July 14th is

Grand Marnier Day

Pandemonium Day

Mac and Cheese Day

Shark Awareness Day

National Tape Measure Day *

_________________________________________

MORE! Gustav Klimt, Gertrude Bell, and Fats Domino, click

_________________________________________

WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Australia – Alice Springs: Annual Camel Cup

France – French Guiana/French Polynesia/Martinque/Mayotte/
New Caledonia/Réunion/Guadeloupe/St. Barthélemy/
St.  Martin/St. Pierre et Miquelon/Wallis & Fotuna:
Bastille Day/Feté de la Fédération

Germany – Düsseldorf:
Open Source Festival

India – Puri, Orissa: Jagannath Rath Yatra
(Hindu chariot festival)

Iraq – Republic Day

United Kingdom – Emmeline Pankhurst Day

_________________________________________

On This Day in HISTORY

756 – Tang Dynasty, China: rebellion instigator General An Lushan leads his army toward capital city Chang’an; Emperor Xuanzong flees, which costs him his throne

1430 – The Burgundians remand Joan d’Arc to Bishop Cauchon, of Beauvais

1494 – Poliziano born as Angelo Ambrogini, Italian Renaissance poet and classical scholar instrumental in the divergence of Humanist Latin from medieval norms; noted for translations of  poetry by Catullus and sections of Homer’s Iliad

1602 – Cardinal Mazarin born in Naples, Italian cardinal, diplomat and politician who was the successor to Cardinal Richelieu as the Chief Minister of State (1642-1661) to the French Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV; his personal library was the foundation of the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris, the oldest public library in France, and one of the richest collections of rare books and manuscripts in Europe

1671 – Jacques d’Allonville born, French astronomer and mathematician, who witnessed a total solar eclipse with Edmond Halley in 1715, during which both men observed flashes of light from the moon’s dark surface, which they noted as fulminations

1769 – Gaspar de Portolá and his men establish a base in Northern California

1789 – French Revolution – Parisians storm the Bastille to release prisoners

Storming of the Bastille 1789 by Houel

1790 – Celebration in Paris of national reconciliation in the Fête de la Fédération

1795 – The French Nation Convention votes “La Marseillaise” France’s national anthem

1798 – U.S. Congress passes the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to publish false, scandalous or malicious writing about the federal government

1853 – The Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, the first major ‘World’s Fair’ in the U.S., opens in New York City

1861 – Kate M. Gordon born, American activist, daughter of parents who were both advocates of equality between the sexes, she was a civic leader and prominent advocate of woman’s suffrage in the Southern U.S.; in 1896, she joined the Portia Club, a New Orleans women’s rights group, and became co-founder with her sister Jean of the Equal Rights Association Club; she was National American Woman Suffrage Association corresponding secretary (1901-1909); campaigned and raised funds for the first Louisiana hospital for the  treatment of tuberculosis (1909-1913); organizer of the 1913 Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, and headed the 1918 Louisiana suffrage campaign, the first statewide effort in the American South

1862 – Gustav Klimt born, Austrian symbolist painter, leading figure in the Vienna Secessionist movement

Three Ages of Woman – Mother and Child – detail, by Gustav Klimt

1866 – Juliet Wytsman born, Belgian Impressionist painter, noted for her landscapes and gardens

1868 – National Tape Measure Day * – Alvin J. Fellows patents “improvements for tape measures” including a way to make them retractable

1868 – Gertrude Bell born, British author, archaeologist, explorer, mapmaker, public administrator and spy; influential in the establishment of Jordan and Iraq; traveled extensively in Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Arabia (1892-1913); in 1915, her knowledge of the region and fluent Arabic was tapped by British Army Headquarters in Cairo; during WWI, she was the only woman political officer in the British forces, given the title “Liaison Officer, Correspondent to Cairo,” then “Oriental Secretary”; she witnessed the horrors of the Armenian Genocide, reporting that in Damascus, “Turks sold Armenian women openly in the public market,” and in Ras al-Ain in Northern Syria, “the desert cisterns and caves were filled with corpses.” When the war ended, she was assigned to analyze the Mesopotamian situation – after ten months, she presented an official report entitled “Self Determination in Mesopotamia,” but British Commissioner Arnold Wilson wanted an Arab government “under the influence” of British officials who would have the real power and control. A compromise was reached, mainly due to the British government’s desire to cut costs in the Middle East: the British installed Faisal bin Hussein, a trusted ally who had commanded Arab forces with T.E. Lawrence, as the first King of the newly kluged-together nation of Iraq. Bell was an integral part of the Iraqi administration in its infancy, described as “one of the few representatives of His Majesty’s Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection.”

