October 2^nd is

Custodial Workers Day

Fried Scallops Day

Guardian Angels Day

Name Your Car Day

World Farm Animals Day *

International Day of Non-Violence *

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MORE! Thakkar Bapa, Joan Baez and Thurgood Marshall, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Guinea – Independence Day

Honduras – Semana Morazánica
(Day 2 – honors Francisco Morazán *)

India – Mahatma Gandhi’s Birthday

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On This Day in HISTORY

945 – The kingdom of Min, in what is now the mountainous region of China’s Fujian province, is conquered and annexed by Southern Tang (937-976), which came after the fall of the Tang Dynasty, during the Ten Kingdoms period

1187 – Siege of Jerusalem: Saladin captures Jerusalem after 88 years of Crusader rule, as Balian of Ibelin surrenders the keys to the Tower of David; Saladin accepts ransom for seven thousand of the inhabitants, who march away in three columns, preventing the kind of bloodbath that the Crusaders had let loose when they first captured the city in 1099; those unable to pay the ransom are enslaved

Balian of Ibelin surrenders city of Jerusalem to Saladin, from Les Passages faits Outremer par les Français contre les Turcs et autres Sarrasins et Maures outremarins, c. 1490

1452 – Richard III born, last Plantagenet king of England

1470 – Richard Neville, 16^th Earl of Warwick, England’s richest and most powerful peer of the age, falls out with King Edward IV of England over foreign policy and the king’s choice of Elizabeth Woodville as his wife. Warwick leads a rebellion, forcing Edward to flee to the Netherlands, and restoring Henry VI to the throne, but just over six months later, Warwick is killed fighting Edward’s men at the Battle of Barnet

1528 – William Tyndale, renowned English Reformer and Bible translator published his famous work The Obedience of a Christian Man

1535 – Jacques Cartier is the first European to see what will be Montreal

1552 – Russo-Kazan Wars: The Siege of Kazan by the Muscovite army under Ivan the Terrible is the final battle of the war, as the Russians blow up part of the city’s walls, then destroy most of the Tatar buildings, including mosques, release Russian prisoners of war, and massacre hundreds of  Kazan Tatars

1615 – Pope Paul V adds a Feast Day for Guardian Angels * to the Roman calendar

1718 – Elizabeth Montagu born, English reformer, “Queen of the Blues” (Bluestockings, literary intellectuals) who was noted for her literary salon which included Samuel Johnson,  Sir Joshua Reynolds,  Edmund Burke, Elizabeth Carter, David Garrick, Fanny Burney,  and Sarah Fielding and Horace Walpole. She was also a patron of the arts, up-and-coming writers in particular. In 1760, she wrote and contributed anonymously three sections to Dialogues of the Dead, and in 1769, published under her name An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear. When her much older husband died in 1775, she inherited his substantial fortune, and the following year, adopted her orphaned nephew Matthew Robinson, making him her heir. A collection of her letters was published posthumously, many of them written to her sister, Sarah Scott, who was novelist and translator 

1755 – Hannah Adams born, American author of books on comparative religion and early U.S. history, first woman in America to make writing her profession; A View of Religion, A Summary History of New England, The History of the Jews, Letters on the Gospels 

Hannah Adams, by Chester Harding, 1827

1780 – British Major John André is hanged as a spy for trying to help Benedict Arnold turn over West Point to the British forces

1789 – George Washington sends proposed Constitutional amendments (the Bill of Rights) to the States for ratification

1792 – Francisco Morazán * born, Honduran politician and statesman; attempted with others to form the Central American countries of Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador into one nation, the Federal Republic of Central America, under a federalist government similar to the U.S. in 1789, lasting from 1824 to 1836

1792 – Cipriani Potter born, British composer, pianist and one of the first teachers at the Royal Academy of Music

1800 – Nat Turner born, American slave who led the most sustained slave rebellion in U.S. history; taught reading writing and religion as a child, he became a fiery preacher, who believed himself chosen by God to lead slaves in Virginia out of bondage; 51 white people are killed in the uprising; 56 black slaves accused of  being part of the rebellion are executed, including Nat Turner; laws are passed in the American South prohibiting teaching slaves to read or write, and tensions between North and South increase

1814 – The Disaster of Rancagua: Spanish forces under Mariano Osorio  defeat rebel Chilean forces, ending the independent Chilean Patria Vieja, and beginning the Reconquista period of Spanish rule

1835 – The Texas Revolution is started by local militia fighting with Mexican soldiers at the Battle of Gonzales

