August 30th is

U.N. International Day of the Disappeared *

Frankenstein Day *

Grief Awareness Day *

Slinky Day *

International Whale Shark Day *

Toasted Marshmallow Day              

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MORE! Anita Garibaldi, John Gunther and Sylvia Earle, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Cyprus, North Cyprus & Turkey –
Zafir Bairam/Victory Day
(War of Independence – Battle of Dumlupinar)

East Timor – Consultation Day

Iran – Eid-e-Ghadir  (Shia Muslims celebrate
Ali ibn Abi Talib’s succession)

Kazakhstan – Constitution Day

Peru – Santa Rosa de Lima (Peru’s patron saint)

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On This Day in HISTORY

526 – Theoderic the Great, King of the Ostrogoths and ruler of Italy, dies; his daughter Amalasuntha takes power as regent for her 10-year-old son Athalaric. When her son dies in 534, she briefly becomes Queen, choosing her cousin Theidaha as co-ruler, but is assassinated with at the least his permission, giving Byzantine Emperor Justinian I an excuse to send his general Belisarius on an invasion of  Italy

1096 – Pope Urban II bans use of the crossbow, on pain of excommunication, against fellow Roman Catholics; still allowed for use against non-believers, heretics and heathens

1681 – English King Charles II grants William Penn a royal charter for a large tract of land in America to satisfy a debt owed to Penn’s father

1748 – Jacques-Louis David born, French Neoclassicist painter

Self Portrait, 1794, by Jacques-Louis David

1767 – Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwencke born, German composer, pianist and music publisher; Direktor der Kirchenmusik in Hamburg

1780 – Benedict Arnold secretly promises to surrender West Point fort to the British

1787 – Mary Thomas born, poet and early South Australian settler whose diaries and letters, first published in 1915, are a detailed account of early colonial life

1797 – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is born, author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein Day * honors her best-known work

1821 – Anita Garibaldi born, Brazilian comrade-in-arms and wife of Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi after his arrival is Brazil. A skilled horsewoman – while pregnant, she escapes after being captured by enemies during the Battle of Curitibanos by stealing a horse; when it is shot out from under her, she wades into the river Canoas. Her pursuers assume she will drown, and leave her for dead. She survives for four days without food or water before finding help, and reunites with Garibaldi; a few months later she gives birth their son

1835 – Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, is founded, named after then-British Prime Minister, William Lamb, 2^nd Viscount Melbourne

1836 – Houston, Texas, is founded, named after Sam Houston, hero of San Jacinto

1852 – Jacobus Hoff born in Holland, German chemist, first winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry (1901)

1862 – Confederate victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run in Manassas VA

1871 – Ernest Rutherford born in New Zealand, English Nobel Prize-winning physicist (1908)

1893 – Huey P. Long born, “The Kingfish” of Louisiana politics; after serving as Chair of the Railroad and Public Service Commissions, he was Louisiana’s governor (1928-1932), and senator (1932-1935); assassinated in 1935 at the Louisiana State Capitol

1901 – John Gunther born, American journalist; author of Inside Europe, Inside U.S.A., and Death Be Not Proud

1907 – Luisa Moreno born as Blanca Rosa López Rodríguez in Guatemala, U.S. Labor Movement political activist, labor organizer, and writer  

1909 – Virginia Lee Burton born, American children’s author and illustrator; her book The Little House won a Caldecott Award; she founded textile collective Folly Cove Designers

1909 – Charles Doolittle Walcott discovers fossils near Burgess Pass, naming the site as the Burgess Shale

Charles, Sidney and Stuart Walcott working at the Burgess Shale

1912 – Nancy Wake born in New Zealand, British agent during WWII, a Special Operations Executive member who became a leading figure in the French Resistance; one of the Allies most decorated servicewomen of the war, by 1943 she was the Gestapo’s most wanted person with a 5 million franc price on her head

1912 – E. M. Purcell born, American Nobel Prize-winning physicist (1952)

1913 – Sir Richard Stone born, English Nobel Prize-winning economist (1984)

1918 – Fanni Kaplan shoots and seriously injures Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin; she refuses to implicate anyone else, insisting she acted alone

1919 – Kitty Wells born, American singer-songwriter and guitarist, first woman to top the U.S. country charts, Country Music Hall of Fame inductee; Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1991)

1922 – New Orleans Rhythm Kings record “Tiger Rag”

1922 – Regina Resnik, American mezzo-soprano; her international career spanned 50 years, but the NY Met was her artistic home

1923 – Barbara Ansell born, British physician; founder of pediatric rheumatology, developing a system of classifying childhood arthritis, and specialized in research and treatment of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis

1923 – Charmian Clift born, Australian writer, essayist and memoirist; she wrote essays for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Herald in Melbourne (1964-1969); known for her memoirs Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, and her novel Honour’s Mimic; alcoholism and a disintegrating marriage contributed to her suicide in 1969  

