June 18th is

Autistic Pride Day *

Go Fishing Day

International Sushi Day *

International Picnic Day

National Splurge Day

Sustainable Gastronomy Day *

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MORE! Li Yuan, Susan B. Anthony and Gamal Nasser , click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Bermuda – National Heroes’ Day

China/Hong Kong/Macau/Taiwan –
Duan Wu Jie/Tuen Ng (Dragon Boat Festival)

Egypt – Eid el-Galaa /Evacuation Day *

Seychelles – Constitution Day

United Kingdom – London:
Royal Volunteer Service GrandFest

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On This Day in HISTORY

618 – Li Yuan becomes Emperor Gaozu of Tang, beginning three centuries of Tang dynasty rule over China, a golden age for art and literature in China

1178 – Five Canterbury monks see what is possibly the Giordano Bruno crater being formed. The current oscillations of the Moon’s distance from the Earth (on the order of meters) may be a result of this collision

1429 – French forces led by Joan d’Arc defeat the main English army under Sir John Fastolf at the Battle of Patay during the Loire campaign; the English field army is decimated; England never recovers its position in France

1511 – Bartolommeo Ammannati born, Italian sculptor and architect; collaborated with others on the Library of St. Mark’s in Venice, the Villa Giulia in Rome, and the Pitti Palace and Ponte Santa Trinita in Florence

Ammannati Courtyard and Boboli gardens of the Pitti Palace

1681 – Feofan Prokopovich born, Russian Orthodox archbishop; ally of Peter the Great;
rector of the Kiev-Mogila Academy; and a founder of the Russian Academy of Sciences

1799 – William Lassell born, amateur English astronomer who discovers satellites of Neptune and Uranus, and confirms discovery of Hyperion, a satellite of Saturn

1811 – Frances Sargent Osgood born, American poet, very popular during her day; exchanges romantic poems with Edgar Allen Poe

1812 – The United States declares war against Great Britain

1815 – The Allied armies of the Seventh Coalition, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, in coordination with a Prussian army led by von Blücher, defeat Napoleon’s Armée du Nord at the Battle of Waterloo, but the number of dead on both sides is devastating, over 42,000 total, 22% of all the soldiers engaged in the battle. The phlegmatic Wellington calls it “the nearest-run thing you ever saw” and sheds tears when the names of his dead and wounded officers are read to him

1821 – German composer Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischutz (The Marksman) premieres in Berlin

1854 – Edward Wyllis Scripps born, American newspaper publisher, The Detroit News, founder of United Press (now UPI); Scripps University is named for him, since he donated a large part of the school’s endowment

1857 – Henry Clay Folger, Jr. born, Standard Oil of New Jersey executive; founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC

Paster Reading Room at the Folger Shakespeare Library 

1862 – Carolyn Wells born, American author and poet; light verse and limericks

1865 – Fannie Pearson Hardy Eckstorm born, American ornithologist and folklorist

1873 – United States v. Susan B. Anthony: Susan B. Anthony, stalwart suffragist, is on trial for voting in the 1872 presidential election. Her position is that the 14^th Amendment, intended to give male former slaves U.S. citizenship, including the right to vote, should also apply to women, because it says, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Since it says all ‘citizens’ and all ‘persons’ and does not specify gender, she contends it should apply to female citizens and persons as well. The Rochester Union and Advertiser editorialized: “Citizenship no more carries the right to vote that it carries the power to fly to the moon…” Susan B. Anthony and 7 or 8 other women had registered and cast their ballots, after she threatened to sue the election inspectors if they refused to allow the women to vote. A Rochester Democrat named Sylvester Lewis files a complaint charging Anthony with registering and voting illegally. U.S. Commissioner William C. Storrs, acting on his complaint, issues a warrant for her arrest, for violating section 19 of an act of Congress called the Enforcement Act, which carries a maximum penalty of $500 or three years imprisonment. Anthony is arrested. Prior to her trial, she and her supporters write hundreds of letters, and she goes on tour in Monroe County NY, making a speech called “Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?” which causes such a stir that the prosecutor is able to get a change of venue to Ontario County, where Anthony promptly begins another speaking tour.  On the day of the trial, the courtroom is filled to capacity. When her attorney calls her to the witness stand, the district attorney’s objection that “She is not a competent as a witness on her own behalf” is sustained by the judge. Immediately after the two-hour closing argument of defense council, the judge takes a paper out of his pocket, and reads, “The Fourteenth Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote, and the voting by Miss Anthony was in violation of the law. Assuming that Miss Anthony believed she had a right to vote, that fact constitutes no defense if in truth she had not the right. She voluntarily gave a vote which was illegal, and thus is subject to the penalty of the law. Upon this evidence I suppose there is no question for the jury and that the jury should be directed to find a verdict of guilty.” So the jury is not allowed to decide the case. Her attorney argues for a new trial on the grounds that Anthony has been denied a trial by jury, but the judge denies the motion. Before sentencing, the judge asks, “Does the prisoner have anything to say why sentence shall not be pronounced?” To which Anthony responds, “Yes, your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.” The judge interrupts, “The Court cannot listen to a rehearsal of arguments the prisoner’s counsel has already consumed three hours in presenting.” But Anthony persists, even as the judge pounds his gavel and repeatedly orders her to sit down, until she has said everything she intended to say, then sits down, only to be told to rise for sentencing. She is fined $100 and the cost of the prosecution. Anthony refuses to pay even “a dollar of the unjust penalty.” The judge, in a move to preclude any appeal to a higher court, responds, “Madam, the Court will not order you committed until the fine is paid.” American women have to fight another 47 years before the 19^th Amendment is ratified, recognizing us as citizens and persons with the right to vote

1877 – James Montgomery Flagg born, American illustrator and poster artist

Uncle Sam recruiting poster by James Montgomery Flagg

1892 – Macadamia nuts are first planted in Hawaii

1905 – Eduard Tubin born, prolific Estonian composer who went into exile in Sweden upon the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1944

1913 – Sylvia Porter born, American economist, author and columnist for the New York Post; author of How to Make Money in Government Bonds

1913 – Françoise Loranger born, French Canadian playwright, radio producer and feminist; left school at age 15 because there was no public education for girls in Québec in 1928; by 17, she was writing short stories for Revue Populaire magazine; began writing radio scripts in 1938; publisher her first novel, Mathieu, in 1949; in the 1950s and 60s, she wrote scripts for television dramas, and a theatrical play, Une maison … un jour in 1965; her play, Encore cinq minutes, won the 1967 Governor General’s award for French Drama

1915 – Alice T. Schafer born, American mathematician; in 1932, she was the only woman with a mathematics major at the University of Richmond in Virginia, where women were not allowed in the campus library, but she won the departments James D. Crump Prize in mathematics in her junior year, and completed her BA in mathematics in 1936. She worked for the next three years as a secondary school teacher to save enough money for graduate school, which she attended at the University of Chicago. Her field of study was differential geometry of curves and implications of the singular point of a curve; Duke Mathematical Journal from Duke University Press published her initial work in 1944, and the American Journal of Mathematics published her next phase in 1948. After teaching at several other schools, she became a full professor at Wellesley College in 1962, where she designed special classes for students who had difficulties with math, expanding to helping high school students. She was a founding member of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971, and served as its second president (1973-1974). Upon her retirement from Wellesley in 1980, she continued to teach at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, until her second retirement in 1996; elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1985, and honored with an Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics from the Mathematical Association of America in 1998

1933 – Colin Brumby born, Australian composer and conductor; noted for his work, Fibonacci Variations, and The Phoenix and the Turtle, a commission from the Academy of St Martin in the Fields for string orchestra and harpsichord

1940 – Winston Churchill delivers a speech in British House of Commons, which concludes:

The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a 1000 years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

