October 3^rd is

National Techie’s Day

Boyfriend Day

Soft Taco Day

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MORE! George Bancroft, Gertrude Berg and Gore Vidal, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Germany – German Unity Day *

Iraq – National Day

South Korea – Kae Chun Jul
(Foundation Day)

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On This Day in HISTORY

2457 BC – Gaecheonjeol *, the date when Hwanung (환웅), son of the Lord of Heaven, purportedly descended from heaven with 3,000 followers to live with mankind. His legend credits Hwanung with instituting laws and moral codes, and teaching the people art, medicine and agriculture. Gaecheonjeol is celebrated as South Korea’s National Foundation Day

52 BC – Vercingetorix, leader of the a confederation of Gallic tribes, surrenders to the Romans under Julius Caesar, ending the siege and Battle of Alesia

1373? – (date uncertain) Jadwiga of Poland born, the first woman monarch of the Kingdom of Poland, she reigned from 1384 to 1399

1648 – Élisabeth Sophie Chéron, French painter, poet, musician and academic

1683 – Qing dynasty naval commander Shi Lang reaches Taiwan (under the Kingdom of Tungning) to receive the formal surrender of Zheng Keshuang and Liu Guoxuan after the Battle of Pengh. Zheng Keshuang is the last king of Tungning

1685 – In Amsterdam, the Dutch East India Company decides to send French Huguenots to the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa for settlement. The Huguenots were Protestants, and many of them fled to Holland to escape persecution in France. The first Huguenots had already gone to the Cape in 1671, but the first large group of Huguenots, mostly families, arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1688

1680s drawing of Tabletop Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope

1713 – Antoine Dauvergne born, French violinist and composer

1789 – President George Washington issues a proclamation “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving” on Thursday the 26^th day of November

1790 – John Ross born, aka Koo-wi-s-gu-wi, American, longest-serving Principle Chief of the Cherokee Nation (1828-1866)

1800 – George Bancroft born, American historian and statesman; advocate for secondary education; established U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and obtained additional funds for U.S. Naval Observatory during his tenure as U.S. Secretary of the Navy 1845-1846; U.S. Minister plenipotentiary to Britain for discussions on the Oregon boundary dispute (1846-1849); a founding member of the American Geographical Society (AGS); Congress chose him to deliver a special eulogy on Lincoln in 1866

1820 – In Beijing, the short reign of the Daoguang Emperor of the Qing dynasty begins (1820-1826); the empire was declining, and Westerners were beginning to encroach the borders of China, pushing for the opening of trade, which would lead to the First Opium War (1839-1842)

1844 – Sir Patrick Manson born, Scots physician and parasitologist, founder of the field of tropical medicine; first to discover mosquitoes can be hosts to a developing parasite that causes a human disease (filariasis, related to heartworm in dogs)

1849 – Jeannette Gilder born, pioneering American woman journalist and editor; used the pen name “Brunswick,” when writing for The Boston Evening Transcript and was their New York Correspondent; co-founder with her brother Richard of The Critic (1881-1906), a literary magazine; also joint editor with him of Scribner’s Monthly

1849 – Edgar Allen Poe is found delirious on the street in Baltimore, and taken to Washington Medical College, where he died at early in the morning on October 7. His medical records have been lost, adding to speculation about cause of  death

1854 – William Crawford Gorgas born, U.S. Army physician, Surgeon General of the U.S Army (1914-1918); worked on abating transmission of malaria and yellow fever by controlling mosquitoes

1858 – Eleonora Duse born, Italian actress, regarded as one of the greatest actors of all time; remembered for roles in plays by Gabriele d’Annunzio and Henrik Ibsen; formed her own company as actor-manager – rival of Sarah Bernhardt

1859 – Lilian Whiting born, journalist and author, The Life Radiant, Land of Enchantment, and The Golden Road

1860 – Annie Horniman born, British theatre manager, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester, promoted new playwrights

The original Abbey Theatre on left, and
Annie Horniman, portrait by Emma Magnus

1863 – President Lincoln declares the last Thursday in November will be Thanksgiving Day

1867 – Pierre Bonnard born, French Post-Impressionist avant-garde painter

The Letter, by Pierre Bonnard (1906)

1872 – The Bloomingdale brothers open their first store in New York City

1873 – Emily Post born, American author and authority on etiquette; Etiquette, her first major book, was successful because it broke new ground, aimed at people who without wealth or social position; her radio program and daily column were so popular, she had to set up a special office to handle the high volume of mail