1928 – The Independence of India League is established

1935 – Alexandra Bellow born in Romania, Romanian American mathematician who has contributed to the fields of ergodic theory, probability and analysis; 1987 Humboldt Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

1935 – Sylvia Earle born, American oceanographer, pioneer in use of SCUBA gear, first woman to serve as chief scientist at NOAA; co-designer and builder of the first submersible craft to reach 3,000 foot depths; in 1986, she set the women’s record for a world solo dive depth and tied the overall record with Graham Hawkes; author of  Atlas of the Ocean: The Deep Frontier

1941 – The WWII Nazi Siege of Leningrad begins, which will last nearly 2 ½ years

1943 – Bonisile John Kani born, South African actor and producer, member of the Serpent Players; Kani collaborated with playwright Athol Fugard in producing his plays, which have garnered international acclaim

1944 – Dame Frances Cairncross born, British economist, journalist and academic; Senior Fellow at the School of Public Policy, UCLA; chair of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Fiscal Studies; Rector of Exeter College, Oxford (2004-2014); chair of the Economic and Social Research Council (2001-2007); on the staff of The Economist (1984-2004); economics correspondent (1973-1981) and staff writer (1973-1984) for The Guardian newspaper

1944 – Molly Ivins born, American columnist, political commentator, humorist and author; she was the first woman police reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune, then joined the Texas Observer in 1970 and where she covered the Texas legislature. She worked for the New York Times (1976-1982) which hired her for her colorful writing style, and then tried to get her to tone it down. She returned to Texas to become a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald (1981-1991), and then the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (1992-2001), which was syndicated and carried by hundreds of newspapers. Her 1991 book Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? was on the New York Times bestseller list for 29 weeks

1945 – WWII; Hong Kong is liberated from the Japanese by British Armed Forces

1945 – In Vietnam, the August Revolution ends as Emperor Bảo Đại abdicates, ending the Nguyễn dynasty

1956 – In Louisiana, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway opens

1958 – Muriel Gray born, Scottish horror novelist, broadcaster on Channel Four’s music show The Tube, and journalist who has written for Time Out, The Sunday Herald, and The Guardian; the first woman Rector of the University of Edinburgh, the first female chair of the Glasgow School of Art board of governors; appointed to the board of trustees of The British Museum since 2015; elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2018; Patron of the Scottish charity Trees for Life, which is working to restore the Caledonian Forest

1958 – Anna Politkovskaya born to Ukranian parents, Russian journalist, writer, and human rights activist who reported on Russian political events, especially the Second Chechen War (1999-2005), which made her national and international reputation, refusing to give up reporting in spite of intimidation, arrest by Russian military forces, and being poisoned on a flight from Moscow which forced her to turn back for medical treatment.  Her post-war articles about conditions in Chechnya were re-published in book form, but her worl was mainly accessed by Russian Readers through Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper known for its often-critical investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs. She received numerous international awards for her work. In 2004, she published Putin’s Russia for readers in the West. She was assassinated in October 2006 in the elevator of her block of flats, which attracted international attention, but the five men arrested and sentenced to prison for the murder never revealed who ordered or paid for the killing

1960 – Kevin Oldham born, American pianist and composer; died at age 33 of AIDS

1963 – The “Hotline” between Moscow and Washington goes into operation

1965 – Bob Dylan releases his “Highway 61 Revisited” album

1967 – Thurgood Marshall is confirmed by U.S. Senate 69-11 (with 20 not voting) as the first black Supreme Court justice; he will be a passionate voice for individual rights and expanding civil rights on the Supreme Court for 24 years before retiring for health reasons

1974 – The first cooperative U.S. and Netherlands scientific satellite is launched from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California

1983 – Guion S. Bluford Jr. is the first African-American astronaut in space aboard the Challlenger space shuttle

1984 – Space shuttle Discovery lifts off for first voyage, deploys three communications satellites, with Judith A. Resnik aboard, who becomes the second U.S. woman in space

1988 – South Africa withdraws its military forces from Angola that had been fighting on the side of Jonas Savimbi-led guerrilla forces UNITA against SWAPO (South West African People Organization), supported by Cuba. After the withdrawal, a consensus is reached between South Africa, Cuba and Angola concerning the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, and steps toward South West Africa becoming the independent country of Namibia (on March 21, 1990) 

1989 – Leona Helmsley, “Queen of Mean” hotelier, found guilty of income tax evasion

1990 – George H.W. Bush tells reporters a “new world order” could emerge from the Persian Gulf crisis

1999 – East Timor votes for independence from Indonesia in UN-sponsored referendum

2005 – Hurricane Katrina strikes the Gulf Coast with devastating force, killing more than 1,700 people and flooding New Orleans after the city’s levees fail

2010 – U.N. resolution establishes August 30 as International Day of the Disappeared *

2011 – The first National Grief Awareness Day * is started by Angie Cartwright on her mother’s birthday

2012 – First International Whale Shark Day – Whale Sharks are added to International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species

2015 – Slinky Day * is launched to celebrate the 70^th Anniversary of the Slinky

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