May 23rd is

National Taffy Day *

National Lucky Penny Day

World Turtle Day *

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MORE! Ben Franklin, Margaret Fuller and Robert Moog, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Abkhazia – Flag Day

Canada – Montréal QC:
Cinéma L’Amour Film Festival

Jamaica – Labour Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

1127 – Uijong born, 18^th monarch (1146-1170) of the Goryeo dynasty of Korea, deposed by warriors in a coup d’état after he humiliated them for years

1430 – Joan d’Arc is captured by the Burgundians while leading an army to raise the Siege of Compiègne; they sell her to the English

1498 – Girolamo Savonarola is burned at the stake in Florence, Italy, for heresy and disobedience

1533 – King Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon is declared null and void by Thomas Cranmer, appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury just two months before

1696 –  Johann Caspar Vogler born, German composer and organist

1701 – Captain Kidd, convicted of murder and piracy, is hanged

1707 – Carolus Linnaeus born, Swedish biological classifier

1753 – Giovanni Battista Viotti born, Italian composer and violinist

1785 – Benjamin Franklin writes in a letter that he has invented bifocals

1793 – The first pennies in the United States are made of copper – Lucky Penny Day *

1810 – Margaret Fuller born, journalist, editor, author, women’s rights advocate, wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the first major U.S. feminist work. She was the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial  (1840). By her 30s, Fuller was considered the best-read person in New England, male or female, and was the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College. She joined the New York Tribune staff under Horace Greeley (1844), became one of the first American literary critics, then both the first American female foreign correspondent and first American woman war correspondent while traveling in England, France. and Italy, reporting on the Italian States Revolution of 1848, sending back eye-witness accounts of the uprising in Rome. She met Giovanni Angelo, the Marchese d’Ossoli, a liberal revolutionary who was ten years younger. They became lovers, had a son (1848), and married the next year. After the Roman uprising was put down, they fled to Florence (1849).  When the family sailed for the U.S., their ship ran aground in a storm off Fire Island, NY, in July 1850. Their bodies are never found

1827 – The first U.S. nursery school is established in New York by Joanna Bethune and Hannah L. Murray, “to relieve parents of the laboring classes from the care of their children while engaged in the vocations by which they lived, and provide for the children, a protection from the weather, from idleness and the contamination of evil example besides affording them the means of early and efficient education.” Almost 500 children of mothers working to support their families were cared for in the first 2 years

1842 – Maria Konopnicka born, Polish poet, novelist, translator, journalist and women’s rights activist

1846 – Arabella Mansfield, née Belle Aurelia Babb, born, the first U.S. woman to pass the bar exam; though she never used her law degree, but taught English and History at Simpson College and Iowa Wesleyan; later served as a dean in both the music and art schools at DePauw University; helped organize the Iowa Suffrage Society

1855 – Isabella Ford born, English author, lecturer, suffragist, trade unionist and social reformer, worked with female mill workers and trade unionists; the first woman to speak at a Labour Representation Committee conference (now the British Labour Party)

1873 – Canada’s North West Mounted Police force established; they are renamed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1920

1879 – Elizabeth Gunn born, New Zealand pediatrician and children’s health pioneer; served in WWI as a captain in the New Zealand Medical Corps; after the war, she was employed by the school medical service, and set up “health camps” for malnourished children to spend 3 weeks eating nourishing food, and getting fresh air and sunshine, eventually organized as the National Federation of Health Camps

1883 – The year Salt Water Taffy * is invented in Atlantic City, New Jersey

1895 – The New York Public Library is created, by combining the Astor and Lennox libraries

1908 – Max Abramovitz born, U.S. architect, Lincoln Center, United Nations Building

1908 – Hélène Boucher born, notable French aviator and aerobatics pilot, who set several women’s world speed records, and held the international (male or female) record for speed over 621 mph (1,000 km) in 1934; after she was killed in a plane crash, she was the first woman to lie in state at Les Invalides

Hélène Boucher with her Cirrus-powered Avro Avian – 1933

1910 – Artie Shaw born, composer, Swing era bandleader and clarinetist

1910 – Margaret Wise Brown born, children’s book author, Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny

1912 – Jean Françaix born, French Neoclassical composer and pianist

1914 – Barbara Ward born, English economist, journalist, lecturer, advocate of sustainable development

1914 – Celestine Sibley born, American journalist for the Atlanta Constitution (1941-1999), covering the Georgia General Assembly, and author of Children, My Children, which won the 1982 Townsend Prize for Fiction

1919 – Ruth Fernández born, Puerto Rican contralto, known as “La Negra de Ponce” who wrote racial barriers as the first Afro-Puerto Rican female singer to gain popularity and success at home and on tour in Latin American and the U.S.; as a member of the Puerto Rican Senate (1973-1981), she campaigned for many reforms, including better working conditions

1922 – The play Abie’s Irish Rose opens on Broadway

1923 – Alicia de Larrocha born, called “greatest Spanish pianist in history”

1926 – Aileen Clarke Hernandez born, union organizer, civil rights activist, 2nd NOW national president, co-founder Black Women Organized for Action, San Francisco

1934 – Robert Moog born, American engineer, inventor of the Moog Synthesizer

1940 – Frank Sinatra records “I’ll Never Smile Again” with Tommy Dorsey and the Pied Pipers

1940 – Cora Sadosky born, Argentinian mathematician and academic, left Argentina because of political unrest, Professor of Mathematics at Howard University in the 1980s; Appointed to a visiting professorship for women from the National Science Foundation for 1983-1984 and again in 1995-1996; elected president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (1993-1995)

1949 – The Republic of West Germany is established

1956 – Ursula Plassnik born, Austrian diplomat and People’s Party politician; Austrian ambassador to Switzerland since 2016; Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs (2004-2008); Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel’s cabinet chief (1997-2004); member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR)

1961 – Norrie May-Welby born in Scotland, Australian transsexual person who pursued legal status as being neither a man or a woman from 2010 to 2014, when the High Court of Australia ruled in NSW Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages v Norrie that it is in the power of the New South Wales Registry of Births to register May-Welby as ‘non-specific’; in 2017, began protesting the Australian marriage law defining marriage as between a man and a woman, which prevents May-Welby and partner from obtaining a marriage license

1963 – Viviane Baladi born in Switzerland, French mathematician researching dynamical systems; a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris since 1990, with a leave of absence to teach at the University of Geneva (1993-1999); author of  Positive Transfer Operators and Decay of Correlation (2000)

1964 – Ruth Metzler born, Swiss politician and corporate executive; Vice President of Switzerland (2003); Minister of Justice and Police (1999-2003); Member of the Swiss Federal Council (1999-2003); working for the pharmaceutical company Novartis since 2005

1966 – The Beatles release “Paperback Writer”

1977 – The U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear the appeals of Watergate wrong-doers H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell

1984 – U.S. premiere of the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

1990 – American Tortoise Rescue is founded, sponsor of World Turtle Day *

2015 – Myanmar President Thein Sein implements controversial population control law requiring women to wait 3 years between births

2016 – Chinese archaeologists announce evidence found of earliest use of barley in China to make beer, in Shaanxi province 3400-2900 BC

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