June 29^th is:

Almond Buttercrunch Day

Camera Day

Waffle Iron Day

International Mud Day *

World Scleroderma Day *

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MORE! Julia Lathrop, Antoine Saint-Exupery and Oriana Fallaci, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Fiji – National Sports Day

French Polynesia – Autonomy Day

Italy, Malta, Peru, Switzerland and
Vatican City – Feasts of  St. Peter & St. Paul

Spain – Haro, La Rioja: Battala dos Vinos
(St. Peter’s Day Battle of the Wines)

Seychelles – National Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

512 – A solar eclipse is recorded by a monastic chronicler in Ireland

1444 – George Castriot, known as Skanderbeg, an Albanian military commander, defeats an Ottoman invasion force at Torvioll

1504 – Jacques Cartier reaches Prince Edward Island in Canada

1613 – Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre burns down

1748 – Giacomo Leopardi born, Italian poet, scholar and philosopher; noted for his lyrical poetry

1767 – British Parliament approves the Townshend Revenue Acts, imposing import duties on glass, lead, paint, paper and tea shipped to America

1818 – Pietro Angelo Secchi born, Italian Jesuit and astronomer; Director of the Observatory of the Roman College (later the Pontifical Gregorian University); pioneer in astronomical spectroscopy, one of the first scientists to state authoritatively our Sun is a star; compiled data on over 10,000 binary stars, discovered three comets, and made maps and illustrations of his observations of the moon and Mars

1835 – Celia Thaxter born, American poet and short story writer; she was married at sixteen. During a period of separation from her husband, she returned to her father’s hotel, the Appledore House, in the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine in 1861, where she was the hotel’s hostess, welcoming notable literary figures of the day like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Whittier, and Sarah Orne Jewett, and artists William Morris Hunt and Childe Hassam. Her first book of poems, Driftwood, was published in 1879, when she also reunited with her husband, moving into a house they had built at Kittery Point, Maine. She died suddenly in 1894, while on a visit to Appledore House; noted for Among the Isles of Shoals, several poetry collections, and her account of “A Memorable Murder” that happened when she was present on nearby Smuttynose Island

1858 – George Goethals born, U.S. Army engineer, directed Panama Canal construction

1858 – Julia Lathrop born, American social reformer, activist and civil servant; met Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr at school, later worked with them and others at Hull House; first woman member appointed to Illinois State Board of Charities, where she advocated for improving social services, and introduced reforms like appointing women doctors to positions in state hospitals, and moving the insane out of state workhouses.   She was appointed by President Taft as the first woman to head a United States federal bureau, as first bureau chief of the newly formed United States Children’s Bureau (1912-1922), where she directed research into child labor, infant mortality, maternal mortality, juvenile delinquency, mothers’ pensions and illegitimacy, and not only created child welfare policy but implemented it, one of the earliest opportunities for an American woman to have a active role in government policy-making and creation of regulations

1868 – George Ellery Hale born, American astronomer; developed the Hale telescope, a
200-inch reflector at Palomar Observatory near San Diego; pioneer in solar physics, discovered magnetic fields in sunspots

1871 – Luisa Tetrazzini born, Italian coloratura soprano, very popular in Europe and America from 1890 through the 1920s

1880 – France annexes Tahiti

1886 – James VanDerZee born, African-American photographer, a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance

James VanDerZee, portrait by Irving Penn

1888 – Professor Frederick Treves performs first appendectomy in England

1893 – Helen Hokinson born, American cartoonist; contributed 68 covers and over 1,800 cartoons to The New Yorker

1897 – Kazue Togasaki born, survivor of 1906 San Francisco earthquake, physician who pioneered a place in American medicine for women of Japanese ancestry, one of the few physicians (general practitioner and obstetrician) allowed to practice medicine in the Japanese Internment Camps during World War II

1899 – Margaret Byrd Rawson born, educator and researcher, identified and treated reading disorders including dyslexia

1900 – Antoine Saint-Exupery born, French aviator and author; The Little Prince

1908 – Leroy Anderson born, American conductor, arranger and composer

1910 – Frank Loesser born, American composer, librettist and lyricist

1911 – Bernard Hermann born, American composer; noted for scores of many of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films

