motions of stars and planetary paths written by Klaúdios Ptolemaíos, the most accepted geocentric model until Copernicus published  On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543

614 – King Chlothar II proclaims the Edict of Paris, which defends the rights of Frankish nobles but excludes Jews from all civil employment in the Frankish kingdom

1386 – Heidelberg University opens its doors. Its papal charter specifies it is to be modeled after the University of Paris to include four faculties: philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, and medicine. Heidelberg is Germany’s oldest university

1540 – Battle of Mabila: Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto’s forces destroy the fortified village of Mabila in present-day Alabama, killing Chief Tuskaloosa, suzerain of multiple tribal vassals

1553 – Luca Marenzio born, Italian Renaissance composer and singer

1587 – Lady Mary Wroth born, English Renaissance poet, one of the first women to achieve an enduring reputation in literature; wrote Urania, first known/surviving prose romance written by an English woman, the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, and Love’s Victory, a pastoral closet drama (reader’s theatre piece for private performance) 

1595 –Edward Winslow born, founder of the Plymouth Colony

1616 – Nicholas Culpeper born, English botanist, herbalist and astrologer; author of   The Complete Herbal, one of the most detailed sources of pharmaceutical and herbal knowledge of the time

1632 – Luca Giordano born, Italian painter

Self-Portrait by Luca Giordano

1648 – Boston shoemakers form the first American labor organization

1685 – King Louis XIV of France revokes the Edict of Nantes, which established legal toleration of the Protestant Huguenots

1697 – Canaletto born as Giovanni Canal, Italian painter and printmaker

The Grand Canal, Venice – by Canaletto

1701 – Charles le Beau born, French historical writer; Histoire du Bas-Empire, en commençant à Constantin le Grand, in 22 volumes

1775 – Poet Phillis Wheatley, a black slave in Boston, is freed upon the death of her master John Wheatley

1787 – Robert Livingston Stevens born, inventor and steam-driven transport builder; first steamship to navigate the ocean successfully; the ‘John Bull’ steam locomotive

1799 – Christian F. Schonbein born, German chemist, discovered and named ozone

1804 – Rama IV born, known in English-speaking countries as King Monghut, of the House of Chakri, the King in Anna and the King of Siam, by Anna Leonowens, which inspires the musical, The King and I

1851 – Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is first published as The Whale by Richard Bentley of London

1859 –Henri-Louis Bergson born, French philosopher; 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature; Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory)

1867 – U.S. takes possession of Alaska after purchasing it from Russia for $7.2 million – celebrated in the state as Alaska Day *

1874 – Christine Murrell born, English medical doctor, first woman member of the British Medical Association’s Central Council; woman suffragist, chair of WWI Women’s Emergency Corps; president of Medical Women’s Federation (1926-1928)

1892 – First long distance telephone line between Chicago and New York opened

1894 – H.L. Davis born, American novelist, poet and short story writer; won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Honey in the Horn

1897 – Isabel Briggs-Myers born, American author and co-creator with her mother, Katherine Cook Briggs, of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a Jung-based psychological questionnaire to determine a person’s dominant perception function – sensation, intuition, feeling or thinking – and their decision-making process, designed to evaluate “normal” populations

1898 – U.S. takes possession of Puerto Rico from Spain

1900 – Evelyn Berckman born, American author of detective fiction, Gothic horror novels and non-fiction British naval history, who began writing after semi-paralysis ended her career as a pianist; The Beckoning Dream, The Heir of Starvelings, and Creators and Destroyers of the English Navy

1900 – Sarah Bavly born in the Netherlands, Israeli nutritionist and author; chief dietitian for Hadassah hospitals and head of Hadassah’s school lunch program; Tzunatenu (Our Nutrition) was a standard elementary-school textbook for decades

1905 – Jan Gies born, Dutch Resistance member; with his wife Miep Gies, hid Anne Frank, her family and the van Pels from Nazi persecution, and rescued Anne Frank’s writings before the secret police ransacked their hiding place after the Franks and van Pels were discovered and arrested in 1944

