November 8th is

Benjamin Banneker Day *

Cook Something Bold
and Pungent Day

Harvey Wallbanger Day

World Town Planning Day *

X-ray Day *

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MORE! Edmund Halley, Sarah Bernhardt and Christiaan Barnard, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Bosnia-Herzegovina & Serbia – Mitrovdan
(Russian Orthodox feast of Demetrius)

Bulgaria – Saint Michael’s Day

Micronesia – Pohnpei:
Constitution Day

New Zealand – Christchurch:
AFI Silver Film Festival

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On This Day in HISTORY

1342 –Julian of Norwich born, English anchoress and mystic; her Revelations of Divine Love is the first theological book in the English language attributed with certainty to a woman; venerated in the Anglican and Lutheran churches, but not beatified by the Roman Catholic church

1519 – Hernán Cortés enters Tenochtitlán and Aztec ruler Moctezuma welcomes him with a great celebration

1602 –The University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library opens for scholars and students

1605 – Under torture, Guy Fawkes reveals what he knows of the Gunpowder Plot, and the British government names ringleader Robert Catesby as a wanted man. Catesby and his remaining followers reach Holbeche House, but Richard Walsh, Sheriff of Worcester and his 200 men kill five conspirators, including Catesby, and take the rest into custody

1656 – Edmund Halley born, English astronomer, computed ‘his’ comet’s orbit

1710 – Sarah Fielding born, English author; wrote The Governess, or the Little Female Academy, the first novel aimed specifically at children

1731 – Benjamin Banneker * born this week, a free black American farmer, surveyor, and self-taught astronomer, who built a clock entirely out of wood, the first clock built in the American colonies, which kept perfect time for 40 years 

1745 – Charles Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender” to the thrones of Scotland, England, France and Ireland, enters England with over 5,000 men

Prince Charles Edward Stuart, 22, painted by Antonio David, 1732
– Scottish National Gallery

1793 – The Louvre Museum in Paris opens to the public

Projet d’aménagement de la Grande Galerie du Louvre, c. 1789
by Hubert Robert, Musée du Louvre

1805 – The Lewis and Clark expedition, aka “the Corps of Discovery” reaches the Pacific Ocean, almost a year and a half after their departure on May 14, 1804

1837 – Mary Lyon founds Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which later becomes  Mount Holyoke College

1847 – Bram Stoker born, Irish author of Dracula

1878 – Dorothea Bate born, English paleontologist, and pioneer in archaeozoologist

1880 – French actress Sarah Bernhardt makes her American stage debut in Adrienne Lecouvreur in New York City

1883 – Arnold Bax, English composer and poet is born

1884 – Hermann Rorschach born, Swiss psychiatrist

1889 – Montana is admitted as the 41st U.S. state

1895 – Wilhelm Röntgen discovers X-rays while experimenting with electricity  and takes the first X-rays – X-ray Day *

Wilhelm Röntgen’s first X-ray

1897 – Dorothy Day born, American journalist and social activist; one of Alice Paul’s ‘Silent Sentinels’ for woman’s suffrage carrying signs in front of the White House; co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement

1900 – Margaret Mitchell born, American author of Gone With the Wind

1908 – Martha Gellhorn born, novelist, travel writer, journalist and war correspondent, was one of two little girls who represented “future voters” at a demonstration for woman’s suffrage at the 1916 national Democratic convention in St. Louis; she went to Europe in 1930, determined to become a foreign correspondent, and worked at the United Press Paris bureau; returned to the U.S. and worked with photographer Dorothea Lange for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, documenting hungry and homeless people; went with Ernest Hemingway to Barcelona in 1937 to cover the Spanish Civil War, then reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, and covered WWII from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore and England; posed as a stretcher bearer to cover D-Day, the only woman to land at Normandy; one of the journalists who covered the liberation of Dachau; her four-year marriage to Hemingway ended in divorce in 1945, in part because of conflict over her career; she worked for Atlantic Monthly, covering the Vietnam War, the Arab-Israel conflicts and the civil wars in Central America; retired in 1995 at the age of 87 because of failing eyesight; The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was created in her honor in 1999

1910 – William H. Frost patents an insect exterminator

1921 – Douglas Townsend born, American composer and musicologist

1922 – Christiaan Barnard born, South African cardiac surgeon; performed the first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967

1922 – Thea D. Hodge born, American computer scientist, a pioneer in the field who mentored many women students; member of the Association for Computing Machinery

1923 – Adolf Hitler makes his first attempt at seizing power in Germany with a failed coup in Munich now known as the “Beer-Hall Putsch”

1926 – Darleane C. Hoffman born, American nuclear chemist; in the 1950s she applied for a position in the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the radiochemistry group, but was told, “We don’t hire women in that division.” She persisted, and was hired by an enlightened male group leader, becoming a division leader of the isotope and nuclear chemistry division, the first woman to head a scientific division there; senior faculty scientist in the Nuclear Science Division of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; one of the researchers who confirmed the existence of Seaborgium, element 106; recipient of the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1997

1932 – Ben Bova born, American sci-fi writer; six-time winner of the Hugo Award; editor of Analog magazine (1972-1978); noted for Exiles and Grand Tour series

1932 – Franklin Roosevelt defeats Herbert Hoover for his first term as U.S. president

1933 – The Civil Works Administration is created by executive order by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to create jobs for more than 4 million unemployed Americans

1939 – Life With Father premieres on Broadway

1949 – World Town Planning Day * founded by Professor Carlos Maria della Paolera of the University of Buenos Aires to promote creating livable communities

1951 – Dame Laura M. Cox born, English, Queen’s Bench High Court judge

1956 – After turning down 18,000 names, the Ford Motor Company decided to name their new car the “Edsel,” after Henry Ford’s only son

1960 – Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy defeats VP Richard Nixon for the U.S. presidency

1965 – The soap opera “Days of Our Lives” debuts on NBC-TV

1966 – Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts becomes the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate by popular vote, and Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California

1971 – Led Zeppelin releases album Led Zeppelin IV, including “Stairway to Heaven”

1979 – The program, The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage, premieres on ABC-TV, and evolves into the news program Nightline

1980 – Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California announce the discovery of a 15th moon orbiting the planet Saturn

1985 – Sting’s concert movie Bring On the Night opens in the U.S.

1990 – President George H. W. Bush orders 150,000 more soldiers to be deployed in the Persian Gulf, joining the multi-national forces fighting Iraq

1991 – The European Community and Canada impose economic sanctions on Yugoslavia in an attempt to stop the Balkan civil war

1992 – About 350,000 people rally in Berlin against racist violence

1993 – Five Picasso paintings and other artwork valued at $52 million are stolen from the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, Sweden

1994 – Republicans gain control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1954

1997 – Chinese engineers divert the Yangtze River to begin work on Three Gorges Dam

2000 – Waco special counsel John Danforth releases report absolving the federal government of wrongdoing in the 1993 Branch Davidian siege

2004 – U.S. troops attack Sunni insurgent strong holds in Iraq

2011 –Asteroid 2005 YU55 passes .85 lunar distances from Earth (201,700 mi/324,600 km), the closest known approach by an asteroid of this brightness since 1976

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