December 19th is

A Christmas Carol Day *

Evergreen Day

Hard Candy Day

Oatmeal Muffin Day

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MORE!  Thomas Paine, Mrs. Fiske and Robert Ripley, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Anguilla –
Heroes and Heroines Day

India – Goa:
Goa Liberation Day

Serbia –Sveti Nikola

Ukraine –
Saint Nicholas Day (Orthodox)

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On This Day in HISTORY

211 – Publius Septimius Geta, co-emperor of Rome, is lured to come without his bodyguards to meet his brother Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Caracalla), to discuss a possible reconciliation. When he arrives, the Praetorian Guard murders him and he dies in the arms of his mother, Julia Domna

1154 – Henry II is crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey

1606 – The Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery depart England carrying settlers who found, at Jamestown, Virginia, first of the 13 colonies that became the U. S.

1699 – William Bowyer born, English printer, pamphleteer, and editor; edited and published the New Testament in Greek, with notes; dubbed “the learned printer”

1714 – John Winthrop born, American mathematician, physicist and astronomer; Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard College (1738-1779)

1732 – Benjamin Franklin publishes the first Poor Richard’s Almanac

1776 – Thomas Paine publishes the first of a series of pamphlets in The Pennsylvania Journal entitled “The American Crisis”

1777 – General George Washington leads his army of about 11,000 men to Valley Forge PA to camp for the winter

1783 – Charles Julien Brianchon born, French mathematician, chemist, and artillery officer; after serving as a lieutenant in Napoleon’s artillery, he became a professor at the  Artillery School of the Royal Guard at Vincennes; notable for his proof of Brianchon’s theorem, related to Pascal’s theorem

1814 – Edwin Stanton born, U.S. Secretary of War under President Lincoln

1820 – Mary Livermore born, American journalist, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist; she worked for the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War in Chicago, as nurse, and an organizer, including helping with the great 1863 Chicago fair, which raised nearly $100,000 to aid Union Soldiers and the war effort; after the war, she was the founding editor and contributor of the Agitator, a newspaper which merged with the Woman’s Journal when she moved to Boston, supporting the women’s suffrage and temperance movements. She also appeared on the lecture circuit, traveling 25,000 miles (40,000 km) a year, and speaking five nights a week for five months of the year.

1825 – George Frederick Bristow born, American composer, conductor and violinist; advocate for American music

1828 – U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun pens The South Carolina Exposition and Protest, denouncing the Tariff Act of 1828, which increased tariffs on goods that competed with industries in the northern U.S. states while increasing costs on British goods imported by Southern states, and upsetting their balance of trade with Great Britain, one of the biggest customers for Southern cotton – Calhoun introduced his ‘Doctrine of Nullification’ – his claim that a state has the right to reject federal laws, or to secede from the union

1842 – Hawaii’s independence is recognized by the U.S.

1843 – A Christmas Carol Day * – A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is published for the first time, in England

1865 – Minnie Maddern Fiske born, ‘Mrs. Fiske’ a leading American actress who spearheaded the fight against the Theatrical Syndicate which controlled booking of all U.S. top theatrical attractions from 1896 to 1910, and introduced American audiences to Henrik Ibsen’s plays, beginning with Nora in A Doll’s House

1871 – Albert L. Jones patents corrugated paper

1875 – Mileva Marić born, Serbian mathematician; the only woman among Albert Einstein’s fellow students at Zürich’s Polytechnic, and the second woman to finish a full program of study at the Department of Mathematics and Physics; she became Einstein’s first wife; their first child, a daughter, died in infancy, and one of their two sons was diagnosed with schizophrenia

1875 – Carter G. Woodson, African-American historian and author, a pioneer in the study of black American history; founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History; in 1926, he launched the precursor of Black History Month, “Negro History Week”

1875 – Grace M. Bareis born, American mathematician; first person to earn a doctorate degree in mathematics from Ohio State University in 1909; a founding member of the Mathematical Association of America; Ohio State has awarded the annual “Grace M. Bareis Mathematical Prize” since 1949

