October 6^th is

American Libraries Day *

Mad Hatter Day *

National Badger Day

National Noodle Day

Physician Assistant Day

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MORE! Sarah Crosby, Thor Heyerdahl and Liu Yang, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Australia – Melbourne:
Melbourne Arts Festival

Britain – London: Frieze Art Fair

Egypt – Armed Forces Day

Syria – Tishreen &
October Revolution Day

Turkmenistan –
Earthquake Remembrance Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

105 BC – Battle of Arausio: Migratory tribes of Cimbri (possibly a Celtic people but origin uncertain) led by Boiorix and Teutoni win a decisive victory against two Roman armies outside Arausio (now Orange in southeastern France) near the Rhone River. The two inexperienced Roman commanders – proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio, a noble, refuses to serve under the higher-ranked consul Gnaeus Mallius Maximus because he is a ‘new man’ – are so much at odds that Caepio launches an inept assault on the Cimbrian camp while Maximus is negotiating with Boiorix – causing virtually all the Romans and large numbers of their allied troops, servants and camp followers to be lost, one of the worst defeats in Roman history. Because of this debacle, Gaius Marius takes over as commander-in-chief of the entire Roman Army and radically reforms the organization and recruitment of Roman legions; the Senate sets aside term limits to allow Marius to be elected as senior consul an unprecedented five times in a row

AD 23 – Emperor Wang Mang (9-23), a Han Dynasty court official who seized the throne from the Lui family and founded his own brief Xin dynasty, is hacked to pieces when the capital city Chang’an is overrun by Han forces and the imperial palace is ransacked. Liu Xuan reclaims the throne as the Gengshi Emperor, and the Han dynasty is restored

1539 – Hernando de Soto’s conquistadors enter Anhaica, Apalachee capital (present-day Tallahassee FL), by force

1565 – Marie de Gournay born, French protofeminist writer; noted for The Equality of Men and Women (1622) and The Ladies’ Grievance (Les femmes et Grief des dames, 1626); she was an advocate for women’s education

1591 – Settimia Caccini born, Italian singer and composer, one of the first women known to have a successful career in music, but none of her compositions were published during her lifetime

1600 – The earliest surviving opera, from the beginning of the Baroque period, Jacapo Peri’s Euridice, premieres at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence

1683 – German Mennonites, the first group of the major German immigration to the U.S. arrive in America, to found Germantown in the Pennsylvania colony

1723 – Benjamin Franklin, at age 17, arrives in Philadelphia, and begins working in the printing trade

1729 – Sarah Crosby born, considered the first woman to be a Methodist preacher. She and Mary Bosanquet were the most popular women preachers of Methodism of their day, and worked together, co-founding an orphanage, first in Leytonstone, and then moving it to Yorkshire. Crosby continued traveling and preaching, writing that she had traveled 960 miles in the year 1777 alone, until rheumatism curtailed her travels, but she was still teaching and preaching at local meetings the week before her death in 1804

1744 – James McGill born, Scottish-Canadian businessman and philanthropist, founded McGill University

1767 – Henri Christophe born a slave, one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution; elected President of Haiti in 1807, but created a Kingdom on the Northern part of the island in 1811 and was proclaimed King Henri I; instituted major building projects, including a fortress, palace, roads and schools by using forced labor, which led to threats against his regime and assassination plots; he committed suicide in 1820

1789 – Louis XVI returns to Paris after the Women’s March on Versailles, when hundreds of market women, joined by many sympathizers, came to complain about the scarcity and high price of bread which was brought on by deregulation of the grain market, and they demand the return of the king, his family and the French Assembly

Louis XVI by Antoine-François Callet – 1786

1820 – Jenny Lind born, Swedish opera star, known as the “Swedish Nightingale”

1857 – The American Chess Congress holds its first national tournament in New York

1876 – American Libraries Day * – The American Library Association is founded, the oldest and largest library association in the world

1884 – The U.S. Naval War College is founded in Newport RI

1887 – Charles-Édouard Jeanneret known as Le Corbusier born in Switzerland, French architect, a pioneer of modern architecture

Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France, 1954

1889 – The Moulin Rouge opens its doors to the public in Paris

1895 – Caroline Gordon born, American novelist and literary critic; associated with the Southern Agrarian writers in the 1930s. She was awarded the O. Henry Award second-place prize for her 1934 short story “Old Red,” which placed higher than short stories by William Saroyan, Pearl S. Buck, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe.  Also noted as mentor to novelists Walker Percy and Brainard Cheney