1873 – “Captain Jack” Kintpuash, chief of the Northern California-Pacific NW Modoc tribe, found guilty of war crimes by the U.S. Army for the ambush killing of General Canby at a peace talk where U.S government insists the Modocs return to the Klamath Reservation, is hanged with three others, and some Modoc warriors are sent to prison

1885 – Sophie Treadwell born, American playwright, novelist and journalist; Machinal, often called an expressionist play, is the best-known of her plays which were produced on Broadway

1888 – Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard: or, The Merryman and His Maid premieres at the Savoy Theatre

1889 – Carl von Ossietzky, German journalist and whistleblower, 1935 Nobel Peace Prize for exposing the clandestine, treaty-breaking German rearmament; after Hitler’s rise to power, in 1933 he convicted of high treason, sent to Esterwegen concentration camp, starved and mistreated by the guards; he defied the Nazis by accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, but of course not able to go to Oslo to receive it; died in 1938, of tuberculosis contracted at Esterwegen

1893 – J.S. Thurman patents a motor-driven vacuum cleaner

1897 – Ruth Muskrat Bronson born, Bureau of Indian Affairs official who got loans for Indian students, National Congress of American Indians forced authorities to honor treaties (1944), wrote Indians are People, Too

1899 – Gertrude Berg born as Tillie Edelstein, American pioneer in radio, who wrote, produced and starred in the long-running serial comedy-drama The Rise of the Goldbergs, later called The Goldbergs, about the Jewish family of Molly and Jake Goldberg who live in a Bronx tenement. The first 15-minute episode aired on November 20, 1929 on the NBC radio network. She wrote almost all 5,000 of the show’s radio episodes, and a 1948 Broadway adaptation, Me and Molly. In 1949, CBS put The Goldbergs on television. Gertrude Berg won the very first Emmy Award for Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for the show’s debut season. In 1951, her co-star Philip Loeb, who played Jake Goldberg, was blacklisted when his name appeared in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. The series was canceled as a result of Loeb’s participation, and both networks and sponsors insisted Loeb be fired as a condition of the show returning to air, despite Gertrude Berg’s protests. Loeb resigned rather than cause Berg trouble. He reportedly received a generous severance package from the show, but he sank into a depression that ultimately drove him to suicide in 1955. The Goldbergs returned a year after Loeb departed the show and continued until 1954, after which Berg also wrote and produced a syndicated film version

Gertrude Berg and Philip Loeb as Molly and Jake Goldberg in 1949

1900 – Thomas Wolfe born, influential American novelist; Of Time and the River, You Can’t Go Home Again and Look Homeward, Angel

1904 – Mary McLeod Bethune opens her first school for African-American students in Daytona Beach, Florida

1906 – W.T. Grant opens a 35-cent department store

1906 – Natalie Savage Carlson born, American children’s book author; she wove family stories and folktales from her French Canadian heritage into her early books, such as The Talking Cat and Other Stories of French Canada. Noted for The Family Under the Bridge, and The Orphelines books

1919 – James Herriot born as James Alfred Wight, British veterinary surgeon and the author of semi-autobiographical books about the life of a country veterinarian, such as his best-seller All Creatures Great and Small, which incorporated his earlier books If Only They Could Talk and It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet

1922 – Governor Hardwick of Georgia appoints Rebecca Felton fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate, the first woman to be a U.S. Senator. She served just 24 hours. At 87 years, nine months, and 22 days old, she was the oldest freshman senator to enter the Senate. Felton is still the only woman to have ever served as a U.S. Senator from Georgia. Felton was also the last person to serve in either house who had been a slave owner before the Civil War, and was an outspoken white supremacist and racist

1925 – Gore Vidal born, American author, political commentator, essayist and public intellectual; Myra Breckinridge

1928 – Erik Bruhn born, Danish premier danseur, choreographer, teacher and artistic director of the Swedish Opera Ballet (1967-1973) and the National Ballet of Canada (1983-1986)

Eric Bruhn as Don Quixote

1928 – Sir Shridath Surendranath Ramphal born, Guyanese statesman and barrister; 2nd Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations (1975-1990); Minister of Foreign Affairs of Guyana (1972-1975); Assistant Attorney General of the West Indies Federation (1958-1962); Crown Counsel, then Solicitor-General, in the Guyanese Attorney-General’s Office (1953-1958)

1929 – Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes is renamed Kingdom of Yugoslavia

1932 – Iraq gains independence from Great Britain, and joins the League of Nations

1941 – Adolf Hitler declares in a speech given in Berlin that Russia had been “broken” and would “never rise again”

1942 – FDR establishes the Office of Economic Stabilization, authorizing control of rents, wages, salaries and farm prices.

