April 3rd is

Chocolate Mousse Day

Film Score Day *

Pony Express Day *

National Tweed Day *

Weed Out Hate Day

World Party Day *

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MORE! Oscar Wilde, Jane Goodall and Allen Ginsberg, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Guinea – Second Republic Day

New Zealand – Southland:
Provencial Anniversary Day

Serbia –Belgrade:
Belgrade Dance Festival

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On This Day in HISTORY

686 – Maya king Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’ assumes the crown of Calakmul, in an area just north of what is now the Mexican-Guatemalan border

Maya stucco container from era of King Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’ 

1043 – Edward the Confessor is crowned, one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings of England

1077 – Emperor Henry IV grants the county of Friuli, on northeast Italy, with ducal status, to Sigaerd, Patriarch of Aquileia, and its first Parliament begins representing the communes as well as the nobility and clergy

1693 – John Harrison born, English clockmaker who invented a marine chronometer, a long-sought-after device for solving the problem of calculating longitude at sea; his solution revolutionized navigation 

1778 – Pierre-Fidele Bretonneau born, French epidemiologist; first successful tracheotomy

1783 – Washington Irving born, American author

1791 – Anne Lister born, British traveler, diarist and mountaineer; first woman to climb Monte Perdido in the Aragonese Pyrenees and Vignemale, the highest peak in the French Pyrenees; often called the “first modern lesbian” because her wealth allowed her to live openly as a couple with another wealthy heiress, Ann Walker, from 1834 until Lister’s death in 1840; her diaries run to four million words, the details of her lesbian relationships from her school days on written in a private code  

1807 – Mary Carpenter born, English educational reformer, antislavery activist and feminist, founds a ‘ragged school’ for children of the poor, publishes articles and books on her work that helped in the passage of several education reform acts; first woman whose paper is published by the Statistical Society of London

1817 – Mathilde Franziska Anneke born, German feminist, journalist and newspaper publisher; after emigrating to the United States, she became an abolitionist, started another feminist newspaper and opened a school for girls

1823 – Tweed Day * – William “Boss” Tweed born, crooked New York politician – let’s celebrate the wonderful warm wool cloth from Scotland instead

1829 – James Carrington patents a coffee mill

1836 – Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford born, American author and poet, began writing to earn money when her parents became ill; gothic romances and detective stories 

1860 –First Pony Express * mail delivery service by horse and rider between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California begins; the 1,800 mile run will take 10 days

1861 – White settlers, illegally moving onto Sioux land under treaty in Minnesota, petition President Lincoln for protection from the Indians

1870 – Sara McLaughlin Conboy born, American factory worker and labor organizer, first woman US delegate to the British Trades Union Congress, one of the organizers of the United Textile Workers of America

1876 – Margaret Anglin born in Canada, American stage actress, director, and producer, known for roles in Greek tragedies and Shakespeare, as well as contemporary productions; appeared in over 80 plays between 1894 and 1943

1885 – Bud Fisher born, American cartoonist; Mutt and Jeff

1888 – Emma Smith becomes the first victim listed in eleven unsolved brutal murders of women committed in or near the impoverished  Whitechapel district in the East End of London, but her death is markedly different than the others, and it is unlikely she is a victim of the infamous ‘Jack the Ripper‘

1895 –The trial in the libel case brought by Oscar Wilde against the Marquess of Queensberry begins, but evidence is unearthed of Wilde’s homosexuality, and he is the one imprisoned

1898 – Henry R. Luce born, American magazine publisher; Time, LIFE and Sports Illustrated

1912 – Dorothy Eden born in New Zealand, author, moved to London in 1954, wrote 18 novels in historical and suspense genres; An Important Family

1919 – Clairette Oddera born, French-Canadian singer and nightclub owner

1922 – Joseph Stalin is the USSR’s first General Secretary of the Communist Party 

1924 – Doris Day born, American singer, actress, and animal rights activist

1924 – Roza Shanina born, Soviet Sniper, first female sniper to be awarded the Order of Glory; she was killed in action while guarding a severely wounded commander

1934 – Jane Goodall born, British primatologist-anthropologist-ethologist; 45-year study on chimpanzees in Tanzania; founder of the Jane Goodall Institute

1936 – Bruno Richard Hauptmann is executed for the kidnapping and death of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh

1942 – Film Score Day * – the film score for The Jungle Book by Miklós Rózsa is so popular that it becomes the first commercial album of the score of an American film which wasn’t a musical to be released

1946 – Hanna Suchocka born, Polish lawyer, politician and diplomat; serves as Polish Ambassador to Malta and the Holy See; first woman Prime Minister of Poland

1948 – U.S. President Truman signs the Marshall Plan, officially the European Recovery Program, authorizing $5 billion to aid 16 countries, including Germany; $40 million dollars have already been given to France, Austria, China and Italy

1955 – The American Civil Liberties Union announces it will defend Allen Ginsberg’s book Howl against obscenity charges

1959 – The Coasters song ‘Charlie Brown’ is banned by the BBC because it refers to “throwin’ spitballs,” but it is lifted after 2 weeks

1968 – Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech in Memphis TN, the day before he is assassinated

1969 – U.S. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announces plans to “Vietnamize” the war

1973 – Martin Cooper of Motorola makes the first handheld mobile phone call to Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs

1975 – Bobby Fischer refuses to play in a chess match against Anatoly Karpov, giving Karpov the title of World Champion by default

1981 – The Osborne 1, the first successful portable computer, is unveiled at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco

1991 – United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 is adopted in an attempt to reduce tensions between Iraq and Kuwait

1995 – World Party Day *: Vanna Bonta’s ‘Quantum Fiction’ novel Flight has a World Party Day, so fans really start one – “Pass the food and turn up the music”

1996 – “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski is captured at his Montana cabin

2000 – United States v. Microsoft Corp.: Microsoft is ruled to have violated United States antitrust law by keeping “an oppressive thumb” on its competitors.

2009 – Iowa’s Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage

2010 – Apple Inc. releases the first generation iPad, a tablet computer

2010 –Utah HS students replicate Van Gogh’s Starry Night with 2 tons of Malt-O-Meal

2016 – The ‘Panama papers’ are leaked, revealing financial and attorney-client information on 214, 488 offshore entities, some of them shell corporations used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.

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