December 3rd is

Peppermint Latte Day

Roof over Your Head Day

International Day for Persons with Disabilities *

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MORE! Galileo, Anna Freud and Joseph Conrad, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Canada – Toronto ON: Fuyu Matsuri
(Japanese Canadian Winter Festival)

Nepal – Urdhyauli Parwa 
(Harvest Festival)

Spain – Salamanca:
Fiesta de San Francisco Javier

Sri Lanka – Unduwap Full Moon Poya

Turkmenistan – Good Neighbourliness Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

1468 – Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano succeed their father, Piero de Medici, as rulers of Florence, Italy

Lorenzo il Magnifico admiring Michelangelo’s Faun by Ottavio Vannini

1557 – The first Covenant of Scottish Protestants forms

1621 – Galileo develops the telescope

1678 – Edmund Halley receives an MA from Queen’s College, Oxford.

1684 – Ludvig Baron Holberg, founder of Danish & Norwegian literature, is born

1685 – Charles II bars Jews from settling in Stockholm, Sweden

1729 – Padre Antonio Francisco Soler born, Spanish composer and member of the Order of Saint Jerome; chapel master at the Spanish royal court at El Escorial

1755 – Gilbert Stuart born, American portrait painter

Self-Portrait, by Gilbert Stuart

1792 – The trial of France’s King Louis XVI begins which will lead to his execution

1795 – Rowland Hill, who would introduce 1st adhesive postage stamp in 1840, born

1803 – Hector Berlioz born, French composer

1818 – Illinois becomes the 21st U.S. state

1833 – Oberlin College in Ohio opened as the first truly coeducational school of higher education in the United States.

1834 – The Zollverein (German Customs Union) begins first regular census in Germany

1835 – The Manufacturer Mutual Fire Insurance Company of Rhode Island issues the first fire insurance policy

1838 – Octavia Hill born, leader of the British Open-Space Movement, activist for improving the lives of the working poor; co-founder of the British National Trust

1838 – Cleveland Abbe born, American meteorologist and time zone advocate; director of the Cincinnati OH Observatory; developed telegraphic weather reports and daily weather maps; “father” of the National Weather Service

1842 – Ellen Swallow Richards born, American chemist; first woman admitted to MIT; pioneer in sanitary engineering and first to apply chemistry to the study of nutrition

1842 – Phoebe Apperson Hearst born, American feminist and philanthropist; benefactor and director of the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association, which had 26 schools in San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake; first woman Regent of the University of California, Berkeley; founder of the University of California Museum of Anthropology; mother of William Randolph Hearst

1847 – Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delaney begin publishing the North Star, an anti-slavery paper

1849 – California asks to be admitted to the Union as a free state

1857 – Joseph Conrad born in Poland, British novelist; Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim

1857 – Karl Koller born in Austria, Ophthalmologist who introduced the use of cocaine as a local anesthetic for eye surgery, which greatly simplified the delicate surgery; moved to the U.S in 1888; honored by the American Ophthalmological Society

1861 – In his first annual message President Lincoln argues that “labor is prior to, and independent of capital. Capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed…”

1883 – Anton von Webern is born, Austrian composer

1895 – Anna Freud born in Austria, psychoanalyst; pioneer in child psychoanalysis

1901 – In the State of the Union, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt asks Congress to curb the power of trusts “within reasonable limits”

1904 – Charles Dillon Perrine discovers Jovian moon Himalia at Lick Observatory

1906 – U.S. Supreme Court orders Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) leaders extradited to Idaho for trial in the murder case of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg, who was assassinated by one-time union member Harry Orchard, a paid informant for the Cripple Creek Mine Owners’ Association; the IWW leaders are found not guilty in two trials 

1908 – Edward Elgar’s 1st Symphony in A premieres

1910 – Georges Claude unveils the first modern neon lighting at the Paris Motor Show

1911 – Nino Rota, Italian composer and conductor; noted for film scores

1915 – The U.S. expels German attaches on spy charges

1925 – “Concerto in F,” by George Gershwin, world premiere at New York’s Carnegie Hall, with Gershwin at the piano

1927 – Putting Pants on Philip, the first Laurel and Hardy film, is released

1931 – Alka Seltzer is sold for the first time

1937 – Stephen Rubin born, English shoe manufacturer of Reebok and Adidas

1938 – Sally Shlaer born, American mathematician, software engineer; co-developer of the Shlaer-Mellor method of software development

1942 – Alice Schwarzer born, German journalist, feminist, author and founder-publisher of the feminist journal EMMA

1947 – The Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire opens at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater

1948 – The House Un-American Activities Committee announces the “Pumpkin Papers” produced by former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers – they are microfilm of supposed secret documents he claims he hid inside a pumpkin on his Maryland farm

1954 – William Walton’s opera “Troilus & Cressida,” premieres in London

1954 – Grace Andreacchi born, American novelist, poet and playwright; Music for Glass Orchestra, Raphael and Tobias, Songs for a Mad Queen

1960 – The musical Camelot debuts at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway

1964 – Free Speech Movement: Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest of the UC Regents’ decision to forbid protests on UC property.

1965 – The Beatles album Rubber Soul is released

1967 – At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South African,  Christiaan Barnard’s team performs the first human heart transplant on 53-year-old Louis Washkansky)

1967 – Marie Françoise Ouedraogo born, Burkinabé mathematician and academic in the Mathematics Department of the University of Ouagadougou; president of the African Mathematical Union Commission on Women in Mathematics in Africa (2009-present)

1973 – NASA’s Pioneer 10 sends back the first close-up images of Jupiter

1979 – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini becomes the first Supreme Leader of Iran

1984 – A cloud of toxic gas escapes from a pesticide plant run by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India, killing over 4,000 people

1992 – First International Day of Persons with Disabilities * is proclaimed by the United Nations on anniversary of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981)

1994 – The PlayStation is released in Japan

1997 – In Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, representatives from 121 countries sign the Ottawa Treaty prohibiting manufacture and deployment of anti-personnel landmines, but the United States, People’s Republic of China, and Russia do not sign the treaty

2002 – Christina Aguilera’s album “Stripped” is released in the U.S

2005 – XCOR Aerospace makes the first manned rocket delivery of U.S. Mail in Kern County CA

2014 – The Japanese space agency, JAXA, launches the space explorer Hayabusa 2 from the Tanegashima Space Center on a six-year round trip mission to an asteroid to collect rock samples

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