1920 – Nicole Russell, Duchess of Bedford born, author and producer, one of the first female television producers in France

1920 – Ray Harryhausen born, influential American-British pioneer in Dynamation, a stop-motion model form of film animation; noted for the first film version of Mighty Joe Young, The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts

1927 – Marie Thérèse Killens born, Canadian Liberal Party member of the House of Commons of Canada (1979-1988)

1929 –Oriana Fallaci born, Italian journalist and author, frequently covered war and revolution; her book Interview with History contains interviews with world leaders

1930 – Viola Léger born in America, Canadian actress and Canadian Liberal Party Senator (2001-2005); Officer of the Order of Canada (1989); Governor General’s Performing Arts Award (2013)

1940 – Paul Klee, Swiss German artist, dies at age 60, after suffering for many years from scleroderma – World Scleroderma Day * is on June 29 in remembrance of Klee

Sans Titre (Deux poissons, un hameçon, un ver) by Paul Klee

1942 – Charlotte Bingham born, English novelist and television scriptwriter; known mainly for historical romance novels, and scripts for the series Upstairs, Downstairs

1945 – Chandrika Kumaratunga born, Sri Lankan politician; inaugural Chair of the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation since 2015; first woman President of Sri Lanka (1994-2005); Prime Minister of Sri Lanka (1994); Sri Lanka Freedom Party leader (1994-2006); Member of Parliament (1994); Chief Minister of the Western Province (1993-1994)

1949 – Anne Veneman born, American lawyer and Republican public servant; Executive Director of UNICEF (2005-2010); first woman appointed as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (2001-2005), after previously serving as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture (1991-1993); Deputy Undersecretary of Agriculture for International Affairs and Commodity Programs (1989-1991); Associate Administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (1986-1989)

1953 – The Federal Highway Act authorizes construction of 42,500 miles of freeway

1966 – Twenty women pack into Betty Friedan’s hotel room in Washington D.C. during the EEOC Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women. Friedan writes ‘N.O.W.’ on a paper napkin, and they form the National Organization for Women, with an initial budget of $135.oo

1966 EEOC Conference attendees – Betty Friedan is first on the right

1968 – Pink Floyd releases their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets

1972 – U.S. Supreme Court rules in the case Furman v. Georgia that arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth  Amendments, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment

1974 – Mikhail Baryshnikov defects from the Soviet Union to Canada while on tour with the Kirov Ballet

1987 – Vincent Van Gogh’s “Le Pont de Trinquetaille” auctioned for $20.4 million

1992 – U.S. Supreme Court is divided in Planned Parenthood v Casey. It upholds part of Roe v Wade, but overturns its trimester framework which completely banned the states from regulating abortion in the first trimester, and limited regulations in the second trimester to those which would protect a woman’s health. They redraw the lines of increasing state interest, and weaken the 14^th Amendment protection, replacing it with the “undue burden” standard: “An undue burden exists and therefore a provision of law is invalid if its purpose or effect is to place substantial obstacles in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.”  This has opened the flood gates of state regulations and legislation which have to be challenged one by one, burdening the federal courts, costing millions in states’ budget dollars to defend, and usually ending with a finding of unconstitutional against the states

1993 – Aerosmith releases “Cryin’”

1995 – Shuttle Atlantis and Mir space station form largest man-made orbiting satellite

2006 – U.S. Supreme Court rules in Hamdan v Rumsfeld that the Bush Administration plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violates both U.S. and  international law

2007 –Apple’s iphone goes on sale for $599 – the price is lowered to $399 for the Christmas season

2009 – International Mud Day * is sponsored by the World Forum Foundation, launched in 1998, a non-profit which connects early childhood professionals around the world for an exchange of ideas at an annual World Forum on Early Care and Education, and now sponsors Global Leaders for Young Children, a program of training and financial support for promising educators to develop projects in their home countries

2009 – Financier Bernard Madoff receives a 150-year sentence for his fraudulent Ponzi scheme, estimated at $64.8 billion as of November 2008

2016 – U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter lifts Pentagon’s ban on transgendered people serving in the U.S. armed forces

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