1897 – Florence B. Seibert born, American biochemist who found that the cause of fever in many patients after being given intravenous injections was contamination during the distillation of water being used in the injections, and developed a device to prevent contamination; but Seibert is best known for indentifying the active agent in the antigen tuberculin as a protein, and isolated a purified form which became the basis of the development and use of the first reliable test for TB, which quickly became the international standard tuberculin test. For this breakthrough, she received the Trudeau Medal from the National Tuberculosis Association in 1938, the American Chemical Society’s Francis P. Garvan Medal in 1942, and the first Achievement Award given by the American Association of University Women in 1943. She was at the Henry Phipps Institute at the University of Pennsylvania from 1932 to 1959, and was finally made a full professor of biochemistry in 1955, just four years before her retirement. Seibert was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1990

1898 – Ossian Everett Mills founds Phi Mu Alpha Sinphonia, the largest U.S. music fraternity, at the New England Conservatory of Music

1899 – The Long March Home: Just before the outbreak of the South African War (2^nd Anglo-Boer War), the mines were closed, and the miners paid off, but the mine owners had not repatriated them, so thousands of miners were forced off mine property and away from the safety of the mine compounds.  They and their families were stranded in Johannesburg, fearing they would be arrested for vagrancy, or shot by Boer commandos. Trains were available to transport refugees to Natal, 354 miles (569 km) away, but many Black mineworkers couldn’t afford the train fare. Over 7,000 Zulu mineworkers, escorted by Mr. J.J. Marwick, representative of the Natal Native Affairs Department and six Republican policemen, left Johannesburg on their way home to Natal and Zululand, walking some 34 miles (56 km) per day, except for those too ill to continue the march, who boarded trains at Heidelberg station

1900 – Vivion Lenon Brewer born, American activist for desegregation. She was a graduate in 1917 of the high school which later was called Little Rock Central High School, in Little Rock, Arkansas, and went on to get degrees in sociology and the law. In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Central High School, and a majority of citizens of Little Rock voted to close the city’s public high schools rather than integrate them. In 1958, Brewer was a founding member with Adolphine Fletcher Terry of the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC).  Brewer became the chair and spokesperson for the WEC, making her the target of threats and offensive phone calls and mail. The schools were re-opened in 1959, and she resigned as chair of the WEC in 1960. She wrote about the WEC in The Embattled Ladies of Little Rock: 1958-1963, The Struggle to Save Public Education at Central High

1901 – Eveline Du Bois-Reymond Marcus born, German-Brazilian zoologist, artist and academic; she and her husband, Ernst Marcus, collaborated in studies of several invertebrate groups between 1924 and 1936, but when he was dismissed from his professorship at Berlin University due to the rise of Nazism, they moved to São Paulo, Brazil, where he taught at the University of São Paulo, where they mainly studied freshwater and land invertebrates. After her husband’s death in 1968, she continued their studies, publishing about 30 papers, mostly on opistobranch  molluscs. In 1973, she was elected an Honorary Member of the Brazilian Malacological Society and in 1979 of the Malacological Society of London. She was also awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of São Paulo in 1976

1910 – Barbara Castle born, English politician, Member of Parliament for Blackburn (1945-79) the longest-serving female MP in the House of Commons

1914 – Thor Heyerdahl born, Norwegian explorer, adventurer and ethnographer, best known for his 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition across the Pacific Ocean on a hand-built raft, to show that the ancient Polynesians could have made long sea voyages

1914 – Mary Louise Smith born, Republican Party committeewoman and chair (1974-77), supporter of ERA and pro-choice

1914 – Joan Littlewood born, English theatre director, known for work in developing the Theatre Workshop group, called “Mother of Modern Theatre” — notable for 1963 production of “Oh, What a Lovely War!”

