August 6th is

Fresh Breath Day

Hiroshima Day *

Root Beer Float Day

Wiggle Your Toes Day

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MORE! Ann Lee, Teddy Roosevelt and Takako Doi, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Christianity – Feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus

Carnival Monday/August Monday – Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, British Virgin Islands, Domenica, Montserrat, Saint Kitts & Nevis

Andorra – La Vella Festival

Australia – Northern Territory:
Picnic Day

Bolivia – National Day

Canada – Civic Holiday

Côte d’Ivoire – National Day

El Salvador – San Salvador:
Celebración del Divino Salvador del Mundo
(celebration of Christ’s transfiguration)

France – Lorient: Festival Interceltique
(Celtic cultural festival)

Iceland – Fridagur verslunarmanna
(Commerce day)

Jamaica – Independence Day

Japan – Hiroshima: Peace Ceremony &
Peace Message Lantern Floating *

Tuvalu – Children’s Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

1538 – Bogotá, Columbia, is founded by Gonzalo Jiméniez de Quesada

1619 – Barbara Strozzi born, Italian Baroque singer and composer

1664 – Johann Christoph Schmidt born, German composer and organist

1697 – Nicola Salvi born, Italian sculptor-architect; Rome’s Trevi Fountain designer

1774 – Shaker Founder ‘Mother’ Ann Lee and a small group of her followers arrive in NYC from Great Britain, where she had been arrested and jailed multiple times

1787 – Sixty proof sheets of the U.S. Constitution are delivered to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia PA

1809 – Alfred Tennyson born, British Poet Laureate (1850-1892);  in 1884 Queen Victoria elevated him to Baron Tennyson of Aldworth, styled as Alfred, Lord Tennyson; the first raised to a British peerage for his writing

1817 – Zerelda Wallace born, American lecturer, temperance advocate and suffragist, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary on women’s suffrage

1819 – Norwich University is founded in Northfield, Vermont as the first private military school in the U.S.

1825 – Bolivia splits off from Peru, gains independence from Spain

1828 – Andrew Taylor Still born, American founder of osteopathy

1848 – Susie King Taylor born, first African-American Civil war nurse, author and educator; nursed the First South Carolina Volunteers, a black unit, during the Civil War; notable for her memoir Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers; first African-American to teach openly in a Georgia school for former slaves, teaching both adults and children

1861 – The United Kingdom annexes Lagos, Nigeria

1862 – Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas is scuttled on the Mississippi River after suffering catastrophic engine failure near Baton Rouge, LA

1869 – Frank Cobb born, American newspaper editor of the New York World

1881 – Sir Alexander Fleming born, Scottish bacteriologist; discovers penicillin (1928)

1886 – Inez Milholland born, labor lawyer, suffragist, WWI correspondent and orator; led the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 on a white horse

1890 – Murderer William Kemmler is first person executed by electric chair, at Auburn Prison NY

1901 – Kiowa land in Oklahoma is opened for white settlement, effectively dissolving the contiguous reservation

1911 – Lucille Ball born, star of I Love Lucy and first woman to head a major television studio, Desilu

1912 – The Progressive ‘Bull Moose’ Party holds their convention at the Chicago Coliseum; Jane Addams gives the seconding speech nominating Teddy Roosevelt as their presidential candidate, a first for a woman. Unlike Republicans and Democrats, the Progressive Party fully endorses women’s suffrage, in addition to advocating for child labor laws, and an 8-hour workday. Though they disagreed on how to end child labor, and gain suffrage for women – Addams favored federal laws, while Roosevelt wanted to stay with a state-by-state approach – they admired and respected each other. Roosevelt thanked Addams for her nominating speech in a telegram: “I prized your action not only because of what you are and stand for, but because of what it symbolizes for the new movement.”

