June 25th is

National Catfish Day

Color TV Day *

Global Beatles Day

Strawberry Parfait Day

International Day of the Seafarer

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MORE! Antonio Gaudi, Rose O’Neill and George Orwell, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Canada – Discovery Day

Croatia –Statehood Day

Mozambique – Independence Day

Slovenia – National Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

1530 – At the Diet of Augsburg the Augsburg Confession is presented to the Holy Roman Emperor by the Lutheran princes and Electors of Germany; the Augsburg Confession, written in both German and Latin, is the primary confession of faith of the Lutheran Church and one of the most important documents of the Lutheran Reformation

1667 – French Doctor Jean-Baptiste Denys performs the first fully documented human blood transfusion; he transfused about twelve ounces of sheep blood into a 15-year-old boy, who survived the transfusion

1678 – Venetian Elena Cornaro Piscopia is the first woman awarded a doctorate of philosophy when she graduates from the University of Padua

1689 – Edward Holyoke born, American, Harvard University president (1737-69)

1788 – Virginia becomes the tenth U.S. state to ratify the Constitution

1852 – Antonio Gaudi born, innovative Spanish (Catalan) architect

1860 – Gustave Charpentier born, French composer; opera Louise

1867 – Lucien B. Smith patents the first barbed wire

1868 – Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina  readmitted to the Union

1874 – Rose O’Neill born, American cartoonist, illustrator, writer and feminist; the first published American woman cartoonist (True magazine, 1896); creator of the  popular comic strip Kewpies (debut 1909); she was the highest-paid woman illustrator of her day. Kewpies also became dolls, in several versions, first manufactured in 1912

1876 – George Armstrong Custer’s men are defeated at Little Big Horn by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors; over 50% of the troops are killed, including Custer

1881 – Crystal Eastman born, American lawyer, suffragist and writer

1885 – Benito Lynch born, Argentine novelist and short story writer

1887 – George Abbott born, American producer, director, playwright and actor; his career spanned over 80 years; among many awards are a Tony for a career distinguished achievement in the theatre, and a Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award

1898 – Kay Sage born, American Surrealist artist and poet

I Saw Three Cities – by Kay Sage (1944)

1990 – Lord Louis Mountbatten born, English statesman, naval leader; last viceroy of British India

1900 – Zinaïda Aksentieva born, Ukrainian-Soviet astronomer, worked on mapping gravity and tidal deformation of the earth; Director of the Poltava Observatory (1951-1969)

1900 – Taoist monk Wang Yuanlu discovers the Dunhuang manuscripts, a cache of ancient texts that are of great historical and religious significance, in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China

1903 – Madame Marie Curie announces her discovery of radium

1903 – Eric Blair born, known by his pen name George Orwell, English author, essayist and journalist: his strong support of democratic socialism and opposition to totalitarianism, especially in 1984 and Animal Farm, continues to influence popular and political culture

1906 – Mentally unstable Pittsburgh PA millionaire Harry Thaw shoots and kills renowned architect Stanford White, who had sexually assaulted Thaw’s wife, former chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, when she was 16

1910 – The U.S. Congress passes the Mann Act, which prohibits interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes”; the ambiguous language would be used to selectively prosecute people for years to come

1910 – Diaghilev’s premiers Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird

Poster art for Ballets Russes 1910 Firebird

1911 – William H. Stein born, American biochemist, 1972 Nobel Prize

1913 – American Civil War veterans begin arriving at the Great Reunion of 1913.

1921 – Celia Franca born in England, daughter of Polish immigrants; English Canada dancer-choreographer; founder and first artistic director (1951-1975) of the National Ballet of Canada

1923 – Dorothy Gilman born, American author, Mrs. Pollifax spy thriller series

1926 – Dame Margaret Anstee born, British diplomat, served at the UN from 1952 to 1993; in 1987 became the first woman Under-Secretary-General;  first woman to head a peacekeeping mission, in Angola (1992-1993)

1926 – Ingeborg Bachmann born, Austrian poet, radio scriptwriter, prose author and short story writer

1934 – Beatriz Sheridan born, Mexican director and actress, pioneer of Mexican telenovelas, and prominent figure in Mexican theatre

1938 – The U.S. federal minimum wage is 25 cents an hour 

1946 – Ho Chi Minh goes to France for talks on Vietnamese independence

1947 – The Diary of Anne Frank is published in the Netherlands

1950 – War begins on the Korean peninsula as North Korea invades South Korea

1951 – Eva Bayer-Fluckiger born, Swiss mathematician and professor, worked on topology, algebra number theory, lattices, quadratic forms and Galois cohomology

1951 – Color TV Day * – CBS broadcasts Premiere, the first commercial color television program, and Pabst airs the first beer commercial in color

1952 – Kristina Abelli Elander born, Swedish painter, creator of large-scale room installations, and figures in ceramics and textiles 

Superbruden & Dödskallen – 1976 – by Kristina Abelli Elander

1954 – Sonia Sotomayor born, lawyer and judge, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

1962 – U.S. Supreme Court rules that the use of an unofficial, nondenominational prayer in New York public schools was unconstitutional

1969 – The Hollies record “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” with Elton John playing piano

1970 – Ariel Gore born, author and editor-publisher of Hip Mama, an alternative press publication covering the culture and politics of motherhood

1973 – Former White House Counsel John Dean testifies before the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee

1974 – Nisha Ganatra born in Canada of Indian subcontinent ancestry, film director, producer, screenwriter and actress, best known for her films Chutney Popcorn and Cosmopolitan

1991 – The Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence

1993 – Kim Campbell is chosen as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and becomes the first female Prime Minister of Canada

1993 – Tansu Çiller takes office as the first woman Prime Minister of Turkey

1996 – Independence Day, starring Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman, premiers in Los Angeles

1998 – In Clinton v. City of New York, U.S. Supreme Court rejects a presidential line-item veto law as unconstitutional

2014 – In Riley v. California, U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously that police cannot examine the digital contents of a cell phone without a court order

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