February 14th is

Valentine’s Day

National Donor Day *

California Oranges Day *

Ferris Wheel Day

Pet Theft Awareness Day *

Cream-Filled Chocolates Day

International Book Giving Day *

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MORE! Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass, and Charlotta Bass, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Ash Wednesday/Carnival: in Brazil, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinque, Panama, Saint Barthélemy, and Saint Martin

Lebanon –
Raki Hariri Memorial Day

Vietnam – Tet Holiday

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On This Day in HISTORY

842 – Charles the Bald and Louis the German swear the Oaths of Strasbourg, mutual pledges of allegiance, in French and German

1349 – Several hundred Jews are burned to death by mobs while the remaining Jews are forcibly removed from Strasbourg

1400 – Richard II of England dies, most probably from starvation, in Pontefract Castle, on the orders of Henry Bolingbroke

1502 – The Catholic Monarchs, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, issue a decree that Muslims in Granada refusing to convert to Catholicism must leave Spain

1530 – Spanish conquistadores, led by Nuño de Guzmán, overthrow and execute Tangaxuan II, the last independent Tarascan monarch in today’s central Mexico

Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán painted in the Codex Telleriano Remensis

1556 – During the reign of Roman Catholic Queen Mary I of England, who succeeded her Protestant brother Edward VI, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, is declared a heretic and degraded from holy orders; he is later burned at the stake

1602 – Francesco Cavalli born, Italian opera composer

1655 – The Mapuche under Clentaru, their elected military leader, rise up in insurrection against the Spanish (in today’s central Chile)

1760 – Richard Allen born enslaved, teaches himself to read and write; allowed by his master, a Methodist, to work odd jobs for pay, so he can buy his freedom, in 1777; becomes a Methodist preacher in 1784, but leaves church over its segregationist policies; co-founder of the Free African Society, a non-denominational mutual aid society in 1787; operates an Underground Railroad station, helping escaped slaves (1797-1831); founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816

 1778 – American sloop-of-war Ranger, commanded by John Paul Jones, receives a first official salute for America’s new flag, “Stars and Stripes,” from the French fleet at Quiberon Bay under Admiral Toussaint-Guillaume Picquet de la Motte

1803 – Moses Coates received a patent for the apple parer

1804 – Karađorđe leads the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottoman Empire

1813 – Alexander Dargomyzhsky born, Russian composer

1818 – Frederick Douglass born as a slave (he chose this day as his birthday, the exact date was unrecorded), escapes in 1838, and becomes an abolitionist leader and outstanding orator; author (his autobiography went through nine reprints in the first three years after publication); editor of The North Star, a major anti-slavery newspaper; and supporter of women’s suffrage

1819 – Christopher Sholes born, American inventor, developer of a successful typewriter

1829 – Solomon G. Brown born, works for Samuel Morse, helps to install the first Morse telegraph; becomes the first African American employee of the Smithsonian in 1852, and works his way up from laborer to a registrar in charge of transportation, receiving materials, and overseeing storage of animal specimens, for 54 years; Member of the House of Delegates for the District of Columbia (1871-1874)

1838 – Margaret E. Knight, American inventor, including a machine to fold and glue paper bags with flat bottoms

1847 – Anna Howard Shaw born, America minister and physician, one of the most influential leaders of the women’s suffrage movement

1849 – The first photograph of a serving U.S. President is taken by Matthew Brady of President James Polk

1859 – Oregon becomes the 33rd U.S. state

1870 – Esther Hobart Morris begins her tenure as the first female U.S. Justice of the Peace – ironically, she’s appointed to replace a judge resigning in protest over Wyoming’s passage of the women’s suffrage amendment to its state constitution in December 1869

1871 – Marion Mahoney Griffin, American architect/delineator, community planner, second woman graduate in architecture from MIT, chief renderer of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs (1895-1909)

1874 – Charlotta A. Spears Bass born, newspaper publisher and civil rights activist, works for the California Eagle newspaper in Los Angeles (1904-1951), taking over after the owner/editor dies – by 1925 it is the West Coast’s largest Black newspaper, circulation 60,000; first African American woman U.S. Vice Presidential candidate when the Progressive Party chooses her as their nominee

1882 – George Jean Nathan born, American editor, and drama critic

1889 – California Oranges Day * – in Los Angeles, the first shipment of California oranges are put in special cooled railroad cars for transport to the Eastern U.S.

