July 15 is

Tapioca Pudding Day

Gummi Worm Day

Pet Fire Safety Day

Give Something Away Day

Celebration of the Horse Day

_________________________________________

MORE! Inigo Jones, Iris Murdoch and Julian Bream, click

_________________________________________

WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Britain – St. Swithun’s Day

Brunei –
His Majesty the Sultan’s Birthday

India – Telangana: Bonalu
(Hindu Mahakali festival)

Italy – Palermo: Feast of St Rosalia
(Palermo’s patron saint)

Kiribati – Unimwane Day
(Senior Citizens’ Day)

Turkey – Democracy and Freedom Day

_________________________________________

On This Day in HISTORY

484 BC – Dedication of the Temple of Castor and Pollux (the twins of the constellation Gemini) in Rome

756 – In the middle of the An Lushan Rebellion, Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty is given an ultimatum by his Imperial Guards: execute chancellor Yang Guozhong by forcing him to commit suicide, or face a mutiny

1099 – The First Crusade: Christian soldiers take Jerusalem

1573 – Inigo Jones born, influential Welsh-English architect and stage designer, introduced classical Italian Renaissance architecture to Britain; noted for designing Queens’ House, and Covent Garden square

1606 – Rembrandt Van Rijn, Dutch painter, is born

Self Portrait c 1665 by Rembrandt van Rijn

1638 – Giovanni Buonaventura Viviani born, Italian violinist and composer

1741 – Russian Captain Aleksei Chirikov sights Southeast Alaska, and sends men ashore in a longboat, the first Europeans to be recorded making landfall in Alaska

1796 – Thomas Bullfinch born, American author of Bullfinch’s Mythology

1779 – Clement Moore born, author, Greek literature and theology professor, most remembered for his Christmas poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas”

1799 – The Rosetta Stone is found in Rosetta, Egypt, by Pierre-François Bouchard

1834 – The Spanish Inquisition officially disbanded after 356 years

1858 – Emmeline Pankhurst born, militant British Woman’s Suffrage leader

1870 – Georgia is the last Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union

1884 – Enrique Soro Barriga born, aka Enrique Soro, Chilean symphonic composer, professor and later director at the National Conservatory of Music of Chile

1901 – Over 74,000 Pittsburgh steel workers go on strike

1904 – First Buddhist temple in the U.S. established in Los Angeles

1905 – Dorothy Fields born, American librettist and lyricist; wrote over 400 songs for Broadway musicals and Hollywood films, including “The Way You Look Tonight,” “A Fine Romance,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” and “I’m in the Mood for Love”

1918 – Brenda Milner born in England, British-Canadian pioneer in clinical neuropsychology, and the study of memory; professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute; explored interaction between the brain’s left and right hemispheres; honored with the 2009 Balzan Prize for Cognitive Neuroscience

1919 – Iris Murdoch born in Ireland, British novelist and philosopher; awarded the 1978 Booker Prize for her novel The Sea, the Sea, and the 1997 Golden PEN Award for her body of work

1922 – First duck-billed platypus seen in America exhibited at NYC Bronx Zoo

1927 – Carmen Zapata born of Mexican and Argentinian parents, American actress and activist; co-founder of the Screen Actors Guild Ethnic Minority Committee in 1972, and co-founder/first president/producer-director of the Bilingual Foundation for the Arts (BFA) in 1973, which produces plays in English and Spanish

1933 – Julian Bream born, English virtuoso on the classical guitar

1938 – Carmen Callil born, Australian publisher, writer and critic; notable as founder of Virago Press in 1973, which published women authors, and as creator of Virago’s Modern Classics list, which brought back into print the best “forgotten” women authors of the past; elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010, and honoured with their Benson Medal in 2017

1942 – Glenn Miller and his band record “Jukebox Saturday Night”

1942 – Vivian Malone Jones born, one of the first two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama in 1963, and the university’s first black graduate. She worked as a research analyst for the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice; after she earned a Master’s degree in Public Administration, she worked as an employee relations specialist at the central office of the U.S. Veteran’s Administration. Jones was appointed as Executive Director of the Voter Education Project, then Director of Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, and was Director of Environmental Justice for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) until her retirement in 1996

1943 – Jocelyn Bell Burnell born, Northern Irish astrophysicist who discovered the first four radio pulsars in 1967, when she was still a research student. She was excluded from the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was given for the discovery to her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish and radio astronomer Martin Ryle. Ryles’ work on aperture-synthesis technique and Hewish’s decisive role in the discovery of pulsars were cited in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ press release announcing the award. Several prominent astronomers criticized her omission. She became the project manager for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii in 1986; President of the Royal Astronomical Society (2002-2004); Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford, a Fellow of Mansfield College; President of the Institute of Physics (2008-2010). In 2018, her appointment as Chancellor of the University of Dundee was announced. She is a long-time campaigner for increasing the number and status of women in the fields of astronomy and physics

1944 – The Greenwich Observatory is damaged by a WW II German bomb

1950 – Arianna Huffington born in Greece, Greek-American author and syndicated columnist; co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, which was acquired by AOL in 2011 for $315 million USD. She remained as President of the Huffington Post Media Group until 2016, when she left to start Thrive Global

1955 – 18 Nobel laureates sign the Mainau Declaration against nuclear weapons, later co-signed by 34 more laureates

1965 – Mariner IV spacecraft sends back first close-up photos of planet Mars

1971 – U.S. President Richard Nixon announces he will visit the People’s Republic of China

1987 – Taiwan ends 37 years of martial law

1988 – Movie Die Hard is released in the U.S.

1997 – Donatella Versace launches her first couture collection for her brother’s Versace label, a year after his murder

2006 – The social media platform Twitter is launched

2009 – The movie Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opens in U.S. theaters

2010 – Same-sex marriage is legalized in Argentina

_________________________________________