1915 – Carolyn D. Goodman born, American clinical psychologist, opponent to McCathyism in the 1950s, and prominent civil rights advocate after her son Andrew and two other civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Mississippi in 1964; co-author with Brad Herzog of My Mantelpiece: A Memoir of Survival and Social Justice  

1917 – Fannie Lou Hamer born, civil rights leader and voting rights crusader, helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964)

1925 – Shana Alexander born, journalist; first female staff writer for LIFE magazine

1927 – The Jazz Singer, first feature-length ‘talking’ picture, premieres in New York

1931 – Al Capone goes on trial for income tax evasion

1931 – Riccardo Giacconi born, Italian astrophysicist, pioneer in Ex-ray astronomy; 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics

1939 –  Sheila A. Greibach born, theoretical computer scientist; currently Emeritus Professor; professor in the UCLA Computer Science Department since 1970; member of the faculty of the Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Physics (1963-1969); noted for work in formal computing languages, automata, compiler theory, and context-sensitive parsing using the stack automaton model. The Greibach normal form, and Greibach’s theorem are named for her

1948 – Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams opens on Broadway, starring Margaret Phillips and Tod Andrews

Playbill for Summer and Smoke, 1948

1949 – Lonnie Johnson born, African American engineer and inventor of the Super Soaker water gun; also holds over 120 other patents; founder and president of Johnson Research and Development in 1991; worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1979-1982)

1952 – Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap opens in London, beginning the longest-run of a theatrical production in British history

1952 – Ayten Mutlu born, Turkish poet, writer and translator, specializing in translating women poets from antiquity

1956 – Kathleen Webb born, American comic book artist and writer; one of the first women writers for Archie Comics

1961 – JFK advises American families to build bomb shelters for protection from radioactive fallout should there be a nuclear exchange U.S. and the Soviet Union

1965 – Peg O’Connor born, Feminist philosopher; Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota; noted for work on Wittenstein’s approach to ethics, the philosophy of addiction, and gender equity in the field of philosophy; author of  Life on the rocks: finding meaning in addiction and recovery, and co-author of Feminist interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein

1970 – Maria Kannegaard born in Denmark, Norwegian jazz musician and composer; noted for composing music for the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra

1973 – Egypt and Syria’s coordinated attack on Israel leads to the Yom Kippur War

1976 – In a debate with Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter, President Gerald R. Ford asserted there is “no Soviet domination of eastern Europe.” Ford later concedes that he had “misspoken”

1976 – Over 4,000 student protesters at Thammasat University and in Sanam Luang Square in Bangkok, Thailand, are surrounded and attacked by the Red Guars, extreme right-wing militants, government security forces, and the police. Students trying to escape the bloodbath by diving into the Chao Praya River were shot at by naval vessels. Even students who tried to surrender, lying down on the ground, were beaten, many to death. Some were hung from trees, others were set on fire. Women students were raped, alive and dead, by police and Red Guars. This continued for hours, until it was halted by a violent rainstorm at noon. The number of dead and injured reported by the government has been disputed, but over 3,000 demonstrators were arrested. There already had been a week of student demonstrations against the return of Field Marshall Thanom Kittikachorn, military dictator of Thailand (1963-1973), from exile. After the massacre, the Thai military seized power from the elected civilian government which had instituted many democratic reforms, and installed hard-line royalist Thanin Kraivichien as premier.  Kittikachron, the main cause of the demonstrations, never tried to return to power

1978 – Liu Yang born, astronaut, first Chinese woman in space

1981 – While reviewing a military parade, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is assassinated by Muslim extremists enraged by the Sinai Treaty with Israel

1986 – Folks in Boulder CO celebrate the first Mad Hatter Day * choosing the date 10-6 because of the ‘10/6’ (10-shillings-and-6-pence) price tag tucked in the band of the Mad Hatter’s  hat in the original John Tenniel drawing for Alice in Wonderland

1987 – The Senate Judiciary Committee votes 9-5 against the nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court

1995 – Swiss astronomers announce the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi, which is 50.9 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus

2004 – Charles Duelfer, the top U.S. arms inspector in Iraq, reports finding no evidence Saddam Hussein’s regime had produced weapons of mass destruction after 1991

2006 – Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer is awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature

2015 – The European Court of Justice decided an international agreement, generally known as a Safe Harbor rule, used by thousands of companies for moving people’s digital data between the European Union and the United States was invalid, effective immediately, because it allowed American government authorities to gain routine access to Europeans’ online information. The court said leaks from Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency, made it clear that American intelligence agencies had almost unfettered access to the data, infringing on Europeans’ rights to privacy. The decision threw into doubt how global technology giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google could collect, manage, and analyze online information from their millions of users in the 28-member bloc. Decisions by this court, the highest legal authority in the EU, cannot be appealed

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