February 17th is

Cabbage Day

Café au Lait Day

My Way Day

Public Science Day

PTA Founders Day

World Pangolin Day

World Human Spirit Day *

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MORE! Huey Newton, Mary F. Berry and Barack Obama, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Lunar New Year/Chinese New Year/Spring Festival/Tet Second Day in: China, Hong Kong, Macao, Malaysia, Mongolia, Taiwan and Vietnam

Australia – Canberra:
Dîner en Blanc Canberra

Chile – Puerto Natales:
Reeditan Film Festival (free day)

Japan – Okayama: Saidai-ji Eyo Hadaka
(Shinto – Men’s Purification Ritual)

Kosovo – Dita e Pavarësisë
(Independence Day)

Libya – Revolution Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

1600 – Giordano Bruno, ‘free thought’ hero, is burned at the stake as a heretic in the ironically-named Campo de’ Fiori (Field of Flowers) in Rome, and all of his works are put on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Vatican’s Holy Office

1621 – Myles Standish is appointed first commander of the English Plymouth Colony (now Massachusetts)

1653 – Arcangelo Corelli born, Italian violinist and composer

1665 – Rudolph Jacob Camerarius born, German botanist; identifies the stamens and pistils as male and female organs

1801 –U.S. House of Representatives resolves an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr by choosing Jefferson as president and Burr, vice president

1843 – A. Montgomery Ward born, American mail-order merchant

1848 – Louisa Lawson born, Australian writer, women’s rights activist; takes over as  publisher of radical pro-federation newspaper The Republican, and later launches The Dawn, Australia’s first journal produced by an all-woman staff; a leading figure in the Australian woman suffrage movement, called ‘The Mother of Suffrage in New South Wales’

1854 – The British Empire recognizes the Boer Orange Free State’s independence

1863 – A group of citizens in Geneva found an International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, which later becomes the International Committee of the Red Cross

1864 – ‘Banjo’ Paterson born, Australian poet, journalist and songwriter

1870 – The U.S. Congress passes a resolution to readmit Mississippi to the union, on the condition that it never changes its constitution to disenfranchise Blacks

1874 – Thomas J. Watson Sr. born, American industrialist who built IBM

1876 – Canned sardines, packed in oil, sold in the U.S. for the first time

1877 – Isabelle Eberhardt born, Swiss explorer and author, travels extensively in North Africa, often wearing male clothing for the freedom it allows her; dies in a desert flash flood in 1904

1877 – Andre Maginot born, French statesman; ‘Maginot Line’ is named for him

1877 – Isidora Sekulić born, Serbian author, adventurer and polyglot, extensive traveler; known for strong female characters in her fiction

1879 – Dorothy Canfield Fisher born, author, educational reformer and social activist, brought the Montessori Method to the United States

1881 – Mary Carson Breckinridge born, American nurse-midwife; Frontier Nursing Service founder; started family care centers in the Appalachian Mountains

1897 – Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst hold the first convocation of the National Organization of Mothers (now the Parent Teacher Association AKA the PTA), 2,000 people attend.

1888 – Dorothy Kenyon born, American attorney, feminist and civil liberties activist; in 1950, accused of communist affiliations by Senator McCarthy, she called him “an unmitigated liar” and “a coward to take shelter in the cloak of Congressional immunity” then responded, “I am not, and never have been, a supporter of, a member of, or a sympathizer with any organization known to me to be, or suspected by me, of being controlled or dominated by Communists.” A NY Times editorial and support from Eleanor Roosevelt and other respected public figures made McCarthy back off, and the charges are dismissed

1904 – Madama Butterfly premières at La Scala in Milan

1905 – Rózsa Politzer Péter born, Hungarian mathematician, called the ‘founding mother of recursion theory’ because her research papers helped found recursive function theory as a distinct and separate area of mathematical research

1912 – Andre Norton born Alice Mary Norton, author, used “Andre” as more salable pen name in science fiction and fantasy, 50 years later she is named “Grand Dame of Science and Fantasy”

1913 – The Armory Show opens in New York, a landmark exhibit displaying works of artists who are to become some of the most influential painters of the early 20th century

1918 – Jacqueline Lelong-Ferrand born, French mathematician noted for work on conformal representation theory, potential theory and Riemannian manifolds; she proved the compactness of the group of conformal mappings of a non-spherical compact Riemannian manifold, resolving a conjecture of André Lichnerowicz

1919 – The Ukrainian People’s Republic asks the Triple Entente (alliance of Great Britain, France and the Russian Empire) and the US for help fighting the Bolsheviks

1933 – Wisconsin Senator John Blaine sponsors the Blaine Act, which is passed by the U.S. Senate, initiating the repeal of the 18^th Amendment (Prohibition)

1938 – Mary Frances Berry born, American historian, lawyer and civil rights activist; first black woman to head a major research university as chancellor of the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus in 1976; Jimmy Carter appoints her to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1980: when Ronald Reagan comes into office in 1981, he tries to fire Berry and dismantle the commission, but she sues the Reagan Administration successfully in federal court to retain her seat

1942 – Huey P. Newton born, American activist; co-founder of the Black Panthers

1947 – The Voice of America begins broadcasting to the Soviet Union

1957 – Loreena McKennitt born, Canadian singer-songwriter

1959 – First weather satellite, Vanguard 2, launches to measure cloud-cover distribution

1964 – In Wesberry v. Sanders, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that congressional districts have to be approximately equal in population

1965 – The Ranger 8 probe launches to photograph the Mare Tranquillitatis region of the Moon in preparation for the manned Apollo missions; Mare Tranquillitatis, the “Sea of Tranquility” becomes the site chosen for the Apollo 11 lunar landing

1969 – Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan record “Girl from the North Country” in Nashville

1972 – Cumulative sales of the Volkswagen Beetle exceed those of the Ford Model T

1972 – President Nixon leaves for his visit to China

1976 – The Eagles ‘Greatest Hits’ album is released

1996 – World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov beats the Deep Blue supercomputer in a six-game chess match in Philadelphia PA

1996 – NASA’s Discovery Program begins as the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft lifts off on the first mission ever to orbit and land on an asteroid, 433 Eros

1997 – The Virginia House of Delegates votes unanimously to retire the state song, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia” which glorifies slavery

2002 – New regulations to go into effect requiring German pig farmers to spend 20 seconds a day with each pig, 10 seconds in the morning and 10 seconds in the afternoon

2003 – World Human Spirit Day * is launched by Michael Levy of Point of Life to promote a connection between people during two minutes of silent meditation

2005 – President George W. Bush names John Negroponte as the first U.S. national intelligence director

2008 – Kosovo declares its independence as the Republic of Kosovo

2009 – President Barack Obama signs $757 billion economic stimulus package into law

2011 – In Bahrain, Libya, security forces launch a pre-dawn raid on protesters camped out around the Pearl Monument near the financial district; four protesters are killed and many more injured

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