1906 – James Brooks born, American abstract painter and muralist

1910 – E. M. Forster publishes his novel Howard’s End

1918 – Bobby Troop born, composer-singer-songwriter and actor; “Get Your Kicks On Route 66”; married to singer-actress Julie London

1919 – Anita O’Day born, American Jazz singer

1919 – Pierre Trudeau born, Prime Minister of Canada (1968-1979 & 1980-1984)

1920 – Melina Mercouri born, award-winning Greek actress and singer; activist against the Greek military junta which overthrew the government in 1967 –   the junta revoked her Greek citizenship; politician, a founding member of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), a centre-left political party; elected in 1977 as the MP for Piraeus B; Greek Minister of Culture (1981-1989)

1921 – Beatrice Worsley born in Mexico, Canadian, first woman to earn a Ph.D. in what is now called computer science, from Cambridge (Alan Turing was one of her advisors); female computer scientist in Canada; wrote the first program to run on EDSAC, and co-wrote the first compiler for Toronto’s Ferranti Mark 1

1922 – A consortium founds the British Broadcasting Company (now the BBC) to establish a nationwide network of radio transmitters for a national broadcasting service

1923 – Jessie Mae Hemphill born, American country blues singer-songwriter

1924 – Buddy MacMaster born, Canadian traditional Cape Breton fiddler

1926 – Chuck Berry born, American singer-songwriter

1929 – Celebrated in Canada as “Persons Day” * : The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overrules the Supreme Court of Canada in Edwards v. Canada when it declares that women are considered “Persons” under Canadian law, establishing both the citizenship rights of Canadian women, and the “living tree doctrine,” that a constitution is organic and must be read in a broad and liberal manner so as to adapt it to changing times. The Lord Chancellor, Viscount Sankey, wrote that “…exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours,” and that “to those who ask why the word should include females, the obvious answer is why should it not.”

1929 – Violeta Chamorro born, Nicaraguan publisher and politician, President of Nicaragua (1990-1997)

1935 – Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra records “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”

1941 – The nation-wide release date of the classic film noir, The Maltese Falcon

1946 –Aaron Copland’s 3^rd Symphony premieres

1954 – Texas Instruments announces the first transistor radio

1962 – Dr. James Watson of the U.S., and Dr. Francis Crick and Dr. Maurice Wilkins of Britain are named winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for their work in determining the double-helix molecular structure of DNA; English researcher and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin is not included because she died in 1958, and the Nobel is not awarded posthumously

1967 – USSR probe Venera 4 reaches Venus, becomes first spacecraft to measure another planet’s atmosphere

1968 – On Oct. 18, 1968, the United States Olympic Committee suspended two black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, for giving a “black power” salute as a protest during a victory ceremony in Mexico City

1972 – Congress passed the Clean Water Act, overriding President Nixon’s veto

1979 – The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allows individuals to have home satellite earth stations (TV dish receivers) without a federal government license

1984 – Esperanza Spalding born, American jazz bassist and singer; musical prodigy, played violin in the Chamber Music Society of Oregon at age 5; Four-time Grammy Award winner, including first jazz artist to win Best New Artist in 2011

1990 – Los Angeles City Council proclaims the first Rocky Horror Picture Show Day * on its 40^th anniversary

1991 – Azerbaijan declares independence from the Soviet Union

2005 – The Sydney Tower Eye opens, 309 meters tall, and becomes an instant landmark

2007 – Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returns to Pakistan, after eight years abroad; as her cavalcade makes its way through a crowd in Karachi, two bombs explode, killing 149 people, and injuring 402 more; Bhutto is uninjured, but she will be assassinated in December

2009 – The first Hard-Boiled Detective Day,* started on the anniversary of the release date for the film noir classic, The Maltese Falcon (see also 1941 entry)

2013 – Saudi Arabia becomes the first country to turn down a seat on the UN Security Council in protest over Syria

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