1895 –Ingeborg Refling Hagen born, Norwegian author, poet, teacher and anti-fascist activist who feigned insanity to get out of prison after she was arrested for opposing the Nazi regime in 1942

1900 – Margaret Brundage born, American illustrator for pulp magazine Weird Tales

Weird Tales September 1941 cover by Margaret Brundage

1903 – The Williamsburg Bridge opens in New York City, the largest suspension bridge in the world (until 1924), also the first major suspension bridge using steel towers to support its main cable

1906 – Leonid Brezhnev born, leader of the USSR as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (1964-1982)

1910 – Jean Genet born, French novelist, playwright and political activist; in his early life, he was a vagabond, petty thief, and prostitute, convicted of lewd conduct, but was aided by Jean Cocteau. Cocteau helped get his first novel Notre Dame des Fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers) published, and joined Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso in successfully petitioning the French President to get Genet’s conviction set aside. Notable for his play, The Maids, and his support of the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Yasser Arafat, and his essays protesting police brutality toward Algerians in Paris

1915 – Édith Piaf born, French singer-songwriter-actress

1918 – Robert Ripley begins his “Believe It or Not” column in the New York Globe

1920 – David Susskind born, pioneering American TV producer, and talk show host

1924 – The last Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost is sold in London, England

1928 – Eve Bunting born in Northern Ireland, prolific American author; Coffin on a Case won 1993 Edgar Award for Best Juvenile from the Mystery Writers of America

1932 – BBC World Service begins broadcasting as the BBC Empire Service

1940 – Phil Ochs born, American singer-songwriter – “Draft Dodger Rag” “What Are You Fighting For?” and “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”

1941 – Maurice ‘Moe’ White born, American singer-songwriter-producer-bandleader, founder of the band Earth, Wind & Fire

1944 – Richard Leakey, Kenyan paleoanthropologist and conservationist

1949 – Orna Berry born, Israeli scientist; first woman Chief Scientist and head of industrial research and development for the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labour (1996-2000)

1950 – Eleanor J. Hill born, American attorney; Department of Defense Inspector General (1995-1999); awarded the DOD Distinguished Service Medal; in 2010, she began serving on The Constitution Project’s Guantanamo Task Force to investigate detainee treatment

1957 – The Music Man opens on Broadway

1960 – Neil Sedaka releases “Calendar Girl”

https://youtu.be/6-ym9EjBH2E

1961 – Judgment at Nuremberg premieres in New York

1969 – Aziza Mustafa Zadeh born, Azerbaijani composer-performer, known for her fusion of jazz and Azerbaijani mugam 

1972 – Apollo 17, the last of the Apollo program’s manned lunar landings, splashes down in the Pacific

1974 – Nelson Rockefeller is sworn in as Vice President of the United States under President Gerald Ford under the provisions of the twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution

1980 – Nine to Five, starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, opens

1984 – A British-Chinese accord will return Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997

1986 – Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh is appointed to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal

1986 – The Soviet Union announces it is freeing dissident Andrei Sakharov from internal exile and pardoning his wife, Yelena Bonner

1989 – U.S. troops invade Panama to overthrow the regime of General Noriega

1995 – The United States Government restores federal recognition to the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi Native American tribe

1997 – The movie Titanic opens in American theaters

https://youtu.be/zCy5WQ9S4c0

1998 – President Clinton is impeached by the House of Representatives, and will face a Senate trial

2000 – The U.N. Security Council votes to impose sanctions on Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers unless they close all terrorist training camps and surrender U.S. embassy bombing suspect Osama bin Laden

2005 – Afghanistan’s first democratically elected parliament in over 30 years convenes

2008 – U.S. President George W. Bush signs a $17.4 billion package of loans to bail out ailing auto makers General Motors and Chrysler

2012 – Park Geun-hye is elected, the first female president of South Korea

2013 – Spacecraft Gaia is launched by the European Space Agency
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