1941 – Delia Smith born, English cook, cookery columnist, author, and television presenter on her programmes Family Fare and How to Cook, and a frequent guest on other shows, until her retirement from television in 2013. Her 1971 best-seller How to Cheat at Cooking, reissued in an updated version in 2008, became a best-seller for the second time. Her influence on household cooking in Britain is dubbed the “Delia Effect” since ingredients or cookware she uses on a show would be sold out the following day

1942 – Pat Hutchins born, English illustrator, children’s book author and presenter on 45 episodes of the British children’s television series Rosie and Jim; her book, The Wind Blew, was awarded the 1974 Kate Greenaway Medal by the Library Association for best children’s book illustrations

1948 – The United Nations Commission on Human Rights adopted its International Declaration of Human Rights

1948 – Sherry Turkle born, American academic and author in the field of human-technology interaction; professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Her books, The Second Self, and Life on the Screen, discuss computers as part of our social and psychological lives and how they affect the way we view ourselves

1948 – Columbia Records unveils its new long-playing, 33 1/3 rpm phonograph record

1956 – Gamal Abdel Nasser finalizes independence from Britain, and the British been evacuating their troops – celebrated in Egypt as Evacuation Day *

1960 – Barbara Broccoli born, American film producer, notable for her work on the James Bond franchise, and staging musical theatre versions of successful films

1962 – Lisa Randall born, American theoretical physicist working in particle physics and cosmology; professor of science on the physics faculty at Harvard; contributor to the Randall-Sundrum model, a five-dimensional warped geometry theory, which she co-published in 1999 with Raman Sundrum; honored with the 2007 Lilienfeld Prize and the 2012 Andrew Germant Award. Her controverisal Dark Matter Disk Model posits that 66 million years ago, a tiny twitch caused by an invisible force in the far reaches of the cosmos hurled a comet three times the width of Manhattan toward Earth. The collision produced the most powerful earthquake of all time and released energy a billion times that of an atomic bomb, superheating the atmosphere which killed three-quarters of life on Earth. She is the author of Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions and Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World

1964 – Patti Webster born, American entertainment publicist for notable recording artists, actors and athletes, such as Alisha Keys, Usher, Halle Berry and Chris Paul; author of It Happened in Church: Stories of Humor from the Pulpit to the Pews (2008); member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences; Webster died of cancer in 2013 at age 49

1967 – The first Monterey International Pop Festival features Simon and Garfunkel, The Beach Boys, Otis Redding, Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, The Who, Jim Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, and The Mamas and The Papas, among others

1968 – The Supreme Courts upholds the ban on discrimination in selling or renting residential housing in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company

1972 – Anu Tali born, Estonian conductor; Music Director of the Sarasota Orchestra in Florida (2013 until 2019); honored with the Cultural Award of Estonia in 2003

1979 – President Jimmy Carter and Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev sign the SALT II strategic arms limitation treaty in Vienna

1983 – Astronaut Sally K. Ride becomes America’s first woman in space as she and four colleagues blast off aboard the space shuttle Challenger

1983 – Mona Mahmudnizhad, a 17-year-old Iranian Bahá’í, is the youngest of 10 Bahá’í women sentenced to death and hanged in Shiraz, Iran because of their Bahá’í Faith. The official charges against Mahmudnizhad range from “misleading children and youth” because she taught children expelled from school for their beliefs, to being a “Zionist” because the Bahá’í World Centre is located in Israel

1996 – ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski is indicted on ten counts in four separate bombings that killed two people and injured two others

2004 – European Union leaders agree on a constitution for its 25 members

2005 – Autistic Pride Day * is celebrated by Aspies for Freedom; Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) and Autism Rights Group Highland (ARGH) also have events

2006 – Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori is elected as the first female presiding bishop for the Episcopal Church, U.S. arm of the global Anglican Communion

2009 – International Sushi Day * is founded

2013 – Russia passes a law banning same-sex couples, singles, and unmarried couples from countries where same-sex marriage is legal from adopting Russian children. Single Russians may adopt, but adopting couples must be married. In 2012, Russia had banned all adoptions by Americans

2016 – Sustainable Gastronomy Day * is adopted by the UN General Assembly

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