1874 – The Great Chicago Fire destroys 47 acres of the city

1912 – Woody Guthrie born, American Folk and Protest Singer-Songwriter

1918 – Ingmar Bergman born, highly influential Swedish filmmaker; The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957)

1921 – Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are convicted in Dedham, Mass., of killing a shoe company paymaster and his guard

1927 – First commercial airplane flight to Hawaii

1929 – Jacqueline, comtesse de Ribes, born, French aristocrat, ready-to-wear fashion designer, theatrical and television producer, philanthropist and ecological activist; producer of the inaugural play at the Recamier Theatre in 1958, then managed the International Ballet of the Marquis de Cuevas after the death of the Marquis (1961-1966). She was co-producer in 1966 of a three-part series for French television, then co-produced Eurovision programs for UNICEF in the 1970s; in 1974 in the Balearic Islands, she became an early advocate for nature conservation and ecology, then orchestrated an international campaign to safeguard the migratory bird refuge on the island of Espalmaor

1938 – The Manifesto of Race is published, preparing the way for the enactment in October of the Racial Laws in Fascist Italy; the manifesto declares: Italians are descendants of the Aryan race; all non-Aryan races are inferior; Jews should be banned from many professions; and sexual relations/marriages between Italians and Jews or Africans be prohibited

1940 – Susan Howatch born, English author and academic; noted for family saga novels covering sequential periods of history, and her Starbridge series, novels about the Church of England, centering on the fictional Anglican diocese of Starbridge

1942 – Helen O’Connell and Bob Eberly sing their last duet together, recording “Brazil” with the Jimmy Dorsey band

1946 – Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care is first published, quickly becoming a bestseller, and one of the most widely-discussed books ever published

1946 – Sue Lawley born, veteran English broadcaster; BBC Plymouth subeditor and freelance reporter (1970-1972); reporter/presenter on BBC news magazine Nationwide (1972-1975); anchor on nightly news programme Tonight (1975), then rejoined Nationwide as one of its two anchors (1976-1983); anchor on Six O’Clock News (1984-1989); introduces the BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures

1956 – Fats Domino hits top of the charts with “I’m in Love Again”

1957 – Tawya Ateya takes her seat in Egypt’s National Assembly,  first female parliamentarian in the Arab world.

1960 – Jane Goodall begins her study of chimpanzees at Gombe Stream Reserve

1960 – Anna Bligh born, Australian politician; leader of  the Queensland Labor Party (2007-2012); first woman Premier of Queensland (2007-2012); Member of Queensland Parliament for South Brisbane (1995-2012)

1962 – Vanessa Lawrence born, British geographer, public speaker and first woman Director-General and Chief Executive of Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency (2000-2014); Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors and of the Royal Academy of Engineering; a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; co-founder and inaugural chair of the Association of Chief Executives (ACE)

1965 – NASA space probe Mariner 4 flies by Mars, photographing the planet

1976 – Capital punishment is abolished in Canada

1989 – Cyndi Lauper’s “My First Night Without You” is  the first closed-captioned video (closed-caption version not on YouTube!)

1993 – Aeroflot begins non-stop flights between New York and Moscow

2012 – The Ana Cecilia arrives in Havana Bay, carrying the first U.S. government-sanctioned shipment of humanitarian aid to Cuba, and ending the 50-year trade embargo imposed by the Kennedy administration in 1962

2015 – NASA spacecraft New Horizons performs first flyby of Pluto

_________________________________________