October 15^th is

I Love Lucy Day *

National Grouch Day *

World Students Day *

World Maths Day *

International Rural Women’s Day *

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MORE! Virgil, Lucille Ball and Nelson Mandela, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Argentina – Día del Respeto a
La Diversidad Cultural

Belize – Pan America Day

Chile: Encuentro de Dos Mundos

Cambodia – Norodom Sihanouk
(Hommage Day for late King Father)

Colombia – Día de la Raza

Costa Rica – Feriado del Encuentro
de las Culturas

French Guiana – Cayenne Festival

India – Durga Puja
(Festival of Hindu goddess Durga)

Jamaica – National Heroes Day

Japan – Tokyo: Kagurazaka Bakeneko
(Changeling cat – bakeneko – costume parade)

Malawi – Mother’s Day (Rural Women’s Day)

Thailand – King Bhumibol’s Death Anniversary

Tunisia – Fête nationale de l’evacuation
(Evacuation day)

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On This Day in HISTORY

70 BC – Virgil born as Publius Vergilius Maro, Augustan period Roman poet; author of three of the most famous poems in Latin: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid

1066 – Edgar Ætheling, 15-years-old and the last male member of the royal house of Cerdic of Wessex, is proclaimed King of England, but never crowned. He was born in exile in Hungary, and comes to England with his family at age six. Never fully acknowledged as his uncle’s heir, with no powerful relatives to champion his cause, he sits on the throne for less than three months, while disorganized military attempts to stop William the Conqueror fail. Edgar reluctantly pays homage to his successor at William’s coronation

1529 – The Siege of Vienna ends as the Austrians rout the invading Turks, turning the tide against almost a century of unchecked conquest throughout eastern and central Europe by the Ottoman Empire

1582 – The worldwide adoption of the Gregorian calendar begins in the Roman Catholic nations. Eventually, all nations except Ethiopia, Iran and Afghanistan will use some version of it for civil purposes

1608 – Evangelista Torricelli born, Italian physicist and mathematician; the inventor of the barometer, and successor, upon Galileo’s death, to Galileo’s posts as mathematician to Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici and chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa

1686 – Allan Ramsay born, Scottish poet, playwright, publisher and bookseller, collector of old lowland Scots poetry, and impresario of the early Enlightenment Edinburgh

   Allan Ramsay – 1722 – by William Aikman

1764 – Edward Gibbon sees friars singing in the ruined Temple of Jupiter,  inspiring him write The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

1783 – Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes make the first of a series of tethered test flights in the Montgolfier brothers balloon, becoming the first humans to make an ascent into the skies, preparing for their first free flight, which will happen the following month

1793 – French Queen Marie Antoinette is tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal for everything from misappropriating Treasury funds to incest with her son Louis Charles

1815 – Napoleon Bonaparte begins his exile on St. Helena

1830 – Helen Hunt Jackson born, American author, poet and activist for improved treatment of Native Americans by U.S. Government; author of Ramona

1836 – James Tissot born, French painter and illustrator; notable genre painter of fashionably dressed women, and Biblical characters

Self-Portrait by James Tissot, 1865

1844 – Friedrich Nietzsche born, German cultural critic, philosopher, classical philologist and poet, who profoundly influenced modern philosophical thinking

1860 – Grace Bedell, 11 years old, writes a letter to presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, telling him he would look better if he grew a beard

1869 – Girton College, Cambridge is founded, England’s first residential college for women. Women are originally only granted titular degrees – the title of a Bachelor or Master of Arts, but not full rights – they couldn’t vote in the university Senate, sit on committees, or use the library, museums, or laboratories of Cambridge

Girton College

1880 – Marie C. C. Stopes born, Scottish palaeobotantist, advocate of birth control, women’s rights and eugenics; first woman academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester; editor of Birth Control News, and author of Married Love, a controversial but influential sex manual published in 1918; she opposed abortion, arguing that it would be unneeded if contraceptives prevented unplanned pregnancies; her work has been overshadowed by her eugenic concerns of “impending racial darkness”

1881 – P. G. Wodehouse born, English novelist, playwright and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20^th century; creator of Bertie Wooster and the inimitable Jeeves

1883 – The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down part of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, so individuals and corporations can discriminate based on race

1888 – Willard Huntington Wright, aka S.S. Van Dine, is born, American art critic, editor and author of the popular Philo Vance detective novels

1892 – U.S. government announces 1.8 million acres in western Montana, bought from the Crow Indians for 50 cents per acre, are open to settlers

1905 – C.P. Snow born, English novelist and physical chemist; known for his series Strangers and Brothers and his 1959 lecture, published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, about his view of a growing communication gap between members of the scientific and humanities professions

