November 16th is

National Button Day *

Have a Party with Your Bear Day

National Fast Food Day

UNESCO Day *

International Day for Tolerance *

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MORE! W.C. Handy, Joan Lindsay and Harry Potter, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Bonaire, Sint Maarten & Sint Eustatius –
Sint Esutatius Day

Canada – Montréal QB:
M pour Montréal Festival (thru 11-18)

France – Beaujeu:
Beaujolais Nouveau Day

North Korea – Mother’s Day

Tajikistan – President’s Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

42 BC – Tiberius born, Roman general who became emperor (14 AD – 37 AD)

951 – The Chu Kingdom ends when Chinese Emperor Li Jing’s Southern Tang expeditionary force of 10,000 men invades during a civil war in Chu

1491 – In La Guardia, Spain, a medieval blood libel (false accusation of ritual murder made against Jews) results in an auto-da-fé execution of several Jews and conversos forced to confess under torture to the murder of a child, even though no corpse had ever been found, and their “testimony” was so conflicting the court had trouble depicting the events that were supposed to have taken place. This “child” was quickly made into a saint, El Santo Niño de La Guardia, and was used by the Spanish Inquisitor General  Tomás de Torquemada in the campaign against heresy and crypto-Judaism (secret adherence to Judaism while public professing another faith)

1528 – Jeanne d’Albret born, became Jeanne III, queen regnant of Navarre; a spiritual and political leader of the French Huguenots; after the Huguenot defeat in 1569, she negotiated the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye with Catherine de’ Medici, arranging a marriage between her son, Henry, and Catherine’s daughter, Marguerite; she died during preparations for the wedding in 1572, starting an unsubstantiated rumor that Catherine de’Medici had her assassinated by means of poisoned gloves

1643 – Jean-Baptiste Chardin, aka Sir John Chardin, born, French jeweler who traveled extensively as the agent for his family’s business; his ten-volume book, The Travels of Sir John Chardin, is highly regarded as an excellent work of early Western scholarship on the Near East, especially Persia, where the shah, Abbas II, commissioned Chardin to purchase jewels on his behalf

1717 – Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert born, French mathematician, physicist and music theorist; worked with Denis Diderot on the Encyclopédie; his formula for solutions to the Wave equation is named for him

1720 – Carlo Antonio Campioni born, French-Italian composer

1793 – During the French Revolution, 90 anti-republican Catholic priests are executed by drowning at Nantes

1806 – Mary Tyler Peabody born, one of the Peabody sisters of Massachusetts; author, teacher, translator, abolitionist and suffragist; she taught young children in her school in Salem, and wrote educational works for children and parents, including The Flower People: Being an Account of the Flowers by Themselves; Illustrated with Plates, a popular storybook which introduced children to horticulture; married at age 36, she was the second wife of the education reformer and politician Horace Mann; promoted Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’ writing and speaking career, first Native American woman known to copyright and publish work in the English language 

1822 – Missouri trader William Becknell arrives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over a route that becomes known as the Santa Fe Trail

1827 – Charles Elliot Norton born, author, scholar, social critic, and social reformer; many contemporaries considered him “the most cultivated man in America”

1838 – The London Protocol, an agreement reached between the three Great Powers (Britain, France and Russia), establishes creation of an internally autonomous, but tributary Greek state under Ottoman suzerainty

1849 – A Russian court sentences writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky to death for anti-government activities, but his sentence is later commuted to hard labor

1852 – English astronomer John Russell Hind discovers the asteroid 22 Kalliope

1855 – David Livingstone becomes the first European to see Victoria Falls in what is present-day Zambia-Zimbabwe

1864 – American Civil War: Union General William T. Sherman and his troops began their “March to the Sea”

1873 – W.C. Handy born, American composer called “father of the blues”

1886 – Arthur Krock born, American journalist who covered the tenures of eleven U.S. presidents; The New York Times Washington bureau chief and “In the Nation” columnist; won Pulitzer Prizes for Correspondence in 1935 and 1938, and a Special Citation in 1951

1889 – George S. Kaufman is born, American playwright, whose collaborations include You Can’t Take It With You, Dinner at Eight and The Man Who Came to Dinner

