March 22nd is

Bavarian Cream Crepes Day

World Water Day *

Data Innovation Day

Goof-Off Day

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MORE! Katherine Jones, Jessie Sampter and Deborah Bull, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Albania & Kazakhstan –
Persian New Day

Germany – Ravensburg:
Die Burg Film Festival

India – Bihar: Bihar Day

Puerto Rico –
Día de la Abolición de la Esclavitud *
(Emancipation from slavery day)

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On This Day in HISTORY

871 – Battle of Marton: Æthelred of Wessex defeated by a Danelaw Viking invasion force

1394 – Ulugh Beg born, Persian astronomer and mathematician

1508 – Ferdinand II of Aragon commissions Amerigo Vespucci as chief navigator of the Spanish Empire

Waldseemüller 1508 world map

1599 – Anthony van Dyck born, Flemish-English painter and etcher

1615 – Katherine Boyle Jones born, Vicountess of Ranelagh, Irish scientific and political philosopher; member of the Hartlib Circle, a correspondence network which discussed and influenced issues of agricultural and scientific innovation, developments in mathematics and medicine, and educational reform, and the Great Tew Circle, a group concerned with literary and religious matters; her correspondence with her brother, chemist Robert Boyle, shows she had considerable impact on his work, and her notebooks show the results of her researches in medicine and chemistry

Katherine Boyle Jones, Vicountess of Ranelagh

1621 – The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony sign a peace treaty with Massasoit of the Wampanoags

1630 – The Massachusetts Bay Colony outlaws possession of cards and dice

1638 – Anne Hutchinson expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious dissent

1712 – Edward Moore born, English playwright; The Foundling and The Gamester

1739 – Nader Shah occupies Delhi in India and sacks the city, stealing the jewels of the Peacock Throne

1765 – The British Parliament passes the Stamp Act that introduces a tax to be levied directly on its American colonies

1784 – The Emerald Buddha is moved to Wat Phra Kaew, Thailand

1785 – Adam Sedgwick born, English scientist, pioneer in Geology

1814 – Thomas Crawford born, American sculptor; “Freedom” figure atop Capitol dome

Freedom, Capitol dome statue, by Thomas Crawford

1822 – Ahmed Cevdet Pasha born, Ottoman sociologist, historian, statesman and jurist; Head of the Mecelle Commission, which issues the Civil Code of the Ottoman Empire in sixteen volumes of civil law; family law is left as the domain of Islamic religious law

1829 – In the London Protocol, the three protecting powers (United Kingdom, France and Russia) establish the borders of Greece

1855 – Dorothy Tennant born, Lady Stanley, British Victorian neoclassicist painter and author of several books, some which she also illustrated; noted for London Street Arabs (1890); married to explorer Henry Morton Stanley, and edited his autobiography

Street Arabs at Play – 1890, by Dorothy Tennant

1868 – Robert Andrews Millikan born, American physicist, 1923 Nobel Prize for Physics for work on measuring elementary electronic charge, and on the photoelectric effect

1873 – When petitions are brought to the Spanish National Assembly, it bans slavery in Puerto Rico * ; slave owners are given monetary compensation for each slave, but for the next three years slaves are still required to work for their former owners

1882 – U.S. outlaws polygamy

1883 – Jessie Sampter born, American educator, poet and activist; leading educator for Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America; advocate for pacifism, Zionism, social justice and assisting Yemenite Jews, especially women and girls

1895 –Auguste and Louis Lumiere show their first movie – the one-minute Employees Leaving the Lumiere Factory, generally regarded as the first public display of a movie projected onto a screen – to an invited audience in Paris

https://youtu.be/DEQeIRLxaM4

1899 – Ruth Page born, American ballerina and choreographer, began ballet lessons in 1919; first American to be accepted into the Ballets Russes; noted as choreographer for Frankie and Johnny (1938), The Merry Widow, Billy Sunday; combined opera and ballet in a school for young dancers

1901 – Greta Kempton born in Austria, American painter; official White House portraits of Bess and Harry Truman

