April 7^th is

Coffee Cake Day

National Beer Day *

International Beaver Day *

International Snailpapers Day *

World Health Organization Day *

Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Rwanda Genocide *

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MORE! Ravi Shankar, Janis Ian and Dag Hammarskjold, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Armenia – Motherhood and Beauty Day

Haiti – Toussaint L’Ouverture Memorial Day *

Kiribati – National Health Day

Kyrgyzstan – People’s Revolution Day

Mozambique – Mozambique Womens’ Day

Rwanda – Tutsi Genocide Memorial Day

Tanzania – Sheikh Abeid Amani Karume Day
(revolutionary leader – first V.P of Tanzania)

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On This Day in HISTORY

529 – First draft of the Corpus Juris Civilis (a fundamental work in jurisprudence) is issued by Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I

611 – Maya King Uneh Chan of Calakmul sacks rival city-state Palenque in Mexico

Temple at Calakmul

1141 – Empress Matilda becomes the first female ruler of England, adopting the title ‘Lady of the English’ but her war with Stephen makes her reign short-lived

1521 – Inquisitor-General Adriaan Boeyens bans Lutheran books; he becomes Pope Adrian VI the following year

1712 – A slave revolt in New York kills 6 white men; 21 black men are executed

1724 – First performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion at Leipzig

1770 – William Wordsworth born, major English poet

1795 – France adopts the metre as the basic measure of length

1803 –  Flora Tristan born, French author, socialist and feminist; her works include Peregrinations of a Pariah and The Workers’ Union

1803 – Toussaint L’Ouverture * a leader of the Haitian Revolution, who had laid down his arms in exchange for a French promise not to restore slavery, dies imprisoned in France under harsh interrogation, after being seized by French General Jean-Baptiste Brunet at a false parley set up in Haiti to entrap him

1805 – Beethoven conducts first performance of his 3rd symphony, Eroica, in Vienna

1827 – English chemist John Walker invents wooden matches

1830 – President Andrew Jackson submits the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to Congress authorizing removal most of the tribes in the southeastern states to lands west of the Mississippi; Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) denounces the bill, speaking for six hours over three days, “I ask in what code of the law of nations, or by what process of abstract deduction, their rights have been extinguished? Where is the decree or ordinance that has stripped these early and first lords of the soil? Sir, no record of such measure can be found. And I might triumphantly rest the hopes of these feeble fragments of once great nations upon this impregnable foundation. However mere human policy, or the law of power, or the tyrant’s plea of expediency, may have found it convenient at any or in all times to recede from the unchangeable principles of eternal justice, no argument can shake the political maxim, that, where the Indian always has been, he enjoys an absolute right still to be, in the free exercise of his own modes of thought, government, and conduct . . . Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin? Is it one of the prerogatives of the white man, that he may disregard the dictates of moral principles, when an Indian shall be concerned? No, sir. . .”

1872 –  Marie Equi born, American physician, lesbian, abortion provider, suffragist, labor and anti-war activist; recognized by Theodore Roosevelt and the U.S. Army for her services during the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco; spoke against US involvement in WWI and was imprisoned under the Sedition Act for a three-year term and served a year-and-a-half

1889 – Gabriela Mistral born as Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, Chilean poet, diplomat and educator, recipient of 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature

1891 – Nebraska passes legislation for an eight-hour workday, requiring overtime pay, but Nebraska’s Supreme Court strikes it down

1915 – Billie Holiday born, American jazz singer, songwriter

1917 – De Falla’s ballet El Sombrero de tres Picos premieres in Madrid

1920 – Ravi Shankar born, Indian sitar master

1922 – Warren G. Harding’s Interior Secretary, Albert B. Fall, leases the Teapot Dome oil reserves to Harry Sinclair, in what becomes the Teapot Dome Scandal

1923 – First brain tumor operation under local anesthetic performed at NYC’s Beth Israel Hospita by Dr K. Winfield Ney

1926 – Violet Gibson fires shots at Italian Dictator Mussolini, but only hits his nose

1931 – Daniel Ellsberg born; he releases the ‘Pentagon Papers’ to the New York Times

1933 – The first Nazi anti-Semitic laws bar Jews from the law and public service

1933 – National Beer Day * the day the sale of beer becomes legal again in the U.S. as the Cullen-Harrison Act goes into effect, redefining what an “intoxicating beverage” is to exclude beer from Prohibition – but full repeal of Prohibition wasn’t until the December 5, 1933  ratification of the 21 Amendment, repealing the 18^th Amendment

1937 – Eleanor Holmes Norton born, member of the U.S. House of Representatives for the District of Columbia since 1991

1940 – Booker T. Washington is the first black person to appear on a U.S. Stamp

1946 – Syria’s independence from France is officially recognized

1948 – World Health Organization Day * – WHO, the UN global health organization goes into operation

1949 – South Pacific opens on Broadway

1951 – Janis Ian born, American singer-songwriter

1953 – UN General Assembly elects Dag Hammarskjold as Secretary-General

1954 – U.S. President Eisenhower first uses the phrase “domino effect” in reference to communism in Indo-China at a news conference

1963 – Yugoslavia is proclaimed a Socialistic republic

1969 – U.S. Supreme Court strikes down laws prohibiting private possession of obscene material

1975 – First meeting in Paris of oil -exporting and -importing countries on world economic crisis

1975 – Beverly Sills makes her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in Gioacchino Rossini’s Siege of Corinth

1978 – A Guttenberg bible sells for $2,000,000 in New York

1980 – President Carter breaks off relations with Iran over hostage crisis

1983 – Oldest known human skeleton, 80,000 years old, is discovered in Egypt

1985 – First live telecast of the New York Easter Parade

1987 – National Museum of Female Physicians opens in Washington, D.C.

1988 – Russia announces withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan

1990 – Michael Milken pleads innocent to security law violations

1994 – Vatican acknowledges Holocaust (Nazis killing Jews) for the first time

1999 – Banana Wars: The World Trade Organization rules in favor of the United States in its long-running trade dispute with the European Union over its complex combination of tariffs and quotas on bananas

2000 – U.S. President Clinton signs into law the Senior Citizens Freedom to Work Act, reversing a Depression-era law so senior citizens may earn some money without losing Social Security retirement benefits

2001 – NASA’s Mars Odyssey is launched

2002 – The Roman Catholic church announces that six priests from the New York Archdiocese are suspended over allegations of sexual misconduct

2004 – UN designates this date as a Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Rwanda Genocide * commemorating the 800,000 people who were murdered during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, central Africa

2009 – The first International Beaver Day * is launched by Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife (BWW), originally called  ‘Friends of Beaversprite’ which was founded in 1985 to honor the memory and continue the work of Dorothy Richards at Beaversprite Sanctuary in the Adirondack Mountains; in 1996, now internationally recognized as a major source on Beaver behavior and habitat, and problem-solving when human and wildlife needs conflict, their name changes to Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife

2009 – Vermont becomes the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage

2010 – The first International Snailpapers Day * is created by Dan E. Bloom of Taiwan, to commemorate the existence of printed newspapers before online versions totally take over. The Dibao is earliest news-on-paper, a handwritten account of news in the imperial court and the capital city, beginning around 200 BCE in China

2012 – Joyce Banda, leader of the People’s Party, is Malawi’s first female President

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Featured Image: Picasso costume sketches for El Sombrero de tres Picos