March 14th is

International Ask A Question Day *

Learn About Butterflies Day

MOTH-er Day

National Pi Day
(3.14 etc.) *

Potato Chip Day

Science Education Day

International Day of Action for Rivers *

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MORE! Emily Murphy, Sylvia Beach and Diane Arbus, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Sikhism – New Year – 1 Chet Nanakshahi 550

Albania – Dita e Verës të Ri
(Summer Day)

Andorra – Constitution Day

Japan – White Day
(men respond to valentine gifts from women)

Liberia – Decoration Day

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines –
National Heroes Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

44 BC – Casca and Cassius decide, on the night before the Assassination of Julius Caesar, that Mark Antony should live

1489 – Caterina Cornaro, last Queen of Cyprus, goes into exile, after being forced to abdicate, and sell to the Republic of Venice the administration of Cyprus

1493 – Christopher Columbus writes a letter describing the indigenous people he encountered as “men of great deference and kindness”

1592 – Ultimate Pi Day: the largest correspondence between calendar dates and significant digits of pi since the introduction of the Julian calendar

Lady Philippa Speke, by unknown artist, dated 1592 –
Can you find the three Pi added to the picture?

1629 – A British Royal charter is granted to the Massachusetts Bay Colony

1681 – Georg Philipp Telemann born, notable German Baroque composer

1743 – The first American town hall meeting, at Boston’s Faneuil Hall

1794 –Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin

1804 – Johann Strauss I born, Austrian Romantic composer, popularized the waltz; his son, Johann Strauss II, would be known as “The Waltz King”

1815 – Josephine Lang born, German composer

1833 – Lucy Hobbs Taylor born, women’s rights advocate, first American woman to graduate from dental school

1836 – Isabella Mayson Beeton born, author, cookery columnist and journalist, “Mrs. Beeton” known for her 1861 book Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management

1851 – Anna C. Maxwell born, American nurse, served as superintendent for several nursing schools; involved in nursing in both the Spanish-American War and WWI, awarded the Medaille de l’Hygiene Publique by the French government for her work in WWI, one of the first women buried at Arlington National Cemetery

1854 – Paul Ehrlich born, German biologist and immunologist, shared 1908 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his contributions to immunology

1863 – Casey Jones born, American railroad engineer

1864 – Samuel Baker discovers another source of the Nile in East Africa, naming it Lake Albert Nyanza

1868 – Emily Murphy born, Canadian jurist, author, and activist, first female magistrate in Canada, one of the ‘Famous Five’ whose Persons Case establishes Canadian women as ‘persons’ under the law

1879 – Albert Einstein born in Germany, theoretical physicist; E = mc² called “the world’s most famous equation”; 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”

1887 – Sylvia Beach born, American ex-pat proprietor of the famous English-language bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare & Company, a gathering place for ‘Lost Generation’ Americans, like Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald; original publisher of James Joyce’s controversial novel Ulysses 

1891 – The submarine Monarch lays telephone cable along the bottom of the English Channel to prepare for the first telephone links across the Channel

1894 – Osa Leighty Johnson born, American documentary filmmaker, author and adventurer; with her husband, Martin, studies wildlife and peoples in East and Central Africa, South Pacific Islanders and aborigines of British North Borneo, creates feature films like Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Seas, Trailing Wild African Animals. Osa’s Four Years in Paradise, and Across the World with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson; her autobiography, I Married Adventure, was the best-selling non-fiction book of 1940; after her husband’s death, her show, The Big Game Hunt, debuts in 1952, the first TV wildlife series; The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum is in Chanute KS, her hometown

Osa Johnson with Wah-Wah the Gibbon

1900 – The 1900 Gold Standard Act establishes gold as the only standard for redeeming paper money, ending bimetallism (allowing silver to be exchanged for gold)

1902 – Margaret A. Hickey born, president of National Federation of Business and Professional Women (1944-46), represented the BPW at UN Conference in San Francisco (1945), chaired the Women’s Advisory Committee (1942) and served on and/or chaired many government groups, but never had policy-making opportunity

