April 11^th is

Barbershop Quartet Day

Cheese Fondue Day

U.S. Submarine Day *

International “Louie Louie” Day *

World Parkinson’s Disease Day *

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MORE! Leo Rosten, Annie Besant and Richard Berry, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Azerbaijan –
Early Presidential Election 2018

Costa Rica – Juan Santamaria Day
(national hero who died at Battle of Rivas)

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On This Day in HISTORY

1471 – Wars of the Roses: King Edward IV of the House of York seizes London from King Henry VI, and takes back the throne

1564 – English involvement in France’s First War of Religion ends with the Peace of Troyes; the French pay 120,000 gold crowns in exchange for the British ending their claim to Le Havre, and the two countries agree to freedom of commerce between them

1689 – Coronation of William III and Mary II as joint sovereigns of England, Scotland and Ireland

1713 – The Treaty of Utrecht is signed, ending the War of Spanish Succession

1722 – Christopher Smart born, English actor, playwright and poet

1727 – Premiere of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the St. Thomas Church, Leipzig

1755 – James Parkinson born, English surgeon, apothecary and political activist for social reform and universal male suffrage; An Essay on the Shaking Palsy describing “paralysis agitans” which is named for him

1803 – Jon Stevens patents a twin-screw propeller steamboat

1814 – Napoleon Bonaparte abdicates as emperor of France and is exiled to Elba

1857 – John Davidson born, Scottish poet and playwright

1862 – Charles Evans Hughes born, U.S Supreme Court Chief Justice

1864 – Johanna Elberskirchen born, German feminist author and activist for rights of women, gays and lesbians, and blue-collar workers; publishes books on women’s health and sexuality; her last public appearance is at the 1930 World League for Sexual Reform conference in Vienna; in 1933, the Nazi Party comes to power and her activities end; when she dies in 1943, there is no public record of her funeral

1865 – Mary White Ovington born, American suffragist, journalist, daughter of abolitionists; co-founder and leader of the Greenpoint Settlement in Brooklyn (1896-1904); in 1908, Ovington, with William English Walling and Dr. Henry Moskowitz, calls for a national conference on the civil and political rights of black Americans, to be held on Lincoln’s birthday in 1909; this conference is where the NAACP comes into being

1868 – Former Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu surrenders Edo Castle to Imperial forces, marking the end of the Tokugawa shogunate

1876 – The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks is organized

1881 – Spelman College is founded in Atlanta GA as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, an institute of higher education for African-American women

1888 – The Concertgebouw (concert hall) in Amsterdam is inaugurated

1893 – Dean Acheson born, U.S. Secretary of State 1949-1953, key player in the development of the Truman Doctrine and the creation of NATO

1900 – U.S. Submarine Day * – the U.S. Navy purchases a submarine, renaming it the USS Holland, its first commissioned submarine

1908 – Jane Bolin born, American lawyer and judge, first black American woman to graduate from Yale Law School, first to join the NYC Bar Association and the NYC Law Department, as well as the first African-American woman judge in the U.S.

1908 – Leo Rosten born in Poland, American author and social scientist

1909 – The city of Tel Aviv is founded

1913 – The pavilion at Nevill Ground, a cricket venue in Kent, England, is burned down by militant suffragettes, who leave behind suffragette literature to claim responsibility, the ground was chosen as a target because of their no-admittance to women policy

1914 –Dorothy Lewis Bernstein born, American mathematician who worked centered on  applied mathematics, statistics, computer programming; she also did research on the Laplace transform; first woman to be elected president of the Mathematics Association of America (1979-1980)

1916 – Annie Besant, British feminist, activist and Fabian Society member; establishes the Home Rule League in India, campaigning for democracy and British Empire dominion status

1921 – Emir Abdullah establishes the first centralized government in the newly created British protectorate of Transjordan; he becomes King of Jordan in 1946

1921 – Iowa becomes the first U.S. state to impose a cigarette tax

1925 – Viola Gregg Liuzzo born, American Unitarian Universalist activist and member of the NAACP, who answers the call of Martin Luther King Jr., coming to Selma Alabama after Bloody Sunday in 1965, and marchs from Selma to Montgomery, helping with coordination and logistics. Driving back from taking other activists to the Montgomery airport, she is murdered, shot to death by Ku Klux Klansmen firing from a car that pulled alongside, which was also carrying FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe. He testifies against the shooters, leading to their conviction. Rowe is given a pass by the FBI for actively participating in violence, sometimes even inciting it, against Civil Rights activists from 1961 until 1965, when he goes into the witness protection program. The FBI launches a smear campaign against Liuzzo after her death, falsely claiming she was a Communist Party member, a heroin addict, and had abandoned her children to have sex with black men in the Civil Rights movement, as part of their attempt to discredit Dr. King and the whole Civil Rights Movement

1928 – Ethel S. Kennedy born, American human rights campaigner; after the assassination of her husband, Robert Kennedy, she founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, a non-profit dedicated to advancing human rights through litigation, advocacy and education

1935 – Richard Berry born, American singer-songwriter; International “Louie Louie” Day * is launched by fans in honor of his song on Berry’s birthday in 2003

1938 – Reatha Clark King born, African-American chemist and corporate executive; Executive Director/Board Chair of the General Mills Foundation (1988-2003); Professor of Chemistry at City University of New York (1968-1977); research chemist for the National Bureau of Standards (1962-1967), the first black woman chemist hired by the agency

1941 – Ellen Goodman born, American journalist, syndicated columnist and author; won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary; co-founder and director of The Conversation Project, which helps people talk to their loved ones about what kind of end-of-life care they want before the time when decisions must be made

1945 – American soldiers liberate Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany

1951 – The Stone of Scone, the stone upon which Scottish monarchs were traditionally crowned, is found on the site of the altar at the ruins of Arbroath Abbey; it was taken by Scottish nationalist students from Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day in 1950. It had been at Westminster since 1296, taken by Edward I as spoils of war, and kept in spite of the Treaty of Northampton in 1328, in which England agreed to return it to Scotland. In 1996, it was transported to Edinburgh Castle, arriving on St. Andrew’s Day, and is now in the Crown Room alongside the crown jewels of  Scotland. It will be briefly returned for future coronation ceremonies to Westminster Abbey

1951 – President Truman relieves General Douglas MacArthur “with deep regret” of all his Far East commands, after he publicly challenged the President’s foreign policies

1952 – Indira Samarasekera born in Sri Lanka, Canadian Mechanical Engineer; President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Alberta (2005-2015); member since 2016 of the Canadian Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments

1957 – Singapore is granted internal self-rule by Britain

1959 – Ana Maria Polo born in Cuba, American lawyer and arbitrator on Casa Cerrado (Case Closed), broadcast by Telemundo, which became the first Spanish-language program nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award in 2010; a breast cancer survivor, she is a frequent speaker at fundraisers for the cause

1961 – The trial of Adolf Eichmann, for war crimes committed during WWII, begins in Jerusalem

1968 – President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing

1968 – President Johnson also signs the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibits tribes from making or enforcing laws that violate the Bill of Rights, but specifically excludes the Fifth Amendment individual rights of members, under specific internal tribal provisions

1970 – NASA’s Apollo 13 is launched

1979 – Ugandan dictator Idi Amin is deposed

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