1942 – WWII: The first successful launch of a V-2 /A4-rocket from Test Stand VII at Peenemünde, Germany, the first man-made object to reach space

1944 – Founding of the New York City Opera

1949 – Laurie Simmons born, American artist, photographer and filmmaker; part of The Pictures Generation, a group of artists whose work was shown in a 2009 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art; notable for her Black Series, photographs of rooms she constructed with dollhouse furniture and replicas of iconic, easily recognizable artworks, and her 2006 film, The Music of Regret

1951 – Kathryn D. Sullivan born, American geologist, oceanographer and NASA astronaut; a crew member on three Space Shuttle missions, she became the first American woman to walk in space on October 11, 1984. Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans, and Atmosphere Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (2014-2017)

1952 – Great Britain becomes the world’s third nuclear power when they detonate their first atomic bomb

1954 – Father Knows Best premieres on CBS-TV

1955 – Buket Uzuner born, Turkish best-selling novelist, and travelogue and short story writer; noted for her travelogues about being a solo woman backpacker, including Travel Notes of An Urban Romantic, and her 2013 novel İstanbullular  (English title is I Am Istanbul) and her first novel İki Yeşil Susamuru, Anneleri, Babaları, Sevgilileri ve Diğerleri (translated as Two Green Otters, Mothers, Fathers, Lovers and All the Others); awarded Turkey’s Yunus Nadi prize for her novel Balık İzlerinin Sesi (translated as The Sound of Fishsteps)

1955 – Captain Kangaroo and The Mickey Mouse Club debut on television

1957 – The California State Superior Court rules that Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems is not obscene

1958 – Chen Yanyin born, Chinese sculptor; her first solo show, Box Series, was at the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute in 1994; she participated in several collaborative shows around the world, and some of her work was shown in Between Ego and Society: An Exhibition of Contemporary Female Artists in China at the Chicago Cultural Center

Chen Yanyin – Acrobatics

1958 – Louise Lecavalier born, Canadian contemporary dance icon; began her professional career as a member of Le Groupe Nouvelle Aire; joined Édouard Lock’s dance group, Lock Danseurs, in 1980, which quickly became La La La Human Steps, where she was the company’s principal dancer; her first work as a choreographer was So Blue, which premiered in Düsseldorf in 2012. Lecavalier was honored with the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement in dance in 2014

Louise Lecavalier in So Blue

1961 – The Dick Van Dyke Show premieres on CBS-TV

1961 – Rebecca Stephens born, British mountaineer, writer, motivational speaker, leadership coach, and journalist. She was the first British woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the third woman and the first British Woman to climb the Seven Summits. She is the founder of the leadership development company Seven Summits Performance Ltd; a presenter on BBC television science series Tomorrow’s World (1994-1996)

1962 – Project Mercury: NASA launches Sigma 7 from Cape Canaveral, with astronaut Wally Schirra aboard, for a six-orbit, nine-hour flight

1962 – Stop the World, I Want to Get Off! opens on Broadway

1968 – Leonard Bernstein conducts the NY Philharmonic in first performance of William Schuman’s To Thee Old Cause, dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy

1971 – Billie Jean King becomes first female athlete to earn $100,000 in a single season

1978 – The price of gold reaches a then-record high of $223.50 an ounce in London

1980 – Lindsey Kelk born, British author of thirteen novels, journalist and blogger, currently lives in Los Angeles, California; former children’s book editor; noted for her “I heart” books, which began with I heart New York

1981 – Irish nationalists at the Maze Prison near Belfast, Northern Ireland, end a seven month hunger strike that had claimed 10 lives

1985 – The Space Shuttle Atlantis makes its maiden flight (Mission STS-51-J)

1990 –Berlin is no longer divided as the German Democratic Republic ceases to exist and its territory becomes part of the Federal Republic of Germany. East German citizens become part of the European Community, which later becomes the European Union. Now celebrated as German Unity Day *

1999 – The first National Techies Day * is launched by Techies.com and CNET Networks to encourage kids to study computer science

2008 – George W Bush signs into law the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, a $700 billion bailout of the U.S financial system and some foreign banks

2009 – Maine voters vote to repeal a state law allowing same-sex couples to marry

2016 – Yoshinori Ohsumi is awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for  discovering mechanisms for autophagy, the consumption of the body’s own tissue as a metabolic process occurring in starvation and certain diseases

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