1914 – Austria-Hungary declares war against Russia; Serbia declares war on Germany

1916 – Richard Hofstadter born, American “post-WWII liberal consensus” historian;  Social Darwinism in American Thought and Anti-intellectualism in American Life 

1928 – Jackie Presser born, American Teamsters Union leader (1983-88)

1917 – Barbara Cooney born, American children’s author and illustrator, honored with two Caldecott Medals and a National Book Award

– from Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney

1926 – Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel

1926 – Elisabeth Beresford born in France, British author of children’s books, known for creating The Wombles of Wimbleton Common, who “make good use of bad rubbish”

1926 – Don Juan, starring John Barrymore opens, the first feature-length film using Vitaphone sound-on-disc system (synchronized musical score and sound effects)

1928 – Andy Warhol born, the original American Pop Art artist

1930 – New York County Judge Joseph Force Crater steps into a taxi and disappears; a missing person case that has never been solved; he is declared legally dead in 1939

1930 – Abbey Lincoln, born as Anna Marie Woolridge, American singer-songwriter and civil rights activist

1934 – Piers Anthony born, English-American scifi and fantasy author; noted for his  Xanth series

1940 – The Soviet Union illegally annexes Estonia

1942 – Netherlands Queen Wilhelmina is first reigning queen to address U.S. Congressional joint session

1945 – The U.S. B-29 Enola Gay drops “Little Boy” atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. 70,000 people are killed instantly, thousands die over years from burns and radiation –
Commemorated at Hiroshima Peace Ceremony & Peace Message Lantern Floating * in Japan and as Hiroshima Day * in the U.S. and UK

1947 – Radhia Cousot born in Tunisia, the only woman in her class at the Polytechnic School of Algiers – she was also ranked first in her class; French computer scientist known for inventing abstract interpretation, a theory of sound approximation of the semantics of computer programs, a way of gaining information about control- and data- flow without performing all the usual calculations; after working as an associate research scientist at the Joseph Fourier University of Grenoble, she was appointed in 1980 to the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, where she rose through the research ranks to the senior level to head the research team “Semantics, Proof and Abstract Interpretation” in 1991, and then on to the École normale supérieur (2006-2014); honored with the IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills Award in 2014

1956 – Final broadcast of the DuMont Television Network, a boxing match

1960 – Cuba nationalizes all foreign-owned property

1961 – Mary Ann Sieghart born, English journalist,  wrote a weekly political column for The Independent; BBC Radio 4 presenter of Start the Week; chair of the Social Market Foundation, an independent think tank

1962 – Jamaica becomes independent from Great Britain

1965 – President Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act into law

1967 – Lorna Fitzsimons born, British Labour politician, member of Parliament for Rochdale (1997-2005); President of the National Union of Students (1992-1994)

1979 – Marcus Hooper, aged 12, is the youngest person to swim the English Channel

1982 – American premiere of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” in NYC

1988 – NYC Tompkins Square Park Riot – police charge at protesters of a new park curfew, causing a riot, leading to over 100 complaints of police brutality

1990 – The UN Security Council votes 13-0, with Cuba and Yemen abstaining, for economic sanctions against Iraq

1991 – Tim Berners-Lee releases description of his idea for a World Wide Web

1991 – Takako Doi becomes first female speaker of Japan’s House of Representatives

Takako Doi in 1986

1993 – Pope John Paul II issues his Veritatis splendor(‘splendor of truth’) encyclical, asserting that absolute truths and moral laws exist and are accessible to all persons; affirms the Catholic Church’s magisterium (moral authority); and self-determination is not an absolute, but must be bound by an understanding of Divine Law (as expressed by the Roman Catholic Church)

1996 – NASA says ALH 84001 meteorite contains evidence of primitive life-forms

2009 – U.S. senate confirms Sonia Sotomayor 68-31 as first Hispanic, and third female, Supreme Court Justice

2012 – NASA’s Curiosity rover lands on surface of Mars

2015 – The expansion of the Suez Canal is inaugurated at a ceremony in Ismaïlia

2015 – Comedian Jon Stewart hosts The Daily Show for the last time

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