1906 – Alicia Patterson born, American publisher, founder and editor of Newsday

1906 – Victoria Spivey born, record producer, songwriter, 1920s blues singer; in the all-black cast of the 1929 film Hallelujah

1907 – Varian Fry born, American journalist who ran a rescue network during the early years of WWI in Vichy France, which helped over a thousand anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape from capture and the Holocaust, including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Pablo Casals and Hannah Arendt. Hiram Bingham IV, the American Vice Consul in Marseille issued thousands of visas, not always legally, to enable Fry and his allies to get people from France to Portugal, where the Unitarian Service Committee in Lisbon aided refugees with papers and passage on ships. Fry was the first American to be recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” by the State of Israel

1908 – Olivia Ensor Coolidge born in Britain, American author of historical books for Young Adults, many about Ancient Greeks and Romans; and biographies for adults, including one on Edith Wharton

1908 – John Kenneth Galbraith born, Canadian-American economist and diplomat; U.S. Ambassador to India (1961-1963)

1914 – The Clayton Antitrust Act is passed by U.S. Congress

1922 – Agustina Bessa-Luís born, Portuguese writer and executive; director of the daily newspaper, O Primeiro de Janeiro, (1986-1987); director of the D. Maria II National Theatre in Lisbon (1990-1993); noted for her novel, translated as The Lands of Risk

1923 – The Rentenmark is introduced in Germany to counter hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic. After passive resistance in the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, severely slows down the economy, the government’s unbridled printing of extra paper money to compensate puts the Papiermark into freefall on the currency market

1923 – Italo Calvino born, Italian author and journalist, noted for his Our Ancestors trilogy, and his novel Invisible Circus

1924 – Marguerite Andersen born, in Germany, Canadian French-language author, noted for Le Figuier sur le toit, which won a 2009 Trillium Award

1931 – World Students Day * honors A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, born on this day, Indian scientist and statesman, President of India (2002-2007)

1932 – Tata Air Services (now Air India, the flag carrier airline of India) makes its first flight.  The airline was founded by J.R.D. Tata, who was the pilot for this inaugural flight in one of the two airplanes owned by the company, a single-engine de Havilland Puss Moth, to carry air mail from Karachi to Bombay

1937 – To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway is published

1939 – New York Municipal Airport is dedicated, later renamed La Guardia Airport

1943 – Penny Marshall born, American actress, producer and director, noted for directing Big, the first film directed by an American woman to gross over $100 million USD in the U.S.; and for her films Awakenings, A League of Their Own and Renaissance Man

1945 – Pierre Laval, former premier of Vichy France, is executed for treason

1946 – Hermann Goering, Gestapo founder, convicted as a Nazi war criminal, poisons himself hours before his scheduled execution

1948 – Dr. Frances L. Willoughby becomes first woman doctor in regular U.S. Navy

1951 – I Love Lucy Day * – I Love Lucy premieres on CBS-TV

1953 – Teahouse of the August Moon opens on Broadway

1954 – Julia Yeomans born, British theoretical physicist and academic; active in the fields of soft condensed matter and biological physics

1955 – Emma Elizabeth Clark born, British children’s book author and illustrator, known for her Blue Kangaroo series

1964 – Announcement that Soviet Leader Nikita S. Khrushchev has been removed from office, succeeded as premier by Alexei N. Kosygin and as Communist Party secretary by Leonid I. Brezhnev

1966 – Huey Newton and Bobby Seale found the Black Panther Party

1969 – The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam draws over ten million demonstrators across the U.S., including about 250,000 at a candlelit march around the White House in Washington DC

1971 – The start of Iran’s 2.500 year celebration of the Persian Empire

1976 – National Grouch Day * is launched, inspired by Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street

1984 – The Freedom of Information Act is passed

1990 – Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to lessen Cold War tensions and open up the USSR

1990 – South Africa’s Separate Amenities Act, which had barred blacks from public facilities for decades, is scrapped

1991 – The “Oh-My-God particle”, an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray measured at 40,000,000 times that of the highest energy protons produced in a particle accelerator is observed at the University of Utah HiRes observatory in Dugway Proving Ground, Utah

1993 – Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk are named co-winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to end apartheid in South Africa

1998 – The U.N. condemns U.S. for Cuba embargo for the seventh time

2001 – NASA’s Galileo spacecraft passes within 112 miles of Jupiter’s moon Io

2007 – First World Maths Day * an online international mathematics competition, powered by educational resource provider 3P Learning

2007 – U.N. General Assembly adopts a resolution designating October 15 as   International Day of Rural Women *

2011 – Global protests are launched under the slogan “United for #Global Change” across Europe, parts of the Middle East, and in the U.S.; the largest protests are in Spain, involving over 500,000 people in Madrid and 400,000 in Barcelona; issues raised: growing economic inequality, corporate influence over government and international institutions, blocking public participation in the democratic process

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