January 24th is

Cell Phone Recycling Day *

Belly Laugh Day

Compliment Day

Eskimo Pie Day *

Lobster Thermidor Day

Peanut Butter Day

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MORE! Hadrian, Indira Gandhi and Thurgood Marshall, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Romania – Ziua Micii Uniri
(Principalities Unification Day)

Sweden –Lapland:
Kiruna Snow Festival

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On This Day in HISTORY

AD 41 – In Rome, Claudius is proclaimed Emperor after his sadistic despotic nephew Caligula is assassinated by his own disgruntled Praetorian Guards

AD 76 – Hadrian born, Roman Emperor, wall-builder

Hadrian’s Wall, near Scottish border

1287 – Richard de Bury born, English Bishop of Durham, author and one of the first book collectors in Britain; his books series the Philobiblon is considered the earliest to discuss librarianship in-depth

1438 – A potpourri of Popes and the battle for papal supremacy: the Council of Basel suspends Pope Eugene IV, who convokes the rival Council of Ferrara, loses a lot of his power base, makes concessions but reneges; the Basel council declares him a heretic, then elects Felix V as an antipope, while trying but failing to bridge the Great Schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches; Emperor Frederick III commands the city of Basel to expel the Council, so it reconvenes in Lausanne, but lose too much credibility, so antipope abdicates; then Eugene dies, and they throw their dwindling support to his successor,  Pope Nicholas V

1670 – William Congreve born, English Restoration dramatist; Love for Love, The Way of the World

1679 – English King Charles II dissolves the Cavalier Parliament in the middle of the Exclusion Crisis over revelation that his brother James, heir to the throne, is a Catholic

1712 – Frederick the Great born, King of Prussia for 64 years; military leader and theorist; reorganizes the Prussian bureaucracy, judiciary and civil service, giving opportunities to men not of the nobility to serve as judges and bureaucrats; extends freedom of the press; patron of the arts, a gifted musician and composer of sonatas, he also corresponded regularly with key figures of the French Enlightenment, but didn’t care much for a corresponding revival of German culture; he did, however, enthusiastically destroy large areas of natural habitat to create more farmland and space for immigrants, regarding land in its natural state as useless and barbarous

1732 – Pierre Beaumarchais born, French playwright; his plays Le Barbier de Séville, and Le Mariage de Figaro became the basis for the operas by Rossini and Mozart

1776 – E. T. A. Hoffmann born, Prussian Romantic author and playwright, whose stories inspired the ballets The Nutcracker and Coppélia, and an opera, The Tales of Hoffman; also composed vocal and instrumental music

1817 – Argentine Grand Marshal Juan Gregorio de Las Heras of the Army of the Andes leads his troops across the Andes mountains at Uspallata Pass into Chile during the campaign to free Chile from the Spanish Empire

1835 – Slaves converted to Islam rise up in the Malē revolt in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, inspired by their Muslin teachers and stories about the Haitian Revolution, but their plans are discovered by the authorities just before the revolt begins, and the much better-armed soldiers put down the revolt; but continuing concerns about a recurrence lead to repression of Islamic conversions; the slave trade is abolished in Brazil in 1851

1848 – James W. Marshall discovers a gold nugget at Sutter’s Mill in northern California, setting off the gold rush of ’49

1857 – The University of Calcutta founded, first fully fledged university in South Asia

1862 – Edith Wharton born, American novelist and short story writer; Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence

1864 – Marguerite Durand born, French journalist, actress and leading suffragist; founder of the feminist daily newspaper, La Fronde, exclusively run by women, advocated for women’s rights, including admission to the Bar association and the École des Beaux-Arts; during the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, she organized the Congress for the Right of Women; helped to organize several trade unions for working women; she gave her enormous collection of papers to the French government in 1931, which opened the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand in Paris, still one of the world’s best sources for research on feminism and women’s history

Cartoon of Marguerite Durand and her pet lion Tigre, and a front page of La Fronde

1882 – Harold Babcock born, American astronomer

1888 – Ernst Heinkel born, German rocket designer

1888 – ‘Vicki’ Hedwig Baum born, Austrian novelist, best known for Menschen im Hotel, published in English as Grand Hotel

1899 – Humphrey O’Sullivan patents the rubber heel

1900 – During the 2^nd Boer War, the Boers stop British attempts to break the Siege of Ladysmith at the Battle of Spion Kop

1908 – In England, the first Boy Scout troop is organized by Robert Baden-Powell

1910 – Doris Haddock born, American political activist who at the age of 88, begins a walk of over 3,200 miles (5,140 km) across the U.S. advocating for campaign finance reform. She completed her walk almost 14 months later at the age of 90

1911 – Muir Mathieson born, Scottish conductor and composer

1915 – Robert Motherwell born, American abstract painter

The Three Clowns, by Robert Motherwell

1916 – Britain’s Parliament passes the Military Service Act, after the complicated ‘Derby Scheme’ proves too labor-intensive to be workable; the new act specifies that men aged 18 to 41 were liable to be called up for service in the army unless they were married, widowed with children, serving in the Royal Navy, a minister of religion, or working in a number of reserved occupations

1916 – In Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co., the U.S. Supreme Court declares the federal income tax constitutional

1918 – Gottfried von Einem born, Austrian composer

1920 – Eskimo Pies * are patented by Christian K. Nelson, originally as ‘I-Scream Bars’

1924 – St. Petersburg, Russia, renamed Leningrad; it’s St. Petersburg again as of 1991

1925 – Maria Tallchief born, first major American prima ballerina and first Native American prima ballerina; Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and New York City Ballet

1926 – Ruth Asawa born, American sculptor, passionate activist for art education and a driving force behind the San Francisco School of Arts, now renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of Arts

1928 – Desmond Morris born, English zoologist and sociobiology author; The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal

1933 – The 20th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution is ratified, changing the beginning and end of terms for all elected federal offices

1936 – Benny Goodman and his orchestra record “Stompin’ at the Savoy”

1942 – Abie’s Irish Rose debuts on NBC radio

1946 – The General Assembly passes its first resolution establishing the UN Atomic Energy Commission

1952 – Vincent Massey is the first Canadian-born governor-general of Canada

1966 – Indira Gandhi is sworn as the first woman Prime Minister of India

1972 – The U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws that denied welfare benefits to people who had resided in a state for less than a year

1980 – The United States announces its intention to sell arms to China

1985 – Penny Harrington, the first U.S. woman police chief of a major city, assumes her duties as head of the Portland OR force of 940 officers and staff

1986 – The Voyager 2 space probe flies past Uranus, coming within 50,679 miles of the seventh planet of the solar system

1990 – Japan launches the first probe to be sent to the Moon since 1976, a small satellite is placed in lunar orbit

1993 – Thurgood Marshall dies at age 84, first African-American Supreme Court Justice and civil rights icon; as the NAACP’s top attorney, he won 29 of the 32 civil-rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, including the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education which ended segregation in U.S. public schools

1995 – The prosecution gives its opening statement at the O.J. Simpson murder trial

1995 – Van Halen releases their album Balance

2000 – The U.S. Supreme Court upholds a Missouri law that limits the contributions that individuals could donate to a candidate during a single election (Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC).  Justice John Paul Stevens’ concurrence questioned more than two decades of campaign finance jurisprudence, stating: “Money is property; it is not speech.”

2003 – The new federal Department of Homeland Security opens; Tom Ridge is sworn in as its secretary

2017 – Cell Phone Recycling Day * is launched (also called Mobile Phone Recycling Day) by the Jane Goodall Institute to inspire us to recycle used electronics, especially phones – for more information:  http://www.mobilerecyclingday.org/#about

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