1846 – Eliza Maria Mosher born, U.S. physician, educator and lecturer; taught at Vassar College and the University of Michigan, where she became Dean of Women (1896-1902); founder of the American Posture League, re-designing chairs for streetcars and kindergarten classrooms

1847 – Paul von Hindenburg born, German military officer and politician; elected President of Germany in 1925; appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of a “Government of National Concentration” in 1933

1851 – Ferdinand Foch born, WWI French general and later Marshal of France; became Allied Commander-in-Chief in 1918

1852 – Sir William Ramsay born, British chemist whose discovery of the noble gases earned him the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his collaborator Lord Rayleigh

1869 – Mahatma Gandhi born as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Indian nationalist leader whose philosophy of nonviolence influenced movements around the world

1869 – Thakkar Bapa born as Amritial Vithaldas Thakkar, Indian social worker who spent 35 years of his life in service of tribal people and harijans ( people of Hari/Vishnu –“untouchables”) traveling forests in Assam, rural Bengal, drought affected areas of Orissa, Bhil belts in Gujarat and Harijan areas of Saurashtra, Mahar areas of Maharashtra, untouchables in Madras, hilly areas of Chhota Nagpur, desert of Tharparkar, foothills of Himalaya, coastal areas of Travancore; member of the Servants of India Society founded by Gopal Krishna Gokhale in 1914, and was general secretary of the  Harijan Sevak Sangh founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1932

1871 – Martha Brookes Hutcheson born, American landscape architect; enrolled in the first course offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Landscape Architecture, but had to leave after two years of study; designed the grounds for a number of residential estates, including the garden at Alice Mary Longfellow’s Cambridge MA home; after marriage, she retired from commercial practice, but landscaped her five acre garden at their 100 acre farm in New Jersey, now a NJ Historic Trust property, the Bamboo Brook Education Center; third woman named a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects; author of The Spirit of the Garden (1923)

1879 – Wallace Stevens born, American Modernist poet and insurance executive; 1955 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Collected Poems

1885 – Ruth Bryan Owen born, author and politician; first southern woman representative to the US Congress (D-FL 1929-1933); first woman on the House Foreign Affairs Committee; first woman appointed as a US Ambassador (1933-1936, Denmark)

1889 – Nicholas Creede strikes silver in Colorado, the last major silver strike of the Colorado Silver Boom

1890 – Groucho Marx born as Julius Henry Marx, most successful of the Marx Brothers; after Broadway hits in The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, which were also his first movies, and hosting the radio comedy quiz show You Bet Your Life (later revived on television), he and his brothers made a dozen classic comedy films for Hollywood

1895 – Ruth Cheney Streeter born, first director of the United States Marine Corps Women’s Reserve

1901 – Charles Stark Draper born, American scientist and aeronautical engineer; founder-director of  MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, awarded the first contract for the Apollo program, to develop the Apollo Guidance Computer to control navigation and guidance for the Lunar Excursion Module

1904 – Graham Greene born, English novelist, who achieved both literary acclaim and widespread popularity; The Power and the Glory, The Quiet American, The Comedians, Our Man in Havana, and the screenplay for the film The Third Man

1919 – President Woodrow Wilson suffers a major stroke, which partially paralyzes him

1925 – John Logie Baird performs the first test of a working television system

1926 – Jan Morris born James Humphrey Morris, Welsh historian, author and travel writer; known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–1978), a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Hong Kong, and New York City. A trans woman, she published under her birth name until 1972, when she transitioned from a male to a female identity

1928 – Spanish Catholic priest Josemaria Escrivá founds Opus Dei (Praelatura Sanctae Crucis et Operis Dei/The Prelature of the Holy Cross and Work of God)

1929 – Kenneth Leighton born, British composer/pianist, also taught at the University of Edinburgh and was Fellow of  Music of Worcester College, Oxford

1929 – Tanaquil La Clercq born, principal dancer with the New York City Ballet until she contracted polio while on tour in Copenhagen in 1956, which paralyzed her from the waist down; she later taught ballet and wrote Mourka: The Autobiography of a Cat and The Ballet Cook Book

1932 – Constitutionalist Revolution in Brazil: The São Paulo rebels are defeated, outnumbered over 2 to 1 by the armed forces sent to put down their rebellion. The revolt began in July, 1932, against the Presidency of Getúlio Vargas, forcibly imposed by a coup d’état in 1930, after Júlio Prestes had won the election. Prestes was born in the state of São Paulo, and was its most recent President (1927-1930) before the coup. The rebels were demanding that the Vargas regime adopt and abide by a new Constitution, a non-military interim state governor be appointed, and election of a Constituent Assembly. They had expected other states like Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul to join them, but no support was forthcoming