Bess Truman, portrait by Greta Kempton

1902 – Madeleine Milhaud born, French opera librettist and actress; fled France with her husband and children during WWII when the Germans invaded, and stayed in America until 1946; she lived to the age of 105

1908 – Louis L’Amour born, American Western novelist and short story writer

1909 – Gabrielle Roy born, highly regarded French Canadian author and novelist; Bonheur d’occasion (published in English as The Tin Flute) won the 1947 Prix Femina, and the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal; other translated works include Streets of Riches, The Fragile Lights of Earth, and Children of My Heart

1912 – Agnes B. Martin born, in Canada, American abstract expressionist painter; awarded a 1998 National Medal of Arts

Agnes Martin by Mildred Tolbert

1920 – Dame Fanny Waterman born, British pianist; founder, chair and Artistic Director of the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition

1920 – Katsuko Saruhashi born, Japanese geochemist, pioneer in measuring carbon dioxide levels in seawater, showing the evidence in seawater and the atmosphere of the dangers of radioactive fallout; after graduating from the Imperial Women’s College of Science in 1943, she went to work in the Geochemical Laboratory of the Meteorological Research Institute; in 1950, she began studying CO² levels in seawater, having to develop her own measuring techniques for this new study; after the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests in 1954, the Japanese government asked the Geochemical Laboratory to analyze and monitor radioactivity in seawater and rainfall; Sarushashi’s study showed the radioactivity reached Japan in 18 months, and traces spread throughout the Pacific by 1969; her research was some of the earliest proving that the effects of fallout could spread over the entire globe, not just the immediate area of the blast; by the 1970s, she was studying acid rain

1924 – Al Neuharth born, American journalist and author, founded USA Today 

1930 – Stephen Sondheim born, American composer and songwriter

1934 – Sheila Morag Clark Cameron CBE QC  born, Dean of the Arches and Official Principal of the Arches Court of Canterbury (the senior ecclesiastical judge of the Church of England, 2000-2009), since 1983, Vicar-General of Canterbury; was married to actor John Thaw, of the Inspector Morse series

1941 – Billy Collins born, American poet, U.S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003)

1941 – The Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state goes into operation

1945 – The Arab League is formed when a charter is adopted in Cairo, Egypt

1946 – Rivka Golani born, Israeli viola player and composer

1947 – James Patterson born, American mystery novelist

1948 – Andrew Lloyd Webber born, English composer

1960 – Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes are first to patent a laser

1963 – Deborah Bull born, English ballet dancer, article writer and broadcaster; founder of the Artists’ Development Initiative  which opens resources and expertise of the Royal Opera House to small-scale companies and independent artists; Creative Director, ROH2 at Royal Opera House (2002-2008), promoted to Creative Director of the Royal Opera House (2008-2012)

1965 – Bob Dylan releases his first electric guitar album, Bringing It All Back Home

1966 – Pia Cayetano born, Filipino lawyer and politician; the youngest woman elected to the Senate in the Philippines (2004-2016); advocate for the rights of women and children; noted for pushing passage of the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012; serving as a Representative and as Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, since 2016

1972 – U.S. Congress sends the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification; it is ratified by 35 states, but falls three states short of the required 2/3 majority in order to be ratified

1972 – In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that unmarried persons have the right to possess contraceptives

1982 – NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia, is launched from the Kennedy Space Center on its third mission, STS-3

1990 – An Anchorage AK jury finds former tanker captain Joseph Hazelwood innocent of three major charges in connection with the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but convicts him of a minor charge of negligent discharge of oil

1992 – The Democratic Party of Albania wins a decisive majority in the parliamentary election, ending communism in Albania

1993 – The Intel Corporation ships the first Pentium computer chips

1995 – Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov returns to earth, after a record 438-days in space

1993 – World Water Day * officially designated by the UN General Assembly

2010 – Google announces it is stopping censorship of Chinese search results on its site by shifting its location from the mainland to Hong Kong

2013 – The UN Human Rights Council sets up an inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea for the first time

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