April 7th 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 18th 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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So many diverse human experiences! Many thanks for this
Thank you – delighted you enjoyed – I am endlessly fascinated by humanity, past and present.