November 4th is

King Tut Day *

National Candy Day

Fountain Pen Day *

Use Your Common Sense Day *

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MORE!  Mozart, Janaki Ammal and Howard Carter, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Andorra – Saint Charles Borromeu Day 

Dominica – Community Service Day

India & Nepal – Guru Nanak Jayanti
(birth of Sikhism’s founder)

Italy – National Unity Day

Micronesia – National Day

Northern Mariana Islands –
Citizenship Day

Panama – Flag Day

Russia – Unity Day

Tonga – Constitution Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

1429 – Joan d’Arc takes Saint-Pierre-le-Moûthier by assault

1501 – Catherine of Aragon, age 16, and Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales, age 15, meet for the first time, 10 days before they are married – Arthur will die of an unknown ailment, five months after the wedding, Catherine will swear their marriage was never consummated, then she will marry Arthur’s younger brother Henry in 1509, two months after he became King of England at age 18, while she is 24

Young Catherine of Aragon, with pet monkey

1737 – Real Teatro di San Carlo, now the oldest continuously active venue for public opera in the world, opens its doors in Naples, Italy

1783 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 is performed for the first time in Linz, Austria

1791 – The Western Confederacy of American Indians wins the largest victory ever known by Native Americans over the United States in St. Clair’s Defeat, also called the 1791 Battle of the Wabash, in Ohio  – the loss was so great that the U.S. House of Representatives instigated the first Congressional Special Committee Investigation, and President Washington initiated what has become known as ‘executive privilege’ for the first time

1839 – Chartist leader Henry Vincent and a few of his supporters (Chartists support the People’s Charter, which includes the right to vote for every man aged 21 or older ‘of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime’) are being held gaol in Newport, Monmouthshire Wales, so Chartist sympathizers, led by John Frost, march on the town to free them, a confrontation that became the brief but bloody battle called the Newport Rising, the last large-scale armed rebellion in Great Britain

1846 – Benjamin Palmer patents an artificial leg

1847 – Sir James Young Simpson, Scottish physician, discovers the anaesthetic properties of chloroform

1852 – Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour becomes the prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, which becomes a key component in the unification of Italy

1853 – Anna Bayerová born, the second Czech woman medical doctor, but her doctorate was from the University of Bern in 1881, so Czechoslovakia refused to recognize it (the first Czech woman to get a medical degree faced the same problem, but she became a midwife in her hometown); Bayerová set up her medical practice in Berne; in 1889, seven hundred Czech women signed an open letter to her, which appeared in the women’s magazine Ženské Listy, expressing hope that she could return and practice in her homeland

1868 – Camagüey, Cuba, revolts against Spain during the Ten Years’ War

1879 – Will Rogers, American humorist and social commentator, is born: “Common sense ain’t all that common”

1880 – James and John Ritty patent the first cash register

1890 – London’s first deep-level tube railway, the City and South London Railway, opens between King William Street and Stockwell

1897 – Janaki Ammal born, Indian botanist who researched cytogenetics and phytogeography; did notable work on sugarcane and the eggplant; strong supporter of Gandhi and India;s independence;the Ministry of Environment and Forestry of India instituted the Janaki Ammal National Award of Taxonomy in her honor in 2000; the ‘Magnolia Kobus Janaki Ammal’ is named for her

1909 – Evelyn Bryan Johnson born, American pilot with the greatest number flying hours of any woman pilot in the world; Colonel in the Civil Air Patrol; after learning to fly in 1944, she logged 57,635.4 flying hours, and became the oldest flight instructor in the world, training a record number of pilots and giving the most FAA exams; she lived to age 102

“Mama Bird” Evelyn Bryan Johnson

1915 – Marguerite Patten born, English home economist, food writer and broadcaster; during WWII, she worked for the Ministry of Food, giving recipes making use of available rationed food on a BBC programme called The Kitchen Front; debuted her first television cookery show on the BBC in 1947; author of dozens of cookery books, including the first cook book in England with colour illustrations, Cookery in Colour

1921 – Mary Sherman Morgan born, American rocket fuel scientist and engineer, who invented the liquid fuel Hydyne in 1957, which powered the Jupiter-C rocket

1922 – King Tut Day * – British archaeologist Howard Carter and his workmen uncover a step leading to the tomb of King Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt 

Antechamber of King Tut’s Tomb – photo by Harry Burton

1924 – Nellie Tayloe Ross wins a special election to succeed her husband William after his death as Governor of Wyoming, the first woman governor of a U.S. state, serving from 1925 to 1927 – then she is director of the U.S. Mint under the administrations of three presidents from 1933 to 1953

Nellie Tayloe Ross, obituary, San Diego Union, December 21, 1977

1928 –Hannah Weiner born, American poet; part of the New York “happenings” of the 1960s; in later years, she wrote journals about her experiments with automatic writing and her struggles with schizophrenia

1929 –Shakuntala Devi born, Indian polymath, mental calculator, author of both fiction and non-fiction on mathematics, puzzles, and a sympathetic study of homosexuality in India, considered the first serious work on the subject

1939 – Gail E, Haley, American children’s book author-illustrator, winner of the 1971 Caldecott Medal and the 1976 Kate Greenaway Medal

1939 – The 40th National Automobile Show: first air-conditioned car is put on display

1952 – The U.S. federal government establishes the National Security Agency (NSA)

1956 – The Hungarian Revolution is ended when additional Soviet troops arrive, combine forces with Soviet units already there, and kill an estimated 3000 civilians, and wounding 13,000 more

1960 – At Kasakela Chimpanzee Community in Tanzania, Dr Jane Goodall observes  chimpanzees creating tools, the first-ever observation in non-humans

1962 – United States concludes Operation Fishbowl, its final above-ground nuclear weapons testing series, in anticipation of the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

1965 – Lee Ann Roberts Breedlove is the first woman to exceed 300 mph, 308.5 mph

1966 – The Arno River floods Florence, Italy, to a maximum depth of 6.7 m (22 ft), leaving thousands homeless and destroying millions of masterpieces of art and rare books – Venice is submerged on the same day to an all-time record acqua alta of 194 cm.

1970 – Salvador Allende takes office as President of Chile, the first Marxist to become president of a Latin American country through open elections

1973 – The Netherlands experiences the first Car-Free Sunday caused by the 1973 oil crisis. Highways are used by buses, cyclists and roller skaters

1979 – Iran hostage crisis: An Iranian mob, mostly students, overrun the US embassy in Tehran and take 90 hostages (63 are Americans), demanding the shah return to Iran to stand trial

1984 – Nicaragua holds its first free elections in 56 years

1988 – U2’s concert movie Rattle and Hum opens in the U.S. and the U.K.

1991 – Ronald Reagan’s presidential library opens in Simi Valley, CA

1995 – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated by an Israeli Ultraorthodox Jewish extremist after leaving a peace rally

1999 – U.N. imposes economic sanctions against the Taliban that controlled most of Afghanistan because they refuse to turn over Osama bin Laden, who is charged with masterminding the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania

2001 – The Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone movie world premiere in London

2002 – Chinese authorities arrest cyber-dissident He Depu for signing a pro-democracy letter to the 16th Communist Party Congress

2007 – Bud Bilanich starts Use Your Common Sense Day * on Will Rogers birthday

2008 – Barack Obama becomes the first African American to be elected U.S. President

2011 – The first Fountain Pen Day, celebrated on the first Friday of November
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