1903 – U.S. Senate ratifies the Hay-Herran Treaty to guarantee U.S. rights to build a canal at Panama, but the Colombian Senate rejects the treaty; on November 6, 1903, a deal is signed with the newly independent country of Panama

1903 – President Theodore Roosevelt establishes the first U.S. national bird sanctuary to protect pelicans and herons nesting on Pelican Island, near Sebastian FL

1914 – Henry Ford announces the new continuous motion method to assemble cars, which reduces the time to make a car from 12½ hours to 93 minutes

1921 – Ada Louise Huxtable, American author and architecture critic and preservationist, won the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, in 1970

1923 – Diane Arbus born, unique American photographer, noted for photographing marginalized people; the first American photographer whose work was displayed at the influential Venice Biennale

1923 – President Harding becomes the first U.S. President to file an income tax report

1936 – Adolf Hitler tells a crowd of 300,000 that Germany’s only judge is God and itself

1939 – Hungary occupies the Carpatho-Ukraine, and Slovakia declares its independence

1939 – The Republic of Czechoslovakia is dissolved, leading to the Nazi occupation

1943 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first President to fly in an airplane while in office

1947 – The U.S. signs a 99-year lease on naval bases in the Philippines

1947 – Moscow announces 890, 532 German POWs have been held in the U.S.S.R.

1948 – New laws are proposed allowing British women married to foreigners to automatically retain their citizenship; only the status of women who choose to formally renounce their British citizenship would change

1958 – Perry Como’s “Catch A Falling Star” is certified as the first gold single

1960 – Heidi B. Hammel born, American planetary astronomer; vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), which operates world-class astronomical observatories like the the National Solar Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope; she is the interdisciplinary scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in October 2018; 2002 recipient of the Carl Sagan Medal for communication enhancing the public’s understanding of planetary science

1976 – Egypt formally abrogates a 1971 Treaty Friendship and Cooperation with USSR

1977 – Heart releases their Little Queen album, featuring “Barracuda”

1979 – The Census Bureau reports 95% of all Americans are or will be married

1983 – OPEC agrees to cut its oil prices by 15% for the first time in its 23-year history

1989 – Imported assault guns banned in the U.S. under  President George H.W. Bush

1991 – The “Birmingham Six,” imprisoned for 16 years for their alleged part in an IRA pub bombing, are set free after a British court agrees the police fabricated evidence

1991 – Bolivian interior minister Guillermo Capobianco resigns after U.S. officials accuse him of receiving money from drug traffickers

1995 – American astronaut Norman Thagard becomes the first American to enter space aboard a Russian rocket

1996 – U.S. President Bill Clinton commits $100 million for an anti-terrorism pact with Israel to track down and root out Islamic militants

1998 – The first International Day of Action for Rivers * is organized by International Rivers Network, a volunteer group founded in 1995 to link river protection advocacy groups with each other, and with the communities which depend on rivers for sustenance

2002 – Five Scottish appeals court judges uphold conviction of a Libyan intelligence agent for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, ruling unanimously that Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi is guilty of bringing down the plane over Lockerbie, Scotland

2003 – Marilee G. Adams starts Ask A Question Day * on Albert Einstein’s birthday to encourage everyone to keep asking questions

2004 – Socialists score a dramatic upset win in Spain’s general election, unseating conservatives stung by charges they’d provoked the Madrid terror bombings by supporting the U.S.-led war in Iraq

2005 – A million people protest in Beirut, Lebanon, demanding Syrian withdrawal

2008 – In Tibet, when police try to disperse a peaceful demonstration in Lhasa led by Buddhist monks, it escalates into violence, which spreads to other provinces; Chinese authorities close the region to foreign media; hundreds of police and Tibetan protesters are injured or killed; due to lack of press access, numbers vary and cannot be confirmed

2009 – National Pi Day (math Pi = 3.14159265 etc.) * started by Dan Hellerich, is recognized by the U.S. House of Representatives

2014 – The city of Paris announces it will run public transportation systems free for three days in an effort to combat air pollution; unseasonably warm temperatures had caused heavy smog and high levels of pollution

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