1937 – Dominican Republic dictator Raphael Trujillo orders the execution of all the Haitians living within the borderlands; 20,000 Haitians killed over 5 days

1939 – The Benny Goodman Sextet records “Flying Home”

1941 – Diana Hendry born, English poet, children’s author and short story writer; won the 1991 Whitbread Award for best children’s book for Harvey Angell

1943 – Anna Ford born, English journalist and television news reader who worked for for Granada TV (1974-1977), ITN (1978-1981) and the BBC (1977-1978 and 1986-2006); she helped launch TV-am, the first British breakfast television programme (1981)

1944 – WWII: German troops end the Warsaw Uprising under the Polish resistance Home Army, the largest military effort by a resistance group of the war; exact figures are unknown, but an estimated 16,000 members of the Polish resistance are killed and some 6,000 badly wounded, and between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians die, mostly in mass executions. Jews harbored by Poles are exposed by German house-to-house clearances and mass evictions of entire neighborhoods. The Soviet Red Army was expected to aid the Poles, but halted just outside the city, ignoring Polish attempts at radio contact

1949 – Annie Leibovitz born, American portrait photographer; first woman to have an exhibition at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery (1991)

1950 – Peanuts by Charles M. Schultz is first published

1955 – Dame Nancy Rothwell born, British physiologist, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester since 2010; one of the directors of AstraZeneca, the pharmaceuticals company; co-chair of the Council for Science and Technology; noted for research on Brown adipose tissue and Cytokines; Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire since 2005

1959 – Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone debuts on CBS-TV

1961 – Joan Baez releases “Banks of the Ohio”

1967 – Thurgood Marshall is sworn in as the first black United States Supreme Court Justice

1968 – Tlatelolco massacre: In Mexico City, dozens of student protesters are killed as government troops fire upon them in the Plaza de los Tres Culturas, and over 1300 people are arrested. Government documents made public since 2000 suggest that snipers had been employed by the government, which contradicts the claim at the time that the protesters had provoked the massacre by shooting at the police and military forces. This was less than two weeks before the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, and the government had been cracking down on all political opposition, not only from students, but from labor unions, and farmers as well, after investing massively (the estimated amount is roughly equal to $1 billion USD today) in preparations for the games

1968 – Victoria Derbyshire born, English journalist and broadcaster; her current affairs and debate programme has been on BBC Two and the BBC News Channel since 2015

1971 – The Natal Indian Congress (NIC), which had been founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1894 to fight discrimination against Indians living in Natal, had fallen into a long period of inactivity after being banned along with the ANC and the Transvaal Indian Congress, but was now revived by activist Mewa Ramgobin. Press in Natal was reporting that the Grey Street area of Durban might be declared as an Indian commercial zone, imposing more government control over the livelihoods of the Indian community

1972 – Danish voters decide in favor of European Common Market membership

1973 – Melissa Harris-Perry born, American writer, academic, and political commentator with a focus on African-American politics; host of the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC (2012-2016); she taught political science at the University of Chicago (1999-2006); Associate Professor of political science and African-American studies at Princeton (2006-2011), leaving when she was denied a full professorship; Founding Director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project, a center for study of Southern race, gender and politics, at Tulane University (2011-2014); regular columnist for The Nation magazine; author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America

1973 – Maria Wetterstrand born, Swedish Green Party politician and Spokesperson (2002-2011) with Peter Eriksson, Member of the Riksdag (Sweden’s parliament, 2001-2011)

1979 – Pope John Paul II denounces all concentration camps and torture in a speech at the United Nations

1980 – Michael Myers (D-PA) becomes first member of either chamber of U.S> Congress to be expelled since the Civil War, because of the Abscam scandal

1982 – The Portland Building, designed by Michael Graves, opens in Portland OR

1983 – The first World Farm Animals Day * to advocate against cruelty to animals raised for food

1990 – The last song of Radio Berlin International’s final transmission is “The End” by the Doors; the following day, the official dissolution of East Germany and the reunification of the German state are formally concluded, less than four months after East German military units began dismantling the Berlin Wall

1996 – President Clinton signs Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments

2000 – The International Space Station’s first residents, an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts, arrive aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule for a four-month stay

2003 – South African author J.M. Coetzee is honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature. The only other South African to win the Nobel for Literature was Nadine Gordimer in 1991

2007 – The U.N. General Assembly passes a resolution establishing October 2, the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, as the International Day of Non-Violence *

2010 – The modern-day version of the ancient religion of Druidry, which is more New Age than Iron Age, is officially recognised for first time in the United Kingdom

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