1895 –Paul Hindemith born, German composer, conductor and violinist

1896 – Joan Lindsay born, Australian author of Picnic at Hanging Rock

1899 – Mary Margaret McBride born, radio interview show host and writer; dubbed “the First Lady of Radio,” her popular program lasted over 40 years; she accepted advertising only for products she was willing to endorse from personal experience, turned down all tobacco and alcohol products, and “broke the color line” during WWII by bringing black interviewees on her show

Mary Margaret McBride interviewing Eleanor Roosevelt

1903 – Barbara McLean born, American film editor; she edited 62 films, including Mary Pickford’s early talkies, The Black Swan (1942), 12 O’Clock High (1949) and All About Eve (1950); six-time nominee for Academy Awards in editing, she won the 1944 Oscar for Best Editing for Wilson; her attitude was, “If you’re going to ask me, then listen to me,” and they did

1904 – English engineer John A. Fleming patents a thermionic valve (vacuum tube)

1907 – Oklahoma is admitted as the 46th state

1914 – The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States officially opens

1915 – Coca-Cola patents its prototype for a contoured bottle

1920 – Qantas, Australia’s national airline, is founded as Queensland and Northern
Territory Aerial Services Limited

One of the first single-engine planes used by Qantas

1933 – The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. establish diplomatic relations for the first time

1935 – Elizabeth Drew born, American author, journalist and political pundit; the Washington correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, she was also a panelist on Meet the Press, and made many appearances on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer; published 14 books, including On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (1994) an account of his first years in office, and Richard M. Nixon (2007)

1938 – The National Button Society starts National Button Day *

1945 – UNESCO Day * – UNESCO is founded, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

1945 – Lynn Avery Hunt born, American historian, author and academic; wrote several books on the French Revolution, including Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984); her 2007 work, Inventing Human Rights: A History, has been heralded as the most comprehensive analysis of the history of human rights

1948 – Bonnie Greer born in Chicago, playwright, novelist and broadcaster, who has lived in the UK since 1986, and became a British citizen in 1997; her plays include Munda Negra (1993), Dancing On Blackwater (1994), and the musical Marilyn and Ella (2005), based on Ella Fitzgerald’s exclusion by the color bar and Marilyn Monroe’s help in getting her employment at the Mocambo nightclub; her musical memoir of growing up in Chicago, Obama Music, was published in 2009

1952 – In the Peanuts comic strip, Lucy first holds a football for Charlie Brown

1954 – Andrea Barrett born, American novelist and short story writer; her story collection, Ship Fever, won the 1996 National Book Award for Fiction

1959 – The Sound of Music opens on Broadway

1964 – Valeria Bruni Tedeschi born, Italian-French screenwriter, actress and film director; her first film, It’s Easier for a Camel . . . won the 2003 Louis Delluc Prize for Best First Film; in 2013, her film, A Castle in Italy, was nominated for the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or

1969 – The U.S. Army announces that several soldiers are charged with the killing and subsequent cover-up of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam on March 16, 1968

1973 – NASA launches Skylab 3 carrying a crew of three astronauts from Cape Canaveral FL on an 84-day mission

1973 – U.S. President Nixon signs the Alaska Pipeline measure into law

1974 – Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie On Reggae Woman” is released

1981 – A vaccine for hepatitis B is approved

1985 – Colonel Oliver North was put in charge of the shipment of HAWK anti-aircraft missiles to Iran

1988 – Estonia’s parliament declares sovereignty for the Baltic republic

1988 – In the first open election in more than a decade, voters in Pakistan elect populist candidate Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister of Pakistan

1992 – The Hoxne Hoard is discovered by Eric Lawes in Hoxne, Suffolk

1995 – UNESCO adopts a Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, now celebrated as International Day for Tolerance *

1998 – The U.S. Supreme Court said that union members could file discrimination lawsuits against employers even when labor contracts require arbitration

2000 – Bill Clinton is the first serving U.S. president to visit Communist Vietnam

2001 – The movie Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone opens in the  UK and U.S.

2001 – U.S. Congress passes a law mandating airport screeners be federal employees

2004 – NASA’s unmanned “scramjet” X-43A reaches nearly 10 times the speed of sound above the Pacific Ocean

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