1891 – Katherine Stinson born, fourth licensed U.S. woman pilot (1912); first woman to “loop the loop” (1915); first woman to fly in Asia, drawing crowd of 25,000 in Tokyo to watch 

1895 – Oscar Wilde’s final play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opens in London at the St. James Theatre

1899 – U.S. Congress approves voting machines for federal elections

1900 – Russia imposed tighter imperial control over Finland in response to an international petition for Finland’s freedom

1903 – The U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor was established

1912 – The first diesel engine submarine was commissioned in Groton, CT

1912 – Arizona is admitted as the 48th U.S. state

1920 – The League of Women Voters is founded in Chicago by Carrie Chapman Catt, and Maude Wood Park becomes its first president

1926 – Monetta J Sleet Jr. born, first African American to the journalism Pulitzer Prize, for Feature Photography in 1969, for his photograph of Coretta Scott King at her husband’s funeral; worked for Ebony Magazine (1955-1996) as a photographer, capturing images of  Billie Holiday, Muhammad Ali, Stevie Wonder, and many others

1929 – Seven gangsters who were rivals of Al Capone are killed in the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” Chicago IL

1936 – The first meeting of the National Negro Congress is convened in Chicago, starting a campaign for labor and civil rights; over 800 people, representing 500 organizations came

1940 – First porpoise born in captivity arrives at Marineland in Florida

1941 – Donna Edna Shalala, University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor (1988-1993), U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (1993-2001), president of the University of Miami (2001- 2015), awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008

1945 – Peru, Paraguay, Chile and Ecuador joined the United Nations

1946 – ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) is unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania, the world’s first general purpose electronic computer

1952 – Sushma Swaraj born, Indian politician and lawyer, India’s second woman to be Minister of External Affairs (currently, since 2014); elected seven times as a Member of Parliament; noted as one of India’s “best loved” politicians by the Wall Street Journal

1956 – Katharina Fritsch born, German sculptor, noted for installations and sculptures which present familiar objects in jarring ways, including a true-to-scale sculpture of an elephant, and Rattenkonig, a circle of black polyester rats standing over 8 feet high

1957 – Lionel Hampton’s only major musical work, “King David,” made its debut at New York’s Town Hall

1961 – Lawrencium, element 103, is first produced in Berkeley CA

1962 – First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy gives a White House hour on TV

1967 – Aretha Franklin records her song “Respect”

1968 – The fourth Madison Square Gardens building opens

1977 – Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” is released

1980 – Walter Cronkite announces his retirement from the CBS Evening News

1983 – A 6-year-old boy becomes the first person to receive heart and liver transplants in the same operation

1988 – Pet Theft Awareness Day *is launched by Last Chance for Animals; almost 2 million pets are stolen every year in the U.S. alone, so this program promotes  having pets micro-chipped or tattooed

1989 – Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini calls on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie because of his novel The Satanic Verses

1989 – The first satellite of the Global Positioning System (GPS) is placed in orbit

1989 – Union Carbide agrees to pay $470 million to the government of India in a court-ordered settlement of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak disaster

1997 – Astronauts on the space shuttle Discovery perform a series of spacewalks to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope

1998 – U.S. authorities officially announce that Eric Rudolph is a suspect in an abortion clinic bombing in Alabama

2003 – National Donor Day * is an educational initiative of  the U.S. Health and Human Services Division of Transplantation to encourage blood donors and organ donation registration

2011 – The TV game show “Jeopardy!” begins airing the first of three episodes pitting top-winning human Jeopardy champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings against an IBM computer named “Watson”

2012 – International Book Giving Day * is conceived by Amy Broadmoore and her son, launched with help from Zoe Toft, to collect and distribute books to disadvantaged children worldwide

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